CHAPTER XV.

THE MAN IN THE STATEROOM.

“Did he make much of a row about it?” asked Jimmie.

“No,” was the answer, “because the porter convinced him that it had accidentally fallen from the vestibule during a short stop in one of the passes. The fellow seemed glad to know that it was gone!”

“How could it get lost from the vestibule?”

“The fellow admitted leaving it somewhere outside the stateroom after taking it to the toilet with him.”

“Did it ever occur to you,” asked Jimmie, “that you bought the hand-bag the porter stole from the man lying here dead?”

“That’s a queer suggestion, don’t you know!” said the Englishman.

“Well, how did the porter come to have the bag to sell if he hadn’t picked it up somewhere on the train?”

“That’s a clever question!” asserted the Englishman. “But look here,” he went on, “why should a man like this one have a false shirt front and a false beard in his luggage?”

“I think I could tell you why if I tried very hard,” answered Jimmie, “but we’d better pass that up for the present.”

“Yes,” Ben said, “I think we’d better give this man decent burial, repair the _Louise_ as far as possible, and start back to camp.”

“I don’t see how we’re going to open a grave,” Carl said.

“We can make a shallow one, I guess,” Ben answered, “and then use plenty of stones for covering. Of course we’ll notify the mounted police as soon as we get to a station, and they will undoubtedly take the body out. Somewhere, undoubtedly, this man had relatives and friends, and they ought to know the manner of his death.”

It was not very difficult making a shallow grave in the soft soil, although the boys had no suitable tools to work with. When at last the body was wrapped in a canvas shroud, composed of material taken from the planes of the wrecked machine, and laid into the grave it was covered to a considerable height with heavy rocks taken from the slope.

This task completed, the boys took guy wires from the now useless aeroplane and repaired the breakage on the _Louise_. The tanks of the _Louise_ being about half empty, the gasoline was drawn from the disabled motors of the wreck and added to the supply.

“It seems lonesome, don’t you know,” the Englishman said, as he took his seat on the _Ann_, “to go away and leave that poor fellow all alone in the valley, with no companionship save that of the stars and the wind!”

“It gives me a shiver to think of it!” declared Ben.

“Well,” Jimmie said in a tone far more serious than was usual with the boy, “every step he has taken since his birth has tended to this place. A million years ago, it was decreed that he should lie here, and that’s all there is of it!”

“Quite true, quite true!” agreed the Englishman.

“Aw, you can’t make me believe a man’s life is mapped out for him like that!” declared Carl. “I guess a fellow has some show!”

When the boys reached the camp the eastern sky was ruddy with the approach of sunrise, and Mr. Havens sat well wrapped in blankets before the fire. His face was pale and showed suffering.

“I thought you’d never come back!” he said. “I saw one of the machines drop, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell which one it was.”

“Two of them dropped,” Ben explained, and in a short time the story of the adventures of the night was told.

“It seems wonderful,” Mr. Havens said, “that we should drop into a region, almost by accident, whither so many things connected with the Kuro case were tending. When the Englishman brought the bag, I thought that the most remarkable occurrence in the world. But now the man who stood in the corridor at Colleton’s door seems to lie over yonder in the valley. It seems like a chapter out of a fairy book!”

“Why, it’s all simple enough!” Jimmie argued. “In fact, it’s the most commonplace thing in the world. This big man stripped Colleton of his disguise in the stateroom and put the articles into the bag, intending to throw it off the train the first time he got a chance. He set the bag out into the corridor or the vestibule so it would be handy when the right time came and the porter stole it.”

“Is this a new edition of the dream-book?” asked Carl.

“Then DuBois lost his hand-bag, and asked the porter to provide him one. For all we know the man just killed may have stolen the Englishman’s bag for his own use. Anyway the porter brought DuBois the bag he stole from the man who has just been killed.”

“Go on!” advised Ben with a grin.

“The porter neglected to remove the contents of the bag, and so the articles used in the disguise of Colleton come into the possession of the purchaser. The Englishman sets out on a hunting trip in the Rocky mountains, strays away from his companions, and turns up at the smugglers’ place with the bag in his hands.”

“You’re only relating the obvious now,” Ben criticised.

“And then,” Jimmie went on, “the big man brings Colleton into some hiding-place in the mountains, using an aeroplane as a means of communication with the cities. His machine is spied by boys who think their own machines can go some and the race follows. The big man drops his aeroplane into a hole in the air and is killed. The Englishman who bought the stolen bag, recognizes him as the man in charge of the sick man in the stateroom. Now, if that isn’t all perfectly simple, I don’t know what is!”

“You take it for granted that Colleton is hidden in this vicinity, then?” asked Ben.

“If he wasn’t, the big man wouldn’t have shown up here!”

“When the big man came in and landed his aeroplane on the other side of the ridge,” Ben suggested, “he brought two men with him. When we went up in the _Louise_ we saw two men walking about the ledge with lanterns in their hands.”

“One of them may be Colleton!” shouted Carl.

