“He saw the badge wasn’t on your sleeve, Harry, so he knew it must be on your hat—there you are!”
“No,” said Harry, “he wouldn’t expect to see it on this flannel shirt—he’d know it belonged on the khaki jacket.”
“Well, he’s a Sherlock Holmes, all right,” concluded Gordon, and there the matter rested for the time being.
At four o’clock in the afternoon the train pulled into the old village of Ticonderoga, which is at the head of Lake George and on the crescent-shaped stream which connects it with Lake Champlain. The boys realized now that it would have been better for them to arrive in the morning, but that would have involved an all-night journey in the train.
There was the inevitable cluster of summer boarders waiting at the station, and the two boys created quite a little ruffle of interest and curiosity as they stepped off the train. They made their way through the group and up to the post-office, where Harry said he wanted to “buzz” the postmaster for any knowledge he might have of the whereabouts of the Oakwood troop. Gordon stood by in fear and trembling lest the official might drop some hint which would simplify their quest and spoil the whole fun of their expedition.
It had gotten around to the postmaster by a somewhat circuitous route that a party of boys and one man had arrived in town the day before and were not known to be staying at any of the houses, so they must have gone somewhere. They couldn’t have stayed in town very long. “If they had, we’d a knowed it,” said the postmaster.
They inquired in the telegraph station as to whether a party of boys had sent a message to Oakwood, N. J., the day before. None had. But the telegraph operator’s sister had called in the doctor that morning, who had told her that the livery stable man had gone into the hardware store to buy a bit and had heard the hardware man say two “rigged-up fellers” had bought a steel trap the night before. So, despite Gordon’s protest, Harry interviewed the hardware man. The incident of the trap was true, but that was all they could learn, and they sought no further information.
It lacked still an hour or two of sunset when they left the village and found themselves on the open road which stretched northward. It traversed a tract of fairly level country about two miles to the west of the lake, and about the same distance to the west of the road rose the mountains. Now and then they could catch a glimpse of the water whose winding course they were following, and always to their left were the hills, rolling one over another far to the westward and fading in color as they receded, till they merged into the horizon. Here and there, amid that multitudinous confusion, there arose some lofty peak touched with the first crimson rays of sunset. Doubtless, there were pleasant villages nestling here and there, and cheerful homes, but these the boys could not see—only the innumerable hills, silent, wild, lonesome. It seemed that they might reach to the farthest ends of the earth. To Gordon the country did not look at all like the map, and it was hard to believe that the print and paper really represented anything or could be used to any purpose.
“Well, here we are in the haystack,” said Harry, cheerily. “Now for the needle—I don’t see it anywhere, do you?”
“Harry,” Gordon answered, “I think we’ve got a job on our hands. Look at those hills. They don’t look much as they do on the map—all crisscrossed up with roads and villages and things.”