CHAPTER VI—WE GET NEW LIGHT ON THE MYSTERY
That night Grove and Pee-wee and I hiked over to Harry Donnelle’s house, to show him what we had copied about the poplar that we thought must be the kind of a one that was meant in the letter.
I said, “There isn’t any such tree as the Dahadinee poplar in any of the books, but I think it must be the same as the Mackenzie poplar, because the Dahadinee River is up that way.”
“Sure,” Harry said; “I guess it’s just a nickname for one of those skyscraper pines that you never see south of Canada. I shot a Canada lynx up one of them on Hudson Bay; they puncture the sky, those things.” Cracky, that fellow’s been everywhere.
Grove said, “How is it going to do us any good?”
“Well, I don’t know that it is,” Harry said; “and I’m not buying a yacht on the strength of it, either. But I had a kind of an idea that we might bang into the woods north of Steuben Junction—that’s up near the Canadian border about forty or fifty miles north of Watertown.”
I said, “I guess that’s a pretty lonely country, hey?”
“Oh, the people wear clothes up that way and live in houses,” he said, “but it isn’t exactly like Broadway and Forty-second Street.”
Pee-wee looked kind of disappointed; I guess he thought that it was like South Africa up there. “Maybe it isn’t so terribly civilized,” he said.
“Well, it’s more civilized than where the Dahadinee poplar grows, you can be sure of that,” Harry said, “so don’t think that we’re going to pull any Christopher Columbus stunt. Everything up there has been discovered.”
“Not the treasure!” Pee-wee shouted.
“Now you kids listen to me,” Harry said, “and don’t fall off the railing—especially Pirate Harris.” He said that, because we were all sitting along the railing of the porch. He was sitting in a wicker chair, tilted back, and his feet stuck up on the railing.
“When I was in the city to-day,” he said, “I went into the big library situated in the dark morass on Fifth Avenue. Groping my way along its dark passages, I escaped the savage bookworms and ferocious authors who frequent its silent lairs, and made my way unobserved to the underground cave where the newspaper files are. Shh!
“There I examined the New York Chronicle of March eighth and ninth and tenth, eighteen ninety-five. You remember that old Hickory wrote his letter on March seventh? Well, here’s a sort of condensed version of a newspaper article that I found. Don’t fall backward Pee-wee, or you’ll go plunk into the rose bush. Now listen.”
Harry took out some pages in lead pencil writing and read them to us. This is what he read, because he gave me the pages afterward and I pasted them in our troop-book:
CANADIAN SPECIAL WRECKED
NEAR BORDER.
FATAL DISASTER FOLLOWS HOLD-UP.
A fatal accident occurred yesterday morning to train number 37 of the Canadian Grand Valley Railroad, when the bridge south of Steuben collapsed with the locomotive and four cars which fell in a mass of wreckage into the deep gully which the bridge spanned. It is supposed that the old fashioned trestle of wood had been weakened by the charring effect of the forest fires which had devastated the immediate neighborhood. Engineers are endeavoring to determine the exact cause with the view to fixing responsibility.
Two cars at the end of the train were not yet upon the bridge when the fatal plunge occurred and while the first of these hung in a precarious position, the brakeman and passengers of the last car had the presence of mind to release the coupling before the last car of the train was dragged into the chasm of the burning wreckage below. Several of the passengers of this last car, however, were in the car ahead at the time of the disaster and lost their lives.
A wrecking crew with physicians and nurses was immediately dispatched from Watertown, the nearest place of any size, but as yet, no survivor has been found amid the charred wreckage, and it seems likely that the only passengers to escape death were four women and two men who were in the last car at the time of the disaster.
They were Mrs. Thomas Ellerton and daughter, of Fawnsboro, New York, Mrs. Manners of New Orleans, and a Miss Elsie Bannard. The two men were Thomas and Frederick Worrel, brothers.
The fatal catastrophe came as a termination to an adventurous trip, for the train was speeding with all steam for Watertown to secure medical treatment for several victims of a bold hold-up by two armed robbers, one of whom was killed by a passenger, who himself was later killed in the wreck.
“Guess that’s about all of that one,” Harry said, “and that was the end of our old pal Thor.” Then he said, “Now here’s part of another article that I copied out of the paper of the day after, so you see there were quite some happenings before the Boy Scouts started.”
Pee-wee said, “Gee, I can’t deny that a lot of things happened before the Boy Scouts started—look at Columbus, what he did.”
“Now listen,” Harry said.
