CHAPTER XI.

THE VALUE OF BEING PREPARED.

“We’re going to find out who’s swinging that lantern anyway,” ventured one of the boys after a while. “Ralph’s heading in that direction in a hurry.”

“There’s a whole pack of ’em in the bargain, at least four or five, because I c’n glimpse ’em every time the light swings back,” said Jack Dunham, a bit nervously.

“Listen to the chatter, will you?” observed Alec. “That tells who they are.”

“Some of the strikers, for a cookey!” added another boy.

There was a rush as the five men came up to them. Evidently the sight of that odd glow traveling over the ground had surprised and mystified them, and they were now bent on learning its origin.

Ralph at the proper time turned the little hand searchlight full upon the newcomers. It was in this way discovered that they were undoubtedly strikers who had evidently been scouring the immediate vicinity in the hope of learning what had become of Mr. Campertown’s grandchild.

“There’s the old padrone at their head!” ejaculated Alec.

“Wonder if Hugh means to tell them to fall in with us?” suggested Arthur Cameron.

“Oh, my goodness, I hope not!” muttered Billy Worth, who for some reason of his own seemed to prefer that the strikers keep their distance, and to leeward at that. The padrone had by this time discovered who it was influenced that queer light to skim along so close to the ground. Hugh, on his part, was pleased to see that the old fellow had been doing everything in his power to fulfill his contract with regard to trying to find the missing child.

“Don’t stop, Ralph,” he told the tracker hurriedly.

“Shunt them off on a side trail, Hugh!” whispered the anxious Billy. “We ought to be crowd enough ourselves to do the business if ever we come up with those three.”

Hugh managed to do this without hurting the feelings of the padrone. It only required a little tact to accomplish the thing. He suggested that the strikers could cover the ground in one district while the scouts carried out their own plans. The padrone understood, because he and his men drifted off again on the hunt, for they spread out like an open fan as they went.

Billy chuckled as though he felt relieved.

“Thank goodness for that!” he observed. “I can breathe easy again. Not but that the padrone means honest, and his men seem to be all right; but their ways ain’t our ways, you know; and, well, I won’t say any more because I want to be fair.”

“What’s happened now, I wonder?” asked Whistling Smith, when they saw that the two in the van had come to a sudden pause.

Hugh turned to the rest of the eager party hovering around.

“Ralph says that right here he can see where the man who had been carrying the child turned and gave his burden into the charge of the fellow wearing the torn shoe” was what he told them, much to their wonder and delight.

“That’s going some,” said the admiring Alec. “Think of him being able to read signs just as easy as we might a page in a book. If any Indian, or that old hunter in Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales, could beat our chum, I’ll eat my hat.”

When the forward movement was resumed they were all feeling more satisfied than ever that it would come out right. Difficulties might, and doubtless would, continue to arise and confront them, but so long as they had such a clever comrade glued to the trail, these must in turn be brushed aside.

Yes, the scent of victory seemed to be in the air for those scouts; it invigorated them beyond measure, and made the labor of that night tramp seem like play.

A quarter of an hour afterward and Ralph announced that the third member of the fugitives had taken the boy, still asleep, and perhaps drugged so that he might not betray them by any crying spell brought about by fright.

“That eases my mind a whole lot,” Bud Morgan remarked; “because do you know I was afraid that fellow, with that torn sole on his shoe, might trip and hurt Reuben. But he didn’t, or else Ralph would have told us so. It’s all right, and things are working for us to beat the band.”

In fact, it was an object lesson to some of the scouts to see how cleverly Ralph managed to read those signs. Those, who up to then had not taken a great deal of interest in such things, began to realize that they were missing one of the best traditions of scoutcraft; and no doubt were taking mental resolutions that from that time on they would turn over new leaves.

They had by now gone more than a mile from the cement plant, and still the trail beckoned them on. Hugh had given it as his opinion that the three abductors must certainly be heading for some place previously selected as a hide-out.

“I base that belief on several things,” he explained, when they had halted for Ralph to rest his strained eyes a minute or two. “In the first place they’ve been hitting it up in an almost direct line. If they had been simply bent on putting as much ground as they could between themselves and the sheriff’s posse, they would have been apt to turn to the right or to the left from time to time as if uncertain which way to go. Am I right, Ralph?”

“It sounds good to me, Hugh,” came the ready response to his question.

“Another thing,” continued the scout master, always willing to pass around any knowledge he might possess, “it isn’t likely these desperate men would go into a game like this without laying all their plans beforehand. They take a lot of risk as it is, because kidnapping a child is a felony that calls for twenty years in the penitentiary.”

