Chapter XII: As Luck Would Have It

Hervey picked his way among the rocks, looking here and there in the crevices and upon the intervening ground as if he had lost something. A more random quest could scarcely be imagined. Tom watched him for a few minutes, then took the shorter way to camp with his little charge.

Hervey followed the rocky ledge for about fifty yards to a point where the dry bed of a stream came winding down out of the mountain. It ran in a tiny canyon between two rocks and so out upon the level fields to the south where the camp lay.

The twilight was well advanced now, the last vivid patches were mellowed into a pervading gray, which seemed to cover the rocks and woods like a mantle. Clad in this somber robe, the wooded height which rose to the north seemed the more forbidding. Not a sound was to be heard but the voice of a whip-poor-will somewhere. Even Hervey's buoyant nature was subdued by the solemn stillness.

Suddenly something between the two rocks caught his eye. The caked earth looked as if a narrow board had been drawn over it. Bordering this broad line, about half an inch from it on either side, were two narrow fancy lines--or at least that is what Hervey called them. Examining these carefully, he saw that they were made up of tiny, diagonal lines. In the place where this ran between the rocks, in the deep shadow, these singular marks were surprisingly legible, and bore not a little the appearance of a border design. The big stones formed a sort of shadow box, causing the markings to appear in bold relief.

Hervey knew nothing of the freakish influence of light on tracks and trails, but he saw here something which he knew had been made by a moving object. The continuous design was so nearly perfect that it seemed like the work of human beings, but Hervey knew that it could hardly be this.

What, then, was it?

Where the lines emerged from between the rocks the marking was less regular and less clear, but plain enough in the damp, crusted earth which covered the mud in the old stream bed.

With heart bounding with joy and elation, Hervey followed the bed of the stream. The tracks, or whatever they were, were so clear that he could keep to the side of the muddy area and still see them.

It was characteristic of him that having made this great discovery, he did not trouble himself about the direction he was taking. In point of fact he was going in a southwesterly direction toward the camp.

For perhaps a quarter of a mile the strange markings were clearly legible in the dusk, running as they did in the yielding caked surface of the stream bed. They were as clear as tracks in caked snow. Then the path of the dried up waterway petered out in an area of rocks and pebbles and beyond that there was no clearly defined way; the brook had evidently trickled down into the lower land taking the path of least resistance among the rocks.

No doubt Tom Slade could have followed that water path to its end, but Hervey was puzzled, baffled. Yet the enthusiasm which carried him, as though on wings, to his triumphs was aroused now. He had the prophecy of Tom Slade to strengthen his determination. He must make good for Tom's sake now, as well as for the sake of his troop. He had told Tom that if he only once found a trail, nothing would stop him--_nothing_. Very fine. All that talk about there being something higher than the Eagle award was nonsense, and Tom Slade knew it was nonsense. "He said I'd do it, and I'm going to," Hervey muttered to himself.

Hervey had no patience with obstacles, he must be always moving, so now he began frantically scrutinizing the ground to see if he could find some sign of the marks which had eluded him. Since he could no longer distinguish the stream bed, he looked for some sign of those marks outside the stream bed.

And presently he was rewarded by the discovery of tracks, animal tracks sure enough, without any ribbon, so to speak, printed between them. There they were upon the hard, bare earth, two lines of claw marks, continuing to a point where they disappeared again at the edge of a close cropped field. Evidently his mysterious predecessor had known just where he wished to go and had forsaken the stream bed when it no longer went in his direction. These were no aimless tracks, they were the tracks of a creature that had particular business in the southwest, and that knew how to get there.