Bob Dexter and the Storm Mountain Mystery or, The Secret of the Log Cabin

“Stop! Stop!” angrily cried Bill. “What are you doing to me?”

“Taking off your leg – that’s all,” answered Bob quietly as he finally pulled the wooden member away from its owner. “But it isn’t going to hurt you, Jolly Bill. This is all we want – now you may have your leg back again!”

As Bob spoke he pulled from the hollow interior of the wooden limb the brass-bound box. At the sight of it Hiram raised a cry of delight.

“That’s mine! That’s mine!” he shouted. “It was stolen from me! It holds the secret of the buried treasure. And you had it all the while, Bill Hickey. You tried to rob me! Give me that box! Scoundrel!”

Bob, with a smile, passed it over. Nor could he cease smiling at the look of chagrin in the face of Jolly Bill Hickey. That individual seemed in a daze as he fumbled at his wooden leg and looked within the hollow of it.

“Empty! Gone!” he gasped.

“Yes, Bill, the jig is up for you,” remarked Bob. “You had your try at solving the puzzle, but you couldn’t make head or tail of it, could you? Not head or tail!”

At hearing repeated to him the very words he had used in reference to the brass box, Bill turned pale.

“Wha – what’s it all about? Who are you, anyhow?” he gasped and there was a look of fear on his face as he gazed at Bob.

“He’s just an amateur detective, that’s all,” chuckled Harry.

“But I guess he’s solved this mystery,” added Ned.

“No, not quite all,” admitted Bob with a smile. “We have yet to find the treasure. Bill had a try at it, but he couldn’t locate it. Now we’ve got to solve the puzzle. Do you mind opening that box, Mr. Beegle? It isn’t difficult. The difficulty lies inside, I think.

“And don’t try any of your tricks, Bill Hickey,” he sternly warned the wooden-legged sailor, who was still holding his artificial limb with a look of wonder on his face. “If things turn out all right, and Hiram doesn’t want to make a complaint against you, we’ll let you stump off. But if you cut up rough – we’ll have the police here in no time.”

“I’m not going to cut up rough,” said Bill, humbly enough, “But you won’t make anything out of that,” he added, as Hiram drew a folded paper from the brass box. “I tried. I might as well admit it, for you seem to know all about it,” he went on. “I tried but I couldn’t make head or tail of it. There’s no sense to it. I don’t believe there is any treasure. I believe Hank used it all up himself and then left this silly paper to tease you, Hiram. It’s a lot of bosh!”

And when Bob Dexter and his chums glanced at the paper they were inclined to agree with Jolly Bill, who now was far from what his name indicated.

For written in a plain, legible hand in black ink on what seemed to be a bit of old parchment, was this strange message:

It will not do to dignify, or, let us say, to magnify a sun spot. For ten million years thousands of feet have, to give them their due, tried to travel east or west, and have not found ten of these spots. The sunny south of the Red Sea makes a gateway that entices many away from their post of duty. In summer cows eat buttercups and they fatten up a lot.

“Whew!” ejaculated Ned as he read this. “What does it mean?”

“Reads like some of the stuff we have to translate in High School,” added Harry.

“It’s a puzzle, that’s what it is,” said Bob. “But we’ll have to solve it. Now, Mr. Beegle – ”

“Look out – there he goes!” cried the sailor, as he jumped toward the door. But he was too late to intercept Bill Hickey who, having strapped on his wooden leg, was now pegging away at top speed down the trail from Storm Mountain.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE TREASURE

“Let him go,” suggested Bob with a laugh. “His game’s played out and he knows it. No use arresting him and having a long-drawn out case in the police court. That is if you’re satisfied, Mr. Beegle?”

Hiram looked a bit disappointed at the escape of Jolly Bill. The old sailor was accustomed to seeing punishment meted out to those who deserved it. And certainly Bill deserved something in this line. But, after all, Hiram was a bit of a philosopher.

“If he isn’t taking away any of my treasure with him, I don’t mind letting him go,” he said, as he stood in his doorway and watched Bill stumping off down the rugged trail.

“No, he won’t take any of the treasure with him,” said Bob. “I’ll guarantee that. But whether we can find it or not is another question. Bill tried his best and didn’t succeed.”

“I don’t see how anybody could succeed with this to work on,” complained Ned as he looked at the seeming jumble of words which had been written down by Hank Denby, to guide his heir to the buried treasure, and to keep others from finding it. It looked as if he might succeed in keeping it even from the one entitled to it. “There’s no making any sense of this,” concluded Ned, dubiously.

