“Disobey?” asked Bob, rather surprised.
“I guess it would amount to that—and in another way it wouldn’t!”
“How could it if it didn’t and why wouldn’t it if it did?”
The others laughed at Al’s twisted inquiry.
“Uncle Fred didn’t give you orders to ‘lay off’ watching, did he, Bob?” and as Bob shook his head, “He only meant for us to concentrate on seeing if we could pick up a clue to the mysterious ’plane. Well, I feel that by finding out what Griff is doing, and why his father is so fidgety and furtive, and the rest of the puzzles here, we may be led to that ’plane, or get a clue to it or to its pilot.”
“I don’t see any disobedience in that.”
“Well,” Curt answered Bob, “the way I look at it, if Uncle Fred took us into the case he expected us to obey the ‘spirit’ of the orders he gave, and he did say to forget the smaller things here and work on locating the ’plane.”
“I see,” agreed Bob. “It’s a pretty deep—what Lang would call, ethical problem. Father meant to leave Griff alone, unless he did something actually incriminating, and to put all our effort on the other thing. Let’s see your paper, Al.” He held out his hand for the brief note Al had preserved.
Study it as they would, they got nothing helpful from the grass-stained paper with the smudged writing.
“Let’s think who we’ve seen use an indelible pencil,” hinted Al. “Remember, the morning we found this, we decided, in a joke, that there were too many indelible pencils to try to trace the writer because he used one; but how many people close to this mystery have you seen using one?”