I guess every one of us lay awake thinking about it that night. Anyway, I know I did. And most all the time till the day we got home, we kept talking about it. Harry Donnelle would always laugh and say maybe there wasn’t anything to it at all and that if he knew who the sailor was, he’d go and give the money to his people—probably.
He said he guessed the camp-fire up at Temple Camp was what started him seeing pictures. But always he would say how it was funny that a man without his second finger should have that letter on him. But he said that as long as there wasn’t any finger, it couldn’t point anywheres, and we should worry.
But just the same all the way home, whenever we started a camp-fire, we’d look into it and kind of see an old soldier with white hair and a blue coat and then we’d see a young fellow, wearing khaki, and a ring with Lincoln’s head cut on it.
In the fire we made near Orange Lake just before we hit Newburgh, we saw a soldier in a kind of a restaurant where there were a lot of sailors and we saw them take something away from him. But that’s always the way it is with camp-fires. Mostly we saw the old soldier.
Harry Donnelle always laughed about it and said the camp-fire was a regular art gallery and he guessed he’d give that unlucky two hundred dollars to an orphan asylum, or to the widows and orphans of the poor garage keepers or to the destitute Standard Oil Company. So it got to be a kind of a joke, and that’s the way it was till the whole thing was solved. And I’m going to tell you all about it, too, but I can’t bother now, because I have to tell you about our hike and the crazy thing that happened next day.
CHAPTER XVII
APPALLING! WONDERFUL! MAGNIFICENT!
Anyway, there was one person we never saw in the camp-fire blaze and that was Mr. Costello. If we had, we wouldn’t have seen the blaze. He was so big that he would have filled the whole fire. Harry Donnelle said he could even have blown a camp-fire out if he wanted to—even the big one at Temple Camp.
I wasn’t awake when Dorry started for Kingston in the morning, so I didn’t hear him go. But I knew when he came back all right. If I hadn’t known it, it would have been because I was dead.
He got back before noon and the first I saw of him he was sitting on a big, high fancy seat of a cage wagon, wedged in alongside a great big man with a high hat on and a cutaway coat and a red vest. The big man was driving and the two horses had sleigh bells on them and fancy harness and they made an awful racket. They were dandy white horses, though. Dorry looked awful scared and little alongside the big man. The cage wagon was all gold color and fancy on the top and the wheels looked like Fourth of July pinwheels.
Harry said, “Mr. Costello doesn’t exactly look as if he had sneaked off, does he? He’s not ashamed to be seen. What’s that, a searchlight?”