“No. He said that would depend entirely on how he found his aunt. If she was very sick he might stay there quite a while.” And this was about all the girl could tell them.
“Evidently Ken Greene doesn’t hesitate to tell fairy tales when it suits his purpose,” was Andy’s comment when he and his twin were again on their way back to the offices in Wall Street. “Said he was going to Rochester and then takes a train for Galveston! Some little distance between those two places, if you ask me!”
“Did you catch that name—Sobber?” returned his brother. “That sounds familiar to me. I’ve heard my father mention that.”
“Tad Sobber was one of the rascals who tried to do Aunt Dora and her mother out of the fortune that was left by Mr. Stanhope. Sobber and a fellow named Sid Merrick went down to Treasure Isle and did their best to get the treasure in their possession. But their ship, the Josephine, was caught in a hurricane and went down with everybody on board excepting four sailors who escaped in a rowboat and were picked up in a steamer bound for Havana. Since that time Tad Sobber and the other rascals have never been heard of.”
“But if this Ken Greene is really related to the Sobbers, that would certainly make him no friend of our father, and especially no friend of Uncle Dick.”
“Probably not. In that case, Greene would most likely be only too willing to do an injury to those who had kept his relative from getting a whack at that money.”
The older Rovers listened with keen interest to what the twins had to relate and asked many questions concerning Greene. Then one of the detectives from the private agency was called in and he immediately took up the task of following this new lead.
In the meantime something else had happened at the homes on Riverside Drive which looked to Fred and Jack as if it might be of importance. Randy and the others had taken their undeveloped photographic films to a shop in the neighborhood, and now Mary and Martha, out for a walk, had brought the finished pictures back. In looking these over, Fred and Jack came upon the snapshot Randy had taken just before the touring car with the broken mudguard and broken headlight had bowled Andy over in the roadway and injured him.
It was a fairly good picture, only one corner of it being slightly light struck. It showed the groundhog passing under the back wheel of the touring car. The car itself seemed to have a big dent in the back. Two men were on the front seat and one fellow was in the rear. The latter had just turned around, evidently to gaze at the boy who was using the camera, so that his face was turned full toward the lens.