ther. The stains had sunk into the
damp ground but were plainer on the leaves; Eaton picking up a leaf and
fingering it, knew that they were blood. So the man was not dead when
he had been lifted from the car. But he had been hurt desperately, was
unable to help himself, was probably dying; if there had been any hope
for him, his companions would not be carrying him in this way away from
any chance of surgical attention.

Eaton followed, as the tracks led through the woods. The men had gone
very slowly, carrying this heavy weight; they had been traveling, as he
himself had traveled, in the dark, afraid to show a light and avoiding
chance of being seen by any one on the roads. They had been as
uncertain of their road as he had been of his, but the general trend of
their travel was toward the east, and this evidently was the direction
in which they wished to go. They had stopped frequently to rest and
had laid their burden down. Then suddenly he came to a place where
plainly a longer halt had been made.

The ground was trampled around this spot; when the tracks went on they
were changed in character. The two men were still carrying the
third--a heavy man whose weight strained them and made their feet sink
in deeply where the ground was soft. But now they were not careful how
they carried him, but went forward merely as though bearing a dead
weight. Now, too, no more stains appeared on the brown leaves where
they had passed; their burden no longer bled. Eaton, realizing what
this meant, felt neither exultation nor surprise. He had known that
the man they carried, though evidently alive when taken from the car,
was dying. But now he watched the tracks more closely even than
before, looking for them to show him where the men had got rid of their
burden.

It had grown easier to follow the tracks with the increase of the
light, but the danger that he would be seen had also grown greater. He
was obliged to keep to the hollows; twice, when he ventured onto the
higher ground, he saw motor-cars passing at a distance, but near enough
so that those in them could have seen him if they had been looking his
way. Once he saw at the edge of the woods a little group of armed men.
His dizziness and weakness from the loss of blood was increasing; he
became confused at times and lost the tracks. He went forward slowly
then, examining each clump of bushes, each heap of dead leaves, to see
whether the men had hidden in them