The boys filed out, awed and quiet.
Half an hour! It wasn’t long, and they had to find Alex. Perhaps, after all, he had been tempted to go with Charley. But Joan doubted that. She felt sure Alex had been hurt by that awful Charley, or he would have been here to answer to the roll call.
“Come on, Chub.” She pushed against the door, and they went out. The principal had not even noticed them standing there. “Let’s do a bit of sleuthing on our own.”
Lefty’s car clattered up while they were on the steps. “Come on, kids. No use hanging around any longer,” Mack said. “Those boys have probably got to the railroad by now and have hopped the night freight to Chicago. We’ve about as much chance of finding them as a needle in the well-known haystack. We rode all around by that hospital building, and couldn’t find a sign of them.”
When Joan and Chub said they wanted to hunt themselves, Tim surprisingly took their side. “Why not let the kids try? Maybe they’ll find something.”
On the main road, good-natured Lefty stopped the car when they saw the dark, unused hospital building, off by itself in the empty fields, now flooded with patches of moonlight.
“I wish we had a notebook, so we could be real detectives,” mused Joan, as she and Chub started across the dew-wet grass. The others had stayed in the car. “The Dummy mystery is nothing compared to this.”
Chub examined the ground near the clump of bushes by the hospital steps. The branches were brushed back as if a group of boys had pressed against them. There were bits of grass uprooted, as though with the toe or heel of a boy’s shoe, unmistakable signs of a struggle. Joan found a shred of torn khaki on the prickly bush.
“They had a battle all right, those two,” decided Chub. “But Charley couldn’t have carried a big kid like Alex very far. He must have made Alex go with him.”
It did seem so. For Alex wasn’t anywhere around. They peeped behind bushes, and walked around the hospital without finding anything. As they started to the car, they both stood still. A low moan drifted out from somewhere. They both heard it.