“Hold steady a second,” Frank said. “I’ll try to drag you out.”
He reached up and seized one of Joe’s feet. He tugged, but Joe was evidently firmly wedged in the chimney.
“Keep on climbing and come out at the top,” called Chet.
“Wait till I get you!” answered Joe. “This isn’t funny.”
“Come on, you chaps,” said Frank, to the others. “Lend a hand. We’ll just have to drag him out by main force.”
Gingerly, Biff and Chet entered the fire place. The three boys were crowded together. They reached up to grab Joe by the feet just as the prisoner made another struggle and sent more soot pouring down on his rescuers. Within a few seconds, the three were liberally covered with the black substance.
“All together, now,” said Frank, when they had grabbed Joe by the ankles. “Pull!”
They pulled.
With surprising quickness, Joe came loose. He came plunging down into the fireplace on top of the others, each of whom lost his balance and sat down heavily. There was more soot.
The four lads were piled in a heap in the fireplace, so blackened and dirty as to be unrecognizable. Joe, of course, had the worst of it. His face was as black as coal. He was a bedraggled, sooty object, but not a much sorrier sight than his companions.
As they sat up and looked at one another, the humor of the situation suddenly struck them.
“Oh, boy! You chaps look funny!” yelled Chet, and burst into a howl of laughter.
“No funnier than you!” roared Biff. “You look like a chimney sweep.”
They scrambled out of the fireplace, laughing in spite of themselves.
“If somebody could have seen us all when Joe came down out of that chimney!” laughed Frank. “I’ll bet we looked funny. What a glorious tumble!”
“I vote we all take a bath,” said Chet mournfully.
“We certainly need it. And the fire is out and we have no hot water.”
They looked glumly at each other, black and wretched, and then they began to laugh again.
“What did you find, Joe?”
“Soot!” returned the victim.
“We know you did. But what else did you find? Or didn’t you have a chance to explore the chimney?”
“I explored it, all right. And I can tell you this—there’s nothing hidden up there.”
This announcement was a shock to them all.
“Didn’t you find anything?” demanded Frank.
Joe shook his head.
“I turned on the flashlight and examined the inside of the chimney very carefully. The rocks and mortar are just as solid inside as they are on the outside. I didn’t find a trace of anything unusual.”
“You looked on the left hand side, at the front?”
“Exactly as the cipher said. And I tried to figure it out at about nine feet from the floor. Just to be sure, I examined every inch of the chimney on that side. I was just going higher when I got stuck.”
Even the grime could not hide the disappointment expressed in the boys’ faces just then.
“I guess that message was just a fake,” said Biff finally.
But the Hardy boys would not agree with this.
“If it is a fake, why was Hanleigh so frightened lest we would be able to read it?” asked Frank.
“Well,” shrugged Biff, “if it isn’t a fake, why isn’t there something queer about that place in the chimney? We’ve examined it from the front, and Joe has examined it from the inside, and there is certainly nothing hidden there.”
“I can’t understand it,” Frank admitted. “Just the same, I believe that message means something. It is certainly disappointing to find ourselves up against a blank wall just when we thought we were going to solve the whole mystery.”
The boys lighted the fire again and after they had heated water they scrubbed themselves thoroughly and had a good cleaning-up. Within an hour they were presentable again, the soot had been swept up from the floor, and all evidences of their adventure in the chimney had been removed.
“I wonder,” suggested Joe, “if there is another Cabin Island.”
“Not in Barmet Bay,” said Frank.
“Perhaps somewhere else. Perhaps this message refers to an island in some other part of the country altogether. Perhaps Hanleigh merely guessed that this was the place.”
“There may be something in that. It’s just possible that Hanleigh is in the same boat as we are, and that we are all being fooled.”
“Well,” said Chet, “we’ve done the best we could, and there is something wrong somewhere, so why should we worry about it any longer? We came here for an outing—not to solve puzzles.”
“That’s right,” declared Biff. “If this chap Hanleigh comes back we’ll try to get the truth out of him, but we won’t do ourselves any good by racking our brains over this business. Forget it!”
So the subject of the cipher message was officially dropped.
To Frank, however, their failure to discover anything of importance in the big chimney had been very disappointing. He had been elated by his success in solving the mystery of the cipher message and he had looked upon the entire riddle as being near solution. The setback was a hard pill to swallow. In spite of the fact that Biff thought the message was a fake, Frank clung stubbornly to the belief that it was genuine and important.
“Hanleigh wouldn’t have made such a fuss about it,” he argued, “unless there was something important behind it all.”
He regretted Hanleigh’s escape now. Frank longed to meet the man again. He wanted another chance to force the fellow into an explanation of how he came to be in possession of Sparewell’s notebook. And, above all, he wanted to know what the cipher message referred to. What was hidden in the chimney?
“We’ll find out,” he insisted. “Perhaps, in the long run, it will all turn out to be just as simple as that cipher.”
He looked gloomily at the big chimney.
What mystery did it hide? Was there any mystery? Was the whole message just a hoax?
He could not believe this. In any case, Hanleigh knew something about the