BANDIT DIES AFTER CAPTURE
EDDIE TRENT, NOTORIOUS HOLD-UP MAN
ENDS CAREER AFTER DARING TRAIN
ROBBERY
Edward Conners, alias Eddie Trent, notorious through the Canadian northwest for his career of murder and robbery, paid the penalty of his last escapade in the hayloft of a barn near Evans Mills in upper New York, yesterday, where he was discovered by a sheriff’s posse.
Trent had sought refuge in the barn after the killing of his companion, Wister, in their hold-up of the Canadian Special train. It is supposed that the two quarrelled in the woods north of Steuben Junction, and that Trent killed his pal in an altercation over their booty and was wounded himself in the affray.
The desperado was suffering from loss of blood and exposure at the time of his discovery, and lived but a short while. He had no booty, and died refusing to confess how much he had secured in his desperate enterprise.
A pistol and knife were found upon him, the latter crusted with dried earth, which led to the supposition that he may have buried his booty in the woods near where the body of his pal was found. But a careful search of the locality revealed no sign of any recent digging. Trent, or Conners, was the robber who held up the Californian—and so on, and so on, and so on.
That’s the way Harry finished up. There was a lot more about that robber, only Harry hadn’t bothered to copy it.
“So there’s the romance of an old railroad car for you,” he said, “and if you can beat that with your Robin Hoods and Rob Roys and Captain Kidds and Jesse Jameses, why then you’re some dime novelist. And I’ve got a kind of a hunch that the real truth about the little Strawberry Festival has never really been solved. A whole lot of things happened on that——”
“Momentous day,” Pee-wee piped up.
“Right the first time,” Harry said, “and then came a—what-d’ye-call-it, a lapse of twenty-five years. Lapse is right, isn’t it?”
“Sure, that’s it—lapse,” Pee-wee said.
“And meanwhile, the automobile was invented and the Boy Scouts were started and Scout Harris was wished onto the world. Now comes the last act of the drama—revealing the mystery—and the first thing to do.”
“Shh, don’t talk so loud,” Pee-wee said; “the first thing to do——”
“Is to get a new tire and have the carburetor fixed. Then we’ll wait for a favorable tide and sail away in the good ship Cadillac. What do you say?”
CHAPTER VII—WE PLAN OUR TRIP
That was always the way it was with Harry Donnelle; he’d laugh and make a joke about everything and jolly Pee-wee, but anyway, one thing was sure, and that was that we knew more about what happened away back on that day before any of us was born, than the man that wrote that last newspaper article. We knew that that fellow Trent didn’t kill his pal, and we knew that he wasn’t shot by his pal, either. We knew that some man who signed his name Thor did that, and we knew that there was a couple of bags of gold, too.
I said to Harry, “I wish you’d please be serious and tell us what you think.”
“I think we’ll take an auto trip up toward Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence,” he said.
“Can Skinny go?” I asked him.
“Surest thing you know,” he said; “Skinny’ll go as first mate. You’ll go as ship’s cook, Grove will be a common seaman, and Pee-wee’ll be a very common seaman. If the wind is fair and we don’t have any squalls or blow-outs, I don’t see why we shouldn’t make the desert island of Steuben Junction by Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“Oh boy!” I said, “that’ll be great.”
Then he got kind of more serious and he said, “Now you kids listen to me. There may be a sequel to that affair, and then again there may not be. We’re going on an automobile trip, the five of us. On the way back, I’ll drop you off at Temple Camp, if you say, so you can join the rest of the bunch.
“We’ll take the Adirondack tour up as far as Watertown and see if we can dig up Steuben Junction, and then we’ll bang around in the woods. There’s just about chance enough of our finding something, to make the trip interesting. But we’re out for a good time, not for gold, just remember that. Then none of us will be disappointed. Understand, Pee-wee?”
Grove said, “Yes, but there were two bags of gold and when that fellow was discovered, he didn’t have them. They must be somewhere.”
