ngham gave him the names Buck and Hank Tolliver,
Bart was positive that the same covered the identity of the two men who
had been at the Sharp Corner with Lem Wacker.

Bart had started at once for Millville. His first intention was to get a
conveyance at the livery stable, his first impulse to solicit the
co-operation of the town police.

While discussing these points mentally, however, a farmer driving west
came down the road. He had a good team, said he was passing through
Millville, seemed glad to give Bart a lift, and so it was that the young
express agent found himself on the solitary lookout there, two hours
before noon.

He experienced no difficulty whatever in finding out all about the
Tollivers inside of twenty minutes after his arrival.

They were the last members of a shiftless, indolent family who had lived
on the edge of Millville for twenty years.

When the father and mother died the family broke up. The two boys, Buck
and Hank, kept bachelor's hall at the ricketty old ruin of a house on
the river until ejected by its owner for non-payment of rent, and then
went to the bad generally.

They patched up an abandoned shack over on the bottoms, the postmaster
at Millville told Bart, and lived by fishing, hunting and their
depredations on orchards and chicken coops.

In one of their nightly forays about a year previous they were captured
and fined heavily. They could not pay the fine and were sent to jail for
six months.

About the first of June they were released, came back to Millville,
found their old shack burned down, and since then, the postmaster
understood, had camped out in the woods, giving the town a wide
berth--in fact, only occasionally appearing, to buy a little flour,
sugar or coffee, or, mostly, tobacco.

Nobody had seen them for over a week--nobody knew anything of a
newly-painted red wagon.

It seemed probable, Bart theorized, that if they had made for hiding in
any of their familiar woodland haunts, they had reached the same by
driving through Millville before daylight, and when nobody was astir.

Bart finally found a woodcutter who knew where the Tollivers had had
their camping place the week previous. He described the spot and Bart
was soon there--a secluded gully about two miles from town.

The place showed evidences of having been used as a camp, but not
recently, and Bart went on a general blind hunt.

He traversed the woods for miles, both sides of a dried up rivercourse,