ty turkey coop.

The marks of horse and wagon were quite as plain in the faint light of
dawn as they had been the night before. In the darkness the thief
had driven his wagon over some small stumps, amid which his horse had
scrambled in some difficulty, it was plain.

Hiram, tracing out these marks as a Red Indian follows a trail,
saw something upon the edge of one of the half-decayed stumps that
interested him greatly.

He stood up the next moment with this clue in his hand--a white, coarse
hair, perhaps four inches in length.

"That was scraped off the horse's fetlock as he scrambled over this
stump," muttered Hiram. "Now, who drives a white horse, or a horse with
white feet, in this neighborhood?

"Can I narrow the search down in this way, I wonder?" and for some
moments the youth stood there, in the growing light of early morning,
canvassing the subject from that angle.

CHAPTER XXVII. RUN TO EARTH

A broad streak of crimson along the eastern horizon, over the treetops,
announced the coming of the sun when Hiram Strong reached the automobile
road to which he, on the previous night, had traced the thief that had
stolen Sister's poults.

Now he looked at the track again. It surely had come from the direction
of Scoville, and it turned back that way.

Yet he looked at the white horse-hair scraped off upon the stump, and
he turned his back upon these signs and strode along the road toward his
own home.

Smoke was just curling from the Atterson chimney; Sister, or Mrs.
Atterson, was just building the fire. But they did not see Hiram as he
went by.

Hiram's quest led him past the place and to the Dickerson farm. There
nobody was yet astir, save the mules and horses in the barnyard, who
called as he went by, hoping for their breakfast.

Hiram knew that the Dickersons had turkeys and, like most of the other
farmers, cooped them in distant fields away from the house. He found
three coops in the middle of an old oat-field tinder a spreading beech.

The old turks roosted upon the limbs of the beech at night; they were
already up and away, hunting grasshoppers for breakfast. But quite a few
poults were running and peeping about the coops, with two hen turkeys
playing guard to them.

Hiram saw where a wagon had been driven in here, and turned, too. The
tracks were made recently. And one of the coops was shut tight, although
he knew by the rustling within that there were young turkeys in it.

It was too da