And I was comforted thereby, and asleep when some one aroused us in the morning. I tumbled from my bunk, astonished by the sudden knowledge that I had slept in all my clothing, and that I had not suffered a wickedly troublesome dream. Tim was up and pouring coffee, hot and steaming, into the tin cups, and the day was breaking over the eastern hills in the early hour of the morning, so swift is the sun’s reappearance in that high clime. We ate and drank sparsely, quietly, each intent on what the signs might show, and deliberately, nay, almost leisurely, tightened our belts and went out of the door, George in the lead, Tim, short and stocky, bending behind him like an unleashed hound, and Bill, huge and grim, following. It was a foregone conclusion that the robber had done one of two things--approached from behind the cabin in the daylight, while we were working, or crept stealthily in at night while we were asleep. In the latter case he had doubtless fled down the trail. In the former he would have retreated by the rear of the cabin, and out into the screen of the forest on the mountainside above. So, first, we inspected the trail. Veterans in reading signs were these men who had permitted me to share their lot, and they walked forward with keen eyes sweeping this way and that--eyes which nothing could escape. A broken twig, a patch of crushed, indented moss, anything unusual, would be observed and noted. They bade me walk behind, and scanned the ground for a hundred yards before one of them uttered a sound. Then George straightened up, and I saw the hurt look on his face give way to an angry scowl, and saw him swing one ponderous fist into a palm. “Come here,” he said, with strange repression, and we joined him. There, plainly imprinted in the mud, where some one had entered the trail from a moss-carpeted side, were tracks, and they were those of one who wore shoes--shoes of civilization, such as but few men wore in our outskirt of a rough world, and the shoes were pointed, delicately, foppishly, almost daintily. We lifted our heads and stared at one another, with the same unvoiced comment leaping from our eyes. We looked again at the telltale tracks in the mud, clearly leading down the hillside to the gulch below, and thus off toward the camp. We lifted our heads once more and George spoke. “Laughing Jim!” he said. “No other man in all the country wore such shoes!” Tim added. “And no one but an expert crook would have taken a chance in coming into our cabin night before last,” suggested Bill. “That’s when the trick was turned,” declared George. “And he has paid me--gratitude!”