When they landed, the prisoners’ feet were untied and they were marched off toward the nearest railroad station. The women, who had, of course, not been tied up with the others, were given their choice of going home or of going on with the men. They chose to stick by their husbands. It was a queer-looking procession winding through the old pine woods. The prisoners were all sullen and there was not very much conversation.

Mr. Graham attempted to be sociable. “Well, Roberts, you certainly had us buffaloed for a long time, but we have caught up with you at last.”

“Yes,” Roberts snarled contemptuously, “and if you had not stumbled on to that old chain out there in the swamp you would never have caught up with us. It was all Qualley’s carelessness.”

“Qualley’s?” Mr. Graham exclaimed in feigned surprise. “Why, he said that he did not know anything about this business.”

That was too much for Roberts. He raved like a crazy man and cursed Qualley in all the vile terms he could think of as the leader of the whole gang and the man who had persuaded him to go into it against his will. Suddenly he happened to think that he might say something to incriminate himself and shut up like a clam. No further attempts to get a rise out of him had any effect.

They waited beside the railroad track out in the woods because they wanted to avoid the curious crowd which they knew would be embarrassing for both them and the prisoners if they went to the station. When the train finally came they flagged it and arrived at the county seat without seeing more than a dozen people. They turned the prisoners over to the sheriff, who happened to have come down to meet the train, and went on to Okalatchee.

Mr. Graham had to go back to headquarters to write up his report on the case. Murphy was going home to take the good news to his wife, and Scott decided to go with him. There was one point in this mystery which had not been solved: they had not discovered how the logs were taken out of the pond. Mr. Graham tried to persuade Scott to come back to camp and have his wound dressed and get a little rest, but he promised to get Murphy to dress the wound, which he declared was nothing more than a scratch, and thought that he could rest better after he had cleared up the last point in the puzzle.

“Did you hear what Roberts said about stumbling on to that chain in the swamp?” Scott asked, when they were started on the home trail.

Murphy nodded. “That was what we heard all right, but we never had the luck to stumble on to it.”

“As soon as you have told the news to your wife we’ll get out there and have a real look for it.”

Mrs. Murphy was as glad as any of them that the thieves had been caught. “Now,” she exclaimed, “maybe Pat will stay home a little of the time. He has been living at that log pond a good part of the time for the past two years.”

“Yes,” Murphy grinned, “and we are going back there again as soon as I fix up this fellow’s throat, which Roberts came so near slitting for him.”

When Scott had a look at himself in the glass he could easily understand why Mrs. Murphy had been so horrified at the first sight of him. The powder from Roberts’ pistol had blackened all one side of his face till he looked like a half-minstrel, and the flesh wound in his neck, which was really a very shallow one, had bled so profusely that his shirt was all stained up.

“Could not look much worse if I had really been murdered,” he laughed, “but that scratch is almost healed up now.”

“That is because you were so close to the gun that the heat fairly cauterized it, but we’ll have to wash it out just the same and put some antiseptic dressing on it. These gunshot wounds are very apt to cause trouble. Seems as though blood poisoning follows them mighty easy.”

Murphy soon applied a simple dressing and they set off for the old log pond, which had now acquired a new interest. The men, who had already heard of Qualley’s arrest, plied them with curious questions, but they put them off by saying that they had orders not to say anything about it.

“The wooziest thing about this,” Murphy explained, as they walked slowly around the log pond, “is that some logs actually went out of here one night while I was here watching them.”

“Were you alone that night, or was Qualley with you?”

“Qualley was there, too, but he was right in sight all the time.”

“Did he stay right there with you?”

“Let me see. No, he did not stay right there in the brush all the time. As I remember it he went out on the logs once or twice and monkeyed around there when he thought he ............