“Ten thousand!” Mr. Foster cried wildly. “Fifteen! Any amount, so long as he comes back unharmed.”
“Easy,” said Dr. Stone, and took out his pipe and reached into a pocket for tobacco. Amid the hysterical panic he was controlled, steady. “If we’re to get any place we must try to think clearly. When was the boy seen last?”
Captain Tucker answered. “Four o’clock.”
“Then we know he wasn’t kidnaped until after four. And about eight o’clock you were given a ransom note. That means the kidnapers were in the neighborhood an hour ago. How did the note get here?”
“It was brought to me,” said Mr. Foster.
“Who brought it?”
“Ira.”
Dr. Stone’s hand came out of his pocket without the tobacco pouch. Joe, startled, saw his uncle’s eyes turn, as though by instinct, toward the hired man he could not see. Ira Close, always given to a dull, stupid sullenness, shifted his thick-set, muscular body awkwardly.
“I sent him out to find Billy,” Mr. Foster explained. “The boy had been gone since four o’clock when he went out of the house with a plate of food for his rabbits. I thought he might have gone trailing after that organ-grinder——”
“What organ-grinder?” Dr. Stone asked sharply.