“Now, we’ll search fer the body,” announced Anderson.  “Git out of the way, Bud!”

“I ain’t standin’ on it,” protested twelve-year-old Bud Long.

“Well, you’re standin’ mighty near them blood-stains an’—­”

“Yes, ’n ain’t blood a part of the body?” rasped Isaac Porter scornfully; whereupon Bud faded into the outer rim.

“First we’ll look down cellar,” said Mr. Crow.  “Where’s the cellar at?”

“There ain’t none,” replied Elon Jones.

“What?  No cellar?  Well, where in thunder did they hide the body, then?”

“There’s an attic,” ventured Joe Perkins.

A searching party headed by Anderson Crow shinned up the ladder to the low garret.  No trace of a body was to be found, and the searchers came down rather thankfully.  Then, under Mr. Crow’s direction, they searched the wood piles, the woods, and the fields for many rods in all directions.  At noon they congregated at the schoolhouse.  Alf Reesling was there.

“Find it?” said he thickly, with a cunning leer.  He had been drinking.  Anderson was tempted to club him half to death, but instead he sent him home with Joe Perkins, refusing absolutely to hear what the town drunkard had to say.

“Well, you’ll wish you’d listened to me,” ominously hiccoughed Alf; and then, as a parting shot, “I wouldn’t tell you now fer eighteen dollars cash.  You c’n go to thunder!” It was lese majeste, but the crowd did nothing worse than stare at the offender.

Before starting off on the trail of the big sleigh, Anderson sent this message by wire to the lawyers in Chicago: 

     “I have found the girl you want, but the body is lost.  Would you
     just as soon have her dead as alive?

     “ANDERSON CROW.”

In a big bob-sled the marshal and a picked sextette of men set off at one o’clock on the road over which the sleigh had travelled many hours before.  Anderson had failed to report the suspected crime to the sheriff at Boggs City and was working alone on the mystery.  He said he did not want anybody from town interfering with his affairs.

“Say, Andy—­Anderson,” said Harry Squires, now editor of the Banner, “maybe we’re hunting the wrong body and the wrong people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, ain’t ’Rast Little missing?  Maybe he’s been killed, eh?  And say, ain’t there some chance that he did the killing?  Didn’t he say he was going to murder that city chap?  Well, supposing he did.  We’re on the wrong track, ain’t we?”

“Doggone you, Harry, that don’t fit in with my deductions,” wailed Anderson.  “I wish you’d let me alone.  ‘Rast may have done the killin’, but it’s our place to find the body, ain’t it?  Whoever has been slew was taken away last night in the sleigh.  S’posin it was Mr. Reddon!  Well, consarn it, ain’t he got a body same as anybody else?  We’ve just got to find somebody’s body, that’s all.  We’ve got to prove the corpus deelicti.  Drive up, Bill!”