“Unless he gave them to some poor family or to a hospital or an Old Ladies’ Home,” Harry said, awful funny like, “and I don’t just think he did. I don’t believe he was that kind of a train robber. I think the dirt on his knife meant something. It proved what, but it didn’t prove where. I think that when he found he couldn’t do much more than crawl and was getting weaker and weaker, he may have dug a hole and buried his gold, so he wouldn’t be caught with the goods. If he did, he buried some seeds, too. And that was twenty-five years ago. There may possibly be some sign now where there wasn’t any then. Get me? If we should happen to see a big tall pine in a neighborhood where there aren’t any other pines, why——”
“Oh boy, we’ll buy a big cabin cruiser,” Pee-wee yelled, “and we’ll donate about ten thousand dollars to Temple Camp and——”
“We’ll pay off the National Debt and start a line of airplane jitneys to the moon,” Harry said. “Only first we’ve got to find the tree. And we’re not going to hunt for it in somebody’s backyard, either. All we know is, there are some woods up around a place called Steuben Junction; there may be miles of woods.”
“What’s a mile—that’s nothing,” Pee-wee said. “I’ll get a couple of spades from our gardener.”
Harry said, “All right, I’ve been promising some of you an auto trip, and the sooner it’s over the better. So now you’d better trot along and square matters with your scoutmaster and your folks. I don’t want to be charged with kidnapping. I hope they won’t let you go, but if they do, I’ll see it through.”
“Don’t you worry,” Pee-wee said, “I have my mother and father trained.”
I guess we were all glad of one thing, anyway, and that was that vacation began the very next day. Some fellows don’t bother much about school, but I never cut anything—not even vacation.
CHAPTER VIII—WE PLAN OUR ITINERARY
(I BET YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS)
So that’s just how it was that we went off on the Adirondack automobile tour with Harry Donnelle, in his big seven passenger Cadillac, and some of this story is going to be all about that trip. I bet you’ll like it, because we pretty nearly got killed and had a lot of other adventures. The best part of it is where Pee-wee was dashed to pieces from a cliff; he says that’s the principal thing in the story. Believe me, we had some fun that night.
We didn’t tell the rest of the troop anything about those newspaper articles or about our going in what-do-you-call-it—quest of—buried treasure, because we knew they’d only laugh at us. If we found anything, that would be time enough to tell them, that’s what Harry said.
Now maybe you don’t know anything about the Adirondack tour, but anyway, it’s all planned out on a map for motorists. The way you go is up the Hudson to Albany and then you hit out west and go up through Utica to Syracuse. Then you go up north right close to Lake Ontario till you come to Watertown and then you go up along the St. Lawrence River till you get to Ogdensburg. There’s a dandy big apple orchard near Ogdensburg.
After you leave Ogdensburg, you go east again and you come to a place named Malone. Then pretty soon you get to Lake Champlain—that’s a peachy lake. It was invented by a man named Champlain—I mean discovered. Then you go across into Vermont—that’s where the Green Mountains are, only they’re blue. Then you go down through Vermont into New York and pretty soon you get to Albany again. I’m a regular Cook’s Tours, hey? There’s a place right near the station where you get four jawbreakers for a cent in Albany. Mostly you get only three. After that you go down the river until you get to Hudson and then you go over on the boat to Catskill.
And, oh boy, believe me, I know the way from there to Temple Camp. The best way is to go up through Bridge Street, because Warner’s Drug Store is on Bridge Street. He’s a nice man, Mr. Warner is, he charges only ten cents for ice-cream sodas. Temple Camp isn’t on the tour map, but the camp should worry.
The way you get to New York from Temple Camp is down through Kingston and Newburgh to Jersey City. But, gee whiz, I don’t know why anybody should want to go to Jersey City. I know a fellow that comes from Jersey City—every time he gets a chance.
On the very day that we started on our trip, the rest of the troop went to Temple Camp to stay for a month, so it was pre-arranged (I thought up that word pre-arranged) that Harry would put us off there on the way back. He said he’d even do more than that—that he’d throw us off. But just the same, he likes Temple Camp, too.
So now to get the automobile started.
CHAPTER IX—WE HEAR ABOUT “EATS”
When we cleared port (that’s what Harry called it) we had the ship’s papers secreted in one of the door pockets of the good brig Cadillac. Those papers were the two newspaper articles published in March, Eighteen Ninety-five, and the letter of the man who had been killed in the wreck, and the description of the poplar that We had copied out of a book. Pee-wee sat next to that pocket and kept his eye on it. Skinny sat between us and Grove sat in front with Harry.
Pretty soon I said to Harry, “There’s one fellow I wish was on this trip, and that’s Brent Gaylong.”
Harry laughed, and then he said, “It would be right in his line.”
“He was crazy for adventure,” I said. “Do you remember how he told us about digging up a bottle full of gold paint?”
“Wonder what ever became of him and those kids?” Harry said.
