“Yes, it’s easy to see he was standing here after creeping on his hands and knees,” Hugh remarked, still studying the marks.  “And he’s wearing a pretty fine pair of modern shoes into the bargain; which shows that the men you saw were not tramps.  At the same time, Ralph, I can’t believe they were timber-cruisers, either, looking for new belts of forest that could be bought up.  Whenever I’ve seen one of those men, he wore laced hunting shoes that came half way to the knee, so as to protect his legs against snake-bites and thorns while pushing through the scrub.  No, this man has rather a dainty foot, and it strikes me as mighty queer he should be wandering around here.”

“What are we going to do next?” asked Ralph, looking as though he stood ready to carry out any suggestion Hugh might make, even to chasing around and trying to follow the trail of the fleeing spy.

“Nothing, that I can see,” answered Hugh; “and so let’s go in again.  We can talk it over better there than out here, you know.”

Two minutes later and they were once more indoors.  Seated before the fire, they canvassed the matter thoroughly.  From every angle they tried to penetrate the mystery, but it seemed to baffle them.

“I had an experience once that makes me sort of think they may be keepers from some asylum looking for an escaped lunatic,” Hugh finally remarked; “though if that were the case, they’d be apt to wear some sort of gray uniform, and you didn’t say anything about that, Ralph.”

“Yes,” added the other, quickly, “but if that’s what they were, why should they act so queer?  Wouldn’t two such men want to scrape an acquaintance with us scouts, so as to get a few pointers?  I don’t think that covers the bill, Hugh.”

“And I didn’t, either, when I spoke of it,” the patrol leader said, as he smiled and nodded his head.  “But perhaps Bud may set us right.  I can see from the look on his face that he has a brilliant idea.”

“Oh, shucks!  I don’t know how brilliant it is,” the party mentioned hastened to remark, “but you’re welcome to my thought.  Suppose there happened to be some desperate men hiding up here in these woods, say counterfeiters, for instance?  I’ve heard that such fellows always try to pick a lonely place to do their work in.  Well, the Government always sends out smart men belonging to the Secret Service to round these chaps up.  I was speculating on whether those two strangers Ralph saw mightn’t be detectives.  I reckon they looked as if they wanted to detect, all right; and let me tell you, p’raps we’re under the ban of suspicion right now.”

Bud ended his remarks in a rather awed voice, but neither of the others seemed to be at all worried.  Indeed, Hugh chuckled as though amused.

“It may be that you’ve guessed the right answer, Bud,” he said, “but all the same I don’t believe it.  There’s something deeper about those men than that.  And unless I miss my guess, we’ll find in the end, if we learn anything at all, that they’ve got some sort of connection with that queer flash and crash that gave us such a scare earlier in the night.”