“Ah jes’ knowed dat dis yer trip was hoodooed fum de moment dat Marse Frank got dat lil’ green mummery from dat moonshine man,” he said gloomily, and made dire and dismal prophecies till Billy, seeing that Lathrop was very nearly breaking down under the strain, packed the skipper of the Carrier Dove off to bed. Billy and Lathrop spent most of the night hours—except when they fell into troubled dozes from time to time—seated beside the silent wireless instrument, hoping against hope that news of some kind might be received from the boys. Ben’s self-reliance and adaptability had made itself so manifest on the expedition that, as Billy said, it seemed impossible to believe that any really serious mishap had befallen him.
Again and again as they sat by the fire the boys went over and over the puzzling affair. Lathrop repeated his story to Billy a dozen times and each time the young reporter asked for a repetition hoping that some point that would shed a light on the mystery might have been omitted by the other. But Lathrop’s recitals of the incident varied not at all and Billy was fain to give it up at last.
“I’ve worked on a lot of queer disappearance cases,” he remarked sententiously, “but this has them all beaten by ten blocks and the City Hall.”
And when Billy dropped off into a troubled nap he had a vivid dream that his city editor had presented him with a big crocodile, stuffed in a lifelike manner and equipped with silver teeth and claws of enormous size. The young reporter was in the midst of an elaborate speech of thanks when he awoke and found that the first gray heralding of dawn was broad in the east and that the great multitude of herons and fish-eating birds that roosted among the islands was already beginning its pilgrimage to the feeding grounds on the oyster bars of the Archipelago. Dawn in the Everglades is a beautiful and impressive sight, but Billy at that time had no eyes for it. His sole thought was to find Ben Stubbs. He therefore aroused Lathrop and the two boys, after routing out Pork Chops and making him cook them a quick breakfast and put them up a light lunch, started for the canoes, determined to circumnavigate the island in search of their missing comrade. Carefully they explored every inch of the soft muddy beach and in due time arrived at the spot where several feet, intermingled in an inextricable pattern, marked the spot where the Seminoles had blindfolded and kidnapped Ben.
Billy, with a reporter’s trained instinct, was on his hands and knees in a minute and came amazingly near reconstructing the scene of Ben’s capture.
“Ben was seized by several men—Indians I should say. He made a brief resistance but was overpowered and dragged some distance and then carried. He was then hurled into an Indian canoe, which was followed by two others, and taken to some Indian village; where or why, I don’t know,” he declared.
“Well, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Lathrop, laughing, in spite of his heavy heart, at Billy’s surprising enthusiasm, which led him to construct what seemed to the other boy at best a fanciful theory, “like Dr. Watson I can understand part of your reasoning, namely that he was seized by Indians for I can see the marks of their moccasins, I can also understand—knowing Ben as I do—that he struggled;” he chuckled again as he pictured the wiry, steel-muscled Ben laying out his captors, “but for the rest please explain.”
“It’s simple enough, my dear Watson,” said Billy in the manner of the celebrated sleuth of fiction, “Ben’s boots had hob-nails—very well, I can see that after stamping round a lot, hob-nails were dragged by moccasins—see the little lines they made in the sand? Then the lines stop but there are no more hobnails, clearly then he was carried.”
“Yes, but the two canoes that followed the one they put him in?” asked Lathrop. “How do you know that there were two others?”
“Ridiculously simple,” replied Billy, “here is the mark made by the keel of one canoe; beyond that, my dear Watson, if you will use your eyes, you will see two other keel marks—hence three canoes.”