CHAPTER II

Circumstantial Evidence

For a moment Frank Hardy lay in the thicket, stunned by the shock of his
fall, with the breath knocked out of him. Gradually, he recovered
himself and managed to scramble to his feet. His first thought was for
the other boys, but a quick glance showed that both Chet and Joe were
unhurt, beyond a few bruises.

Joe was sitting in the ditch, looking around him in bewilderment, as
though he had not yet realized exactly what had happened, while Chet
Morton was picking himself up out of a clump of undergrowth near the
fence. In the road, the driver of the hay wagon was trying to calm his
startled horses, who were rearing and plunging in fright.

“Any bones broken?” asked Frank of his two companions.

Chet carefully counted his ribs.

“Guess not,” he announced, cheerfully. “I think I’m all here, safe and
sound. Wow! What a spill that was!”

Joe got to his feet.

“Good thing this is a soft ditch,” he said. “It’s lucky somebody didn’t
get a broken neck.”

“Well, nobody did, and that’s that. How about the bikes?”

Frank examined his own motorcycle, righted it, and found that the
machine was not damaged beyond a bent mudguard. He had managed to slow
down sufficiently before careering into the ditch, so that much of the
shock had been averted and the motorcycle had simply turned over into
the spongy turf.

“My bike’s all right,” announced Chet. “It’s bent a little here and
there, but it’s good for a few more miles yet.”

“Same here,” said Joe Hardy, looking up. “I think we’re mighty lucky to
get off so easily.”

“You mighta run me down!” roared the driver of the hay wagon, now that
he had recovered from his fright. “Tearin’ and snortin’ down the road on
them contraptions—”

“Why don’t you watch the road?” asked Frank. “You heard us coming. We
couldn’t see you. You might have killed the three of us, driving out
like that. You didn’t have anything to worry about.”

“I didn’t, eh?”

“No.”

“What if I’d been killed?”

“You could hear our bikes half a mile off—unless you are deaf,” put in
Joe.

“It ain’t my business to listen for them contraptions,” growled the man
on the hay wagon. “I got my work to do.”

“Well, don’t blame us,” said Frank. “And the next time you drive out of
a side road like that, stop, look and listen.”

“Say, who do you think you’re givin’ orders to?” and now the man reached
for his whip and acted as if he meant to get down and thrash somebody.

“None of that—if you know when you are well off,” cried Joe, his eyes
blazing.

Chet stepped forward.

“If you say the word, we’ll give you all that is coming to you,” he put
in.

All of the boys looked so determined that the man let his whip alone.

“Get out o’ my way! I got to be goin’,” he growled.

“Well, after this you be more careful,” said Frank.

The driver grumbled, but the boys were not disposed to remain and argue
the rights and wrongs of the matter. It had been an accident, pure and
simple, with a certain amount of blame on both sides, so they mounted
their motorcycles and drove on.

Because of the spill, the boys realized that their chances of overtaking
the car thieves were correspondingly lessened, but they decided to
continue the pursuit.

“At the rate they’re going,” said Chet, hopefully, “they may have an
upset themselves.”

While the Hardy boys and their chum are speeding along the Shore Road on
the trail of the stolen sedan, it will not be out of place to introduce
them more fully to new readers.

Frank and Joe Hardy were the sons of Fenton Hardy, a famous detective
who had made a national reputation for himself while on the detective
force of the New York Police Department and who had retired to set up a
private practice of his own. Frank Hardy was a tall, dark lad, sixteen
years old, while his brother Joe was a fair, curly-headed chap, a year
younger. Both boys were students at the high school in Bayport.

When Fenton Hardy retired from the metropolitan force, owing to the
great demand for his services in private investigations, he had moved
with his family to Bayport, a thriving city of fifty thousand, on Barmet
Bay, on the Atlantic seaboard. Here the two boys attended school and
here it was that they met with the first adventures that strengthened
their resolution to follow in their father’s footsteps and themselves
become detectives when they grew older.

Fenton Hardy was one of the greatest American criminologists, and his
sons had inherited much of his ability. From their earliest boyhood it
had been their united ambition to be detectives but in this they had
been discouraged by their parents, who preferred to see them inclined
toward medicine or the bar. However, these professions held little
attraction for the lads, and when they eventually had an opportunity to
display their ability as amateur detectives they felt that they had
scored a point toward realizing their ambition.

In the first volume of this series, “The Hardy Boys: The Tower
Treasure,” the lads cleared up a mystery centering about a strange
mansion on the outskirts of Bayport, recovering a quantity of stolen
jewelry and bonds after the police and even Fenton Hardy had been forced
to admit themselves baffled. Thereafter, their father had made but mild
objections to the pursuit of their hobby and was, indeed, secretly proud
of the ability displayed by his sons. Further mysteries were solved by
the boys, the stories of which have been recounted in previous volumes
of this series, the preceding book, “Hunting for Hidden Gold,” relating
their adventures in the far West, where they faced a bandit gang and
went after a fortune in hidden gold in the depths of an abandoned mine.

