Disappointment
Frank Hardy sprang forward.
He crouched down in the fireplace and looked up. He could see Joe’s
wildly plunging feet a short distance above.
“Kick yourself free!” advised Chet helpfully.
“That’s all I can do—kick!” replied the prisoner. “My elbows are wedged
in against these rocks and I can’t get loose.”
“Hold steady a second,” Frank said. “I’ll try to drag you out.”
He reached up and seized one of Joe’s feet. He tugged, but Joe was
evidently firmly wedged in the chimney.
“Keep on climbing and come out at the top,” called Chet.
“Wait till I get you!” answered Joe. “This isn’t funny.”
“Come on, you chaps,” said Frank, to the others. “Lend a hand. We’ll
just have to drag him out by main force.”
Gingerly, Biff and Chet entered the fire place. The three boys were
crowded together. They reached up to grab Joe by the feet just as the
prisoner made another struggle and sent more soot pouring down on his
rescuers. Within a few seconds, the three were liberally covered with
the black substance.
“All together, now,” said Frank, when they had grabbed Joe by the
ankles. “Pull!”
They pulled.
With surprising quickness, Joe came loose. He came plunging down into
the fireplace on top of the others, each of whom lost his balance and
sat down heavily. There was more soot.
The four lads were piled in a heap in the fireplace, so blackened and
dirty as to be unrecognizable. Joe, of course, had the worst of it. His
face was as black as coal. He was a bedraggled, sooty object, but not
much sorrier sight than his companions.
As they sat up and looked at one another, the humor of the situation
suddenly struck them.
“Oh, boy! You chaps look funny!” yelled Chet, and burst into a howl of
laughter.
“No funnier than you!” roared Biff. “You look like a chimney sweep.”
They scrambled out of the fireplace, laughing in spite of themselves.
“If somebody could have seen us all when Joe came down out of that
chimney!” laughed Frank. “I’ll bet we looked funny. What a glorious
tumble!”
“I vote we all take a bath,” said Chet mournfully.
“We certainly need it. And the fire is out and we have no hot water.”
They looked glumly at each other, black and wretched, and then they
began to laugh again.
“What did you find, Joe?”
“Soot!” returned the victim.
“We know you did. But what else did you find? Or didn’t you have a
chance to explore the chimney?”
“I explored it, all right. And I can tell you this—there’s nothing
hidden up there.”
This announcement was a shock to them all.
“Didn’t you find anything?” demanded Frank.
Joe shook his head.
“I turned on the flashlight and examined the inside of the chimney very
carefully. The rocks and mortar are just as solid inside as they are on
the outside. I didn’t find a trace of anything unusual.”
“You looked on the left hand side, at the front?”
“Exactly as the cipher said. And I tried to figure it out at about nine
feet from the floor. Just to be sure, I examined every inch of the
chimney on that side. I was just going higher when I got stuck.”
Even the grime could not hide the disappointment expressed in the boys’
faces just then.
“I guess that message was just a fake,” said Biff finally.
But the Hardy boys would not agree with this.
“If it is a fake, why was Hanleigh so frightened lest we would be able
to read it?” asked Frank.
“Well,” shrugged Biff, “if it isn’t a fake, why isn’t there something
queer about that place in the chimney? We’ve examined it from the front,
and Joe has examined it from the inside, and there is certainly nothing
hidden there.”
“I can’t understand it,” Frank admitted. “Just the same, I believe that
message means something. It is certainly disappointing to find ourselves
up against a blank wall just when we thought we were going to solve the
whole mystery.”
The boys lighted the fire again and after they had heated water they
scrubbed themselves thoroughly and had a good cleaning-up. Within an
hour they were presentable again, the soot had been swept up from the
floor, and all evidences of their adventure in the chimney had been
removed.
“I wonder,” suggested Joe, “if there is another Cabin Island.”
“Not in Barmet Bay,” said Frank.
“Perhaps somewhere else. Perhaps this message refers to an island in
some other part of the country altogether. Perhaps Hanleigh merely
guessed that this was the place.”
“There may be something in that. It’s just possible that Hanleigh is in
the same boat as we are, and that we are all being fooled.”
“Well,” said Chet, “we’ve done the best we could, and there is something
wrong somewhere, so why should we worry about it any longer? We came
here for an outing—not to solve puzzles.”
“That’s right,” declared Biff. “If this chap Hanleigh comes back we’ll
try to get the truth out of him, but we won’t do ourselves any good by
racking our brains over this business. Forget it!”
So the subject of the cipher message was officially dropped.
To Frank, however, their failure to discover anything of importance in
the big chimney had been very disappointing. He had been elated by his
success in solving the mystery of the cipher message and he had looked
upon the entire riddle as being near solution. The setback was a hard
pill to swallow. In spite of the fact that Biff thought the message was
a fake, Frank clung stubbornly to the belief that it was genuine and
important.
“Hanleigh wouldn’t have made such a fuss about it,” he argued, “unless
there was something important behind it all.”
He regretted Hanleigh’s escape now. Frank longed to meet the man again.
He wanted another chance to force the fellow into an explanation of how
he came to be in possession of Sparewell’s notebook. And, above all, he
wanted to know what the cipher message referred to. What was hidden in
the chimney?
“We’ll find out,” he insisted. “Perhaps, in the long run, it will all
turn out to be just as simple as that cipher.”
He looked gloomily at the big chimney.
What mystery did it hide? Was there any mystery? Was the whole message
just a hoax?
He could not believe this. In any case, Hanleigh knew something about
the mysterious Sparewell—else how did he get possession of the
notebook? And in this respect alone the mystery was worth following up.
That evening, the Hardy boys and their chums were gathered around the
fire. Chet and Joe were playing checkers. Biff had rigged up the
punching bag, had donned his boxing gloves, and was making the bag drum
in a lively manner. Frank was still studying the cipher, wondering if
there might not be some little clue he had missed. Once in a while he
referred to the pages of the notebook again.
It was growing colder outside and the boys had to keep a roaring fire in
order that the cabin should be warm enough. The wind was rising and
there were fitful slashes of snow against the windows.
“More dirty weather!” growled Biff, dealing a particularly vicious blow
at the punching bag.
“Seems it’s done nothing but snow since we came here,” said Chet.
“It’s your move,” Joe reminded him.
Chet moved his checker and Joe promptly captured it, with a king as
well.
The scene was peaceful. The boys would have been interested if they had
known of what was happening in a little house in Bayport just then.
Hanleigh was preparing to return to Cabin Island.