“I’ve got to find them!” he decided. “I’ve got to take the trail. Something may have happened[160] to them. That bear we saw may have—” And then he laughed at the notion, for he knew that a bear, however large, could not make away with three strong, healthy lads. “Unless there were three bears,” he mused, with a smile, “and that’s out of the question.”

[160]

He was thinking deeply, so deeply in fact that he forgot to look to the oil stove, and the first he knew the coffee had boiled over, and the bacon was scorched in the pan.

“Oh, hang it!” Tom exclaimed. “I can’t even cook!”

He fried more bacon, and an egg, and on that, and coffee, he made a lonely breakfast.

“Now to reason things out,” he spoke aloud. “I’m glad the rowboat is here anyhow, I can navigate the lake to a certain extent.”

He walked down to the shore, and what he saw there caused him to utter a cry of astonishment.

“There’s been a struggle here—a fight!” Tom cried. “The boys have been taken away against their will!”

He bent over and looked closely at the sandy shore. It was all too evident that some sort of a struggle had taken place there, and that recently. The marks visible by day but not at night proved this.

“Those marks weren’t there when we landed yesterday afternoon,” decided our hero. “Besides,[161] they’re quite a distance from where we brought the skiff in. There’s been some sort of a boat here,” he went on, as he bent over the impression made by the sharp prow of some craft in the sand. “Someone came in a boat, got hold of the boys somehow, and carried them off. But there was a fight all right, and a good one, too, I’ll wager.”

[161]

It did not take a mind-reader to decide this. The sand in several places was scuffed about, raised up in ridges, or scratched into depressions, while the heel marks, deeply indented in the soft material, showed how desperate had been the struggle. But the chums had been overpowered, that was certain, for they had been taken away.

“And in my boat, too, I’ll wager!” cried Tom. “The impudent scallawags! To take my boat, and then use it to carry off my friends. They must have taken some of my gasolene, too. Oh, wait until I get a chance at them!”

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