Chet Morton, who was with the Hardy boys this afternoon, was one of
their high school chums, a plump, good-natured lad with a weakness for
food “and lots of it,” as he frequently said. He lived on a farm about a
mile outside Bayport and, like the Hardy boys, was the proud owner of a
motorcycle. Frank and Joe also owned a motorboat, the _Sleuth_, which
they had bought from the proceeds of a reward they had earned by their
work in solving a mystery. Tony Prito, an Italian-American lad, and Biff
Hooper, two other high school chums of the Hardy boys, also owned
motorboats, in which the boys spent many happy hours on Barmet Bay and
in which they had, incidentally, experienced a number of thrilling
adventures.

“Often wished I owned a boat,” said Chet, as they sped along, “but now
I’m just as glad I have a motorcycle instead. I’d have missed all this
fun this afternoon if I hadn’t.”

“You have a queer idea of fun,” Joe remarked. “Getting dumped out on my
head into a wet ditch doesn’t make me laugh very hard.”

“Better than studying algebra.” Chet’s aversion to school work was well
known.

For a while they sped on without talking. There was no sign of the
stolen automobile, but the boys did not entirely give up hope of
catching up with it. When they had gone about three miles, however, even
Frank was forced to admit that the fugitives had doubtless given them
the slip.

“What’s going on over there?” said Frank suddenly. “There’s a state
trooper and three men over in that farmyard.”

“And a big car, too,” said Chet.

“Why, I know this place,” Joe declared. “This is Dodd’s farm.”

“Not Jack Dodd? The chap who goes to Bayport High.”

“Sure. This is where he lives. I remember the place was pointed out to
me once.”

“I knew Jack Dodd lived on a farm but I didn’t know it was this far
out,” said Chet. “Let’s drop in and see what’s up.”

With Frank in the lead the three boys turned down the lane leading in to
the Dodd place.

“I wonder what that trooper is here for,” he said. “They all seem to be
having an argument over something.”

“Perhaps the trooper met the auto thieves!” conjectured Chet.

When they drove into the barnyard they saw a boy running toward them and
they recognized him as Jack Dodd, a quiet, likable lad who was in their
class at the Bayport high school.

“Hello, fellows!” he called to them, but they saw that there was a
worried expression on his face. “What brings you away out here to-day?”

“Hunting trip,” said Chet, with a curious glance toward the state
trooper, who was standing over by the fence with Mr. Dodd and two burly
strangers. Their voices were raised in a loud argument, in which Mr.
Dodd appeared to be opposed to the others.

“Hunting trip?”

“Hunting for auto thieves,” Frank explained. “Isaac Fussy’s car was
stolen a little while ago. When we saw that trooper here we had an idea
that perhaps he might know something about it.”

“What’s that?” shouted the trooper, a broad-shouldered young chap. “A
car stolen?”

“Yes, sir. We were chasing it. A big Cadillac.”

“Didn’t see it,” replied the trooper. “It didn’t pass this way, I’m sure
of that. We’ve just found one stolen car, anyway.”

“I tell you I didn’t steal it!” declared Mr. Dodd heatedly. “I haven’t
the least idea how that car got there.”

“That’s all right,” interposed one of the other men gruffly. “You can
tell that to the judge. The fact is, we’ve found the car behind your
barn and it’s one of the cars that were stolen in the past couple of
weeks.”

The chums glanced questioningly at Jack Dodd.

“These men are detectives,” he said, in a low voice. “They came out from
the city with the trooper a little while ago.”

“Did they really find a stolen car here?” asked Chet.

Jack nodded.

“They found one all right, but how on earth it got here, I don’t know.
It’s a Packard and somebody must have driven it in and left it among the
bushes behind the barn. We never noticed it.”

“Well,” the state trooper was saying, “I’m going to drive the car back
to Bayport and return it to the owner. You don’t claim it’s yours, do
you?” He gestured toward a splendid touring car near by.

“Of course it isn’t mine,” said Mr. Dodd. “I’ve never seen it before and
I never want to see it again—”

“I guess you don’t,” growled one of the detectives.

“How it got here, I can’t tell. I certainly had nothing to do with
stealing it.”

“People don’t leave perfectly good cars hidden behind other people’s
barns,” said the other detective. “You’d better tell us a straight
story, Dodd. It’ll be easier for you.”

“I’ve told you all I know about it.”

“Well, then, if you don’t know any more about it, perhaps your son
does.”

“I don’t know any more than Dad,” declared Jack stoutly. “I’ve never
seen the car before.”

“Never?”

“No.”

One of the detectives stepped swiftly over to the automobile and
produced an object from the back seat. He held it out toward the boy.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Jack gasped.

“My fishing rod!”

“It’s yours, is it? How did it get there if you’ve never seen the car
before?”