It was while my patrol was on the long hike home from Temple Camp with Harry Donnelle last summer, that we met Brent Gaylong and the five little fellows that he called his patrol. They were on a hike to find a missing person. They belonged in Newburgh and they were awful poor. They were so poor that Brent named their patrol the Church Mice.
But one thing, that fellow was crazy for adventures and he had an awful funny way of telling things. Gee, he had us laughing a lot on the night that we all camped together. Pee-wee and Grove and Skinny had never met him, because they weren’t with us on that trip—momentous trip.
“I’d like to see little Willie Wide-Awake again,” Harry said.
I said, “It’s too bad we didn’t think of it in time; we might have gone through Newburgh.”
“Too late now,” Harry said.
Now I’m coming to the first adventure of that trip and it’s mostly about Pee-wee, but it has something to do with being hungry, too. That’s one thing Scouts like better than dinner and that’s supper. Especially Pee-wee is always hungry; Harry says he’s a whole famine all by himself.
It was dark when we left Albany, because we had to stay there to get our radiator fixed, and while the machine was in the garage, we went to the movies. It was nice skimming along the road to Utica, and we could smell the country. Gee whiz, when that smell gets in the air, I always begin thinking about Temple Camp.
Pretty soon we came to a sign and Grove got out and read it by his flashlight. It said “Welcome to Crystal Falls. Automobile laws enforced.”
“The pleasure is ours,” I said.
“I wonder if there’s any place in this berg where we can put up for the night?” Harry said. “Hanged if I know what’s the matter, but we’re running on five cylinders. That intake isn’t working right, either.”
“Believe me, my intake is all right,” Pee-wee shouted, “only it hasn’t got anything to take in.”
“Always thinking about eats,” I said.
“How about you, Alf?” Harry said to Skinny. “Hungry?”
Skinny said, “Yes, sir.”
“Well then,” Harry said, “we’ll see if we can run her under cover somewhere and get something to eat and a place to bunk in. I doubt if there’s a garage in this thriving metropolis, but if there is, the mechanics are probably home in bed. This machine seems to have an acute attack of the pip. The gas isn’t feeding right.”
“You should worry, the rest of us will feed all right,” I told him.
Ever since we left Albany the engine hadn’t been running right and two or three times Harry had tried to get it running smooth, but he said he couldn’t do anything in the dark. So now we turned into the main street of Crystal Falls and crept along very slow, the engine pounding all the while. There wasn’t anybody to enforce the laws and there wasn’t anybody to welcome us, either. The principal thing about the restaurants was that there weren’t any. And the same with the hotels—they were very nice, only they weren’t there.
“We should have kept out of that garage at Albany,” Harry said; “go to a garage and then your troubles begin. The good ship Cadillac will have to be close-hauled, I’m afraid.”
We stopped alongside the curb and Harry tried to find out what was the matter. I guess there were a lot of things the matter. Anyway, we couldn’t get started again. After about half an hour he gave it up and said he couldn’t do anything until daylight.
“She’s at the mercy of the wind and storm,” he said; “I guess we’ll have to take to the small boats. Do you see that light up the street, Pee-wee? Suppose you hike up there and see if there’s anybody about, and if there is, find out where we can get something to eat and a place to sleep. Tell them we’re wrecked on the treacherous rocks of Main Street.”
“I’ll find out,” Pee-wee said; “don’t you worry. I’ll fix it.”
He started along the street, going scout-pace, and we sat there in the machine for about ten minutes, waiting for him. Gee whiz, I think I was never so hungry in my life.
“I could eat a house,” Grove said.
“I could eat a whole row of apartments,” I told him.
“I could eat some bread and jam,” little Skinny piped up.
“Good for you, Alf,” Harry said; “if I met a piece of pie myself, I wouldn’t be afraid to face it. I guess Pee-wee’ll scare up some information for us.”
And believe me, he did! Pretty soon, back he came, panting all out of breath and trying to shout.
“Hurrah, hurrah!” he was calling.
“Did you find anything to eat?” Harry asked him.
“Better than that! Better than that!” he shouted, coming up to the car. “A scout is—is—a scout is a brother to every other scout. If he has food—and—he has to—he has to share it. There’s a party of scouts up the woods road—they’re having a big blowout—they’ve got liver—a man on horse—a man on horseback told me—I called to him—come on, let’s find the woods road!”
“They’ve got what?” Harry asked him.
“Liver!” Pee-wee panted. “Don’t you know what liver is? It—it—it always goes with bacon. Don’t you know scouts always have liver and bacon when they’re—they’re camping?”
