The Auto Boys' Mystery Part 6

CHAPTER VII

THE LONG-HIDDEN TREASURE IS UNCOVERED

And now, while the weary young searchers were hastening resolutely into the woods to the north of the lake, they were leaving in the forest to the south one who would well bear watching. I do not mean Chip Slider sitting alone, tired and melancholy, beside the shelter of poles, wondering if there could possibly be any place where trouble did not come. No--not Chip, but a man who at this moment stood looking into the little valley where the last camp of the road builders had been.

A somewhat portly, somewhat pompous and self-important appearing individual was this man. His bristly hair, cut very short, was tinged with gray under the large, loose-fitting cap such as golfers and motorists wear. His face was smooth, puffy and red. His very eyes, more touched with red, also, than they should have been, as well as his pudgy hands indicated self-indulgence and love of ease.

Presently the cap and the person under it moved from the rise of ground, above the road builders' last camp, down into the valley. With a smile that had too much of a sneer about it to be pleasant, the man ground his heel into the gravel where the Longknives' road had come to its troubled ending. With the same disagreeable sneer in his manner that accompanied his unpleasant smile, he turned here and there, noting how the brush and stunted stalks of mullen were springing up all about the unfinished task the workmen had left.

Startled suddenly out of his reverie by a bluejay's scream, or some other noise--he may have fancied it, he thought--the man looked hastily, searchingly about him; but satisfied, apparently, that he was alone, he moved leisurely into a shaded place and sat himself down on a stump--another token of the great road that had been begun but never completed. Quite carefully he drew up his trousers at the knees, then picked from his hosiery, whose bright color showed in considerable expanse above his oxfords, some bits of dry gra.s.s and pine needles gathered in his walk. Mr. Lewis Grandall had come, apparently, to view the work his perfidy had caused to be abandoned.

For a long time the unfaithful treasurer of the ambitious Longknives sat in silent meditation. He had noted with some satisfaction that a growth of brush screened his position from easy discovery should anyone chance to pa.s.s that way; and now his thoughts ran back over the circ.u.mstances leading up to his present personal situation. Quite steadily his eyes were fixed upon the unleveled bank of gravel, the half-hewn logs and all the unfinished work in the general picture of desolation and abandonment before him.

It is doubtful, perhaps, if Grandall realized his own responsibility for the waste and ruin on which he looked. At least his face bore no trace of sorrow, no expression of sincere regret. The same dull sneer was in his eyes, the same defiant air was in even the poise of his body and the heel that, with a certain viciousness, he dug into the dry earth.

Lewis Grandall's start in life had been attended by bright prospects.

If only he had been found out the first time he yielded to temptation in scheming to get money by dishonest means, he might still have made his life a success by turning at once to the right road; but not being detected, he became bolder. From mere trickery and deceit it is but a step to out-and-out thievery. Grandall took that step and more. Yet he managed for long to cover his tracks sufficiently that few suspected and no one publicly accused.

One would have supposed that, being accustomed to the handling of other people's money in his banking work, he would not easily have been tempted when he found himself with a large sum of the Longknives' funds in his possession. Neither had he any pressing need of this money at the time he laid his plan to appropriate to his own use the cash intended for Nels Anderson's army of road builders. He merely thought he might some day be glad to have at his command a secret reserve large enough to maintain him indefinitely.

So did he plan the pretended robbery by which a former woodsman he had long known made off with the suit-case wherein he carried the money for Anderson's long overdue payroll. His original purpose had been to make some sort of division of the cash with Murky; but there was not anywhere in the Grandall code either honor or honesty. It was a particularly bright idea, indeed, so Grandall himself considered when the thought came to him that he might have the unsuspecting Murky relieved of the suit-case before the fellow had so much as seen what was in it.

The plan was put into effect. Slider, weak of morals, but strong of arm, was chosen for the work. To him Grandall told as much of his whole scheme as he thought necessary, but told him nothing whatever that was wholly true, with the possible exception of the statement that Murky was not to be trusted because he talked too much.

