CHAPTER ONE
The Lodge on the Lake
The battered station wagon bumped and groaned over the rutted dirt road at about ten miles per hour, churning up great clouds of dust. Sandy Steele wiped the grime and grit from his face with his handkerchief and bent forward to yell in the driver’s ear.
“How much further, Mr. McClintock?”
The wizened little old man tugged his dirty straw hat down tighter as the front wheels lurched in and out of a hole with a jolt that sent all four occupants of the car bouncing several inches off the seats.
“’Bout ’nother quarter of a mile is all,” the man finally replied.
Sandy grinned at his high-school friend Jerry James, seated beside him. “Well, we’ve come twenty miles; I guess we’ll last another fifteen hundred feet.”
The short, stout boy seated up front with the driver turned to face them, his eyes owlish behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses. “One thousand, three hundred and twenty feet, to be precise,” he said solemnly. “That’s a quarter of a mile exactly.”
Sandy and Jerry let out long-suffering groans. At fifteen, Clyde Benson (Quiz) Taylor was the No. 1 student at Valley View High School in central California where the three boys lived only houses apart. At the age of ten, Quiz had been a winning contestant on a television quiz program, which accounted for his nickname. Quiz could discuss Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or the batting averages of the leading hitters in the National and American Leagues with equal ease. His mind was a bulging storehouse of facts and figures that his friends found very valuable. But at times the superior manner in which he flaunted his knowledge could be highly irritating.
“Why did you have to ask him along?” Jerry demanded wearily. “Living with Quiz for a whole month is more than any human being can take.”