lp us
in finding our friend?" he asked of the girl, whose face was beaming at
the pleasure she had been able to give to her deliverers.

"No," she answered. "There is nothing else. I am sorry."

"Let's take a look around the house again, fellows," suggested Frank.
"We may have overlooked something the other day. It's only a chance,
but let's take it."

They made a careful circuit of the house, but nothing rewarded the
search until Frank, with an exclamation, picked up some pieces of rope
that had been lying in the grass not far from the window from which the
prisoner had dropped.

"Are these yours?" he asked of the girl who had accompanied them and
had been as ardent in the search as themselves.

She examined them.

"I do not think so," she declared. "I do not remember seeing any rope
like that around the house."

They scrutinized the pieces carefully.

"Look at these frayed edges," said Frank, laying them together. "You
see that these two pieces were part of one rope."

"I'll tell you what that means," put in Billy. "The girl says that Tom
was bound with ropes. That cut or broken one was the one that was used
to tie his hands. In some way he cut that. He didn't have a knife or
the cut would be cleaner. Perhaps he sawed the rope against a piece of
glass that he might have managed to get near."

"Good guess," commended Bart. "And this long rope was the one that was
used to tie his feet. Tom didn't need to cut that for his hands were
free then and he could untie it."

"Good old scout!" exclaimed Frank in tribute to his absent chum.
"Trust that stout heart of his to keep up the fight to the last minute.
Think of the old boy sawing away at the rope when he didn't know what
minute he'd be taken out and hanged."

"He's all wool and a yard wide," agreed Bart.

"The real goods," said Billy. "But what were the ropes doing out here
in the grass?"

"Oh, I suppose he hated them so that he chucked them as far away as he
could," suggested Bart.

"No," said Frank, measuring the window with his eye. "I'll tell you
how I think it was. Tom knew, of course, that he couldn't get out of
the house by the downstairs way without being nabbed. He didn't know,
of course, that the bunch of Huns weren't in condition to nab anybody.
So the window was the only way left to him. He took the ropes to the
window with the idea of splicing them and climbing down by them. But
that would have taken time, and when he saw