“I—­I thought it was, Miss.”

“Then how do you explain this?” she asked with a comprehensive wave of the hand.

“I don’t explain it.  I swum!  I don’t know what to think about it.  I wish I could get my hands on the scoundrel.”

Miss Elting sat down to think.  “It is plain that we have been followed into the mountains.  The man whom Hazel saw at the ‘Slide’ undoubtedly is the one who has been causing us all the trouble.  He may have been hovering about us all the time, we knowing nothing about it.  I am afraid we aren’t very clever, girls.  We have allowed our enemy to outwit us.”

“I don’t believe he has, Miss Elting,” replied Harriet.  “If so, he has been watching us from a distance.  We surely should have discovered if the man had come close to our camp.”

“It must have been the man that Hazel saw, and I believe he was the one who dropped the green goggles,” was Harriet’s emphatic declaration.  “I wonder what his grievance is?”

“All our stuff gone; we’ll have to go back, won’t we?” mourned Margery.

“We have our luggage, but that is some distance from here,” replied the guardian.  “How long will it take us to get to our supplies, Mr. Grubb?”

“A day, or a day and a half, I reckon.”

“Then we had better go for them to-morrow morning.  We can do nothing more this evening.  But—­what are we to do for food?”

“We have a little.  We have some coffee and a spoonful of rice.  That’s enough.  We can live another twenty-four hours or so on that.  I’ll fix up something now.  Maybe there’s something in a cache back of the hut.  I’ll see.”  To their delight, Janus returned, not long after that, with a small sack of flour and one of corn meal.  It did not take the girls long to start a fire in the small cook stove.  They threw open the windows, the “Shelter” warming up very quickly.

The girls began work at once, Janus showing them how to make the kind of corn cakes that are popular with the mountain guides in the White Mountain range.  All the time Harriet Burrell was thinking intently over their situation and the loss of the supplies.  She was considering the perplexing problems from different viewpoints, with a view toward solving them.

“What did the thief do with our supplies?” she demanded, turning to the guide.

“Probably took them away with him.  That’s the way thieves usually do.  Otherwise, what’s the use in stealing?”

“I don’t think so, sir.  I do not believe this thief took the stuff because he wanted it, but rather to make you trouble.”

“Maybe, maybe.  It’s all the same thing.”

“Oh, no, sir; it isn’t, not if he did not carry the stuff away with him.  If he did not carry it away with him, what could he have done with it?” She regarded Mr. Grubb inquiringly.

“I swum!  I don’t know,” declared Janus, looking deeply puzzled.