The patrol laughed as he scuttled out of the pit, and Dick stood with watch in hand to give him the proper law. 'He's a rum-looking beggar!' said Billy Seton, 'but I'll be hanged if he isn't wide-o. And I reckon he stood it uncommonly well, the way you jawed him, Arthur. He didn't get a bit raggy; he just hung on to his chance of showing himself to be a boy scout.' 'Pooh!' said Arthur. 'This is turning the whole thing into piffle. You fellows seemed to want to chivvy him, so I agreed just for the joke. But it isn't likely that we shall recognise wharf-rats as brother scouts!' 'Not likely!' cried No. 6, whose name was Reggie Parr; but the others said nothing. When time was up, away went the Wolf Patrol on the tracks which Chippy Slynn had made, and for some distance they followed them at an easy trot, for Chippy had posted straight ahead over grassy or sandy land, on which the irons left clear traces. But within a mile and a half of the sandpit the track was lost. Arthur Graydon drove in his patrol-flag beside the last marks which could be found, and ordered his scouts to separate and swing round in a wide circle until the line was picked up again. The tracks had ended beside the wide high-road which crossed the heath, and half the patrol took one side of the road and half the other. Within three minutes Dick Elliott raised the wild howl which was their patrol-call, and everyone rushed towards him. He had found the trail. It was on the further side of the high-road, and ran straight ahead beside it, and on raced the Wolves along the tracks. Chippy had observed how clear a trail he left, and when he came to the high-road, he thought it was about time to throw his pursuers out a little, for they could travel much faster than he could go in the tracking-irons. So at the edge of the high-road down went his head and up went his feet, and he walked across the smooth hard road on his hands, leaving no trace, or such a trace as the Wolf Patrol were not yet clever enough to pick up. With the tracking-irons safely hoisted in the air, he went quite thirty yards before he turned himself right side up again, and scuttled off. He went another mile, and practised the same manoeuvre once more, and then he crept very warily forward, for the land was rising to a ridge. Unless he crossed this ridge with the utmost caution the boys behind him on the heath would see his figure against the sky-line. He marked a place where the ridge was crowned with gorse-bushes, and through these he wriggled his way, receiving a hundred scratches, but troubling nothing about that. On the other side the ridge went down even more steeply than by the slope which Chippy had just ascended, and up this farther side a huge waggon, drawn by four powerful horses, was slowly making its way.