h you."

"But we may be late--" began Fred.

"Oh, Captain Putnam will excuse us when I tell him what delayed us."

The rowboat soon reached the shore, and Sam and Tom leaped to the
brushwood, where the trail of the vanished fisherman was plainly to be
seen.

It was decided that Fred and Powell should remain in charge of the
rowboat, so that nobody might come and make off with the craft. Leaving
their fishing outfits behind them the two Rover boys struck out through
the bushes, and soon gained a narrow forest path running through the
woods that skirted this section of Bass Lake.

"I wish we could catch Baxter," said Tom, on the way. "It would be a
feather in our cap, Sam."

"We must be careful. More than likely he is armed, and he won't
hesitate to shoot if he is cornered."

"Oh, I know that. The most we can do is to follow him until we reach
some place where we can summon assistance."

The path led deeper and deeper into the woods and then along a
fairsized brook. They kept their eyes wide open, but could see nothing
excepting a number of birds and an occasional squirrel or chipmunk.
Once they heard the distant bark of a fox and this was the only sound
that broke the stillness.

"It's rather a lonely place," said Sam, after a silence lasting several
minutes. "I must say I shouldn't like to meet Arnold Baxter here
alone."

"For all we know he may be watching us from behind some tree."

Several times they got down to examine the path. Footprints could be
seen quite plainly, but neither of the boys was expert enough at
trailing to tell whether these prints had been made recently or not.

"It would take an Indian scout to make sure of these footmarks," said
Tom. "They are beyond me."

"Let us go a bit further," returned his brother. "Then if we don't see
anything, we may as well go back to the lake."

"Hark!"

They listened intently and at a distance heard a crashing in the
brushwood.

"That sounded as if somebody had jumped across the brook, Tom!"

"Just what I should say, Sam. Come on!"

Again they went forward, a distance of thirty or forty yards. At this
point the path seemed to dwindle down to little or nothing.

"We have come to the end of the trail," was Tom's comment, as he gazed
around sharply.

"Do you see anything?" queried his brother.

"Nothing much. One or two of the bushes over yonder seem to be brushed
aside and broken."

"What do you think we had best do now?"

"Listen!"

B