"Well, who do you think Old Crusty was?"

"Not the escaped convict!"

"Not on your life! He turned out to be the father of the little girl whose pet bird Pee-wee had captured the day before."

"The plot grows thinner," said someone.

"Well, he had all the signs of an old grouch, hair ruffled up, spectacles half-way down his nose-but he fell for Pee-wee, you can bet.

"When he found out who we were (the girl must have told him about us, I suppose) he got kind of interested and when Pee-wee started to explain things he couldn't keep from laughing. Well, in the end he said the only way we could square ourselves was to take the boat away; he said it belonged to his son who was dead, and that he didn't want it and we were welcome to it and he'd send us a couple of men to help us launch it. He seemed to feel pretty bad when he mentioned his son and we were so surprised and excited at getting the boat that we just stood there gaping. Gee, how can you thank a man when he gives you a cabin launch?"

Arnold shook his head.

"Well, we spent a couple of days and eight dollars and fifty-two cents fixing the boat up and then, sure enough, along came two men and Mr.

Stanton's chauffeur to jack the boat over and launch her for us. The girl came along, too, in their auto, and oh, wasn't she tickled! Brought us a lot of eats and a flag she'd made, and stayed to wish us-what do you call it?"

"Bon voyage?"

"Correct-I thank you. Understand, I'm only giving you the facts. We had more fun those three days and that night launching the boat than you could shake a stick at. Well, when we got her in the water I noticed the girl had gone off a little way and kept staring at it. Gee, the boat did look pretty nice when she got in the water. I thought maybe she was kind of thinking about her brother, you know, and it put it into my head to ask one of the men how he died. She didn't come near us while we talked, but stood off there by herself staring at the launch. You see, it was the first time she'd seen it in the water since he was lost, and she was almost crying-I could tell that.

"Well, this is what the man told me. They said this Harry Stanton and another fellow named Benty Willis were out in the launch on a stormy night. There was a skiff belonging to the launch, and people thought they must have been in that, fishing. Anyway, the next morning, they found the skiff broken and swamped to her gunwale and right near it the body of the other fellow. The launch was riding on her anchor same as the night before. The men said Mr. Stanton was so broken up that he had the boat hauled ash.o.r.e and a flood carried her up on the marsh where she was going to pieces when we found her. He would never look at her again. They said Harry Stanton could swim and that made some people think that maybe they were run down by one of the big night boats on the Hudson and that Harry was injured-killed that way, maybe.

"Anyway, when the girl got in the auto and said good-bye to us I could see she'd been crying all right, and she said we must be careful and not run at night on account of the big liners."

"Hmph," said Arnold, thoughtfully.

"Gee, I'll never forget that night, with her sitting in the auto ready to start home and the boat rocking in the water and waiting for us. I can't stand seeing a girl cry, can you? I guess we all felt kind of sober when we said good-bye and she told us to be careful. Tom told her we'd try to do a _real_ good turn some day to pay her back, because we really owed it to her, you know, and there was something in the way he said it-you know how Tom blurts things out-that made me think he had an idea up his sleeve.

"Well, it was about an hour later, while we were sitting on the cabin roof, that Tom sprung it on us. We were going to start up river in the morning; we were just loafing-gee, it was nice in the moonlight!-when he said it would be a great thing for us to find Harry Stanton! Go-o-d ni-i-ght! I was kind of sore at him because I didn't like to hear him joking, sort of, about a fellow that was dead, especially after what the fellow's father and sister had done for us, but he came right back at me by pointing to the board we had the oil stove on. What do you think he did? He showed us the letters N Y M P H under the fresh paint and said that board was part of the launch's old skiff and wanted to know how it got back to the launch. What do you know about that? You see, we had run short of paint and it was thin on that board because we'd mixed gasoline with it. We ought to have mixed it with cod liver oil, hey?

"So there you are," concluded Roy; "Pee-wee and I just stared like a couple of gumps. Those fellows had been out in the skiff and they couldn't have used it with that side plank ripped off. And how did it get back to the launch?"