“Sounds good to me,” Harry said; “where is this sumptous liver and bacon blowout being held?”
“I told you,” Pee-wee panted; “up the woods road.”
“Mmm, mmm!” I said, “I’d just love to meet a slice of fried liver in the woods to-night.”
Harry said, “Well, I guess we’ll have to make a raid on our scout friends, that’s all.”
“We’ll track them to their camp,” Pee-wee said; “I’ll show you how.”
CHAPTER X—WE ATTEND A BLOWOUT
Believe me, that was good news. Hotels are all right—I’m not saying anything against hotels—but when it comes to eats, oh boy, a scout blow-out in the woods has got my kindest regards. And one thing about a scout camp is that anybody is welcome, especially scouts.
Harry said he guessed the car would be all right, because it was all wrong and no one could start it anyway. He said that just then he’d rather have some liver and bacon than the car. So we left it standing there and started back along the street, hunting for the woods road. We went a little way up a couple of different roads, but they both ran through open country. At last we hit into another road that went through woods. It was narrow and rocky and up-hill and the woods were so thick that the trees were all tangled over-head and it was awful quiet.
“Well, this is the right sort of a place for scouts,” Harry said; “they’ve got the right idea.”
“Keep your eyes peeled in the woods for a camp-fire,” Grove said.
“I’m getting hungrier every minute,” Pee-wee shouted.
“Same here, only more so,” I said.
Pretty soon one of us saw a light. It was pretty small and if it was a camp-fire, the camp must have been quite a way off.
“There It is! There it is!” Pee-wee piped up, “it’s——”
“It’s in the road, I think,” Harry said.
In about a couple of minutes we heard voices and some one said, “Raise her a little more.”
Then, good night, before we knew it, we were around a turn and walking plunk into a Ford car with a half a dozen fellows standing around, while one of them was blowing up a tire.
“Any scout camp around here?” Harry asked them.
“This is the only scout outfit I know of,” one of them said; “we had a blowout.”
For about a half a minute we just stood there and none of us spoke. Then Harry said very calm like, to Pee-wee:
“Is this the blowout that you had in mind? Are you sure the man on horseback said liver?”
“He—he was going very fast,” our young hero blurted out.
“I see,” Harry said; “we are foiled again.”
“Good night!” I just blurted out, “the man must have called flivver! Pee-wee, you’re a scream.”
All of a sudden some one said, “That you, Blakeley?”
I said, “Why are you——”
“Don’t you remember Brent Gaylong?” he said.
CHAPTER XI—WE MEET AGAIN
That’s always the way it is with our young hero, Scout Harris. He never hits what he aims at, but he always hits something. If he loses his way, he has an adventure. If he falls down, he finds a penny while he’s on the ground. If he should be blown up by dynamite, he’d land in the ball-field and save his fifty cents admission. You can’t beat him.
So now he began shouting, “Now you see, I brought you to the very fellows you were talking about. Do you mean to tell me that long lost friends aren’t better than eats?”
All I could say was, “Pee-wee, you win.”
Harry Donnelle couldn’t say anything, he just sat down on a rock and laughed and laughed. “Brent,” he said, “this is the Honorable Scout Harris, our young hero, who was leading us to a sumptuous repast in the solemn woods. But this is something better than we expected.”
And you can bet it was! There was Brent Gaylong and little Willie Wide-Awake and the rest of the Church Mice—six of them altogether. Oh boy, it was good to see them.
As soon as we introduced Grove and Pee-wee and little Alf to them, Harry said, “And what in the dickens are you doing here, you old Calamity Jane? The last time we had the bad luck to run into you and your traveling kindergarten you were in hard luck—no scoutmaster, no friends,——”
“Oh, we’re rolling in wealth now,” Brent said; “I mean we’re rolling in our flivver—latest model, self-stopper and everything. We don’t speak to common scouts like you any more. We’re on a trip—a series of trips—we left Newburgh this morning, and we’ve had four trips so far. I hope we don’t get tripped again. Remember how we were out for adventure? Well, now we have it. If you want adventure, get a flivver.”
“Where are you going?” Harry asked him.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said. “Can’t you see we’re not going. The only kind of treatment we haven’t given this machine is asperin. Anybody got an asperin tablet? We won this machine for putting out a fire in Newburgh. We had it wished on us. I’m sorry we put the fire out—it was a nice fire.”
I said, “Brent, you crazy Indian, you sound just the same as last year. You haven’t changed a bit.”
