"It is a _carte postale_," she explained. "We found it in the yard some days after you had been here. It had been trampled in the mud by the horses' feet and the writing had been scraped or blotted out. Perhaps it belonged to the young man. It may have fallen from his pocket. I do not know." Frank took it eagerly from her hand, while his comrades gathered around him. The card was almost illegible, but it could be seen that it was a United States postal. There was not a single word upon it that could be made out in its entirety, but up in the corner where the postmark had been they could see by straining their eyes the letters C and M. "That's Camport, I'm willing to bet!" exclaimed Bart excitedly. "And here's something else," put in Billy pointing to where the address would naturally be looked for. "See those letters d-f-o-r----" "It's dollars to doughnuts that that stands for 'Bradford,'" Frank shouted. "A card from Camport to Tom Bradford. Boys, we didn't guess wrong that day. That was Tom that that brute of a lieutenant was going to hang!" They were tingling with excitement and delight. To be sure, they did not know what had become of their friend. But he had escaped from this house. He was perhaps within a few miles of them. He was, at any rate, not eating his heart out in a distant prison camp. Then to Frank came the thought of Rabig. Perhaps Tom hadn't escaped. Perhaps Rabig had added murder to the crime of treason of which they were sure he was guilty. "Are you sure that you haven't found anything else that would help us in finding our friend?" he asked of the girl, whose face was beaming at the pleasure she had been able to give to her deliverers. "No," she answered. "There is nothing else. I am sorry." "Let's take a look around the house again, fellows," suggested Frank. "We may have overlooked something the other day. It's only a chance, but let's take it." They made a careful circuit of the house, but nothing rewarded the search until Frank, with an exclamation, picked up some pieces of rope that had been lying in the grass not far from the window from which the prisoner had dropped. "Are these yours?" he asked of the girl who had accompanied them and had been as ardent in the search as themselves. She examined them. "I do not think so," she declared. "I do not remember seeing any rope like that around the house." They scrutinized the pieces carefully. "Look at these frayed edges," said Frank, laying them together. "You see that these two pieces were part of one rope." "I'll tell you what that means," put in Billy. "The girl says that Tom was bound with ropes. That cut or broken one was the one that was used to tie his hands. In some way he cut that. He didn't have a knife or the cut would be cleaner. Perhaps he sawed the rope against a piece of glass that he might have managed to get near."