It was a foregone conclusion that the robber had done one of two things—approached from behind the cabin in the daylight, while we were working, or crept stealthily in at night while we were asleep. In the latter case he had doubtless fled down the trail. In the former he would have retreated by the rear of the cabin, and out into the screen of the forest on the mountainside above. So, first, we inspected the trail. Veterans in reading signs were these men who had permitted me to share their lot, and they walked forward with keen eyes sweeping this way and that—eyes which nothing could escape. A broken twig, a patch of crushed, indented moss, anything unusual, would be observed and noted. They bade me walk behind, and scanned the ground for a hundred yards before one of them uttered a sound. Then George straightened up, and I saw the hurt look on his face give way to an angry scowl, and saw him swing one ponderous fist into a palm.
“Come here,” he said, with strange repression, and we joined him.
There, plainly imprinted in the mud, where some one had entered the trail from a moss-carpeted side, were tracks, and they were those of one who wore shoes—shoes of civilization, such as but few men wore in our outskirt of a rough world, and the shoes were pointed, delicately, foppishly, almost daintily.
We lifted our heads and stared at one another, with the same unvoiced comment leaping from our eyes. We looked again at the telltale tracks in the mud, clearly leading down the hillside to the gulch below, and thus off toward the camp. We lifted our heads once more and George spoke.
“Laughing Jim!” he said.
“No other man in all the country wore such shoes!” Tim added.
“And no one but an expert crook would have taken a chance in coming into our cabin night before last,” suggested Bill.
“That’s when the trick was turned,” declared George. “And he has paid me—gratitude!”
We passed, peering, down the trail and out into the gulch. Straight down it we went, finding here and there, in the slow miles, that unusual mark, the mark of a toothpick shoe in a country where all men wore rubber boots or mukluks in the wet and soggy spring. There could have been but one destination for those feet, so, at last, we wasted no more time on signs, but strode hurriedly and angrily away toward Marook. We gained the top of the hill in the pass above the town and looked down. Where last we had seen the ribbon of white, was now open water. The river had broken and cleared itself of ice while we toiled over our dumps. It ran below us, a turgid flood. Down in front of the A. C. Trading Post men were assembled, and they fired guns and shouted, while dogs ran hither and yon, howling a chorus of excitement and salute for the first steamboat of the year. It was coming slowly toward the bank, a tiny, rough affair that had wintered in a slough up the river. We hurried onward toward the water front, and had small need to ask questions, inasmuch as the first one was answered.
“Has any one seen Laughing Jim lately?” demanded George of the group in front of the Hang-out.