She waited. The sound of the automobile vanished in the distance and she judged it safe to investigate. Somewhat gingerly she emerged upon the road and walked toward the spot where the car had entered the woods. The wheel tracks were plainly to be seen, and she followed them inward. It was but a step, perhaps fifty yards. At the end there was nothing but a pile of freshly cut sprucelings. Had the season been other than summer, she would have concluded some one was cutting Christmas trees for the market--but one did not cut Christmas trees in July! But why were the little spruces cut? There must be a reason. She stirred them with her foot. Then, with impulsive resolution, she began flinging them aside. Underneath she came upon a square of canvas--a cover--and concealed by this the last thing in the world she would have expected to come upon.... Bottles and bottles and bottles, carefully laid and piled. Instantly she knew, even before she lifted a bottle and read the label which identified it as whisky of foreign distillage, she had witnessed one step in a whisky smuggler’s progress; had surprised a _cache_ of liquor which had evaded the inspectors at the border, a few miles away. She did not count the bottles, but she estimated their number--upward of a hundred! She was frightened. How it came about, by what process of mental cross-reference, she could not have said, but the one thing obtruding upon her consciousness was the story of the disappearance of Sheriff Churchill! Had he come upon such a hoard? Had his discovery become known to the malefactors? Did that, perhaps, explain his inexplicable absence? Carmel’s impulse was to run, to absent herself from that spot with all possible celerity. She started, halted, returned. There could be no danger now, she argued with herself, and there might be some clew, something indicative of the identity of the men she saw in the car. If there were, it was her duty as proprietor of the _Free Press_ to come into possession of that information. Fortune was with her. In the interstices of the bottles her groping hand came upon something small and hard. She held it in the moonlight. It was a match box made from a brass shotgun shell.... Without pausing to examine it, she slipped it securely into her waist, then--and her reason for doing so was not plain to her--she helped herself to a bottle of liquor, wrapped it in the light sweater she carried, and turned her face toward Gibeon. CHAPTER X Carmel went directly to the room in the hotel which she still occupied pending the discovery of a permanent boarding place. She locked the door carefully and closed the transom. Then with a queer feeling of mingled curiosity and the exultation of a newspaper woman, she placed side by side on her dresser the bottle of liquor she had abstracted from the _cache_ and the match box made from a brass shotgun shell.