“It’s a man!” exclaimed Bob, as he stopped his machine and jumped out. “The man with the box—looks as if he’d been killed!”
CHAPTER II
THE LOG CABIN
Bob Dexter, young as he was, had been through too many strenuous experiences to be turned aside at the thought of a dead man. Besides, this was right in the line of Bob’s ambition, if you get my meaning. That is, he had fully determined to become a detective, and here seemed right at hand a mystery that needed solving. He was first on the scene—a most advantageous thing from a detective’s standpoint.
“I’ve got to keep my wits about me,” thought the lad to himself as he approached the prostrate man who lay suspiciously still and quiet in the grass beside the lonely road.
And while Bob is getting ready to solve what he hopes may be a most baffling mystery, perhaps it would be just as well if I told my new readers a little about the youth who is to figure as the hero of this story.
Bob Dexter’s father and mother died when he was quite young, and his uncle Joel Dexter agreed to care for the lad and bring him up as his own son. Uncle Joel and his wife Aunt Hannah had faithfully kept their promise, and Bob could not have asked for a better home nor for more loving care than he received.
But though loving and kind, Mr. Dexter insisted on Bob “toeing the mark,” as he called it in the matter of work and duties, including attending school. Bob’s uncle was “well fixed” as regards this world’s goods, though not exactly a man of wealth. He was interested in several businesses in Cliffside, including a hardware store he owned. He also loaned money on mortgages and kept a private office over the First National Bank, in which enterprise he was said to own several shares.
Thus Bob grew from boyhood to young manhood, and when he began to develop a taste for detective stories, and, not only that but a desire to solve local crimes and mysteries, Uncle Joel rather “put his foot down,” as he expressed it.
However, when Bob scored a point on the Cliffside police, by finding Jennie Thorp, who, it was supposed, had been kidnaped (though she wasn’t) Bob’s stock went up several points. And when, as I have told you in the first volume of this series, entitled “Bob Dexter and the Club House Mystery,” the youth solved the secret of the Golden Eagle, well, then Uncle Joel “drew in his horns,” as his wife said, and Bob “detected” to his heart’s content.