could amuse yourselves throwing things into the water, eh?"
Matty remarked, with such a vein of sarcasm in his voice that Toby
immediately aroused to defend himself.

"'Twa'n't that at all, Matty Eggleston; prove it by Ty here if either of
us was afraid to go inside your old haunted mill, was we, Ty?" he
exclaimed, with a fine show of righteous indignation.

"Course we wasn't," Ty hastened to declare, with a decided shake of his
tousled head. "We walked along the shore till we came to a nice shady
place, and then squatted down, meanin' to wait till Elmer showed up.
Then I popped a rock at a sassy little turkle, and pretty soon both of
us were letting fly."

"When did you miss Nat, and where was he the last you saw him?" asked
Matty, who was expected some day to become a lawyer.

"Oh!" answered Toby, "he said he'd hang around the dam here and look
into things. You know Nat always did want to pry into everything he
saw."

"What then?" Matty went on asking.

"Why, we saw Elmer and Lil Artha coming, and went to meet 'em, that's
all," replied Ty.

"Have any of you been inside the mill?"

"Why, no," Toby spoke up. "Elmer and Lil Artha sat down to rest, and you
see we expected Nat to pop out on us any minute, so we just didn't say
anything about it till they asked."

"And that was just about the time we first heard your voices close by,"
said Elmer, "so we made up our minds to wait till you joined us, when we
could scatter and search."

"Search!" echoed Larry. "Good gracious! do you think Nat can be lost?"

"It doesn't seem possible," admitted Elmer, "but I blew the bugle, and
sounded the assembly. If Nat heard that he is scout enough to know it
was a command for him to come in--if he could."

"Whew! this is something we didn't expect to run up against--a mystery
right in the start," remarked Matty, mopping his face with his big
bandana handkerchief, which he wore about his neck, cowboy fashion, with
the knot behind.

"You never can tell, suh!" said Chatz, in a solemn manner; and somehow
none of the boys seemed quite as ready to scoff at the Southerner's
superstitious belief, as usual.

"But hadn't we better be looking around?" remarked Matty. "Nat may have
gone into the old mill, bent on investigating, and some accident have
happened to him."

"As what?" queried George, cautiously.

"Oh, well, perhaps he tripped and fell, striking his head as he went
down. Then again, a rotten plank might have given way