Part 18 (1/2)
”I'll help you close up the Cave for the night.”
”I don't need any help.”
”Sure you do. Don't be so inhospitable,” Ross chuckled. ”You may as well invite me, because I'm going along anyhow.”
Dan made no further protest as he fell into step with the Den 1 boy. He knew that Ross had in mind learning if he could, the nature of the paper upon which he had been working. Dan was equally determined to keep Jacques' coded message a Den 2 secret.
”If Ross hadn't pulled that fool trick, I'd have had the code completely broken by this time,” he thought. ”Now I'll have to take the message home, because I don't want him to see it.”
The two Cubs climbed the stairs and entered the dark Cave. Dan groped his way to the table and lighted the wick of the kerosene lamp.
In its flickering light, the room somehow did not appear exactly as he had left it. His chair lay overturned. Papers on the table were very disordered. Dan did not recall having left them so.
Not wis.h.i.+ng Ross to see the coded message upon which he had been working, the boy looked about for it. But the paper was not on the table. Nor could he find it anywhere on the floor.
Even the scratch papers on which he had written various combinations of letters, had disappeared.
”Lose something?” Ross inquired as his gaze traveled about the well-furnished room. He added admiringly: ”Nice diggings you have here!
Wish our Den had a cave.”
Dan, thumbing through the loose papers on the table, made no reply.
”What's wrong?” Ross demanded.
”I'm looking for some work I was doing when you broke in here,” Dan answered reluctantly. ”Ross, you didn't-”
”How could I have taken anything?” the other demanded. ”You were hot on my heels every minute.”
”Yeah, that's right, Ross. You were alone when you came here?”
”Sure. What you driving at anyhow?”
”I've lost something-an important paper. You saw me working on it when you came up here.”
”I remember, Dan. Maybe you stuffed it in your pocket when you took after me.”
”I don't think so. I left everything here on the table.”
To make certain, Dan searched all his pockets. The coded message was in none of them.
Thinking that perhaps a gust of wind had carried the paper far across the floor of the cave, he looked in every corner and even under the couch.
”Ross, it's gone,” he said with sudden conviction.
”But how could it have disappeared? Honest, Dan, I didn't take a thing.
And none of the Cubs from Den 1 were with me.”
”I believe you, Ross,” Dan a.s.sured him. ”But someone has been in here while we were on the beach. I sensed it the instant I came in.”
”Anything else missing?”