CHAPTER XXV
When they landed, the prisoners’ feet were untied and they were marched off toward the nearest railroad station. The women, who had, of course, not been tied up with the others, were given their choice of going home or of going on with the men. They chose to stick by their husbands. It was a queer-looking procession winding through the old pine woods. The prisoners were all sullen and there was not very much conversation.
Mr. Graham attempted to be sociable. “Well, Roberts, you certainly had us buffaloed for a long time, but we have caught up with you at last.”
“Yes,” Roberts snarled contemptuously, “and if you had not stumbled on to that old chain out there in the swamp you would never have caught up with us. It was all Qualley’s carelessness.”
“Qualley’s?” Mr. Graham exclaimed in feigned surprise. “Why, he said that he did not know anything about this business.”
That was too much for Roberts. He raved like a crazy man and cursed Qualley in all the vile terms he could think of as the leader of the whole gang and the man who had persuaded him to go into it against his will. Suddenly he happened to think that he might say something to incriminate himself and shut up like a clam. No further attempts to get a rise out of him had any effect.
They waited beside the railroad track out in the woods because they wanted to avoid the curious crowd which they knew would be embarrassing for both them and the prisoners if they went to the station. When the train finally came they flagged it and arrived at the county seat without seeing more than a dozen people. They turned the prisoners over to the sheriff, who happened to have come down to meet the train, and went on to Okalatchee.
Mr. Graham had to go back to headquarters to write up his report on the case. Murphy was going home to take the good news to his wife, and Scott decided to go with him. There was one point in this mystery which had not been solved: they had not discovered how the logs were taken out of the pond. Mr. Graham tried to persuade Scott to come back to camp and have his wound dressed and get a little rest, but he promised to get Murphy to dress the wound, which he declared was nothing more than a scratch, and thought that he could rest better after he had cleared up the last point in the puzzle.
“Did you hear what Roberts said about stumbling on to that chain in the swamp?” Scott asked, when they were started on the home trail.
Murphy nodded. “That was what we heard all right, but we never had the luck to stumble on to it.”