Part 23 (1/2)

What ot to say? You're so s to say, not even Detective Ferrett All he could do histle perplexedly The overworked, thin, tre arm of poor Mrs Haskell had reached out and dealt him a knockout blow, under the exclusive auspices of Pee-wee Harris,Ravens, scout of the first class, ood scout law Nueboro, New Jersey, Troop, Boy Scouts of America!

[Footnote 3: Specifications he probably meant]

CHAPTER xxxIII

THE MYSTERY

It was e puzzle were put together and the full truth revealed As the condition of the invalid improved his memory returned to him This wonderful effect of the operation on his skull was noticeable first in the recollection of trifles and disconnected events in his life Usually he got these confused at first but each iteue of the brain was finally put in its right place

His piecing together the events of his life was like the gathering up of the broken pieces of a bowl and the successful reconstruction of it by patiently fitting in the fraght to the scouts who visited his in the darkness, as one ether the broken picture of his past

But how came that injury, discovered by the merest chance, which had wrapped his early life in a blackness like the blackness of night?

Haskell never told of this connectedly, for he could neither speak of it or think of it without becoic occurrence was never ed radually brought into the light

Joe Haskell and his brother had been twins Long before their father died Bob Haskell had done ht in the confederate cause, and whose end was hastened by his dishonest, worthless son

Hicksville proved too s the cash drawer in the railroad station, withdrew fros in the great metropolis of New York

Joe and his ain The stunted affections and criminal tendencies of the one son seemed compensated for in the other, who re coreat war called hi at a southern camp and was later transferred to Camp Merritt, which was an embarkation camp Had it not been for a certain occurrence he would have sailed with the swar and summer of 1918 But he never went to France

On a pleasant Sundayin April of that year, Joe Blythe started for Woodcliff to dine at the home of a family he did not know--the home and family of Miss Bates As we know, he never reached that hospitable roof We do knoever, that in an isolated shack in the woods not far fro his leave of absence, an unmailed letter to his mother, and Miss Bates' card

How came he to that shack? It was in a bypath sometimes followed by soldiers, he said He said he paused there to get out of a shower This statement was at least partly verified by the authorities who secured reports that it did rain on that day

Joe Blythe said that in that shack he met his brother, shabby, desperate Did the brother know that Joe was a soldier in the ca in wait for him in that secluded spot? That also see hiht, is certain Who shall say what actually transpired between these brothers in that lonely spot?

But the proven facts of Bob Haskell's career are these He escaped frolary and a brutalstation after another to find safety in military service, and was rejected as unfit wherever he applied

Neither Joe nor anyone else knoas in the ht the neighborhood of Camp Merritt No one knohether the horrible plan which he executed had been previously conceived

But this is certain, that he struck his brother on the head and laid him low and took fro he did not take, because he did not want it, and that was a little trinket containing their mother's picture which Joe had alorn

Wein that dank,he lay there noforth, in an ill-fitting suit of civilian clothes, des, likewise, who shall tell the full truth? He visited a place called Blytheville and took the nareat cities, so he said He was in the west He was in jail for vagrancy He watched so of his past He was sheltered by the Salvation Army somewhere

He was a wanderer over the country

And so in time he wandered to New York There he fell in withthe old camp Probably they had no faith in him They did not reckon that he would fall in with a troop of scouts who, in the good cause of pitying friendshi+p, would make the old shacks of the deserted reservation echo to the sound of their saws and hahter

And the brother?

April in the terrible year of 1918 was the month of all months when troops were sent abroad by the thousands, half equipped, untrained, as fast as the speeding transports could carry thes, of confusion and frantic hurry Men, men, men, whether they were soldiers or not, so only that they were men! Fe of the frenzied haste in the embarkation camp those days Feill ever realize how near the war ca consciousness and only the silent records of the War Depart his supreme sacrifice under a name but a part of which was his own That he lived in camp as his brother for at least a few hours in that ti rush and inevitable disorder see, under the name of Joseph Haskell, we know