"Oh!" gasped George and Lil Artha in a breath; while Chatz did not say a single word, only sat there with his eyes fixed on the beaming face of the scout master, and the light of a cruel disappointment in their depths.
"I tried to follow the trail," continued Elmer, "but that dust happened to be limited in its scope, so that it was more than I could master, and I had to give it up. But of course the fact that a barefooted man had been at that window where Toby said he saw a white face gave me lots to think about, even if I did make up my mind not to say anything about my find until I had more to tell."
When Elmer paused to get his breath Toby grinned as though greatly pleased.
"See!" he ejaculated, thrusting his chin out aggressively, "some of you other fellows thought I was seeing things that didn't exist, and you knocked me right hard about gettin' a pair of specs, because I needed the same. But seems like it was you ought to go and visit the oculist. I did see a face, and it was sure a white one in the bargain. But excuse me, Elmer, for keepin' the floor so long; that's out of my system now, and let's forget it. Please go on and tell us the rest, because I'm dead sure there's a lot more back of this."
"Well," the other scout observed, "of course, when we got home I was bound to go around and ask a lot of questions about the old Cartaret place up here; and everything else I could hit on. What I learned didn't add a great deal to my stock of knowledge until just by accident I happened to read a little item in an old number of the Stackhouse News that came to our house, and it set me to thinking out a theory. That article was about a family named Oxley that live near Stackhouse I should think. It seems that they have the misfortune to have a son who is crazy, because of some accident to his head several years ago. He wasn't violent, and like some people they couldn't bear the thought of having him shut up in an asylum; so they hired a keeper, and he was watched at home. But it seems that he must have slipped away, for a report had gone out that he was missing, and the paper asked its readers to communicate with the family if by chance they came upon a demented man, dressed in the white uniform of a Spanish officer; for it seems he had been in Cuba during the war, and imagined himself a soldier again."
Elmer paused to let what he had said sink into the minds of his chums; and it could be easily seen from the way they exchanged knowing looks that the full significance of the scout master's discovery had struck them heavily.
"Elmer, you hit the right nail on the head when you guessed that!" cried Toby.
"Dressed in white, too; that clinches the thing!" added Lil Artha.
"I'm afraid it does," sighed Chatz, in a disappointed tone, while George only said:
"Mebbe it does; but you can't always sometimes tell!"