Chapter VI: We Get New Light on the Mystery

That night Grove and Pee-wee and I hiked over to Harry Donnelle’s house, to show him what we had copied about the poplar that we thought must be the kind of a one that was meant in the letter.

I said, “There isn’t any such tree as the Dahadinee poplar in any of the books, but I think it must be the same as the Mackenzie poplar, because the Dahadinee River is up that way.”

“Sure,” Harry said; “I guess it’s just a nickname for one of those skyscraper pines that you never see south of Canada. I shot a Canada lynx up one of them on Hudson Bay; they puncture the sky, those things.” Cracky, that fellow’s been everywhere.

Grove said, “How is it going to do us any good?”

“Well, I don’t know that it is,” Harry said; “and I’m not buying a yacht on the strength of it, either. But I had a kind of an idea that we might bang into the woods north of Steuben Junction—that’s up near the Canadian border about forty or fifty miles north of Watertown.”

I said, “I guess that’s a pretty lonely country, hey?”

“Oh, the people wear clothes up that way and live in houses,” he said, “but it isn’t exactly like Broadway and Forty-second Street.”

Pee-wee looked kind of disappointed; I guess he thought that it was like South Africa up there. “Maybe it isn’t so terribly civilized,” he said.

“Well, it’s more civilized than where the Dahadinee poplar grows, you can be sure of that,” Harry said, “so don’t think that we’re going to pull any Christopher Columbus stunt. Everything up there has been discovered.”

“Not the treasure!” Pee-wee shouted.

“Now you kids listen to me,” Harry said, “and don’t fall off the railing—especially Pirate Harris.” He said that, because we were all sitting along the railing of the porch. He was sitting in a wicker chair, tilted back, and his feet stuck up on the railing.

“When I was in the city to-day,” he said, “I went into the big library situated in the dark morass on Fifth Avenue. Groping my way along its dark passages, I escaped the savage bookworms and ferocious authors who frequent its silent lairs, and made my way unobserved to the underground cave where the newspaper files are. Shh!

“There I examined the _New York Chronicle_ of March eighth and ninth and tenth, eighteen ninety-five. You remember that old Hickory wrote his letter on March seventh? Well, here’s a sort of condensed version of a newspaper article that I found. Don’t fall backward Pee-wee, or you’ll go plunk into the rose bush. Now listen.”

Harry took out some pages in lead pencil writing and read them to us. This is what he read, because he gave me the pages afterward and I pasted them in our troop-book:

CANADIAN SPECIAL WRECKED
NEAR BORDER.

FATAL DISASTER FOLLOWS HOLD-UP.

A fatal accident occurred yesterday morning to train number 37
of the Canadian Grand Valley Railroad, when the bridge south of
Steuben collapsed with the locomotive and four cars which fell
in a mass of wreckage into the deep gully which the bridge
spanned. It is supposed that the old fashioned trestle of wood
had been weakened by the charring effect of the forest fires
which had devastated the immediate neighborhood. Engineers are
endeavoring to determine the exact cause with the view to fixing
responsibility.

Two cars at the end of the train were not yet upon the bridge
when the fatal plunge occurred and while the first of these hung
in a precarious position, the brakeman and passengers of the
last car had the presence of mind to release the coupling before
the last car of the train was dragged into the chasm of the
burning wreckage below. Several of the passengers of this last
car, however, were in the car ahead at the time of the disaster
and lost their lives.

A wrecking crew with physicians and nurses was immediately
dispatched from Watertown, the nearest place of any size, but as
yet, no survivor has been found amid the charred wreckage, and
it seems likely that the only passengers to escape death were
four women and two men who were in the last car at the time of
the disaster.

They were Mrs. Thomas Ellerton and daughter, of Fawnsboro, New
York, Mrs. Manners of New Orleans, and a Miss Elsie Bannard. The
two men were Thomas and Frederick Worrel, brothers.

The fatal catastrophe came as a termination to an adventurous
trip, for the train was speeding with all steam for Watertown to
secure medical treatment for several victims of a bold hold-up
by two armed robbers, one of whom was killed by a passenger, who
himself was later killed in the wreck.

“Guess that’s about all of that one,” Harry said, “and that was the end of our old pal Thor.” Then he said, “Now here’s part of another article that I copied out of the paper of the day after, so you see there were quite some happenings before the Boy Scouts started.”

Pee-wee said, “Gee, I can’t deny that a lot of things happened before the Boy Scouts started—look at Columbus, what he did.”

“Now listen,” Harry said.

BANDIT DIES AFTER CAPTURE
EDDIE TRENT, NOTORIOUS HOLD-UP MAN
ENDS CAREER AFTER DARING TRAIN
ROBBERY

Edward Conners, alias Eddie Trent, notorious through the
Canadian northwest for his career of murder and robbery, paid
the penalty of his last escapade in the hayloft of a barn near
Evans Mills in upper New York, yesterday, where he was
discovered by a sheriff’s posse.

Trent had sought refuge in the barn after the killing of his
companion, Wister, in their hold-up of the Canadian Special
train. It is supposed that the two quarrelled in the woods north
of Steuben Junction, and that Trent killed his pal in an
altercation over their booty and was wounded himself in the
affray.

The desperado was suffering from loss of blood and exposure at
the time of his discovery, and lived but a short while. He had
no booty, and died refusing to confess how much he had secured
in his desperate enterprise.

A pistol and knife were found upon him, the latter crusted with
dried earth, which led to the supposition that he may have
buried his booty in the woods near where the body of his pal was
found. But a careful search of the locality 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?”

“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——”

“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?”