"Cross the bog, enter the woods, skirt the hut--but I won't go into details. The best way to prove you know exactly what you have to do is to see if you can describe the route yourself. Come into my room, old fellow, and let us see if you can give me a sufficiently exact account of the ground you will have to pass over, for me to draw up a chart by it. An hour spent with paper and pencil to-night may save you from an uncertainty to-morrow that would lose you a good ten minutes." "Good! that's an idea; let's try it," rejoined Hickory. And being by this time at the hotel, they went in. In another moment they were shut up in Mr. Byrd's room, with a large sheet of foolscap before them. "Now," cried Horace, taking up a pencil, "begin with your description, and I will follow with my drawing." "Very well," replied Hickory, setting himself forward in a way to watch his colleague's pencil. "I leave the widow's house by the dining-room door--a square for the house, Byrd, well down in the left-hand corner of the paper, and a dotted line for the path I take,--run down the yard to the fence, leap it, cross the bog, and make straight for the woods." "Very good," commented Byrd, sketching rapidly as the other spoke. "Having taken care to enter where the trees are thinnest, I find a path along which I rush in a bee-line till I come to the glade--an ellipse for the glade, Byrd, with a dot in it for the hut. Merely stopping to dash into the hut and out again----" "Wait!" put in Byrd, pausing with his pencil in mid-air; "what did you want to go into the hut for?" "To get the bag which I propose to leave there to-night." "Bag?" [Illustration: (Page 364)] "Yes; Mansell carried a bag, didn't he? Don't you remember what the station-master said about the curious portmanteau the fellow had in his hand when he came to the station?" "Yes, but----" "Byrd, if I run that fellow to his death it must be fairly. A man with an awkward bag in his hand cannot run like a man without one. So I handicap myself in the same way he did, do you see?" "Yes." "Very well, then; I rush into the hut, pick up the bag, carry it out, and dash immediately into the woods at the opening behind the hut.--What are you doing?" "Just putting in a few landmarks," explained Byrd, who had run his pencil off in an opposite direction. "See, that is the path to West Side which I followed in my first expedition through the woods--the path, too, which Miss Dare took when she came to the hut at the time of the fearful thunderstorm. And wait, let me put in Professor Darling's house, too, and the ridge from which you can see Mrs. Clemmens' cottage. It will help us to understand----" "What?" cried Hickory, with quick suspiciousness, as the other paused. But Byrd, impatiently shaking his head, answered: "The whole situation, of course." Then, pointing hastily back to the hut, exclaimed: "So you have entered the woods again at this place? Very well; what then?"