Indeed, wild as the spot was, there was little likelihood of anybody troubling the young people, for they had Reno along.  This faithful creature watched over the trio most jealously and, as they were eating on the grass, he found some sudden reason to become excited.  He rose up, stiffening his back, the hair rising on his neck, and a low growl issuing from his throat.  The girls were a little startled, but Tom sprang up, motioned to Helen and Ruth to keep still, and ran to the angry mastiff.

“What’s the matter with you, Reno?” demanded Tom, softly, but putting a restraining hand upon his collar.

Reno lurched forward, and Tom gripped the collar tightly as he was dragged directly toward a thick dump of shrubbery not many yards away.

CHAPTER XXIV

 The initials

There was no sound that Tom Cameron or the girls could hear from the shrubbery; but Reno evidently knew that somebody was lurking there.  And by the dog’s actions Tom thought it must be somebody whom Reno disliked.

“Oh, don’t leave us, Tom!” begged Helen, running behind her brother and the mastiff.

“Come on—­ both of you!” muttered Tom.  “We’ll see what this means.  Stick close to me.”

He had picked up a stout club; but it was in the huge and intelligent mastiff that they all put their confidence.  The dog, although he snuffed now and then as though the scent that had first disturbed him still came down the wind, had ceased to growl.

They came to a path in the thicket and followed it for a few yards only, when Reno stopped and stiffened again.

“Hush!” whispered Tom, and parted the bushes with one hand, his other still clinging to the mastic’s collar.

There was a tiny opening in the shrubbery.  It surrounded the foot of a huge beech tree.  In some past day a careless hunter had built a fire close to the trunk of this tree.  It was now hollow at the base, but vines and creepers growing up the tall tree had hidden the opening.

A man was on his knees at the foot of the tree and had drawn the matted curtain of creepers aside with one hand while with the other he reached in to the full length of his arm.  He had no suspicion of the presence of the young people and Reno.

Out of the hollow in the tree trunk he drew something wrapped in an old pair of overalls.  He unwrapped it, still with his back to the spot where the dog and his master and the girls stood.  But the three friends could see over his shoulder as he knelt on the ground, and saw plainly that the object he had withdrawn from the tree trunk was a flat black box, evidently japanned, and there was a fair-sized brass padlock which fastened it,

“Ha, ha, ha!” chuckled the man to himself, as he wrapped the box up again in the old clothes, and then thrust it hastily into the hollow tree.  “Safe yet! safe yet!”