“No,” said Jack; “but if that bullet had been an inch further to th’ right, you wouldn’t be a-settin’ laughin’ there,” and a little shudder ran through him as he thought of it, and he clinched his hands as he imagined what his vengeance would have been. “Do you suppose Nolan lives here?” asked Allan, looking curiously around the room. “No,” said Jack; “they’s one o’ th’ Waymores lives here, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was in cahoots with Nolan. These people’re just as much vagabonds as them that go trampin’ about th’ country.” Allan looked again about the squalid room, and turned a little sick at the thought of living in the midst of such filth and wretchedness. “Come, let’s get out of here,” he said. “I want some fresh air. This is enough to turn one’s stomach.” “I tell you,” suggested Jack, “suppose we go out th’ back door there an’ sneak around th’ edge of th’ clearin’. Mebbe we kin come on Nolan when he ain’t lookin’—and what I’ll do to him’ll be a plenty!” Allan laughed at his ferocity. “I don’t believe Nolan would stay around here,” he said. “He didn’t know but what there were others with us. He probably decamped as soon as he took that crack at me.” “Well, it won’t do any harm t’ try,” said Jack, and try they did, but no trace of Nolan was anywhere to be seen. They went on through the woods, eating their lunch beside a limpid spring which bubbled from beneath a rock in the hillside, and during the afternoon pushed on along the valley, but met no human beings. If it was indeed Nolan who fired the shot, he had taken to cover effectually. Allan began to doubt more and more that it had really been Nolan. “It might have been a hunter,” he pointed out to Jack, “who was shooting at something else, and did not see us at all. Such things happen, you know.” “Yes,” Jack admitted, “but that wasn’t what happened this time,” and, when they reached home again, he went straight over to the offices and related to Mr. Schofield the details of the morning’s adventures. That official promised to put two detectives on Nolan’s trail at once. They worked on it for two or three days, but, though they even employed a bloodhound in the effort to run him down, all their work was quite in vain. The man to whom the cabin belonged said he had walked over to a neighbour’s that Sunday and had been away from home all day. He denied all knowledge of Nolan or Reddy Magraw, And the search ended, as all the others had done, without finding a trace of either of them.