“Oh, we haven’t had a real try at it yet,” said Bob, cheerfully. “Let’s go at it systematically. But first I’d like to clear up a few loose ends. Do you know anything about this man with the hook arm, Mr. Beegle? The one who calls himself Jake Dauber, and who went off with Rod in such a hurry?”

“No, he’s a stranger to me,” answered the old sailor. “He wasn’t one of us in on the secret of the treasure. But he might have had some deal with Rod to help him get my share away from me. And when Rod couldn’t, this man with the hook got tired and took Rod off on some other trick.”

“Perhaps,” admitted Bob. “But in the light of what has come out, Mr. Beegle, do you still think it was the organ grinder who attacked you on the road and tried to take the box away from you? And do you think he visited you here in the cabin, and made his way into your strong room while you were looking at this paper,” and Bob indicated the cipher, for such it was.

“I don’t know what to think,” admitted the old sailor with a puzzled shake of his head. “I certainly didn’t see any one like an organ grinder attack me on the road that day you found-me, Bob. And, as I say, I didn’t see the man who got in here, made me senseless and took this box.”

“I think it’s pretty safe to assume,” said Bob, as he sat down at a table and spread the mysterious square of parchment out in front of him, “it’s pretty safe to assume that Jolly Bill was the guilty man in both instances. He sneaked out on you from the bushes, Mr. Beegle, and struck you down before you had a chance to get a good look at him. You assumed that it was Rod because you had him in your mind.

“Then, finding that his first assault wasn’t a success, Bill tried other tactics. He sneaked up here in the night, and saw you in the room, looking over the paper from the brass box. He made use of some mysterious chemical, I think – something that overpowered you and made you fall unconscious. He could have tossed a sponge, saturated with it, into the room while you were intent on studying this cipher, Mr. Beegle. Then, when the fumes had blown away, after having knocked you out, he entered, took the box away with him, locked you in and put the key back.”

“But how did he do that?” demanded the sailor. “I can understand all but that part of the key.”

“We’ll come to that in time,” said Bob. “I’m not worrying about that. The main mystery is solved. We know who stole the brass box, and we have it back – with the cipher, or map, if you want to call it that, which tells where the treasure is buried.”

“But does it tell?” asked Ned. “It isn’t exactly a map. But does it tell about the treasure?”

“Of course it does!” declared Bob.

“Then you’re smarter than I give you credit for being if you can make head or tail of this,” commented Harry.

“We’ll see,” and the young detective smiled. “At any rate we have cleaned up the loose ends. Jolly Bill was the robber, and as many another criminal has done, instead of fleeing he remained on the spot to throw suspicion off, which he succeeded in doing very well. Then came Rod on the scene, disguised as an Italian organ grinder to see if he couldn’t get at the treasure after Hank Denby died. It was a good game but it didn’t work.”

“Rod was always up to tricks like that,” said Hiram. “He would play them on board the ships we sailed in. I think he had some Italian blood in him, for once, when we were at an Italian port, he was as much at home as any of the natives, and he could talk their lingo, too. But I didn’t know him in his false beard and wig. He was always smooth-shaven.”

“It wasn’t a false beard nor wig, either,” said Bob. “He just let his hair and whiskers grow. He was clean shaved when he and the man with the iron hook took the milk train. Well, we’ll let them go. They don’t figure in this mystery any more.”

“Unless they’ve already dug up the treasure and skipped out with it,” suggested Ned.

“It couldn’t have been done,” declared Bob. “Rod was only digging at random in the bramble patch, though why he hit on that is more than I can tell. But we’d better get to work on this.”

“I’ll say you had!” exclaimed Harry. “And there’s a long trail ahead of you – a long, long trail.”

However, Bob Dexter went to work with a certain system in mind. He had made a sort of study of puzzles, ciphers and the like, and knew certain fundamental rules governing them. That the secret of the treasure was a comparatively simple one he felt convinced.

“One of the things to do is to see if this paper contains any secret writing,” he said. “I mean certain words may be written in with a chemical so as to remain invisible until heated or treated with other chemicals.

“Now Mr. Denby wouldn’t be very likely to make a complicated affair – one that would need other chemicals to bring out the writing. He would know that Mr. Beegle, here, couldn’t have such chemicals at hand. Consequently the simplest way would be the one he would select – that is heat. Let’s see if, like the cipher in Poe’s ‘Gold Bug,’ heat will bring out anything.”

They held the parchment near the flame of a candle, but aside from producing rather an unpleasant odor, nothing developed. The writing remained the same.

“The next thing,” said Bob, “is to pick out from this mass of words certain ones that mean something. As it stands it might be just part of an essay on astronomy or geography. Now in ciphers of this kind certain key words are used, say beginning with the second or third from the start of the message, and then letting the words follow in a certain numerical sequence. Let’s try that.”