Well, here was fresh mystery. And what of these clues? A bullet. That was always important. But where had it been found? He examined it closely. “Wood sticking to it,” he muttered. “Been dug out.”
But what of the shavings? These too he examined. After studying them carefully he was convinced that some one, while waiting for a second person perhaps, had occupied his time whittling a bit of soft wood he had picked up.
“The world is strewn with such piles made by whittle-bugs,” he told himself. He was tempted to toss them into the waste paper basket. Instead he slid them back into the envelope.
After that he read the note through again. “Collect pocket knives.” His voice took on a note of disgust. “What could be the good of that?”
“‘You will hear from me again.’ Well, here’s hoping.”
He threw the envelope to a back corner of the table. But startling revelations would drag it again to the light.
“Collect pocket knives.” Down deep in his heart he knew that he would start this collection to-morrow. He hated doing silly things. But more than this he dreaded making fatal blunders. “A clue is a clue,” he had said many times, “be it faint as a moon at midday.”
* * * * * * * *
The battle Red Rodgers waged after leaving the cabin at the edge of the narrow clearing on that mysterious island was something quite outside his past experience. True, he was not unacquainted with struggle and peril. More than once in the vast steel mill he had watched hot sheet steel, caught by a defective roller, curl itself into a serpent of fire, and had dodged in the nick of time. On the gridiron, with mad crowds screaming, with forms leaping at him from right and left, he had over and over battled his way to victory.
Now he faced neither man-made steel nor man himself, but nature. Before him in the dark lay a primeval wilderness; a small wilderness, to be sure, but a real one for all that. Here, on a rocky ridge scarcely one hundred yards wide, for ages without number trees had fought a battle to the death.