“Ain’t got time,” roared back the strange fisherman, and on the instant he was gone.

“It must have been Arnold Baxter, beyond a doubt,” said Sam.

“If it was, what is he doing here?” questioned his brother.

“He’s keeping out of the reach of the law,” answered Powell.  “I suppose he thought he was perfectly safe in such an out-of-the-way place as this.”

“And he was fishing just to kill time,” put in Fred.

“I’d like to go after him and make sure,” went on Tom.  “What do you say, Sam?”

“I am with 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.