What was the reason for the Blue Ghost? If he could only figure that much out the rest would follow naturally. If the assumption that the ghost was man-made was correct, there had to be some reason for the apparition.
So far as he knew, the ghost had had only one effect, and that was to reduce drastically the use of the picnic ground in front of the old mine. According to the Millers, the grounds were in constant use most years, with family parties, group affairs, and young people spending considerable time in swimming, eating, ball games, and all the other amusements of people who sought the coolness of trees and water to escape the Virginia summer heat.
Now use of the grounds was restricted to affairs of long standing that it would be inconvenient to change or to cancel.
That was a definite effect, he admitted to himself. But who could profit by it?
There was only one possible clue, and that lay in the midnight prowlings of the Blue Ghost and his varying number of companions. Turning the picnic area into a forbidding place, a haunted ground, would give the ghost and friends ample opportunity to roam the upper and lower fields without interference.
Only, why roam the fields?
Somehow, the radioactive dust in the cement bags must tie into it, but Rick couldn't imagine the connection. He thought of a secret uranium strike and rejected it. Empty bags pointed to something gotten rid of, not something gained by a discovery.
The thought was intriguing. If he assumed the bags had arrived full, what had happened to the contents? He tried to think of uses for the powdered ore and couldn't. Even if he could imagine a secret processing plant to extract the uranium for some purpose, there wasn't enough. A sufficient quantity of ore to provide even a gram of uranium metal would mean literally thousands of bags and they had found less than a dozen.
Of course there was the cart Belsely had seen. Rick couldn't credit the farmer's notion that the ghost soldiers had been collecting ghost bodies of the long-dead. But what had the cart been doing? The very idea of a cart led to the idea of something too heavy to be carried without mechanical aid. What? Bags of radioactive ore dust?
He was still tossing in his bed and chewing the data fine when the dogs began to bark. He listened. The barking was far away, probably a mile or more. There were farms on the road to town, and probably all of them had dogs.