CHAPTER III. "I WILL BE BACK." By this time the loafers about Hollow Tree were thoroughly alive to the situation, and Little Snap imagined that Robin Burrnock was looking on with great satisfaction. "Of course there was!" exclaimed the excited Shag. "What hev ye done with it, you young scamp?" "What do you think I have done with it, Mr. Shag?" demanded Little Snap, fearlessly. "If it is not there now, I know no more where it is than you do." "Say I have taken it, do yer?" cried Shag, fiercely. "Ye shall eat 'em words, boy." "That's it, Dan!" broke in one of the spectators, a big, red-whiskered bushbinder. "If ye want enny help, call on me. "Reckon I can handle sich a leetle ginger bub es he," replied the postmaster. "Here's the sack; see if the Hollow Tree package is there fer yerself." Little Snap was standing by the side of Jack, and about six feet from the entrance to the Hollow Tree. Bidding the horse to remain quiet, he entered the opening, upon the bottom of which lay the mail pouch. Giving this a kick toward him, Shag returned to his retreat behind a barrier of poles with which the inclosure had been partitioned off. "It is not here," said Little Snap, when he had hastily examined the small amount of mail matter left in the pouch. "Then where is it?" "I do not know." "I should like to know if it isn't your bizness to know? I shall take the trouble to report yer at headquarters. It isn't th' fust time I have missed letters, though I hev waited to git dead evidence agin' yer afore I blowed. "Boys, I call on yer to prove thet he 'lows th' Hollow Tree mail ain't here." "P'raps he's got yit 'bout his duds," ventured Robin Burrnock. "S'arch him," exclaimed one of the speaker's companions. The four started forward as if they would carry out the intention. Little Snap had picked up the sack, and, with it lying across his left arm, stood in the opening answering for a doorway to the "office." The quartet stopped suddenly in their advance, either lacking the courage to attack the determined boy, or waiting for an order from the postmaster to do so. "It's no use for us to git mixed up in th' muss," said the latter, directly. "He's under Uncle Sam; but ye can count on me to report him in short meter." Without replying, Little Snap threw the pouch over Jack's back and fastened it to a ring in the pommel of the saddle. Then, while the five looked on in silence, he sprang into his seat. "This is only th' beginnin' o' th' end," said Dan Shag, shaking his fist after the departing postboy. The country, after leaving the Hollow Tree, was less broken, the post road winding through a desolate region, thinly populated, and often lonely in the extreme. While trying in his mind to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the Hollow Tree mail, Little Snap allowed Jack to take his own gait, until the Greenbrier River had been reached and he had passed over the pole bridge.