“Eight o’clock from New York, arriving here 10.45,” answered the agent. “Another at 10.00, arriving 12.45, another at 10.02, arriving——”
“Thanks,” interrupted Bob. “Those would be too late. There’s no train, then, except the 4.54 which gets here before 9.45?”
Their informant shook his head impatiently and they moved aside.
“That disposes of Dan,” said Bob. “It isn’t the least bit likely that he’d get up at four o’clock to take a slow train when he could wait until eight and get one reaching here only an hour later. And if he has taken the eight o’clock he won’t be here for nearly three quarters of an hour. So it looks as though some one had deliberately run off with the boat.”
“Gee!” said Tom. “Won’t we be in a fix? Do you suppose we’ll ever find it and get it back?”
“I don’t know,” replied Bob. “I should think, though, that a thirty-six-foot launch would be a pretty hard thing to hide.”
“But the fellow who took it could paint out the name and fix her up a little differently and no one could tell she was stolen.”
“Yes, if we gave him time. But what we’ve got to do now is to get busy. There’s Nel over there.”
Nelson’s report was not comforting. No one had seen the launch that morning, and one old fellow who had rowed across the river at seven o’clock and whose skiff was now tied at the end of the wharf declared that the launch had not been there when he arrived.
“That means,” said Nelson, “that she’s been stolen some time in the night. The man over at the ferry slip says I ought to tell the police and the harbor master at once and telephone up to Norwich and to New Haven and Stonington. So I guess we’d better get busy. Of course they could tow the launch over to some place on Long Island just as easily as they could take her to New Haven, and we can’t very well telephone there, I suppose.”