“I hate to tell Sister--I can't tell her,” Hiram said, as he went slowly back to the house. For Sister had been “counting chickens” again, and she had figured that, at eighteen cents per pound, live weight, the ten turkeys would pay for all the clothes she would need that winter, and give her “Christmas money”, too. The young farmer shrank from meeting the girl again that night, and he delayed going into the house as long as possible. Then he found they had all retired, leaving him a cold supper at the end of the kitchen table. The disappearance of the turkeys kept Hiram tossing, wakeful, upon his bed for some hours. He could not fail to connect this robbery with the other things that had been done, during the past weeks, to injure those living at the Atterson farm. Was the secret enemy really Peter Dickerson? And had Pete committed this crime now? Yet the horse and wagon had come from the direction opposite the Dickerson farm, and had returned as it came. “I don't know whether I am accusing that fellow wrongfully, or not,” muttered Hiram, at last. “But I am going to find out. Sister isn't going to lose her turkeys without my doing everything in my power to get them back and punish the thief.” He usually arose in the morning before anybody else was astir, so it was easy for Hiram to slip out of the house and down to the field to the empty turkey coop. The marks of horse and wagon were quite as plain in the faint light of dawn as they had been the night before. In the darkness the thief had driven his wagon over some small stumps, amid which his horse had scrambled in some difficulty, it was plain. Hiram, tracing out these marks as a Red Indian follows a trail, saw something upon the edge of one of the half-decayed stumps that interested him greatly. He stood up the next moment with this clue in his hand--a white, coarse hair, perhaps four inches in length. “That was scraped off the horse's fetlock as he scrambled over this stump,” muttered Hiram. “Now, who drives a white horse, or a horse with white feet, in this neighborhood? “Can I narrow the search down in this way, I wonder?” and for some moments the youth stood there, in the growing light of early morning, canvassing the subject from that angle. CHAPTER XXVII. RUN TO EARTH A broad streak of crimson along the eastern horizon, over the treetops, announced the coming of the sun when Hiram Strong reached the automobile road to which he, on the previous night, had traced the thief that had stolen Sister's poults. Now he looked at the track again. It surely had come from the direction of Scoville, and it turned back that way. Yet he looked at the white horse-hair scraped off upon the stump, and he turned his back upon these signs and strode along the road toward his own home. Smoke was just curling from the Atterson chimney; Sister, or Mrs. Atterson, was just building the fire. But they did not see Hiram as he went by.