“Nothing in the world, directly. I’m merely trying to figure out, in my own way, how a mind like yours could see under the surface print into the really interesting peculiarity of this clipping. Now I know that your mind didn’t do anything of the sort. Come on, now, Algy, who sent this to you?”
“Cousin of mine up in Harwick. I wish you weren’t so Billy-be-dashed sharp, Average. I used to visit in Harwick, so they asked me to get you interested in Bailey Prentice’s case. He’s the lost boy.”
“You’ve done it. Now tell me all you know.”
Spofford produced a letter which gave the outlines of the case. Bailey Prentice’s disappearance it was set forth, was the lesser of two simultaneous phenomena which violently jarred the somnolent New England village of Harwick from its wonted calm. The greater was the “Harwick meteor.” At ten-fifteen on the night of December twelfth, the streets being full of people coming from the moving picture show, there was a startling concussion from the overhanging clouds and the astounded populace saw a ball of flame plunging earthward, to the northwest of the town, and waxing in intensity as it fell. Darkness succeeded. But, within a minute, a lurid radiance rose and spread in the night. The aerial bolt had gone crashing through an old barn on the Tuxall place, setting it afire.
Bailey Prentice was among the very few who did not go to the fire. Taken in connection with the fact that he was fourteen years old and very thoroughly a boy, this, in itself, was phenomenal. In the excitement of the occasion, however, his absence was not noted. But when, on the following morning, the Reverend Peter Prentice, going up to call his son, found the boy’s room empty and the bed untouched, the second sensation of the day was launched. Bailey Prentice had, quite simply, vanished.
Some one offered the theory that, playing truant from the house while his father was engaged in work below stairs, he had been overwhelmed and perhaps wholly consumed by a detached fragment from the fiery visitant. This picturesque suggestion found many supporters until, on the afternoon of December fourteenth, a coat and waistcoat were found on the seashore a mile north of the village. The Reverend Mr. Prentice identified the clothes as his son’s. Searching parties covered the beach for miles, looking for the body. Preparations were made for the funeral services, when a new and astonishing factor was injected into the situation. An advertisement, received by mail from New York, with stamps affixed to the “copy” to pay for its insertion, appeared in the local paper.
“And here’s the advertisement,” concluded Mr. Algernon Spofford, indicating the slip of paper which he had turned over to Average Jones. “And if you are going up to Harwick and need help there, why I’ve got time to spare.”
“Thank you, Algy,” replied Average Jones gravely. “But I think you’d better stay here in case anything turns up at this end. Suppose,” he added with an inspiration, “you trace this Mortimer Morley through the general delivery.”
“All right,” agreed Spofford innocently satisfied with this wild-goose errand. “Lemme know if anything good turns up.”
Average Jones took train for Harwick, and within a few hours was rubbing his hands over an open fire in the parsonage, whose stiff and cheerless aspect bespoke the lack of a woman’s humanizing touch for the Reverend Mr. Prentice was a widower. Overwrought with anxiety and strain, the clergyman, as soon as he had taken his coat, began a hurried, inconsequential narrative, broke off, tried again, fell into an inextricable confusion of words, and, dropping his head in his hands, cried: