t that
arrow through it one day, when he asked me to throw it up in the air for
him."

"And I ought to know it too, Fred," remarked the short legged cousin of
the missing boy. "Because I bought it for Chris. You see, I lost his
other for him, and I had to spend some of my hard-earned cash to get him
a new one. I found that at Snyder's Emporium; and I thought he'd kick
like fun because it was so odd; but say, he just thought it the best
thing ever! That's Colon's headgear, all right."

"Then we'll consider that point settled," Fred went on to say. "The next
thing on the program to decide is, how does it happen to be lying here
in this ditch? As I remember it, there wasn't much of a wind last night
when I went to bed, and it doesn't seem then that it could have blown
off his head when he was running."

"There wasn't a ripple in the leaves of the trees," declared Bristles.

"And if it did blow off, wouldn't he have stopped to look for it in the
moonlight?" remarked Sid Wells.

"Colon is too careful of his things not to make a hunt for his cap,"
came from Semi-Colon, who ought to know if any one did, about the
peculiarities of his own cousin.

"Well, the cap was here," Fred said; "and we found it; now why was it
lying in the ditch as if it had been thrown there, or knocked off in a
scuffle?"

"Wow! now perhaps we ain't gettin' down to brass tacks!" ejaculated
Bristles.

Fred bent over to examine the road, along the edge of the ditch.

"Looks like somethin' might have been going on here," Corney suggested.

"You're right," Sid added, excitedly. "Why, anybody with one eye could
see there'd been a scramble around here. Look at the scrapings in the
dust; would you? just like a pack of fellows had set on one; and the
bunch were jumping around him, trying to get away, and the others
holding on. Fred, here's where it must have happened, sure!"

"I think so myself," returned the leader of the five boys, gravely
surveying the tell-tale marks in the dust of the road.

"Eureka! ain't we the handy boys, though, to get on the track of the
kidnappers so quick?" exclaimed Bristles, proudly.

"Go slow," advised Fred; "we've only made a start as yet. Even if it
happened here we don't know who jumped on Colon, and captured him. It
might have been those Mechanicsburg fellows; or the three tramps who
searched the Masterson farmhouse; and then again, why, perhaps some of
our own Riverport boys may have been having a little fun,