"I'd have heard him if he'd done that," answered Matt. "He has either stopped, and is lying low, or else he has gone on ahead. I thought I had him, for a minute. Come on, Joe!"
Matt flung onward, and leaped suddenly from the edge of the timber into a cornfield on a little flat between two shoulders of the mountain. He stopped and listened. The leaves of the corn rustled in the faint breeze, and, in the centre of the field, an ungainly scarecrow half reared itself above the tasseled stalks.
"He's in the corn, that's where he is," puffed the cowboy. "Mind your eye, pard, and look out for the dope balls."
"You go one way across the field," suggested Matt, "and I'll go the other. Sharp's the word now, old chap. We're giving that fellow the run of his life, and he's having it nip and tuck to get away."
The field was not large, and Matt and McGlory crossed it rapidly, the king of the motor boys on one side of the scarecrow, and the cowboy on the other. They met on the opposite side of the field, without having seen the sailor.
"I reckon he's dodged us!" growled McGlory, in savage disappointment. "The ornery old webfoot has——"
He stopped aghast, his eyes on the scarecrow. The tattered figure was moving briskly through the corn, toward the side of the field from which the boys had just come.
"There he goes!" shouted Matt, darting away again. "He got into the scarecrow's clothes, and didn't have the nerve to wait until we had left the field."
"Speak—speak to me about—about this!" returned McGlory breathlessly, plunging after his chum through the rustling rows.
Once more in the woods, the boys found themselves even closer to the fleeting mariner than they had been before. He was in plain sight now, and shedding his ragged disguise as he raced for liberty.