"Yes," said Stumper; "thank you"--as though he knew it already, but felt that it was neatly put. "Follow up your flash," added the Tramp. "Smell--then follow. That is--keep on looking." Stumper turned, pirouetting on what the children called his "living leg." "I will," he cried, with an air of self-abandonment, and promptly diving by a clever manoeuvre out of their hands, he fell heavily upon all fours, and disappeared beneath the dense bramble bushes just behind them. Panting, and certainly perspiring afresh, he forced his way in among the network of thick leaves and prickly branches. They heard him puffing; it seemed they heard him singing too, as he reached forward with both arms into the dark interior. Caught by his whole-hearted energy, they tried to help; they pushed behind; they did their best to open a way for his head between the entwining brambles. "Don't!" he roared inside. "You'll scratch my eyes out. I shan't see--anything!" His mouth apparently was full of earth. They watched the retreating soles of his heavy shooting-boots. Slowly the feet were dragged in after him. They disappeared from sight. Stumper was gone. "He'll come back, though," mentioned Judy. The performance had been so interesting that she almost forgot its object, however. Tim reminded her. "But he won't find anything in a smelly place like that," he declared. "I mean," he added, "it can't be a beetle or a grub that we're--looking for." Yet there was doubt and wonder in his voice. Stumper, a "man like that," and a soldier, a hunter too, who had done scouting in an Indian jungle, and met tigers face to face--a chap like that could hardly disappear on all fours into a clump of bramble bushes without an excellent reason! An interval of comparative silence followed, broken only by the faint murmur of the wind that stirred their humming feathers. They stood in a row and listened intently. Hardly a sound came from the interior of the bramble bushes. The soldier had justified his title. He had retired pletely. To Judy it occurred that he might be suffocated, to Tim that he might have been eaten by some animal, to Uncle Felix that he might have slipped out at the other side and made his escape. But no one expressed these idle thoughts in words. They believed in Stumper really. He invariably came back. This time would be no exception to the rule.