“I couldn’t even change a dollar,” he said.
“Well, this is some streak of luck anyway,” Harry said. “We’ve got a 1920 Cadillac stalled down in the village. We’re on our way to search for buried treasure—up near Lake Ontario. We think we’ve got a clew to a couple of bags of gold. Want to join us? At present, we’re starving. You haven’t got such a thing as a cheese sandwich loafing around, have you?”
“The last cheese sandwich I saw was on its way down little Bill’s throat,” he said, “but we have some cold corned beef, and crackers and rye bread, and a few other odds and ends that you’re welcome to. What do you say we make a camp?”
So we all went into the woods and got a fire started just for old time’s sake, and sprawled around it and had some eats. Believe me, it seemed good to be with those fellows again. Brent said that wherever we went, they would go too. He said they were on a vacation and they didn’t care what happened to them. He said that if he could only make one stab for buried treasure, he would feel that he hadn’t lived in vain. That was always the way he talked—crazy like.
CHAPTER XII—WE GET THE CAR STARTED
We spent about an hour in the woods near the road, sitting around the fire and telling all about our adventures since the time we had seen each other before. Those fellows were on an auto trip, the same as we were, and they had a camping kit and everything. They were just starting to follow the Old Forge road north and wriggle around through the Adirondacks, that’s what Brent said. But he said as long as we were going in search of treasure, they’d go with us. He said that treasure was his middle name.
Harry said, “Well, you seem to be something of a dabster with engines; suppose we all go back into the village and maybe you can get our old boat started. Then we’ll hit the trail for the next berg and see if we can get a place to bunk until morning.”
“We bunk in the woods,” one of those little fellows sung out.
Harry said, “Yes, but you’re good scouts; you came prepared to do that.”
Brent said, “All right, pile in as many of you as want to.”
“We’ll walk with Harry Donnelle,” little Willie-Wide-Awake shouted.
So that was the way we fixed it—Pee-wee and Grove and Skinny and I went ahead with Brent Gaylong in the Ford, and Brent’s patrol followed along with Harry.
“Where is the old scow, anyway?” Brent called to Harry.
“Go right up the village street,” Harry said, “and turn into a road branching off. You’ll see it standing near a house; it’s a new Cadillac—seven-passenger—nineteen twenty. We’ll be there long before you get it started.”
“You’ll know it, because the headlights are the only two lights in the whole village,” I said to Brent; “we ought to charge them for illuminating the town.”
“The lights are dimmed,” Pee-wee said.
“It isn’t an old scow,” Skinny piped up, in that funny way of his; “it’s a new scow.”
“Well, I’ll bet a Canadian dime I get it started,” Brent said. “Harry’s all right on adventure and he’d give you the coat off his back, but I think he’s a punk mechanic.”
“He understands engines!” little Skinny sang out. “Don’t you say anything against him, because he understands everything; he sewed a button on for me.”
“Bully for you, Alf,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t say he doesn’t understand engines,” Brent said; “but I think that engines don’t understand him—they don’t appreciate him.”
“He understands everything,” Skinny shouted.
“Well, he understands how to get on the right side of scouts,” Brent began laughing.
Pretty soon we got into the village and came to the place where the road branched off the main street.
“This the place where I turn?” Brent asked us.
“Yes,” Pee-wee said.
“No—wait a minute,” Grove spoke up.
“Go a little further,” I said, “and you’ll see a road—wait a minute—where are we?”
“This is a fine outfit of scouts,” Brent said; “you’d get lost in a department store. Guess again.
“You turn in this road,” Pee-wee shouted.
“No, you don’t,” Grove said; “wait a minute, yes, you do.”
“Oh, goody, goody, goody!” I began shouting. “Everybody’s wrong, as usual, except me—I mean I. There’s the machine now; look between those two houses. A scout is observant.”
In the dark we could see across a lawn between two houses, and there was the car, sure enough.
“Go up to the next road,” I said, “and turn in.”
“Anything you say,” Brent laughed.
“For a minute I didn’t know where I was at,” Grove said.
He drove around into the road where the car was standing and right up to it and then got out. The flivver looked awful funny alongside it.
“Some Cadillac!” he said.
“Isn’t it a peachy car?” Pee-wee asked him. “Isn’t it a beaut? Look at those shock-absorbers. Feel the leather on those seats—boy, boy!” Gee whiz, you’d think the kid was trying to sell the car.
“Very snifty,” Brent said.
