e ceremony of sending
a note to Lester by a negro boy, inviting him to come over and spend
a week with him, bringing his horse and gun, and they would have a
fine time shooting turkeys and driving the ridges for deer. This
arrangement enabled the two conspirators to be together day and
night. They intended to pass the most of their time in riding about
through the woods, and if a deer or turkey happened to come in their
way and they should be fortunate enough to shoot it, so much the
better; but if the game kept out of their sight they would not spend
any precious moments in looking for it. Their object was to devote
themselves exclusively to destroying all David's chances for earning
the hundred and fifty dollars. They would watch him closely, and when
they found out where his traps were set, they would visit them daily,
and steal every quail they found in them.

During the first few days the boys spent together they found out two
things: one was that there was a pile of traps in the yard behind
Godfrey Evans's cabin, and that they were never touched except when
the family happened to be in want of kindling wood. The other was,
that David left home bright and early every morning and went straight
to General Gordon's. What he did after he got there they could not
find out. They would always wait an hour or two to see if he came
out again, and then they would grow tired of doing nothing, and spend
the rest of the day searching the woods and brier-patches in the
neighborhood of the cabin, in the hope of finding some of David's
traps. But they never found a single one, for the reason that they
were all set on the General's plantation, and the boys never thought
of looking there for them.

"It's my opinion," said Lester, one day, when the two were seated at
a camp-fire in the woods, broiling a brace of squirrels which Bob had
shot, "that David has given it up as a bad job and left the way clear
for us."

"Hurrah!" shouted Bob.

"Well--yes; but I'd hurrah louder if he had only set a dozen or two
traps and given us a chance to rob them. If he'd done that, we might
have had a hundred birds on hand now. The best thing we can do is to
set our own traps and catch the quails as fast as we can. We'll keep
an eye on David all the same, however."

This programme was duly carried out--that is, they spent the rest of
the day in setting their traps, but they did not devote any more time
to watching David's movements. Two incident