Sam Bates shuffled his feet and looked dubiously at the floor.
“Well, I have and I haven’t, you might say,” he observed. “I did see your father quite a few days ago, but where he is now, I couldn’t tell you, for I don’t know.” Sam was evidently not a man of gigantic intellect. He spoke slowly and painstakingly and his most obvious statements were delivered with the gravity suitable to pearls of wisdom.
“Where did you see him?”
“I’m a truck driver, see?”
“Yes, you told us that,” said Frank impatiently. “But where did you see our father?”
Sam Bates was not to be hurried. He had a story to tell and he was bound to tell it.
“I’m a truck driver, see?” he repeated. “Mostly I drive just in and around Bayport, but sometimes they give me a run out to some of them villages. That’s how I come to be out there that morning.”
“Out where?”
“I’m comin’ to that. I just forget what day it was, but I think it was about a week from last Monday. I know it was just after Sunday because when I went home to dinner that day the wife was washin’ clothes and dinner was late and I had to eat it out on the back steps anyway for the kitchen was all in a mess. You know how it is on wash day.”
Sam Bates regarded them wistfully, as though hoping for some expression of sympathy and understanding. But the Hardy boys were eager for information, and impatient with the worthy truck driver’s circuitous method of telling his story.