“It’s only four months old,” Pee-wee said.
“Maybe that’s the reason it hasn’t learned to walk yet,” Brent told him. “Well, we’ll take a squint.”
Brent opened the hood while the rest of us piled into the car.
“You can’t make it go,” Skinny piped up; “if Harry couldn’t, you can’t.”
“What do you bet?” Brent said.
“You can’t,” Skinny said.
I don’t know what Brent did to the motor, but pretty soon he closed the hood, whistling to himself all the while, and got into the car. All of a sudden, br, br, br, br, br, she was purring away like an old cat.
“What do you say now?” he began laughing. Poor little Skinny didn’t have anything to say.
“What did you do to it?” I asked.
“Just smiled at it,” Brent said; “the scout smile always wins.”
Believe me, we were all too surprised to speak.
“Any of you kids know how to run a Ford?” Brent asked us.
“Sure, Grove does,” we said. Because they have a flivver at Grove’s house.
“I haven’t got any license,” Grove said.
“All right, hop in there and follow us,” Brent told him; “we’ll move along and meet them and save them a walk.”
So we swung into the woods road, with Grove coming along behind us in the flivver, and just as we reached the place where the woods began, we met Harry and Brent’s patrol, hiking along.
“All right, hop in,” Brent said.
“Well—I’ll—be—jiggered,” Harry began.
“Hop in,” Brent said, “and don’t stand there talking, if you want a place to sleep to-night. You couldn’t even run a carpet-sweeper.”
“You’re a wonder, old man,” Harry said; “what was the matter with her? I tried everything.”
“Did you say please?” Brent asked him.
“No, but I said about everything else,” Harry said.
“Do you want to run that Ford or shall I?” Brent asked him.
“Stay where you are,” Harry said. “I’ll run the Ford. Go ahead, we’ll follow.”
Some of the kids piled into the small car and the rest of them came in with us. We were all separated together.
“This treasure-hunt is developing into a parade,” Brent said. “Look behind, will you? He can’t even get the flivver started.”
But pretty soon we saw them coming along, quite a distance behind us.
I looked at the clock alongside the speedometer and saw that it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. “Time flies,” I said.
Grove said, “Sure, it should be arrested for speeding.”
CHAPTER XIII—WE ARE IMPLICATED
I guess we had been going about fifteen minutes when Brent said, “Let’s see those papers you were telling us about.”
Pee-wee felt in the side pocket and then in the opposite side pocket and then began shouting, “They’re not here! They’re not here! The papers are stolen!”
“Good night,” I said, “the plot grows thicker.”
“Maybe Harry has them in his pocket,” Grove said.
We looked behind, but the Ford wasn’t in sight.
“The papers are stolen! The papers are stolen!” Pee-wee kept shouting, “There’s a plot! Hurry up, drive faster! I bet it was that soda clerk in Bennett’s.”
“The papers aren’t so necessary,” Grove said.
“Sure they’re necessary,” Pee-wee screamed; “that letter reveals the secret. Drive faster!”
Brent didn’t drive any faster, he just laughed; and all the while the rest of us were rooting around, trying to find the papers.
“Look under the seat,” Grove said.
We got up from the back seat and lifted it and Pee-wee poked his head around underneath and groped with his hands.
“Is he there?” Brent asked him.
“Who?” Pee-wee hollered.
“The soda clerk from Bennett’s,” Brent said.
“No, but the mystery grows deeper,” Pee-wee shouted. “Give me the flashlight—quick. There’s some buried treasure here! Look! Here are some spoons. Here’s a silver thing like they have hot chocolate in! He put them here—look! I knew he was a villain!”
Grove and I, who were in the back part of the machine, looked into the space under the seat, and good night, as sure as anything, there was a silver bowl and some spoons in a box all lined with plush. The flashlight made them all bright Just as I was looking, Pee-wee opened a big plush box and there was a gold watch and a dandy long pearl necklace and a lot of other things.
“Now, what have you got to say?” he shouted in my face.
Brent looked around, kind of laughing, but he didn’t bother to stop the car. I guess he was too anxious to get to Utica.
“What do you think it means?” Pee-wee said, in a kind of whisper. “We’d better wait for them to catch up, hey?”
“Wait nothing,” Brent said, all the while laughing.
I said, “I think it means that Harry’s people were bringing the stuff home in the car from somewhere, maybe, and forgot to take it out; that’s what I think. If the rest of them are as careless and happy-go-lucky as he is, that’s probably what happened.”
