“The rascals must have gone this way, of course, for I have passed no diverging road,” Chick rightly reasoned, while striding on across the bridge. “They may have been heading for that town, or for some isolated place near it. There is no branch road at the end of the bridge, so I cannot possibly take a wrong one. It would be encouraging, nevertheless, to find another fragment of the girl’s veil. Something evidently prevented her from dropping more of them.” The road wound through the woods and out of view of the river after leaving the bridge, and another half hour had passed when Chick again came in sight of the stream. He then could see the distant road house on the opposite bank, but no sign of any persons near it. Dugan’s launch no longer was at the float where Nick had observed it. Chick hurried on, and presently met with a surprise, a most agreeable one. He caught sight of another fragment of the torn veil, and of the narrow road leading toward the river. “Eureka!” he muttered, hastening to pick it up. “Here’s another scrap, at last. The girl must have dropped it to denote that her abductors took this side road. In that case--oh, by Jove, here are three more, and lying in a line denoting----” Chick had stopped short in the side road, and his process of reasoning then was precisely what Nick had anticipated. The circumstances, in fact, admitted of only one logical conclusion. “By gracious, there’s nothing to it,” thought Chick, elated. “Nick has been here. No one else could have had four pieces of the veil, and surely no one else would have placed them so suggestively in this direction. He must have picked up a clew that brought him here, and he evidently figured that I would come along this road. So he left these here to direct me.” Chick reasoned, too, that the side road must lead to a dwelling, the occupants of which Nick had been led to suspect, and he then became more cautious. Leaving the road, lest he might possibly be seen, he struck into the woods on the left and picked his way over a low hill, a course that brought him to the edge of the clearing directly back of the Ardley dwelling. Chick had arrived at a point, however, from which he could see only a part of the building a short distance beyond the house, and at which Margate and his confederates had arrived a few moments before. He was too far away, moreover, for their voices to reach his ears. It so happened, too, that Toulon and Patsy Garvan then were approaching the building, but Chick had come from nearly the opposite direction, and the building itself hid them from his view. Though unable to see any sign of Nick, a fact that somewhat mystified him, Chick made one discovery that immediately shaped his course of action.