CHAPTER XXVII
THE GREATER MYSTERY
Since there was no solution of this singular puzzle, Tom did not let it continue to trouble him. He was too busy with his duties incidental to the closing season to concern himself with mysteries which were not likely to reveal anything of value. The kidnapping was a serious affair, and the curious discovery which he had made in the woods was soon relegated to the back of his mind by this, which was now the talk of the camp, and by his increasingly pressing labors.
“DID EITHER OF YOU FELLOWS DO THAT?” TOM ASKED.
Moreover he believed that some scout or other had visited this now memorable spot and marked his initials on the mud, squatting on the log the while. To be sure, the absence of footprints close by, save those easily recognizable as Skinny’s, was perplexing, but since there was no other explanation, Tom accepted the one which seemed not wholly unlikely. At all events, what other explanation was there?
For an hour or more that same night Tom lay under Asbestos’ elm pondering on his singular discovery. Then realizing that his duties were many and various, he put this matter out of his head altogether and went to work in the morning at the strenuous work of lowering and rolling up tents.
The papers which the boys brought up from Catskill that afternoon were full of the kidnapping. Master Harrington’s distracted mother was under the care of a dozen or so specialists, six or eight servants had been discharged for neglect, Mr. Harrington offered a reward of five thousand dollars, somebody had seen the child in Detroit, another had seen him in Canada, another had seen him at a movie show, another had heard heart-rending cries in some marsh or other, and so on and so on.
In New York “an arrest was shortly expected,” but it didn’t arrive. The detectives were “saying nothing” and apparently doing nothing. Master Anthony Harrington’s picture was displayed on movie screens the country over.
But out of all this hodge-podge of cooked up news and irresponsible hints there remained just the one plausible clew to hang any hopes on and that was trainman Hanlon’s recollection of seeing a child in a mackinaw jacket and carrying a jack-knife in the company of two men who alighted from a northbound train at Catskill, within ten miles of Temple Camp.