The Yellow Feather Mystery Read online

  “Until I have more proof, I’ll reserve judgment. I do believe, though, that he’s trying to steal the Woodson estate from Greg, and perhaps old Elias was afraid of him.”

  “Was that the reason you called Mother about us being in danger?” Frank wanted to know.

  “Yes. We must get back the original cutout paper which Greg lost,” Mr. Hardy declared.

  Joe told of his suspicions that Henry Kurt might keep it locked in his office filing cabinet.

  “I saw him take out a sheet of paper and put it in his pocket,” Joe went on. “Maybe when he’s alone he tries to figure out what the cutouts mean.”

  “That’s very likely,” his father said. “I think that Kurt made the one he left with me as a cover-up for his own underhanded work.”

  After talking to Mr. Hardy a while longer, the boys said good night and took off for the Academy. They were halfway along the winding country road when Joe noticed a peculiar reflection in the sky.

  “Looks like a fire,” he said. “Frank! Do you suppose it’s at the school?”

  CHAPTER XII

  A Disastrous Fire

  FRANK gave the car the gun and the convertible roared along the road. He braked to a stop at the edge of a field that bordered the campus.

  Before them an immense bonfire was sending flames high into the air. In its flickering light was a group of excited students.

  “Say, what’s this?” Frank murmured, jumping from the car.

  “There’s Skinny and Chet,” Joe said.

  “And Benny,” Frank added, almost bumping into the bully. “What’s going on, Tass?”

  “Semester celebration! We don’t have to go to bed until we want to. It was Kurt’s idea. He gave us a lot of old record books to burn up.”

  “Record books? He can’t do that!” Frank cried in dismay. He whispered to Joe, “If those records are destroyed, we’ll never find out anything about Harris Dilleau!”

  The Hardys ran over to Chet and took him aside. “Where’s Greg?” Joe asked. “He’d better order the boys to stop this!”

  “Greg’s gone,” Chet replied. “He received a message calling him back to college.”

  Realizing that there was no time to lose if the records were to be saved, Frank leaped between the fire and the students.

  “Fellows!” he cried. “We have to put out this fire! Important papers are being burned. Grab all the snow you can hold and throw it on the flames!”

  But before the boys could carry out his order, Benny jumped forward and shouted, “Bunk! Why should we put it out just because you say so? It’s been a long time since we had a fire like this!”

  “There are valuable records in there,” Frank retorted. “We must save them!”

  He leaped to a nearby snowbank and swept up an armload of snow. As he turned to throw it on the fire, the bulky figure of Benny Tass blocked his path.

  “Look out, Frank!”

  Joe’s warning shout cut through the hubbub of excited students, but it came too late.

  Frank did not see Benny’s foot, which the bully had stuck out deliberately to trip him. The young detective sprawled headfirst toward the fire.

  Like a cat, Joe pounced after his brother and grabbed his coat. He pulled Frank clear of the blaze before it had time to ignite his clothing, then helped him to his feet.

  “Is he all right?” Skinny cried, seeing Frank’s blackened face.

  Anxiously everyone gazed at the unfortunate boy, who rubbed his face with his glove. The only apparent injury was a pair of singed eyebrows.

  Chet angrily faced Benny. “That was a dirty trick,” he said. “You tripped him on purpose!”

  The students gathered around, sensing a fight.

  “It was an accident,” Benny declared as Chet doubled up his fists. “I’m sorry.”

  Despite his apology, the onlookers stared at one another in disbelief. A few minutes previously, most of the students had been ready to side with Tass. Now the entire group turned against him.

  “Let’s put out that fire as Frank said!” one of them shouted.

  Before Benny could protest, the boys began to throw snow on the flames.

  “Here’s a fire extinguisher,” cried Skinny, who had run to the school’s garage to get it.

  Between the extinguisher and the snow heaped on the giant blaze, it soon died down. Chet, meanwhile, had hurried off to the tool shed and soon returned with two steel rakes. Joe grabbed one. Together they pried into the sodden mass, yanking out what was left of the record books.

