Page:Castlemon--Joe Wayring at Home.djvu/409

 wouldn't have caught him if they had gone there.

"There's a good deal of hard sense in Joe's head," said Mr. Swan, after a short pause. "Of course, Matt and his family will come together again somewhere, but you see the trouble is, we don't know what point they are striking for."

"Can't you follow the trails and find out?"

"Take the plainest one of them trails, and I'll bet every thing I've got that you can't follow it a hundred yards," said Mr. Swan. "It is going to take us a good long month to hunt them down, and we'll be lucky if we do it in that time."

"But we can't wait so long," protested one of the guests. "We must return to the city to-morrow. Our business demands our attention."

The guides consulted in low tones, and so did their employers. Finally one of the latter wrote something on a card and handed it to Mr. Swan, saying:

"If we have done all we can, we might as well go back to the hotel; but before we start,