The Boy Scout Camera Club Part 32

"The grandson?" asked Frank.

"The prince, unless I am much mistaken," Ned said, cooly.

"So you saw him?" asked Frank.

"We saw a child," was the reply. "He came toward us for a few steps and then ran back! Now we'll look over the remaining pictures and see what we can find."

"That wasn't the grandson, was it?" asked Frank.

"Mike III. was at the cabin that afternoon," was the reply.

Presently Ned came to another torn print showing the mountain slope directly in front of Chimney rock. He pa.s.sed it over to Frank with an odd look in his eyes.

"Look right in the foreground, between those two stones," he said.

"What is it between the stones?" asked the boy.

"Looks to me like a coat."

"Do you really think it is?"

"Sure thing!" laughed Ned. "I'm going over there directly and see if it is still there."

Frank looked puzzled.

"But how did it come there?" he asked. "Why should it be left there?"

"I have known children to throw off coats or jackets on a hot day,"

smiled Ned. "I imagine that princes are not different from other children."

Ned went on with his examination of the pictures. At last he came to one which was badly torn, almost half of it being missing.

"There," he said. "This is a picture taken right there at Chimney rock. Do you see the face above it?"

The face referred to was not that of either of the two men Jimmie had been captured by, or of Bradley, who sat scowling just beyond reach of their voices.

"That is the man we want," Ned said, with a sigh. "If we had the other part of the picture we should see the boy looking over the rock, close at the man's side."

"Very close!" Frank observed. "They seem to have hold of hands.

Doesn't that look like a closed hand down lower?"

"That is just what it is!"

Ned laid the picture aside and Frank brought out those which had been made from the films taken from the baby camera. There were half a dozen of them and all were remarkably good.

"Look here," Frank said, "the kid took a picture of the slope back of the rock. Our pictures do not show that. Look up a short distance!"

Not very far up the slope hung a huge boulder which seemed on the verge of falling.

"If you'll notice the point of contact with the ground," Frank went on, "you'll see that the boulder is propped up by wedge-like stones put under it."

"Exactly!" Ned said. "And that means that the boulder has fallen or been pried out of its nest, and that the cavity behind it is regarded as a good hiding place."

"Do you think the prince could have been there?"

"Not when Jack and I were in that section. We saw him out on the slope."

"But he went back that way?"

"Yes."

"Tell you what!" Frank exclaimed. "I'm going to take these pictures home to Dad, and let him print them in his newspaper."

"You'll have to write a story to go with them."

"Oh, I suppose so, but stories aren't read when there are pictures.

The cuts tell the story. Dad will like the photographs."

After a time Ned came to the picture of a man with the head torn off!

In destroying the print the outlaws had contented themselves by merely ripping it into two pieces. The head part was not to be found.

"What's the dangling things in front of the man's breast?" asked Frank.

"Legs!" replied Ned.

"I never knew a man to wear his legs up there!" laughed Frank.

"But you have known men to lift kids to their backs and let their little legs hang down in front for handles? What?"

"Never thought of that?" Frank exclaimed.

"If we only had the face!" Ned worried.

Then he paused a moment and went back to the print carrying the strange face.

"Here it is!" he said. "See! This is the same man. There are the boots and the b.u.t.tons. The camera caught the man twice."

"I don't know why you didn't see some of these things when the pictures were made," laughed Frank. "Next time I go out taking snapshots I'm going to study the landscape, so I can choose subjects for my pictures!"

"All this means," Ned began, "that we were watched when we were taking the pictures that afternoon. These people were looking at us!

We might as well have been walking through an open street."

"But why didn't they do something to you, then?" demanded Frank.

"They captured the ones who entered the workroom."

"Those were counterfeiters, not abductors."

"Well, then, they caught Jimmie and lugged him away?"