THE MAN IN THE STATEROOM.
“Did he make much of a row about it?” asked Jimmie.
“No,” was the answer, “because the porter convinced him that it had
accidentally fallen from the vestibule during a short stop in one of the
passes. The fellow seemed glad to know that it was gone!”
“How could it get lost from the vestibule?”
“The fellow admitted leaving it somewhere outside the stateroom after
taking it to the toilet with him.”
“Did it ever occur to you,” asked Jimmie, “that you bought the hand-bag
the porter stole from the man lying here dead?”
“That’s a queer suggestion, don’t you know!” said the Englishman.
“Well, how did the porter come to have the bag to sell if he hadn’t
picked it up somewhere on the train?”
“That’s a clever question!” asserted the Englishman. “But look here,” he
went on, “why should a man like this one have a false shirt front and a
false beard in his luggage?”
“I think I could tell you why if I tried very hard,” answered Jimmie,
“but we’d better pass that up for the present.”
“Yes,” Ben said, “I think we’d better give this man decent burial,
repair the _Louise_ as far as possible, and start back to camp.”
“I don’t see how we’re going to open a grave,” Carl said.
“We can make a shallow one, I guess,” Ben answered, “and then use plenty
of stones for covering. Of course we’ll notify the mounted police as
soon as we get to a station, and they will undoubtedly take the body
out. Somewhere, undoubtedly, this man had relatives and friends, and
they ought to know the manner of his death.”
It was not very difficult making a shallow grave in the soft soil,
although the boys had no suitable tools to work with. When at last the
body was wrapped in a canvas shroud, composed of material taken from the
planes of the wrecked machine, and laid into the grave it was covered to
a considerable height with heavy rocks taken from the slope.
This task completed, the boys took guy wires from the now useless
aeroplane and repaired the breakage on the _Louise_. The tanks of the
_Louise_ being about half empty, the gasoline was drawn from the
disabled motors of the wreck and added to the supply.
“It seems lonesome, don’t you know,” the Englishman said, as he took his
seat on the _Ann_, “to go away and leave that poor fellow all alone in
the valley, with no companionship save that of the stars and the wind!”
“It gives me a shiver to think of it!” declared Ben.
“Well,” Jimmie said in a tone far more serious than was usual with the
boy, “every step he has taken since his birth has tended to this place.
A million years ago, it was decreed that he should lie here, and that’s
all there is of it!”
“Quite true, quite true!” agreed the Englishman.
“Aw, you can’t make me believe a man’s life is mapped out for him like
that!” declared Carl. “I guess a fellow has some show!”
When the boys reached the camp the eastern sky was ruddy with the
approach of sunrise, and Mr. Havens sat well wrapped in blankets before
the fire. His face was pale and showed suffering.
“I thought you’d never come back!” he said. “I saw one of the machines
drop, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell which one it was.”
“Two of them dropped,” Ben explained, and in a short time the story of
the adventures of the night was told.
“It seems wonderful,” Mr. Havens said, “that we should drop into a
region, almost by accident, whither so many things connected with the
Kuro case were tending. When the Englishman brought the bag, I thought
that the most remarkable occurrence in the world. But now the man who
stood in the corridor at Colleton’s door seems to lie over yonder in the
valley. It seems like a chapter out of a fairy book!”
“Why, it’s all simple enough!” Jimmie argued. “In fact, it’s the most
commonplace thing in the world. This big man stripped Colleton of his
disguise in the stateroom and put the articles into the bag, intending
to throw it off the train the first time he got a chance. He set the bag
out into the corridor or the vestibule so it would be handy when the
right time came and the porter stole it.”
“Is this a new edition of the dream-book?” asked Carl.
“Then DuBois lost his hand-bag, and asked the porter to provide him one.
For all we know the man just killed may have stolen the Englishman’s bag
for his own use. Anyway the porter brought DuBois the bag he stole from
the man who has just been killed.”
“Go on!” advised Ben with a grin.
“The porter neglected to remove the contents of the bag, and so the
articles used in the disguise of Colleton come into the possession of
the purchaser. The Englishman sets out on a hunting trip in the Rocky
mountains, strays away from his companions, and turns up at the
smugglers’ place with the bag in his hands.”
“You’re only relating the obvious now,” Ben criticised.
“And then,” Jimmie went on, “the big man brings Colleton into some
hiding-place in the mountains, using an aeroplane as a means of
communication with the cities. His machine is spied by boys who think
their own machines can go some and the race follows. The big man drops
his aeroplane into a hole in the air and is killed. The Englishman who
bought the stolen bag, recognizes him as the man in charge of the sick
man in the stateroom. Now, if that isn’t all perfectly simple, I don’t
know what is!”
“You take it for granted that Colleton is hidden in this vicinity,
then?” asked Ben.
“If he wasn’t, the big man wouldn’t have shown up here!”
“When the big man came in and landed his aeroplane on the other side of
the ridge,” Ben suggested, “he brought two men with him. When we went up
in the _Louise_ we saw two men walking about the ledge with lanterns in
their hands.”
“One of them may be Colleton!” shouted Carl.
