“I suppose the next thing on the program,” Antoine observed, with a smile, “will be breakfast.”

“That suits me!” shouted Tommy and Sandy in a breath.

“Well,” Antoine answered, “I have plenty of bear meat, and a few canned provisions, and plenty of good, strong tea, so we’ll adjourn to the dining room and partake.”

“Have you seen anything of our chum?” asked Will.

Antoine smiled, but made no reply.

“Look here,” Sandy said, pointing down to the moccasin tracks, as they emerged from the cavern and found themselves on the snowy slope, “this man has passed along here before this morning.”

“That’s a fact!” Will exclaimed.  “So he must be the man who carried off George.  If he is, why doesn’t he say so?”

“Perhaps he wants to give us a surprise,” observed Tommy.

It was only a short distance from the system of caverns where the boys had been imprisoned to the home of Antoine, which has previously been described.

When the boys entered, they looked eagerly around in the hope of finding George, but the boy was nowhere to be seen.

“I thought sure you had found our chum in the cavern,” Thede suggested.

“Why, I thought you boys were all here!” replied Antoine, still with that odd smile on his face.

“But there is a boy who was wounded in the bear cavern last night,” Thede explained, “and I left him there while I went after his friends, and when I came back, he was gone.  We thought sure you took him away.”

Antoine made no reply.  Instead, he busied himself with breakfast.

In his efforts in this direction Tommy and Sandy were not slow in joining, and in a short time beautifully broiled bear steaks were smoking on tin plates which Antoine had taken from a cupboard fastened to the wall.  A pot of tea was steeping over a fire built at one end of the cavern.  The boys eyed this with interest.

“We really ought to be going out in search of George,” Will finally said.  “He may be suffering in the cold.”

“That’s right!” declared Tommy.  “I’m going out just as soon as I finish eating!  The lad was carried off by some one, all right, and be can’t be far away!”

“I wonder why we didn’t get our revolvers away from that dead man?” asked Sandy.  “We surely ought to have them!”

“I looked for them,” Will said quietly, “but they were not there!”

“Then he must have hidden them away somewhere,” Tommy declared.  “We laid them down just before crawling through that hole.”

“You will doubtless find them in time,” Antoine suggested.

“I should think the half-breed would have kept them pretty close,” Sandy observed.  “You don’t find automatics like those every day!”

“It strikes me,” Antoine said, directly, “that you boys would better settle down for a little rest previous to going out after your chum.”

“Aw, we don’t need any rest!” declared Tommy.