“He isn’t careless and happy-go-lucky,” Skinny piped up. He was half asleep under the big buffalo robe, and his voice sounded awful funny, as if he were talking in his sleep.
“Maybe Harry stole them,” I said.
Good night, off went the buffalo robe and Skinny sat up like a jack-in-the-box. “He didn’t!” he shouted.
I guess we were all too tired and sleepy to think much about those things that Pee-wee had discovered. Pretty soon our young hero was sprawling on the floor of the car, dead to the world and Skinny was sound asleep on the front seat under the buffalo robe. Grove and I stayed awake, but we didn’t talk much.
It was nearly four o’clock in the morning when we got to Utica and we stopped at a hotel where there were sheds for automobiles. Oh, boy, weren’t we some sleepy bunch! Brent ran the car under one of the sheds and then we all staggered into the hotel. While we were waiting for our rooms, along came the Ford with Harry and Brent’s patrol. They could hardly stand up, they were so sleepy.
He was an awful nice fellow, that hotel man was. He said he didn’t know where he could put eleven people, but he guessed as long as we were scouts, we wouldn’t mind bunking up. So he gave us three rooms and I had Pee-wee and Skinny wished onto me.
The clerk said, “When would you like to be called?”
“Calling won’t do any good,” Harry said; “you’ll have to scream. I think we’ll wake up about ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”
“It’s to-morrow morning already,” I told him; “everything is all mixed up; we’ll have to have lunch for breakfast; we should worry.”
But anyway, I woke up earlier than I thought I would—that was about nine o’clock. Pee-wee woke up while I was getting dressed, and we decided that we’d go out and take a little walk around the city. We went out very quiet, so as not to disturb Skinny.
I guess none of the rest of the fellows were up; anyway, we didn’t see anything of them. We went up the street and stopped in a candy store and got a couple of sodas. I took raspberry, because it’s red—that’s my patrol color. While we were drinking them, Pee-wee said:
“Did you ask Harry about those things?”
I said, “I did not; we were all too sleepy. You should worry about those things.”
When we were finished we took a walk around the town, just for fun, looking in windows. I guess it was about half-past ten when we started back. When we had almost got to the hotel we heard a boy calling, “Extree! Extree! Big robbery! Extree!”
So we bought one, and the first thing we saw was an article with a big heading that said DARING BURGLARY and underneath it said HOME OF JUDGE WEST ENTERED. TWO MISCREANTS HELD.
This is just what the article said, because we kept that paper:
The summer home of Justice Willard E. West in Crystal Falls was entered some time between one and two o’clock this morning by means of a kitchen window, which had been forced open.
Property consisting of jewelry and silverware to the amount of about two thousand dollars was taken.
It was not until the burglars were leaving the house that Judge West’s young daughter, hearing a sound on the lower floor, aroused her parents, who immediately investigated and found that a cabinet in their daughter’s room had been rifled as well as the sideboard in the dining-room, from which several articles of value had been taken.
The judge immediately ’phoned to the village authorities, and as a result of their prompt action, two men who were lurking near the railroad station were arrested.
One of them had in his possession a wallet containing about fifty dollars in bills, which the judge identified as belonging to him. Constable Berry of Crystal Falls, believes that there was a third man implicated in the job, because none of the missing property, except the wallet and a few small articles of silverware, were found upon the two men under arrest. It is supposed that they were frightened away before their work was completed, but a search of the premises both inside and out, failed to reveal a large silver punch bowl, which is missing and the jewelry case of Elsa, the judge’s young daughter. This, it was stated, contained a necklace of pearls valued at nearly a thousand dollars.
An incentive to the capture of the third man is offered by Judge West, in a reward of five hundred dollars, for the return of this precious keepsake.
I just stared at Pee-wee, and he stared at me.
“G-o-o-d night!” I said, “the plot grows thicker.”
“Those are the very things,” he said; “it’s a mystery.”
“It looks as if we were the third man,” I told him.
“Who?” he wanted to know.
“The eleven of us,” I said.
“How do you explain it?” he asked me, all excited.
“I don’t explain it,” I said; “but I know one thing, and that is, I’m going to get back and tell Harry as soon as I can, before the whole crew of us are arrested. Harry’s going to have a mechanic look the car over this morning. Suppose that mechanic should——”
That was enough for Pee-wee; he started up the street scout-pace, and I guess he must have been pretty excited, because he passed right by an old empty sardine box and didn’t even bother to pick it up.