Having been a beneficiary in a small but largely crooked lumber deal Grandall had once managed, Slider entered into the robbery scheme most willingly. With the general result the reader is familiar; but in detail it may be added that, in keeping with the promoter's plan, he who relieved Murky of the suit-case hid it later just where few would suspect it might be hidden.

That place was almost within gunshot of the very spot where the money would have been distributed had it reached those for whom it was intended.

This not only suited Mr. Grandall's convenience, but kept Slider in a comparatively safe locality, as well. So many men had been engaged on the work near Opal Lake that the presence of any kind of person in working clothes, in that vicinity, would occasion no remark.

Thus had Slider secreted the suit-case in a decaying heap of drift along the identical little stream beside which the great gravel road had ended.

There had Grandall found and quietly removed the riches the very next day. Then the dishonest treasurer limped back to his hotel, for he was supposed to be scarcely able to move, owing to his "injuries," as a result of the robbery.

Nearly three years pa.s.sed. The suit-case lay undisturbed where Grandall hid it and its valuable contents were intact. If the Longknives' treasurer had had occasion to make use of this money, meanwhile, he had been either afraid or unwilling to do so. But he knew where it was. He knew that in an emergency he could lay hands on a moderate fortune whose existence he believed none suspected. The thought bolstered his courage in scheming the method of more than one piece of trickery and dishonesty.

Then came the end, as sooner or later in crooked plans it must come--Failure! They all fail,--it is inevitable,--at last. The wrong-doer faced the necessity of flight.

Grandall's defalcations in the bank did not appear at once. A small matter--the "padding" or falsely increasing of some petty bills for material furnished the city--had started an investigation. It was to the amazement of everyone who knew the man that a long, long chain of shady operations and even petty stealing, even the robbery of his own friends, was by slow degrees uncovered.

Toward the last, it was apparent, Grandall had been driven to the most painful desperation. Night and day he must be on guard to keep his deceptions covered up. Constantly he must devise new practices in deceit to conceal others that once had served, but now, daily and hourly, were opening at most unexpected points revealing the treachery, falsehood, hypocrisy and rottenness they erstwhile had secreted.

Like a common thief, the guilty Grandall stole away in the night. Behind him he left all that might have made life useful and pleasant--home, friends, hope and ambition. Lying for some time hidden in a distant city, he at last felt it safe to travel by a circuitous route to Opal Lake.

At a country railroad station he stepped quietly off the train. With no luggage but a small handbag he slipped into the woods. A long tramp brought him the following day to the abandoned clubhouse. The very atmosphere of oppressive loneliness there pleased him because of its a.s.surance of his safety from discovery.

How little Grandall guessed, or even suspected, that at just this time he could not have come to a place more fraught with danger to himself will never be known. No knowledge had he of the eyes that stealthily watched him. No thought had he that the moment he appeared with the stolen suit-case in hand, ready to slip away to hoped-for safety in a distant country, a lurking enemy would leap upon him.

The thief sat for a long time contemplating the ruins where so abruptly the road building had ended. It was not until near evening that he strolled slowly toward the clubhouse. The general course of the gravel drive he followed, but in the main kept a few feet to one side, that the trees and brush might screen him.

He had no fear here, yet he knew some boys were in camp not far away and not even by them did he wish to be observed. For he would spend one night of rest in the clubhouse room that once had been his own; and then he would be away--gone for all time from these and all the scenes of his younger life.

Yet a pair of heavy, scowling eyes watched Grandall's every footstep--saw him enter the clubhouse--saw him seat himself restfully in the empty living-room beside the great fireplace and proceed to make a supper of sandwiches and fruit from his small satchel.

Murky could not have been more vigilant had his own life been at stake.

Not only his determination to gain again the stolen money that had been taken from him, but his hatred of that person the victim of whose double-dealing he had been, made him watchful, and a very dangerous man.

