“I think not,” counseled Curt. “It may be a mystery why the crate is here, and all that! But it isn’t any of our business—is it?”
“No,” admitted Bob. “Let’s go home, and see what father thinks of it. There is probably some easy explanation we haven’t thought of.”
“All right. We can ride out here first thing—early—tomorrow.”
They could not consult the private detective whose success had been so pronounced that cases came to him from distant cities: he was out of town that night.
When they rode out to the field the next day, at sunrise, looking for the mysteriously deserted airplane it was gone!
“Where is your mystery now?” Curt was inclined to poke a little fun at Bob. “As the sleight-of-hand performers say, ‘Now you see it, now you don’t!’”
“Anyway,” Al who was poking about in the grass under the trees, bent and then exhibited a damp, crumpled paper, “here is the note. Now, what do you say if we have a session of the old Master Sleuths, and see what we can deduce from this paper?”
A year before, asked to do a little investigating for Mr. Wright, when he was handling a case where youths would be least likely to arouse suspicion by shadowing, the trio had become intensely interested in detective work and had termed themselves the Master Sleuths, more in fun than in earnest. However, when they had become “air minded” the term had been dropped. Al, reviving it, won a grin from Bob.
“All right,” Bob agreed. “The paper is damp. It has been out in the dew. Under the trees it would take a good while for it to get as soggy as it is. The writing has smudged—it’s sort of purple——”
“It was written with an indelible pencil,” remarked Curt.