“I don’t know about that,” Jimmie went on, “but I’ll tell you there’s some connection between the bunch that stole Colleton and the bunch the Canadian officers arrested for smuggling whiskey over the Canadian border. I don’t believe the red and green signals we saw night before last were entirely for the benefit of the smugglers. I’ll bet the big man who was killed because he didn’t know how to bring a machine out of an air-hole knew the language of those red and green lights!”

Mr. Havens was assisted back to his tent, and the boys busied themselves getting breakfast. The Englishman wandered about the camp for a long time without speaking. It seemed to the boys that he was studying over the events of the night.

Jimmie even suggested to Carl that the Englishman might be searching his memory for some incident connected with the journey across the continent which would place him in the possession of additional information concerning the man who had been killed.

When breakfast was ready, the Englishman took his seat by the white cloth spread on the grass but ate sparingly.

“Have you lost your appetite?” asked Carl.

“That was quite a shock, don’t you know!” was the answer.

“Are you sure the man we buried is the man who occupied the stateroom on the Pullman-car with the sick man?” asked Ben.

“Quite sure!” was the slow reply.

“Did you notice him talking with any one in the car?” asked Jimmie.

“Indeed he was quite intimate with one of the travelers,” the Englishman replied. “They went to the smoking room together and played cards frequently. They were quite chummy, don’t you know.”

“Would you know this second man if you saw him again?”

“Why, of course,” answered the Englishman. “This second man, Neil Howell, is the gentleman who formed the hunting party I joined at San Francisco. He was quite anxious for me to go with him, don’t you know.”

“When did you leave your party?” asked Ben.

“Early yesterday morning,” was the reply. “I wandered about in the mountains until I came to the camp-fire where I was found.”

“Could you make your way to your camp now?” asked Jimmie.

The Englishman shook his head.

“It is in some of the wrinkles of the mountains,” he said, “but I couldn’t even make up my mind which way to set out if I started to find it.”

“Your sense of direction must be deficient!” suggested Carl.

“It must be!” was the answer. “You see,” he went on, “I wandered around this way and that, so long that I couldn’t tell whether my camp was east, west, north or south. During the last few hours of my wandering I was half dazed with hunger and fatigue, so there is little hope of my being able to locate the camp of my friends.”

“Well, we can find it all right!” Jimmie declared. “I can take you up in the machine after we get done breakfast, and after we get last night’s kinks out of our systems, and we can find your camp if it’s anywhere within a thousand miles.”

The Englishman appeared thoughtful for some moments before making any reply. Jimmie nudged Carl and whispered:

“Look here, Cully, I don’t believe he wants to find that camp again! I don’t believe he wants to go back!”

“Yes,” returned Carl, “the quiet, peaceful, uneventful life we are leading seems to appeal to him!”

“We may be able to find the camp,” the Englishman said after a pause, “but really, you know,” he went on, “I wouldn’t want to take another ride in the air to-day!”

“Oh, we can go to-morrow just as well,” laughed Jimmie.

After breakfast the boys advised the Englishman to spend most of the day in sleep. They had had another hard night, and were in need of rest themselves. It was a warm, sunny day, and the lads, well wrapped in blankets, slept until almost noon. After they awoke and prepared dinner, Mr. Havens noticed Carl and Jimmie looking longingly in the direction of the machines.

“What’s on now, boys?” he asked.

“I want to find the answers to two questions,” Jimmie replied.

“Where are the answers?” asked the aviator.

“In the air,” grinned the boy.

“What are the questions?” continued Mr. Havens.

“The first one is this: Who are the men the dead man brought in with him last night?”

“And the other one?”

“Where is the Englishman’s camp?”

“Two very pertinent questions!” suggested Mr. Havens.

“There’s another question,” Jimmie continued, “that I want the answer to, but I don’t see how I’m going to get it right away.”

“Perhaps I can answer it!”

“I’ll give you a try at it,” Jimmie laughed.

“Well, what is it?”

“Did the Englishman accidentally lose his camp or did he lose it on purpose? Can you answer that question?”

“I’ve been watching the Englishman for some time,” the aviator replied, “and I think I can give you the answer. He left it on purpose!”

“I noticed,” Jimmie said, “that he didn’t seem very anxious about my helping him find it!”

“Well, whether he wants to find it or not,” Mr. Havens continued, “I must insist on you boys locating it!”

“You want to know about this man Neil Howell!” laughed Jimmie. “Perhaps you have a notion that by finding him we can get track of the dead man’s associates. You want to know why he induced DuBois to make the mountain trip. In fact, there’s a whole lot of things you want to know about Neil Howell.”

“That’s just the idea,” Mr. Havens replied. “I’m certain that DuBois left the camp voluntarily. There might have been a quarrel, for all I know. I half believe, also,” he continued, “that the Englishman knew what the bag contained when he left camp with it.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jimmie replied, “but I do know that a man going out for a walk in the mountains wouldn’t be apt to carry a hand-bag with him if he intended to return.”