  “Oh, good night!” Joe moaned in dismay. “The fire extinguisher liquid has messed up what the fire didn’t.”

  The pages of the book he had picked showed only blurred, washed-out traces of ink.

  “Maybe not all of them are ruined,” Frank said hopefully, and the raking went on.

  Several students helped, using their glove-protected hands. Soon there was a mass of partly charred papers stacked up in the snow.

  Off to one side, Benny Tass was still complaining bitterly. “It’s a fine thing,” he blustered, “when we let a couple of smart alecks from town come on the campus and tell us we can’t have a celebration!”

  Most of the boys ignored him, but his few close buddies stood by him.

  “Hey,” exclaimed one of Tass’s pals, “Here comes Mr. Kurt. Wait till he hears about this.”

  The headmaster stomped onto the scene. Immediately Benny told him how the Hardys had ordered the fire doused. Kurt stormed over to where the boys were still trying to salvage some of the records.

  “What’s the idea?” he barked. “I gave permission for that bonfire.”

  Frank stepped up to the headmaster. “Mr. Kurt, you know as well as I do that Gregory Woodson wouldn’t want any records of this school burned.”

  “But I’m the one who is in charge here,” Kurt said pompously.

  “I’d like to remind you,” Frank replied, “that Greg Woodson has been named by the court as administrator of his grandfather’s estate. The school and its records are a valuable part of that estate.”

  Kurt was speechless with rage.

  “The destruction of the records could turn out to be a criminal offense!” Joe added.

  Kurt finally found his voice. “I looked over all the records. There wasn’t anything valuable in them.” After a slight pause he said threateningly, “You Hardys will regret this. No one can come in here and tamper with my authority!”

  “No one’s trying to do that,” Frank said. “But we’re going to save Woodson Academy for its rightful owner.”

  At a murmur from the students, Kurt suddenly realized that he had lost face with them. Purple with rage he stalked off, ordering his young charges to follow him. From a distance the Hardys and Chet could hear him trying to explain his side of the case.

  The unpleasant scene over, the boys returned to their salvage work. Soon every readable scrap had been gathered up into a small pile.

  “I sure hope there’s a clue to this mystery in here to make our work worthwhile,” Chet puffed. “Maybe Kurt was right.”

  “I think just the opposite might be true,” Frank spoke up. “They might contain items he doesn’t want us to see. If only those particular ones didn’t burn or weren’t ruined by the fire extinguisher.”

  Joe spoke up, “Kurt probably gave the telltale ones to the boys first. They would have been on the bottom of the pile.”

  “And were saved!” Chet chortled, his enthusiasm returning. “Say, fellows, we ought to hide these papers so Kurt can’t find them.”

  “Or the Yellow Feather or Tass,” Joe agreed.

  “We could take them to your room,” said Chet, then chuckled. “But after the way Frank’s trousers wound up on top of the bell tower, I wouldn’t say it’s a safe place.”

  “I know,” said Frank. “Let’s hide the papers in the tool shed. Unless we’re spotted moving them in, no one would think of looking in there.”

  Making sure that nobody was in sight, the boys spli
t the pile of charred records into three arm-loads and carried them to the shed.

  By the light of a lantern which they found, they stacked them in a corner and covered them with a tarpaulin. The Hardys would investigate the contents in the morning. Frank had found a padlock with a key which he was about to snap on the door when Chet spoke up.

  “I have a better idea. One of us really ought to guard these papers. You fellows must be dead tired after all you’ve been through today, so I’ll stay.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “You’re a real pal.”

  With Chet inside the shed, he locked the door and departed quickly with Joe for their room.

  Chet relighted the lantern and set it on a workbench. Then he decided to begin looking in the pile of records for clues.

  One by one, he began going through the papers. The stack of discarded possibilities was growing high when Chet found an interesting item.

  “Boy oh boy!” he murmured.

  At the same instant he became aware of a scraping sound outside the shed. Quickly extinguishing the lantern he peered out the window. It was so dark he could see nothing at first. But as his eyes adjusted themselves to the change, some of the blackness took shape. It seemed to be moving!

