d we'll halt a few minutes to stoke up for more
steam."

There was a cheer at this announcement, after which the line spread out
again. Ten minutes later a halt was made at the farmhouse, and the
flanks of the searching party came in. The farmer's wife, it turned out,
had an assortment of food that she was willing to sell at a rather good
price. On this assorted stuff the searchers fed, washing it all down
with glasses of milk. Then the search was taken up once more.

"We're moving about a mile an hour now," Dave called across to Dick, as
the Grammar School boys, away out on the right flank, tramped through a
stretch of woods. "Greg may be a hundred miles from here at this minute.
Question--what day in the week shall we have the luck to come up with
him?"

"We're doing the best we can," Dick called back.

"Don't pass along that old chestnut that 'angels can do no better,'"
grimaced Dave.

"Well, could they?"

"I don't know. But do you expect that we'll ever find Greg, moving along
in this fashion?"

"Honestly, I don't," Dick called across. "But we're following the scheme
laid down by wiser and older heads than ours, and I haven't any better
plan to suggest. Have you?"

"I----" began Dave, but finished with: "Hang that branch! It flew back
and hit me!"

"Look where you're going," called Prescott, as he climbed over a wall.
"For your information, Dave, I'll say that we're coming to a road now."

Tom Reade, on Dick's right hand, and Harry Hazelton, on Dave's left,
were also jumping into the road, which they started to cross hurriedly.

"Halt!" cried Prescott, and stood like one transfixed, staring down at
the ground.

"What have you found?" jeered Tom. "A gold mine?"

"Better--I believe!" cried Dick joyously. "Hustle here, fellows!
No--don't crowd too close or you'll trample it out."

"What do you see?" demanded Hazelton.

"This," answered Prescott, pointing down to the ground. His chums
peered, too, and made out a very distinct footprint in the soft soil of
this wild, little-used road through the woods.

"There's been a horse and wagon along here, too," Dick went on
excitedly. "See the fresh wheeltracks, and the marks of the horse's
hoofs?"

"But only that one bootprint," objected Tom. "It doesn't seem to me that
it means much."

Dick gazed reproachfully at his grouped chums, his eyes blazing with
excitement in the meantime.

"Say, don't you fellows remember how Greg ripped off the lower part of