"Um!" Hoskin shook his head. "I ain't so sure 'bout that, Kiddie," he
said. "He has spies planted all along the trail. He knows 'most
everything. You'd best be keerful."

Late on that same day. Rube Carter was crossing the trail, carrying a
load of material for Kiddie's building operations, when he saw Sheila
limping towards him over the bridge. He dropped his load, strode up to
her, and was putting his arms about her neck in welcome when he noticed
that there was blood on her chin and throat. He searched for an open
wound, but found none.

"Looks as if you'd bin gettin' back to yer old business of huntin'
stags," he said. "Wait, though," he added, seeing a nasty tear in the
skin over her shoulder. "Stags don't carry no knives along of 'em, an'
if that ain't a knife stab on your shoulder, then I sure ain't fit t'
be called a scout."

Rube was very much perplexed concerning Sheila's condition. It
appeared to him that, after all, she had not overtaken her master; that
notwithstanding Kiddie's confidence in her running powers, she had
proved that a Highland deerhound was not the equal in speed of a
well-trained prairie pony.

Rube blamed himself for having allowed her to break away from him. He
was glad, however, that she was not lost, and that her injury was not
serious. But where had she been? What had she been doing?

He at once began to exercise his scoutcraft in the endeavour to puzzle
out the mystery.

The blood marks on her chin and throat might very well be accounted for
on the supposition that, instead of following her master, she had gone
aside from the trail to give chase to some large animal--a mountain
goat or a big-horn antelope, and that she had attacked and perhaps
killed it, as she had been trained to do when out deer-stalking in her
native Highlands of Scotland.

She might very easily have been wounded in the encounter by a backward
prod of an antelope's sharp horn; even as she might have got the stains
about her mouth in licking the bleeding wound.

But, unfortunately for this simple theory, the wound in the hound's
shoulder was not of a kind to suggest the stab of a goat's horn or of
an antelope's sharp-pointed antler. It was clearly and unmistakably
the cut of a knife; not round, but thin and straight, and it was too
far forward and too high over her shoulder for her to turn her head and
get at it with her tongue.

Moreover, some of the bristles that had been cut by the kn