“I don’t know about that,” Jimmie went on, “but I’ll tell you there’s
some connection between the bunch that stole Colleton and the bunch the
Canadian officers arrested for smuggling whiskey over the Canadian
border. I don’t believe the red and green signals we saw night before
last were entirely for the benefit of the smugglers. I’ll bet the big
man who was killed because he didn’t know how to bring a machine out of
an air-hole knew the language of those red and green lights!”
Mr. Havens was assisted back to his tent, and the boys busied themselves
getting breakfast. The Englishman wandered about the camp for a long
time without speaking. It seemed to the boys that he was studying over
the events of the night.
Jimmie even suggested to Carl that the Englishman might be searching his
memory for some incident connected with the journey across the continent
which would place him in the possession of additional information
concerning the man who had been killed.
When breakfast was ready, the Englishman took his seat by the white
cloth spread on the grass but ate sparingly.
“Have you lost your appetite?” asked Carl.
“That was quite a shock, don’t you know!” was the answer.
“Are you sure the man we buried is the man who occupied the stateroom on
the Pullman-car with the sick man?” asked Ben.
“Quite sure!” was the slow reply.
“Did you notice him talking with any one in the car?” asked Jimmie.
“Indeed he was quite intimate with one of the travelers,” the Englishman
replied. “They went to the smoking room together and played cards
frequently. They were quite chummy, don’t you know.”
“Would you know this second man if you saw him again?”
“Why, of course,” answered the Englishman. “This second man, Neil
Howell, is the gentleman who formed the hunting party I joined at San
Francisco. He was quite anxious for me to go with him, don’t you know.”
“When did you leave your party?” asked Ben.
“Early yesterday morning,” was the reply. “I wandered about in the
mountains until I came to the camp-fire where I was found.”
“Could you make your way to your camp now?” asked Jimmie.
The Englishman shook his head.
“It is in some of the wrinkles of the mountains,” he said, “but I
couldn’t even make up my mind which way to set out if I started to find
it.”
“Your sense of direction must be deficient!” suggested Carl.
“It must be!” was the answer. “You see,” he went on, “I wandered around
this way and that, so long that I couldn’t tell whether my camp was
east, west, north or south. During the last few hours of my wandering I
was half dazed with hunger and fatigue, so there is little hope of my
being able to locate the camp of my friends.”
“Well, we can find it all right!” Jimmie declared. “I can take you up in
the machine after we get done breakfast, and after we get last night’s
kinks out of our systems, and we can find your camp if it’s anywhere
within a thousand miles.”
The Englishman appeared thoughtful for some moments before making any
reply. Jimmie nudged Carl and whispered:
“Look here, Cully, I don’t believe he wants to find that camp again! I
don’t believe he wants to go back!”
“Yes,” returned Carl, “the quiet, peaceful, uneventful life we are
leading seems to appeal to him!”
“We may be able to find the camp,” the Englishman said after a pause,
“but really, you know,” he went on, “I wouldn’t want to take another
ride in the air to-day!”
“Oh, we can go to-morrow just as well,” laughed Jimmie.
After breakfast the boys advised the Englishman to spend most of the day
in sleep. They had had another hard night, and were in need of rest
themselves. It was a warm, sunny day, and the lads, well wrapped in
blankets, slept until almost noon. After they awoke and prepared dinner,
Mr. Havens noticed Carl and Jimmie looking longingly in the direction of
the machines.
“What’s on now, boys?” he asked.
“I want to find the answers to two questions,” Jimmie replied.
“Where are the answers?” asked the aviator.
“In the air,” grinned the boy.
“What are the questions?” continued Mr. Havens.
“The first one is this: Who are the men the dead man brought in with him
last night?”
“And the other one?”
“Where is the Englishman’s camp?”
“Two very pertinent questions!” suggested Mr. Havens.
“There’s another question,” Jimmie continued, “that I want the answer
to, but I don’t see how I’m going to get it right away.”
“Perhaps I can answer it!”
“I’ll give you a try at it,” Jimmie laughed.
“Well, what is it?”
“Did the Englishman accidentally lose his camp or did he lose it on
purpose? Can you answer that question?”
“I’ve been watching the Englishman for some time,” the aviator replied,
“and I think I can give you the answer. He left it on purpose!”
“I noticed,” Jimmie said, “that he didn’t seem very anxious about my
helping him find it!”
“Well, whether he wants to find it or not,” Mr. Havens continued, “I
must insist on you boys locating it!”
“You want to know about this man Neil Howell!” laughed Jimmie. “Perhaps
you have a notion that by finding him we can get track of the dead man’s
associates. You want to know why he induced DuBois to make the mountain
trip. In fact, there’s a whole lot of things you want to know about Neil
Howell.”
“That’s just the idea,” Mr. Havens replied. “I’m certain that DuBois
left the camp voluntarily. There might have been a quarrel, for all I
know. I half believe, also,” he continued, “that the Englishman knew
what the bag contained when he left camp with it.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jimmie replied, “but I do know that a man
going out for a walk in the mountains wouldn’t be apt to carry a
hand-bag with him if he intended to return.”