“Well, I hope this isn’t going to make any difference, Billy. But it’s only fair for you to know the sort of game you’re running into. I don’t want to feel that you’re going ahead to help us without understanding the situation just as it is.”
“You talk as if this might be a pretty complicated bit of business, Charlie. Suppose you loosen up and tell me about it. Then I may be able to figure better on how I can help you.”
“That’s just what I’m going to do, old man. I want you to meet two of cousin’s protegees here–Bessie King and Zara, the mysterious. If we knew more about Zara and her affairs this wouldn’t be such a Chinese puzzle. But here goes! Ask me all the questions you like. And you girls–if I go wrong, stop me.
“In the first place, Miss Mercer here took a party of her Camp Fire Girls, these same ones that you can see there so busy about getting breakfast, over the state line, and they went to a camp on a lake a little way from a village called Hedgeville.”
“I know the place,” nodded Trenwith. “Never been there, but I know where it is.”
“Well, one morning they discovered these two–Bessie and Zara. And they’d had a strange experience. They were running away!”
“Bad business, as a rule,” commented Trenwith. “But I suppose there was a good reason?”
“You bet there was, old chap! Bessie had lived for a good many years with an old farmer called Hoover and his wife. They had a son, too, a worthless young scamp named Jake, lazy and ready for any sort of mischief that turned up!”
“Is she related to them in any way, Charlie?”
“Not a bit of it! When she was a little bit of a kid her parents left her there as a boarder, and they were supposed to send money to pay for her keep until they came back to get her. For a while they did, but then the money stopped coming.”