  As Chet watched, terrified, the moving object became a person. Was he heading for the tool shed?

  Instinctively the youth started to drop out of sight, in case a light should be flashed in his direction. Before he got below the level of the sill, there was a crash of glass and something hit him full force on the head.

  Chet sagged to the floor.

  CHAPTER XIII

  A Minor Explosion

  EARLY the next morning Frank and Joe hopped out of bed and dressed quickly.

  “I wonder how Chet made out last night,” Frank mused as they hurried toward the tool shed, first making sure that no one was following them.

  Joe grinned as they neared the tool house. “We’ll probably find him lying sound asleep smack on top of the records!”

  Suddenly both boys uttered cries of alarm. Crudely painted on the side of the shed was a large yellow feather! Fearful now that something might have happened to Chet, the Hardys raced forward. Getting closer, they saw the broken window. A second later a bound and gagged figure rose into view.

  Chet Morton!

  The prisoner’s hair was disheveled and there was a smear of blood on one cheek.

  “That Yellow Feather is a fiend!” Frank exclaimed as he hastily unlocked the door and rushed inside.

  He removed Chet’s gag while Joe cut the bonds that held his friend’s arms.

  “For Pete’s sake!” Frank said. “What happened? And are you all right?”

  “Guess so. I was conked,” Chet replied, rubbing a bruise over his left ear. “Somebody shot at me. I went out like a light.”

  “Say,” said Joe, bending down to pick something off the floor, “I’ll bet this is what hit you!”

  In his hand was a small dart. It was about six inches long and had a leather-covered knob at one end.

  “The kind that can be fired from a gun!” Frank cried excitedly. Then another thought struck him. “Chet, the records!”

  “They’re—they’re gone,” Chet said dejectedly.

  Joe leaped to the corner in which the papers had been stacked the night before and groaned. “All our work for nothing!”

  “We really have been taken in by the Yellow Feather,” Frank said as he turned to Chet. “Tell us exactly what happened.”

  Chet related all he could remember.

  “I didn’t see the person well enough to identify him,” he said ruefully. “But he sure fixed me up.”

  “You seem to be all right now,” Joe remarked.

  “Maybe even a little fatter, as a matter of fact!”

  “Say, I’m not so—” Chet began, patting his midriff. “Oh, I almost forgot!”

  Grinning as he unbuttoned his jacket, he brought out a thick record book which had been hidden against his stomach.

  “I was going through the papers,” he explained. “I had just come across this book when I heard the noise, so I stuck it under my coat. Dilleau’s name is in it,” Chet added proudly.

  “Great work!” Joe said, and Frank praised, “Chet, you’re an ace!”

  “Some of the stuff about Dilleau was washed out by the fire-extinguisher liquid,” Chet went on, “but part of it’s left.”

  “Never mind, we’ll take the records to our lab and try to restore them by special chemical treatment,” Joe said enthusiastically.

  Overjoyed that something had been saved, the Hardys took the charred book from the shed, locked it in the trunk of their car, and returned to the school. To their surprise, Mrs. Teevan was back and breakfast was ready. As they headed for the dining hall, the boys met Greg Woodson.

  “That phone call requesting me to go back to college was a fake!” he informed them. “I’d sure like to know who sent me on that wild-goose chase.”

  “Kurt might have done it to get you out of the way while he was having a lot of old records burned,” Frank said, and told Greg about the “celebration.”

  “Well, he won’t catch me off guard again,” Greg said firmly. “I’m sticking right here!”

  After breakfast Frank told him that he and Joe planned to go home to work in their laboratory and try to restore the old data about Dilleau. Chet said he would leave too.

  When the Hardys climbed into their car, Frank could not get any response from the motor.

  “The fuel gauge!” he exclaimed, pointing to the empty reading. “But I filled the tank yesterday!”

  “Somebody must have siphoned off the gas,” Joe surmised. “Maybe we can borrow another car.”

  When they tried to start Greg’s car they discovered that it, too, had no gas.

