“Uncle Dock offered you two counterfeit bills and the other man was afraid they would be detected and that you would know where they came from.”
“I suppose that was his idea. But it made me suspicious. After that, Joe and I kept watching the place and as everything seemed to indicate that something suspicious was going on at the mill we made up our mind to pay them a visit.”
“And a very lucky thing it was that you did. It was a smart piece of work and I want to assure you that the Government won’t forget it.”
The Government did not forget it. Before the month was out, the Hardy boys had received a check for one thousand dollars as a reward for the part they had played in the capture of the counterfeiters.
“Enough money,” Chet Morton said when he heard of it, “to buy gas for the motorboat for a couple of years, anyway.”
As for Uncle Dock and his gang, they were all sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. Frank and Joe made particular inquiries about Lester and they asked their father to see to it that the boy was well taken care of. The result of Mr. Hardy’s efforts in Lester’s behalf was the discovery that “Uncle Dock” was not the boy’s uncle at all, but a rascally impostor who had made claim for the lad at an orphan asylum and who had planned to bring him up in a life of crime.
A well-to-do citizen of Bayport, who heard of the case, offered to give Lester a home and see that he was sent to school. The boy was accordingly assured of a brighter future than had confronted him while he was with Uncle Dock, and no one was more pleased than the Hardy boys.
“We’ll take you out with us in the motorboat, Lester,” they told him.
“Will you?” he asked, his face lighting up with pleasure.
“Sure—you’re one of the gang now.”
“And will you take me with you when you go detectiving?”
“When we go what?” exclaimed Joe.
“When you go detectiving.”
The Hardy boys laughed.
“Oh, you mean when we’re trying to be detectives. We’ll see, Lester. But the chances are we won’t have a chance to be detectives for a long while now. Counterfeiters don’t start operating around Bayport every day, you know.”
“And it’s a good thing they don’t,” Joe added.
But the Hardy boys were destined to have other adventures in which they were to have opportunities of displaying their ability as detectives quite as timely as those which had fallen to their lot in the affair of the old mill. What some of these happenings were will be related in the next volume, called, “The Hardy Boys: The Missing Chums.”
When they received their check which was the reward from the Government for their clever work in running the counterfeiters to earth, they were accompanied to the bank by Chet Morton and Lester, Jerry Gilroy and Phil Cohen, Tony Prito and Biff Hooper, for the Hardy boys had promised to celebrate by treating their friends to ice-cream, to be followed by a motorboat race, wherein Tony, in the Napoli, was going to make a second attempt to beat the Sleuth.
“I guess ten dollars will cover it,” said Frank, as he handed the check over to the cashier. “We can buy gas with the money that’s left over.”
“And you want to deposit nine hundred and ninety dollars?”
“Yes.”
The cashier handed over two five dollar bills. Chet Morton seized one, bit it, gazed reflectively at the ceiling for a moment, then gave it back to Frank.
“I guess it’s good,” he said. “There’s so much counterfeit money going around, these days, that one can’t be too careful.”
Colophon
The Secret of the Old Mill
was published in 1927 by
Franklin W. Dixon.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Elizabeth Miller-Boldt,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2023 by
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
The Secret of the Old Mill,
a painting completed in 1927 by
Walter S. Rogers.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
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