revealed no sign of any recent digging. Trent, or Conners, was the robber who held up the Californian—and so on, and so on, and so on.

That’s the way Harry finished up. There was a lot more about that robber, only Harry hadn’t bothered to copy it.

“So there’s the romance of an old railroad car for you,” he said, “and if you can beat that with your Robin Hoods and Rob Roys and Captain Kidds and Jesse Jameses, why then you’re some dime novelist. And I’ve got a kind of a hunch that the real truth about the little Strawberry Festival has never really been solved. A whole lot of things happened on that——”

“Momentous day,” Pee-wee piped up.

“Right the first time,” Harry said, “and then came a—what-d’ye-call-it, a lapse of twenty-five years. Lapse is right, isn’t it?”

Lapse

“Sure, that’s it—lapse,” Pee-wee said.

“And meanwhile, the automobile was invented and the Boy Scouts were started and Scout Harris was wished onto the world. Now comes the last act of the drama—revealing the mystery—and the first thing to do.”

“Shh, don’t talk so loud,” Pee-wee said; “the first thing to do——”

Shh

“Is to get a new tire and have the carburetor fixed. Then we’ll wait for a favorable tide and sail away in the good ship Cadillac. What do you say?”

Cadillac

CHAPTER VII—WE PLAN OUR TRIP

That was always the way it was with Harry Donnelle; he’d laugh and make a joke about everything and jolly Pee-wee, but anyway, one thing was sure, and that was that we knew more about what happened away back on that day before any of us was born, than the man that wrote that last newspaper article. We knew that that fellow Trent didn’t kill his pal, and we knew that he wasn’t shot by his pal, either. We knew that some man who signed his name Thor did that, and we knew that there was a couple of bags of gold, too.

I said to Harry, “I wish you’d please be serious and 

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