Quite suddenly in the afternoon had the vexed and oft-disappointed tramp discovered Grandall. It was while the latter stood beside the ruins where the gravel road had reached its ending. In delighted surprise Murky with difficulty suppressed a cry. Dropping instantly to the ground, he pressed over his mouth both his dirty hands lest some exclamation he could scarcely resist should betray him. "Blame _me_!" Under his breath he muttered the words with almost fiendish pleasure.

His worst enemy then was the occasion of those sounds that had startled Grandall from his reverie. But he felt himself so entirely alone, so wholly free from any probability of being observed, that he had given the slight noise not a second thought. During all his afternoon of sinister gazing upon the ambitious enterprise his act had wrecked, he still believed himself as completely alone as a man well could be in any vast woods or wilderness.

And even when Grandall left the little valley and walked in silent meditation to spend one night more--but one--in the old house on the Point he heard no footsteps coming on behind. His thoughts were far from pleasant ones but they occupied him fully. The sullen hatred so clearly shown in the expression of his eyes and lips was but a reflection of all that pa.s.sed within his mind. Friends or foes, men were all alike to him, and those who had never voiced a word against him he reviled equally with those who had been his dupes, and with the men whose accusations had caused his flight, as well.

Coming to the clubhouse, Grandall lingered for a time up and down the weed-grown walk leading to the garage. Then while it was yet light he went down to the rotting pier and looked long and earnestly across and up and down the lake. Slowly he returned and, entering the house, went at once down cellar.

In the pitch darkness he felt his way to the rear of the steps leading from above. Striking a match or two, he examined by such flickering flames the rough uneven wall. With bare hands, then, he seized a projecting corner of one of the large flat stones and pulled it easily from place.

If this part of the wall had been laid up with cement or mortar it had been broken down some time before, as would appear very probable, for the masonry that Grandall now brought tumbling to the floor concealed a deep aperture in the dry, sandy earth.

The thief's next lighted match revealed the hole and also revealed a damp and discolored leather case.

Still crouching in the dark cellar Grandall managed to work the rusty lock and lay the suit-case open. Then he struck another match and its dim glow disclosed the carefully packed bundles of bills, and among them a bag of coin. He nodded his head in a satisfied way. He had a.s.sured himself on first arriving at the old house that the treasure was safe; but he would not remove it from the hiding place until he was prepared to leave, he had decided. Now he was ready.

And where was Murky?

As a matter of fact, from his concealment among the bushes near by, he was trying to decipher the room upstairs that this lone visitor to the old house would probably occupy. He had lost sight of Grandall when the latter had quickly entered and gone to the cellar. But it was only for a little while that the scowling eyes searched the open door and the windows in vain.

As Grandall came up to the living-room carrying the discolored suit-case, he glanced quickly all about him. Possibly some sense of his guilt came to his mind now that the evidence of his theft was squarely in his hands, and for the first time he appeared apprehensive. Yet he paused only for a few seconds. He saw to it that all the first floor doors were bolted from within, and slowly climbed the stairs to the sleeping rooms above.

As if quite at home the man entered that room whose long, low window opened upon the little balcony toward the lake. He smoothed down the mattress and brought a blanket from an adjoining chamber. Opening the window wide, for these upper rooms were very close and warm, he drew the suit-case to the better light he thus admitted and proceeded to count the money it contained.

The night was hot, the air seemed stifling, but when he had satisfied himself as to the amount of the treasure, Grandall returned the packages of bills and the bag of gold and silver pieces to their places, then closed and locked the window. He locked his chamber door also, before lying down to sleep. As if that could save him now!

CHAPTER VIII

DAVE MACLESTER'S ADVENTURE

It required no little courage for Dave MacLester to row across the dark waters of the lake to the darker woods of the north sh.o.r.e. Had there been someone to go with him he would have answered the cries for aid much more willingly. But since either he or Chip must remain in camp, Davy set out alone, pretty gloomily, pulling the heavy scow with what speed he could.

MacLester was far from being a coward but by nature he was more timid than calm, self-possessed Phil Way, or bold and venturesome Paul Jones.

With a keen sense of duty and resolute determination to overcome every thought of fear, however, he ran the scow against the steep bank of the lake's far sh.o.r.e.