The boys gave the kindly couple a description of their father, but Mr. Kane could not recollect having seen anyone resembling Mr. Hardy near the farm at any time within the past week. He had been working in the fields, he said, and would probably have noticed any strangers on the road.
So the boys returned to Bayport, puzzled and downhearted over the failure of their search. They could not imagine where Fenton Hardy could have gone if he had not been near the Kane farm.
“Something has happened to him, I’m sure,” said Frank. “It isn’t like dad to stay away this long without sending some word.”
“Perhaps he did write that note.”
“He would have explained a little more. And he would have put in the secret sign.”
The fact that the Hardy boys were searching for their father gradually became known throughout Bayport, and one evening a thickset, broad-shouldered man presented himself at the front door of the Hardy home and asked for the boys. Mrs. Hardy bade him step inside and he waited in the hall, nervously twisting his cap in his hands.
When Frank and Joe came out the stranger introduced himself as Sam Bates.
“I’m a truck driver,” he told them. “The reason I came around to see you was because I heard you were lookin’ for your father.”
“Have you seen him?” asked Frank eagerly.
Sam Bates shuffled his feet and looked dubiously at the floor.
“Well, I have and I haven’t, you might say,” he observed. “I did see your father quite a few days ago, but where he is now, I couldn’t tell you, for I don’t know.” Sam was evidently not a man of gigantic intellect. He spoke slowly and painstakingly and his most obvious statements were delivered with the gravity suitable to pearls of wisdom.
“Where did you see him?”
“I’m a truck driver, see?”
“Yes, you told us that,” said Frank impatiently. “But where did you see our father?”
Sam Bates was not to be hurried. He had a story to tell and he was bound to tell it.
“I’m a truck driver, see?” he repeated. “Mostly I drive just in and around Bayport, but sometimes they give me a run out to some of them villages. That’s how I come to be out there that morning.”
“Out where?”
“I’m comin’ to that. I just forget what day it was, but I think it was about a week from last Monday. I know it was just after Sunday because when I went home to dinner that day the wife was washin’ clothes and dinner was late and I had to eat it out on the back steps anyway for the kitchen was all in a mess. You know how it is on wash day.”
Sam Bates regarded them wistfully, as though hoping for some expression of sympathy and understanding. But the Hardy boys were eager for information, and impatient with the worthy truck driver’s circuitous method of telling his story.
“But what has this got to do with our father?” demanded Joe.
“I’m comin’ to that, see? Give me time. Give me time. As I was sayin’, I’m pretty sure it was on a Monday, for it was wash day, and the wife never washes except on Monday. I mean she never washes clothes except on Monday. She herself, why, she washes every day, of course. Anyway, it was Monday.”
“That was the day dad disappeared,” prompted Frank.
“You don’t say! Well, I saw him that day.”
“Where?”
“I’m comin’ to that. As I was sayin’, it was Monday, and when I went down to the garage the boss, he says to me, says he, ‘Sam, I want you to run a truckload of furniture down the shore road.’ So I said, ‘Well, boss, I guess that’s what I’m here for,’ so he told me that this here load of furniture had to go to one of them farmhouses away down near the Point. So we loaded the truck and I filled her up with gas and away I went. It must have been about nine o’clock by then I guess.”
“And you went down the shore road?”
“Sure. And it was a nice mornin’ for drivin’ too. Anyway, I went out past the Tower Mansion—you know, Hurd Applegate’s place, them people you and your father got back the Tower treasure for—and I was drivin’ along without a care in the world and whistlin’ away, quite happy-like, when I sees that I was comin’ near that haunted house up on the cliff. You know the place—where old Polucca was murdered.”
“The Polucca place!”
“Yeah! Well, anyway, I was comin’ by there and I didn’t drive slow either, for they say there’s ghosts in that place and I ain’t takin’ no chance with nothin’ like that, so the truck was going along at quite a clip, when what should I see but a man walkin’ along the road.”
“Dad!”
“Yeah, it was your father. Well, anyway, nobody ever said Sam Bates wouldn’t give a guy a lift, so I slows down a bit and I says, ‘Hey! D’you want a ride?’ just like that, see? Then this guy turned around so I seen who it was. I didn’t know until then, see? So when I seen who it was I said, ‘Good day, Mr. Hardy, would you like a lift?’ but he thanked me and said he was just takin’ a little walk. So I drove on past him and the last I seen of him he was walkin’ along beside the road.”
“Did he go down the lane to the Polucca place?”
“I dunno whether he did or not. He hadn’t quite reached the lane when I seen him last. But I didn’t meet him on my way back, so I don’t know where he went. Matter of fact, I didn’t think nothin’ more of it until this mornin’ when a bunch of the boys were sittin’ around the garage talkin’ and one of them said that you two lads had been huntin’ all over the city for your old man—I mean your father—and you couldn’t find him.