"Sounds as if the man might have been right about the skiff being smashed by a big boat," said Arnold. "Maybe Harry Stanton was injured and clung to that board. But why should he have pulled it aboard the launch? And what I can't understand is that n.o.body should have noticed it except you fellows. Was it in the launch all the time?"

"Yup-right under one of the lockers. Pee-wee and I had hauled it out to make a shelf for the oil stove."

"But how do you suppose it was no one had noticed it till you fellows got busy with the boat?"

"A scout is observant," said Roy, laughingly.

"Hmph-it's mighty interesting, anyway," mused Arnold. He drummed on a log with his fingers, and for a few moments no one spoke.

"Some mystery, hey?" said Roy, adding a log to the fire.

CHAPTER IV THE OLD TRAIL

Several things more or less firmly fixed in his mind had impelled Tom Slade to challenge that wooded hill the dense summit of which was visible by day from Temple Camp.

He knew that high land is always selected for despatching carrier pigeons; a certain book on stalking which he had read contained a chapter on this fascinating and often useful sport and he knew that in a general sort of way there was a connection between carrier pigeons and stalking; one suggested the other-to him, at least. He knew for a certainty that the message had been written on the unprinted part of a stalking blank and he knew also that on the slope of the hill he had seen chalk marks on the trees the previous summer. Tom seldom forgot anything.

All these facts, whether significant or not, were indelibly impressed upon his serious mind, and to him they seemed to bear relation to each other. He believed that the pigeon had been flying homeward, to some town or city not far distant, where the sender perhaps lived and he believed that the pigeon's use in this emergency had been the happy thought of some person who had taken the bird to the hill only to use for sport. He had no doubt that somewhere in the wilderness of these Catskill hills was a camp where the victim of accident lay, but the weak point was that he was seeking a needle in a haystack.

"I wish we'd brought along the fog horn from the boat," he said, as they made their way across the open country below the hill; "we could have made a lot of noise with it up there; you can hear a long way in the woods, and it might have helped us to find the place."

"If the place is up there," said Doc Carson.

"There's a trail," said Tom, "that runs about halfway up but it peters out at a brook and you can't find any from there on."

"If we could find the trees where you saw the marks last summer," said Connie Bennet, "we might get next to some clue there."

"I can usually find a place where I've been before," said Tom.

"What's the matter with following the brook when we get to it?" said Garry. "If there's anyone camping there they'd have to be near water."

"Good idea," said Doc.

"That settles one thing I was trying to dope out," said Tom. "Why should people come as far as that just to stalk?"

"Maybe they're scouts, camping."

"They'd have smudged up the whole sky with signals," said Tom.

"Maybe it's someone up there hunting."

"Only it isn't the season," laughed Garry. "No sooner said than stung, as Roy would say. Gee, I wish he was along!"

"Same here," said Doc.

"They're probably there fishing," said Tom. "The stalking business is a side issue, most likely."

"That's what the little brook whispers to us," said Doc.

They all laughed except Tom. He was not much on laughing, though Roy could usually reach him.

The woods began abruptly at the foot of the hill and they skirted its edge for a little way holding their lantern to the ground so as to find the trail. But no sign of path revealed itself. Twice they fancied they could see, or _sense_, as Jeb would have said, an opening into the dense woods and the faintest suggestion of a trail but it petered out in both cases-or perhaps it was imaginary.

"Let's try what Jeb calls la.s.sooing it," said Garry.

He retreated through the open field to a lone tree which stood gaunt and spectral in the night like a sentinel on guard before that vast woodland army. Climbing up the tree, he called to Tom:

"Walk along the edge now and hold your lantern low."

Tom skirted the wood's edge, swinging his light this way and that as Garry called to him. The idea of trying to discover the trail by taking a distant and elevated view was a good one, but the tree was either too near or too far or the light was too dim, and the four scouts knew not what to do next.

"Climb up a little higher," called Doc. "They say that when you're up in an aeroplane you can see all sorts of paths that people below never knew about. I read that in an aviation magazine."