Ralph, being rested, evinced a desire to once more take up his onerous duties, and so the little heart-to-heart talk ended for the time being. Such things as these, however, were apt to arouse an additional interest in the minds of lagging scouts, and cause them to watch Ralph’s movements with more concern than ever.

That first mile began to lengthen until some of them felt it must surely be double that distance they had passed over. Still not one complaint had been uttered or a sigh heard.

Nurse Jones seemed to be able to hold her own with the best of them. Apparently it had been no idle boast on her part when she told Hugh she made it a practice to walk ten miles every day and frequently double that far. At that rate, there was really more danger of some of the boys dropping out than of Nurse Jones failing in her self-imposed task.

More than once some of the scouts secretly told each other that she was a “wonder,” and this might be reckoned high praise, coming from boys who, proud of their own accomplishments along the line of extended hikes, were apt to look down contemptuously on such feeble efforts as their sisters among the Campfire Girls might attempt.

It had been remarked that not once had they approached a human habitation. From this fact they could understand that the three men meant to avoid from being seen as much as was possible while heading for their destination.

Hugh was satisfied with the way things were going. For a little while he had secretly confessed at being worried; that was when he feared the men might be making for some station on the railroad; because once they managed to reach a city, the difficulty of finding them would be increased many fold. Scouts are more at home in the great open than on stone pavements, where most of their knowledge of woodcraft would be wasted.

This was of the past now, for the country seemed to be getting more and more lonely as they continued to advance.

Sometimes Ralph met trouble and had to bring his reserve stock of cunning into play before he was able to go on. This generally happened at places where the nature of the ground made the trail almost indistinguishable to the human eye. Perhaps, at such times, Billy Worth might have been caught wishing once more that they had a dog along with the ability to follow a scent; for such an acquisition to their force would have solved these riddles faster than Ralph was able to.

Nevertheless, in every instance, the delay was only temporary, and each in turn served to impress more firmly upon the minds of the boys the great lesson of preparedness they were learning.

Only for Ralph’s taking such pains to study up along these lines they would be finding themselves hopelessly beaten in the endeavor to track down the abductors of little Reuben.

“I wonder if they mean to keep on going all night long?” Blake Merton remarked to the boy on his left, when there could be no doubt about their having covered a good two and a half miles.

“Well, we ought to be as able to keep it going as long as those men,” said Tom Sherwood. “What’s the use of scouts training at long-distance walking, mountain climbing, and all that sort of thing, if they can’t beat out a pack of men who have never practised such stunts?”

Apparently there was no answer to that query; at least Blake Merton did not appear to find any, for he relapsed into silence.

All this occurred while they had been surrounded by darkness. What lay beyond they could only guess at; except when the outlines of tree-tops were seen against the sky there was no means of telling where the horizon lay.

Far in the distance they saw lights from time to time, but as they progressed further along on their journey even these failed to show. This would seem to indicate that the country must be getting more and more lonely.

“It’s a hide-out they’re making for, Hugh,” Ralph declared for the third time. “We’re going to strike pay-dirt sooner or later. And right now, if you look ahead, you can see a dim sort of light. I wouldn’t be much surprised if that was it!”

When the other boys heard this assertion made, they quickened their pace in a perceptible degree; their actions were much more lively, and it could be seen that the pursuit had taken on new vim.

As they drew steadily closer to the dim light they found reason to believe that Ralph was stating the truth when he predicted speedy success.

“It seems to be coming from a window, like there might be a shack of some kind there!” one scout ventured, in a whisper.

“Why, look here, will you, we’ve struck a road!” observed another, exercising the same amount of caution.

“But it’s an old and abandoned one, let me tell you, Billy. See how the grass has grown all over it. They must have built a new road some years ago, and left this one high and dry. That house ahead of us, where the light comes from, was once facing on this same road, and now it’s left high and dry.”

“I tell you what,” Billy declared, “it must have been abandoned by the people who lived there when the old road was given up. They moved to new quarters; and these men, looking around for a good hiding-place, located this shack.”

Hugh at that point asked the others not to even whisper any longer.

“We’ve marked this spot so we could find it again if we wanted to,” he explained to them. “You notice that Ralph isn’t using his torch any more. He thinks it might be dangerous if anyone happened to be looking this way.”

“And do we creep up so as to take a peek in at the shack then, Hugh?” asked Billy.

“Yes, that’s the program,” the scout master told them. “Remember, everybody, not to speak a word unless you’re forced to, and then let it be as soft as the night wind whispering through the leaves. Come on!”

They were wild with eagerness as they obeyed their leader. Each scout mentally resolved that it would not be set down at his door if their finely-laid plans missed connections, and success failed to reward their efforts.

In this way, then, they moved along, and drew close up to the house on the abandoned public highway, from which that light shone dimly through the dirty window sash.