He placed his hand upon the bosom of his shirt and could feel the stiff packet of papers he carried in its accustomed place. His apprehension was immediately relieved.
“Pshaw!” Chet muttered. “This might not have been Tony or that other fellow at all. Just some tramp or the like on the trail, who was attracted to our camp. Probably needed meat and helped himself.
“But it was funny he didn’t wait till daylight and come and ask for it.”
While he was turning these thoughts over in his mind he was moving through the thicket, turning aside bushes, looking under bunches of grass, peering here and there, to trace the tracks of the stranger.
And they were easy to follow—even for a youthful trailer like Chet Havens. A spoor made in the night must be less carefully laid down than a track by daylight. Not much chance to hide footprints while stumbling through the dark.
Chet saw how the stranger had come into the thicket, and how he had left. He had not gone near the camp and the place where the sleeping boys lay. Chet was so sure of this that he did not attempt to examine very closely the camp itself.
He was sure, however, the marauder had robbed them of the bulk of their meat. The in trace and the out trace led directly up the slope from the brook beside which they were encamped, to the trail they were following to Grub Stake.
There, as near as Chet could make out, two horses had stood. He could not discover, the sod was so cut up, whether both, or only one, of the riders had dismounted.
He could picture the possible happening, however. In the night the two riders had come along from the east. They were following the trail in the same direction as the boys.
Hearing the noise made by the wolves over their dead brother, the strange trailers stopped, and one of them had gone down to investigate. The wolves had been frightened away by the coming of this person.