“Well, what do you suppose was the reason for the bonfire?” Johnny bent over to pick up a fragment of black cardboard heavily coated with black paint. This was curved about, forming the segment of a circle. The inside of the circle was black and charred like the inside of a giant firecracker that has been exploded.
Immediately Johnny’s mind was rife with solutions for this fresh mystery. The men were thieves. They had come to this deserted spot at night to divide their loot and to burn any damaging evidence, such as papers, wrappers and whatever else might be connected with it. They were smugglers. The flare of light was a signal to some craft lying far out on the lake, telling them that all was clear and that they might run in. Other possible solutions came to him, but not one of them seemed at all certain. So, in the end, having pocketed the one bit of evidence, he walked back with Ben to his shack. There he promised Ben to return soon to sit out a watch with him on the island; then going down to his boat, he pushed her off.
An hour later he was in his own bed fast asleep, with Ben Zook’s diamonds safe under his pillows.
His last waking thought had been that if those were real diamonds there would be a reward for their return, and that the reward should go to Ben Zook. It would at least be a start toward the purchase of his long-dreamed-of poultry ranch in the country.
CHAPTER XVI
THE STRANGE BLACK CYLINDERS
The forenoon was all but gone when Johnny stirred in his bed, then sat up abruptly to stare about him. He had been dreaming, and woven into the web of his dreams was the face and figure of his one time fellow adventurer, Panther Eye, known familiarly as “Pant.” He had dreamed of seeing the dark fights and narrow escapes, and had dreamed of seeing red lights against a night sky, and blinding white flares. In his dreams he had again fought a mountain feud. All this with Pant at his side.
“I wish he were here!” Johnny exclaimed as he threw back the covers and leaped from his bed. “He’d put the thing together letter by letter, word by word, like a cross-word puzzle, and somehow make a whole of it. The fire at the school; the pink-eyed stranger; the more terrible fire that endangered Mazie’s life; the big stooping man with a limp; the fire at the Zoo; my experience at Ben Zook’s island and at the marsh; for him all these would fit together somehow. But to me they are little more than fragments of the sort of stuff life’s made of. Where’s the affair to end? I’d like to know that.”
Seizing a pen, he wrote a telegram to Pant. Pant, as you will remember from reading that other book, “The Hidden Trail,” had remained behind to finish a task he had begun in the Cumberland Mountains.
“No,” Johnny said to himself after reading the telegram, “he wouldn’t come,” and he tore the paper in four pieces and threw it in the waste basket.
Drawing the fragment of a black cylinder from his pocket, he studied it carefully.