“Here’s the answer to at least a part of the riddle,” cried Dick. “Come ahead with the car, Dave,” and as the flivver shot forward the boys pulled the vines aside sufficiently to allow the car to force its way past and gain the road beyond.
“Whoever uses that old wood-road has certainly hit upon a clever scheme to hide the entrance!” exclaimed Rogers, as he looked back at the vines that twined upward about the big oak and hung like a great curtain from one of its horizontal limbs. “If I hadn’t seen it done, I’d never believe a car could enter or leave this place.”
“Yes, but the tracks!” insisted Dave. “The screen of vines is simple enough, but how can a car pass in or out and leave no tracks? My car left tracks,” and Dave pointed to the faint marks left by the wheels of the flivver upon the twenty-foot width of hard ground between the edge of the macadam road and the barrier of vines.
“That’s just one more question we can’t answer—yet,” replied Ned. “I move we go home now and get together tomorrow morning. Perhaps by then some of us may have doped out an explanation.”
CHAPTER XVI
PUZZLED
The meeting held next morning in Dave Wilbur’s garage was a strictly private affair. Neither Wat Sanford nor Jim Tapley was informed of it for the reason that neither of them could have offered anything as a result of personal observation or of actual experience.
“Well, Ned, did you dope out anything after sleeping on it?” asked Tommy Beals, after Ned Blake had called the meeting to order.
“Can’t say I did,” admitted the latter a bit ruefully. “The more I think of it the more puzzling it becomes. About the only thing I could do was to make a list of such facts as we are certain of so far. Maybe this won’t do any good, but, on the other hand, it may give us something to start from. Shall I read it?”
“Shoot!” grinned Dick. “That’s what Professor Simmons calls the ‘scientific method of approach to a subject’—get your facts all lined up and then make ’em tell their own story.”
“Sure, that’s fine—if the facts will tell a story that we’re not too dumb to understand,” grumbled Rogers, “but go to it, Ned. Let’s hear the worst.”