Page:Harry Castlemon - The Steel Horse.djvu/393

 would not have hired them to return across the mountains and take their chances of capture by Matt Coyle and the Buster band. Now that they could think over their adventures with calmness, they were surprised at the ease with which they had slipped through those ruffians' fingers. They knew they couldn't do it again, and they would have gone home by rail rather than try the mountain route a second time. There was one thing about it, Arthur repeatedly declared: The man who wrote their guide-book must be posted so that he could warn wheelmen to keep away from Glen's Falls until the mischief-making squatter and his new allies had been arrested and lodged in jail.

On the afternoon of the second day after leaving Plymouth, the boys came suddenly upon a couple of tramps who had halted under the shade of a tree by the roadside to eat the bread and meat they had begged at the nearest farmhouse. But these men were not like the other tramps they had seen. They were sailors on the face of them, and looked out of place there in the country so far from salt water. Roy Sheldon was sure there was something