CHAPTER XVII

AN OLD ENEMY

They were starting back along the familiar path to the lodge when they were surprised by the sound of angry voices coming from the direction of the road just beyond.

One of the voices seemed familiar to them and by common consent they turned and retraced their steps. For the voice, improbable as it seemed, had sounded like Buck Looker’s!

As they came out into the open they saw through the gathering dusk the indistinct outlines of a motor car. At first they could not distinguish the owners of the voices raised in altercation, but in a moment more they saw the reason for this.

As they watched they saw someone crawl from underneath the car while another came around from the further side of the machine. Even in the indistinct light the boys recognized the two distinctly. They were Buck Looker and Carl Lutz!

The latter were so busy quarreling that they did not at once notice the boys. Buck was blaming Carl in no uncertain tones with something that had happened to the car.

“Thought you said you knew how to drive!” Buck snarled. “Do you think I’d have risked my neck with a fool like you, if you hadn’t said——”

“Oh, cut it out, can’t you?” Lutz interrupted sullenly. “I can’t help it if the car’s a piece of old junk. The best chauffeur going couldn’t run her two miles without trouble.”

“I suppose you think that lets you out,” sneered Buck. “Make excuses and blame it all on the car——” He paused, mouth open, eyes staring. He had seen the Radio Boys.

“Well, look who’s here!” he said, his mouth stretching in a sneering grin. “Hello, fellows. Can’t we give you a lift wherever you’re going? You look,” with a glance that took in their earth-grimed clothes, “as if you’d been in a fight.”

“No,” said Bob, with a misleading gentleness. “We haven’t been—yet.”

“Well, we’re not looking for any, if that’s what you mean,” sneered Buck, but the boys noticed with a grin that he climbed quickly into the automobile. “We’d hate to wipe up the ground with fellows like you.”

The boys started forward, fists clenched, but Carl Lutz had jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. As the boys sprang forward, the car moved up the road—at first slowly, but gathering speed quickly.

Buck waved a hand to them.

“So long,” he called. “See you again maybe before long.”

“If you do,” said Bob, under his breath, “it won’t be lucky for you.”

“Well, what do you think of that?” breathed Herb, as the Radio Boys once more started for the lodge. “Who would ever have thought we’d have the bad luck to see Buck up here?”

“That fellow,” remarked Jimmy, puffing as he tried to keep up with the longer strides of the other boys, “is a bad penny. He’s always turning up just when you least expect him.”

“I wonder,” said Bob reflectively, “if he can be spending his vacation up here too.”

“Looks like it,” admitted Joe, with a scowl. “Tough luck for us, I’ll tell the world.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Bob, cheerfully. “I have a notion Buck and Carl, too, will keep pretty well out of our way. They aren’t anxious to mix it up with us any.”

“No. But they’re sure to try to make it unpleasant for us some way or other,” insisted Herb. “You know how they are. They’ll do any sort of mean trick as long as there isn’t too much danger of their getting a black eye out of it.”

“We’ll have to take our chance on that,” said Bob, with a grin, adding: “But, somehow, after being lost in that cave, Buck doesn’t bother me a bit. Let him do his worst. He’ll get a good deal better than he gives!”

Nevertheless, in the days that followed the boys thought a great deal about their meeting with the two cronies, and they made all sorts of inquiries in order to find out where the boys were staying.

Finally they found someone, a friend of Mr. Bentley’s, who knew them, though, as he admitted with a frown, he knew no good of them. This gentleman, Mr. Watson by name, said that Buck and Carl Lutz were staying at a fashionable bungalow three or four miles from the ranger station.

“If you’ll take my advice,” he said to the Radio Boys, the frown still lingering, “you’ll give those lads a wide berth. They’re no good. I’d hate to see a boy of mine having anything to do with them.”

“You needn’t worry about our giving them a wide berth, Mr. Watson,” said Bob, adding with a grin: “That’s the best thing we do!”

In the days that followed the boys saw nothing of Buck and his friend and gradually forgot all about them. As long as they kept out of sight, that was all that could be asked of them.

After their adventure in the mysterious mountain cave, the boys found it hard to keep away from the spot. They went there every day or so and soon came to know the various tunnels and passages in the cavern so well that they could almost have found their way about in the dark.

Of course at first they were extremely cautious, for they were not particularly anxious to repeat their first experience. They made use of Herb’s ball of cord, attaching one end of the cord to a tree trunk outside the cave and holding the ball, unwinding it as they felt their way along.

