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Page 24
"Buys a lot of provisions and goes down the river to leave his hat on
the bank!" laughed Tommy. "I guess that was a pretty poor imitation
of a suicide or a drowning accident, either!"
"But this boy didn't get to be intimate with the two breaker boys,"
contended George. "He talked with them about two minutes after the
fight, according to Canfield, but paid no further attention to them
after that. If he had any secret understanding with them, he must
have done a whole lot of talking in a mighty short space of time."
"The right kind of a boy can say a good deal in a minute and half!"
laughed Tommy. "But suppose we let Will go on and explanation us
about that boy tramp in the railroad yards. I think I know what he's
getting at, but I'm not quite certain. Go on, Will, it's up to you."
"In order to make the connection," laughed Will. "I will state for
the third time that we know that the boys are in the mine. It may
also be well to state, once more, that we are reasonably certain that
this other boy came to the mine for the specific purpose of
communicating with the other two. Now this boy didn't drop into the
river. He dropped the provisions he bought for the boat into the coal
mine, and left them there for the consumption of the two boys inside.
That's reasonable, isn't?"
"Fine deduction, as Sherlock Holmes would say to Watson!" laughed
George.
"But this third boy," Will went on, "doesn't go into the mine. He
stays outside to serve as a means of communication between the boys
who are hiding in the mine and some interested person or persons on
the outside. That's perfectly clear, isn't it?
"That'll do very well for a theory," replied George.
"I'll go you a plate of cookies," argued Sandy, "that Will is right,
and that this third boy is hanging around taking messages from the
two boys in the mine and also to the two boys in the mine."
"Didn't I say it was all right for a theory?" chuckled George.
"Now, the point is this," Will continued. "What are those boys in the
mine for? What do they want there? Why didn't they answer our Boy
Scout challenge when we replied to their call of the pack?"
"If you don't ask so many questions, you won't get so many negative
answers," Sandy advised. "We're here to find the boys, and I don't
see that it makes any difference to us what they're in there or not."
"But we've found the boys now," contended Tommy. "We haven't got our
hands on them yet, of course, but we know they're in there, and we
know it's only a question of time when we get hold of them."
"Well," Will insisted, "I'm going to find a motive before I quit the
case. I'm going to know who sent those boys here, and all about it,
before I make any report to Mr. Horton."
"Go as far as you like," laughed Tommy. "My bump of curiosity is
growing half an inch a day, and will continue to spread out until I
find out exactly what those boys are doing burrowing in a deserted
mine."
"Now, we'll get back to the point we started from," Will explained.
"This boy who is undoubtedly doing duty outside the mine in the
interests of the persons who sent the two boys in, furnishes the clue
to the whole situation! When we find him, and find out what he's up
to, and trace any communications he may make back to their original
source, we'll have the whole case tied up tight!"
"That's right!" declared Tommy. "We'll have the case tied up tight if
we succeed in getting hold of this third boy."
"Oh, go on!" laughed Sandy. "We'll be picking third boys and fourth
boys and fifth boys out of the air the next thing you know. We never
went away on a Boy Scout expedition yet that we didn't find all manner
of kids hanging around on purpose to be discovered. We found them on
Old Superior; and in the Everglades; and on the Great Continental Divide;
and up in the Hudson Bay country, we began to think we had stumbled on
the center of population so far as Boy Scouts were concerned!"
"There's just one thing that's likely to make us trouble," Will
resumed. "And that is the fact that Canfield very foolishly slopped
over to Ventner when explaining the purpose of our visit here. That
bum detective knows now that we're here to search the mine. Of course
he might have received, as Canfield says, most of his information from
outside sources, but the caretaker should have thrown him off the
track instead of telling him exactly what our mission here was."
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