“Perhaps somewhere else. Perhaps this message refers to an island in some other part of the country altogether. Perhaps Hanleigh merely guessed that this was the place.”
“There may be something in that. It’s just possible that Hanleigh is in the same boat as we are, and that we are all being fooled.”
“Well,” said Chet, “we’ve done the best we could, and there is something wrong somewhere, so why should we worry about it any longer? We came here for an outing—not to solve puzzles.”
“That’s right,” declared Biff. “If this chap Hanleigh comes back we’ll try to get the truth out of him, but we won’t do ourselves any good by racking our brains over this business. Forget it!”
So the subject of the cipher message was officially dropped.
To Frank, however, their failure to discover anything of importance in the big chimney had been very disappointing. He had been elated by his success in solving the mystery of the cipher message and he had looked upon the entire riddle as being near solution. The setback was a hard pill to swallow. In spite of the fact that Biff thought the message was a fake, Frank clung stubbornly to the belief that it was genuine and important.
“Hanleigh wouldn’t have made such a fuss about it,” he argued, “unless there was something important behind it all.”
He regretted Hanleigh’s escape now. Frank longed to meet the man again. He wanted another chance to force the fellow into an explanation of how he came to be in possession of Sparewell’s notebook. And, above all, he wanted to know what the cipher message referred to. What was hidden in the chimney?
“We’ll find out,” he insisted. “Perhaps, in the long run, it will all turn out to be just as simple as that cipher.”
He looked gloomily at the big chimney.