It was a fascinating place with its passages, its strange, suddenly-widened chambers where they might stand upright and rest their cramped backs.

And the more they saw of the place, the more convinced did they become that at some time or other the cave had really been the refuge of outlaws, who brought their booty there—desperate criminals perhaps.

Then, one day, they came upon something that Herb declared was positive proof of this belief.

At the end of one of the tunnels which they had not explored before they came upon an apartment where were several evidences of former habitation. There were bits of broken crockery, a rusted hammer, the remains of a rudely constructed chair and a worm-eaten table. And in the far corner, so encrusted with dirt and mold that it seemed like part of the earth itself, Herb triumphantly discovered an old burlap bag.

“I bet,” he said, his eyes shining, “that this thing has held gold and silver, jewels maybe!”

“Huh!” said Joe skeptically, “you’ll be finding the treasure next. You can’t tell anything by an empty bag.”

“No,” retorted Herb indignantly, “and you can’t tell anything by the rest of the stuff we’ve found here, the hammer, for instance, and the broken dishes, but you can imagine things just the same.”

“Someone used this place to hide in, that one thing’s sure,” said Bob. “But there hasn’t been anyone here recently. Whoever our friends were, they probably died a couple of hundred years ago.”

But in spite of the chaffing it remained a fact that from that day of this last discovery the boys found the lure of the cave irresistible. They spent hours there, imagining all sorts of romantic happenings in the past and bemoaning the fact that nothing exciting ever happened to them.

“Here it is getting near time for us to go home again, and never a real fire yet,” complained Herb. “That’s what I call a mean trick.”

For, although they visited the rangers every day, the latter reported everything quiet without ever a spark on the horizon and the boys began to think that the fire they had helped to quell at the railroad tracks was the only one they were destined to take part in that summer.

They had had excellent weather all along, warm, sunshiny days when the out-of-doors called to them and the only time they wanted to stay indoors at all was when the spirit moved them to work on their radio set.

But now the weather changed suddenly. One morning the boys woke to find the sky leaden and overcast. There was the feel of rain in the air and a chill breeze was blowing.

“Won’t be very cheerful around the cave to-day,” said Bob, as he stood in the doorway of the lodge, looking up at the lowering sky. “Guess we’d better stick around this cabin. I want to experiment a bit with the transmitter, anyway.”

“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Jimmy, coming to join Bob in the doorway. “But I’m going down to the crossroads. A bit of rain won’t hurt!”

“Of course not,” said Joe, adding with a wicked grin: “Rose says there’s nothing better than rain for the complexion.”

“Say!” retorted Jimmy, aggrieved, “who said I was worrying about my complexion, I’d like to know. You fellows make me sick!”

“It’s doughnuts he’s after,” volunteered Herb. “I looked in the doughnut jar last night and there wasn’t one left.”

“Good-by, I’m going!” said Jimmy, and without another word started off in the direction of the general store at the crossroads, followed by the good-natured hoots of his comrades.

“Doughnuts will die of indigestion yet,” prophesied Herb, with a doleful shake of his head, “Come on, fellows, let’s listen in on something. We haven’t heard a good concert for days.”

For the time Jimmy and his doughnuts were forgotten. The three boys, absorbed in their beloved radio, forgot time and place.

But finally, finding that static was interfering annoyingly, they stopped to make some unflattering comments on it and Bob, happening to look at his watch, suddenly made the discovery that Jimmy had been gone for almost three hours. At almost the same minute he became conscious of the furious wind that whistled and moaned about the lodge. There was no rain—only that terrific wind.

“Whew,” said Joe, going over to the window, “no wonder the old set isn’t working well. This looks like a regular storm, fellows.”

“And Doughnuts has been gone nearly three hours,” said Bob anxiously. “I wonder what can be keeping him?”

They went over to the door, which had long since blown shut, and Herb turned the knob. The door flung inward with such violence that it nearly knocked him from his feet. It took the combined force of the three boys to push it to again.

“A regular hurricane,” gasped Joe. “Takes your breath away. Say, fellows, I wish Doughnuts were back.”

And when another twenty minutes had passed and still no sign of Jimmy, the boys put on their coats, pulled their caps down over their eyes and started out to search for him. They knew the path he would take and they started down it, the wind behind them fairly lifting them along.

“Coming back, we’ll have to face this wind,” shouted Herb.

A ripping, rending noise! A sound as though the earth itself were being torn asunder! With a terrific crash a giant monarch of the forest fell across their path!