“Hmph—it’s mighty interesting, anyway,” mused Arnold. He drummed on a log with his fingers, and for a few moments no one spoke.
“Some mystery, hey?” said Roy, adding a log to the fire.
CHAPTER IV
THE OLD TRAIL
Several things more or less firmly fixed in his mind had impelled Tom Slade to challenge that wooded hill the dense summit of which was visible by day from Temple Camp.
He knew that high land is always selected for despatching carrier pigeons; a certain book on stalking which he had read contained a chapter on this fascinating and often useful sport and he knew that in a general sort of way there was a connection between carrier pigeons and stalking; one suggested the other—to him, at least. He knew for a certainty that the message had been written on the unprinted part of a stalking blank and he knew also that on the slope of the hill he had seen chalk marks on the trees the previous summer. Tom seldom forgot anything.
All these facts, whether significant or not, were indelibly impressed upon his serious mind, and to him they seemed to bear relation to each other. He believed that the pigeon had been flying homeward, to some town or city not far distant, where the sender perhaps lived and he believed that the pigeon’s use in this emergency had been the happy thought of some person who had taken the bird to the hill only to use for sport. He had no doubt that somewhere in the wilderness of these Catskill hills was a camp where the victim of accident lay, but the weak point was that he was seeking a needle in a haystack.
“I wish we’d brought along the fog horn from the boat,” he said, as they made their way across the open country below the hill; “we could have made a lot of noise with it up there; you can hear a long way in the woods, and it might have helped us to find the place.”
“If the place is up there,” said Doc Carson.
“There’s a trail,” said Tom, “that runs about halfway up but it peters out at a brook and you can’t find any from there on.”
“If we could find the trees where you saw the marks last summer,” said Connie Bennet, “we might get next to some clue there.”