A mission- pt1 setting out

Oh wow! it has been a long time. So much has happened that I can only tell you a small part of the story.  Three days after Spy #1 came in, he disappeared.  The king asked me to go looking for him, and I decided to bring my detective friend Coale along.  We started out on a few clues Coale had picked up, and worked our way up and down Sharklett river following the quite obvious traces that the missing spy had left.  He was either not trying to hide, or he was just not very good at it.  At nearly every hotel in his path, he had signed in using his real name, and he usually had bought a detailed map of the town and surrounding area to which he went next.  All the time, I was thinking of how nice it was that he left such a plain track, but it seemed that Coale had different opinions.  When ever we signed in to a hotel or ordered a lunch, he would give a different name.  I often wondered about all this, but as I thought he knew what he was doing, I did not ask him about it.  As we followed the Trail, we were never more than one day behind our quarry, and after a week, it began to grow frustrating.  When he had been going in a straight line,  we would travel twice as far that day so as to get to the next town before he did.  But then we would find that he had retraced his steps, and had gone back to where we had been the night before.  At the end of a fortnight, after traveling 300 miles on foot, we found the runaway spy.