  “Someone doesn’t want us to leave here,” Frank said. “First he doesn’t want us to stay, now he doesn’t want us to go.”

  “Maybe the Yellow Feather found out that we wanted to restore the records about Harris Dilleau,” Joe suggested.

  “All the more reason for us getting to our lab as fast as possible,” Frank said. “But how?”

  Joe grinned, then mentioned Chet’s new contraption. It was better than walking! Taking the records from the car trunk, they went to find their pal.

  “So you want another ride on my propeller sled?” Chet grinned. But upon learning that the Hardys’ car and Greg’s had been drained of fuel, he sobered. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll outsmart the Yellow Feather yet.”

  The three boys hurried to the river where Chet’s invention was lashed to the school dock. Frank and Joe began to slip the lines that held it secure, and Chet spun the flywheel.

  Boom!

  The concussion of the explosion nearly knocked all three of them over. As they regained their balance, Frank asked, “What happened?”

  Still a little groggy, Chet started to examine his motorized sled.

  “The muffler,” he said in a sorrowful voice, “has been blown to bits.”

  Parts of the cylindrical noise absorber were scattered over a wide area of ice.

  “Someone put an explosive mixture in it,” Chet groaned. “Benny Tass, I’ll bet.”

  Chet wound the rope around the flywheel again and tugged. To his amazement, the motor caught hold and burst into a throaty roar.

  “We may be driven deaf, but I’ll get you fellows to Bayport,” he yelled. “Climb aboard.”

  Once they picked up speed, the noise seemed to lessen.

  “I’d sure like to know who wrecked my muffler,” Chet grumbled. “Maybe it wasn’t Benny after all. Kurt’s mad enough at all of us to have done it.”

  As Joe remarked that he doubted that the headmaster would stoop to anything so childish, Frank’s thoughts about the man were concentrating along other lines. Finally he said:

  “You know, Skinny Mason once told us that Kurt was an expert on spring propulsion. I’d forgotten about it until now. I wonder if that dart which knoc
ked you out, Chet—”

  “You mean he has invented some kind of noiseless pistol to fire darts?” Chet exploded.

  “Exactly. And a large one that sent those harpoons out on the bay. That would account for the funny twang we heard,” Frank said.

  Since the Morton farm was nearer than the Hardys’ home, Chet planned to go there, then drive Frank and Joe to their house in his father’s car. Two pretty girls opened the door for them.

  “It’s about time,” Callie and Iola chorused in mock severity. “We’ve been waiting for you!”

  “What’s doing?” Joe grinned at Iola.

  “Have you forgotten that tonight’s the big sleigh ride?” she demanded.

  “We were so tied up with this Yellow Feather mystery we never gave it a thought,” he said apologetically.

  “Well, we have it all arranged,” Callie said.

  “Old Mr. Kemper is going to take us.” And then the girls told of the plans they had made.

  “If we’re going on a sleigh ride”—Frank finally broke in—“Joe and I had better get home fast and do some work.”

  The Hardys departed, with Chet driving them in the Morton car.

  At their house Frank and Joe were greeted in the hall by a peppery voice:

  “Well, it’s a pity you’re never around when you’re wanted!”

  “Hello, Aunt Gertrude.” Joe laughed. “Maybe we ought to have cards printed—At Home Tuesdays!”

  “It would be a fine idea,” his aunt snapped. “Then a visitor would know when to find you.”

  “Visitor? Did we have a visitor?” Frank asked seriously.

  “Yes, indeed, but he couldn’t wait. I gave him what he came for. He said to tell you that Benny Tass had been here.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  The Wild Chase

  “BENNY Tass!” Frank exclaimed. “What did he want?”

  “Benny wanted the Woodson Academy annual for the year in which your father was graduated. He explained to me that there was no copy of that yearbook at school.”

  “But what was his reason?” Joe asked.

  “The boy explained that he was writing a story for the school’s monthly bulletin about famous Woodson athletes. Your father was one of the best that ever played in sports there, so naturally some facts about him should be included.”