“Not a word!” replied Mr. Havens. “We have a clear field here, and all we’ve got to do is to locate this Larry Colleton. I shall probably be laid up with sore feet for a number of days, but that won’t prevent you boys flying over the country in the machines looking for camps.”
“Huh!” grinned Jimmie. “They won’t keep Colleton in no camp! They’ll keep him in some damp old hole in the ground.”
“I presume that’s right, too,” Mr. Havens replied. “But you boys mustn’t look for camps entirely. Whenever you see people moving about, it’s up to you to investigate, find out who they are and where they are stopping. You’ll find that all this will keep you busy.”
“We’re likely to be kept busy if there are a lot of tramps in the hills!” Ben answered, “for the reason that it may take two or three days to chase down each party we discover.”
“I haven’t told you much about the case yet,” Mr. Havens continued, “and I may as well do so now. About six months ago, letters began coming to the post-office department at Washington complaining that a certain patent medicine concern which was advertising an alleged remedy, Kuro, was defrauding its customers by sending about one cent’s worth of quinine and water in return for two dollars in money.”
“Keen, level-headed business men!” exclaimed Jimmie.
“Larry Colleton, one of the best inspectors in the department, was given the case. For a long time, after the investigation began, this Kuro company manufactured a remedy which really worked some of the cures described in the advertising. This was expensive, however, and at times the shipments fell back to the one-cent bottle of quinine water.”
“More thrift!” laughed Ben.
“Another fraud-charge was that the Kuro company often failed to make any shipment whatever in return for money received. Colleton bought hundreds of bottles of their remedy, but the difficult point was to establish the fact that the company was not at the time of the investigation manufacturing the honest medicine. The officers of the company claimed that they were perfecting their medicine every day, and admitted that some of the bottles sent out at first were not what they should have been.”
“Why didn’t he pinch the whole bunch?” demanded Jimmie.