Then he looked up. “Well, there are still some things I’m guessing about,” he said. “That Treasury man asked questions faster than anybody I ever met—but he wasn’t very interested in answering any. I still don’t know how the trail of bills actually put them on the track. It seemed such a long chance when we tried it.”
“It was a long chance,” his father agreed. “But it worked. Two New York banks had people waiting on their doorsteps when they opened up this morning—people who had found half a ten-dollar bill and who wanted to know if they were entitled to exchange it for a good one. Half an hour later two more had turned up.
“The bills were immediately recognized as phonies—good as they were,” he went on, “and Treasury agents were notified. They got in touch with me immediately, in Washington, when they found my name scribbled on the bills. Of course it was the one you left in the truck that actually gave us the tip on where to look for you.”
“You left one in the truck?” Sandy sounded surprised. “I didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” Ken said. “I figured that Cal borrowed the truck from some innocent man—someone not in the gang. So I thought that if I left one bill in the truck the owner might possibly find it. It seemed the best chance we had to bring attention to Cal and the barge in the shortest possible time.”
His father nodded. “The truck owner was the third man to turn up with half a bill. He’d found it when he started to load fish this morning. And when the Treasury people asked him where he’d found it and how it got there, he said it must have been left by the man who borrowed the truck last night. The T-men located the spot where Cal’s barge was supposed to be tied up and learned that it had been towed out at four this morning, heading for Baltimore.”
Sandy sighed comfortably and put down a bare chicken leg from which all the meat had been eaten. “That’s when we figured we were really lost—when the barge moved out.”
“You shouldn’t underestimate the Treasury Department—or the Coast Guard,” Richard Holt said. “It was the Coast Guard that supplied the helicopter in record time, got us on our way, and radioed the tug to find your position.” He reached over and absent-mindedly picked up a chicken wing and began to nibble at it.
“Speaking of underestimating,” he went on, “it looks as though we underestimated you two. You told me in the helicopter that Lausch said Mom’s box was both old and not very valuable. What prompted you to continue your prowling?”
Neither of them answered him immediately. Ken was suddenly very busy helping himself to potato salad from a paper container.