“Of course,” he reasoned, “there may have been two parties of them. Skeel and the two cronies in one, and the old hermit by himself. In that case the boys may have divided themselves. Maybe that’s it. Oh, hang it all!” he exclaimed as if he found the puzzle too much for him. “I’m going to wait until morning.” But the morning brought no solution of the problem. Tom awoke early, after a restless night, during which he several times imagined he heard his chums calling to him. He would jump up, rush to the flap of the tent, toss some light wood on the camp fire, and peer out eagerly, only to find that he had dreamed about or imagined it. Once or twice he called aloud, listening and hoping for an answer, but none came. And so the night passed and morning came. Tom felt little appetite for breakfast, but he knew he must eat to keep up his strength for the task that lay before him. “I’ve got to find them!” he decided. “I’ve got to take the trail. Something may have happened to them. That bear we saw may have--” And then he laughed at the notion, for he knew that a bear, however large, could not make away with three strong, healthy lads. “Unless there were three bears,” he mused, with a smile, “and that’s out of the question.” He was thinking deeply, so deeply in fact that he forgot to look to the oil stove, and the first he knew the coffee had boiled over, and the bacon was scorched in the pan. “Oh, hang it!” Tom exclaimed. “I can’t even cook!” He fried more bacon, and an egg, and on that, and coffee, he made a lonely breakfast. “Now to reason things out,” he spoke aloud. “I’m glad the rowboat is here anyhow, I can navigate the lake to a certain extent.” He walked down to the shore, and what he saw there caused him to utter a cry of astonishment. “There’s been a struggle here--a fight!” Tom cried. “The boys have been taken away against their will!” He bent over and looked closely at the sandy shore. It was all too evident that some sort of a struggle had taken place there, and that recently. The marks visible by day but not at night proved this. “Those marks weren’t there when we landed yesterday afternoon,” decided our hero. “Besides, they’re quite a distance from where we brought the skiff in. There’s been some sort of a boat here,” he went on, as he bent over the impression made by the sharp prow of some craft in the sand. “Someone came in a boat, got hold of the boys somehow, and carried them off. But there was a fight all right, and a good one, too, I’ll wager.” It did not take a mind-reader to decide this. The sand in several places was scuffed about, raised up in ridges, or scratched into depressions, while the heel marks, deeply indented in the soft material, showed how desperate had been the struggle. But the chums had been overpowered, that was certain, for they had been taken away.