"What is it, Bobolink—Jack?" asked the scout master.
"The boxes yonder!" Bobolink managed to exclaim.
"You evidently have seen them before; tell me, Jack, are they the ones you said your father stored for that man?" continued Paul.
"They certainly look mighty like them," replied the other; "and you know, they were taken away that morning early. They must have been carried across country to the shore of the lake, and then ferried over in a rowboat. That was what we saw the marks of, and the four men walked off with these between them."
"Whee! did you ever?" gasped the still bewildered Bobolink. "Yes, here you c'n see the markin' on the lid they threw away when they opened this one—'Professor Hackett, In care of John Stormways, Stanhope,' all as plain as anything. And to think how after all my worryin' the old boxes have bobbed up here. Don't it beat the Dutch how things turn out?"
That seemed to be the one thing that gripped Bobolink's attention—the strange way in which those two heavy boxes with the twisted wire binding had happened to cross his path again.
But Paul was thinking of other things, that might have a more serious bearing on the case. He turned to Jack again.
"What do you know about this so-called professor?" he asked.
"Me? Why, next to nothing, only that he comes from down near New York City at a place called Coney Island, where lots of fakirs hold out; and plenty of men too, in the summer season, who would want to circulate a little money that did not bear the Government stamp."
"But your father seems to have known him; or at any rate believed he was a law-abiding citizen," pursued Paul; "otherwise he would hardly have given him the privilege of storing his cases in his mill over night."