"Nary, I didn't. I left it in the hip pocket of my working clothes."
"And Carl had on the clothes!" exclaimed Matt, with a jubilant ring in his voice. "Carl must have scattered that trail for our benefit."
He stood up in the automobile and looked back over the road they had traveled.
"Why," he went on, "we haven't been as observing as we should have been. There's a paper trail, and Carl must have started it pretty soon after the monkey wagon left the show grounds."
"Well, well!" muttered Burton. "Say, Matt, that Dutch chum of yours is quite a lad, after all. The idea of his thinking of that."
"Carl always has his head with him," declared Matt. "Climb in, Joe. The left fork for ours."
McGlory pulled the crank, before he got in, for the stop had killed the engine.
"It's a cinch," said McGlory, as he resumed his place in the tonneau, "that Carl wasn't hypnotized when he dropped those scraps. How could he drop 'em? That's what beats me. Why, he was locked in, so Ping said."
"There was a hole in the floor," explained Burton. "Not a very big one, but big enough for an ant-eater to get a foot through. I was going to repair the cage, but haven't had time to attend to it."
"Why didn't Carl yell again?" went on McGlory. "If he had yelled long enough, and loud enough, some one would have been bound to hear him and stop Ben Ali."