Authors: Franklin W. Dixon

The Yellow Feather Mystery (16 page)

BOOK: The Yellow Feather Mystery

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Taking turns, they began to yell for help through the narrow opening. There was no reply.

Back at the school, at this very moment, Greg was talking on the telephone. He was worried and excited.

“Hello, Chet?” he cried into the mouthpiece. “You'd better come out here, quick! The Hardys have disappeared.... I don't know. I woke up early and saw Kurt sneaking back into the school. It was shortly after dawn. He had no reason to be out at that hour. I suspect something's up.”

Greg hung up and put on his outdoor clothes.

Where could the Hardys be? The question ran round and round in Greg's mind while he impatiently awaited Chet. Finally the boy arrived in his father's farm truck.

“I borrowed this,” Chet yelled, “so I could bring my propeller sled. We can cover more ground on it.”

They lifted off the sled and Chet started the motor while Greg parked the truck.

“Where do we go first?” Chet asked.

“Let's try the woods,” Greg suggested, running back and jumping on the sled.

As they bounced along one of the trails, Chet noticed the ice fort. “What's that?” he asked.

“Something Kurt had the fellows build yesterday. Oh, good night, the doorway's sealed up!” Greg cried as they neared the fort. “It had an opening yesterday! You don't supposeâ”

“Looks as if someone has cut a small hole through the wall,” Chet remarked as he stopped the sled. He hopped off, placed his mouth near the opening, and shouted:

“Frank! Joe! Hey, anybody inside?”

There was no answer.

“We must break through that wall!” Greg cried. “We'll get picks and crowbars.”

“And waste too much time,” Chet said. “If Frank and Joe are in there, we must get them out pronto!”

“But how?”

“I have it!” Chet announced. “I spent all day yesterday fixing this gimmick. Look out!”

Bouncing back onto the propeller sled, he put the gears into reverse. Then hastily he backed the sled to the wall of the fort. With the propellers spinning so that their sharp edges cut into the hard ice, he backed the sled against the wall.

“It's biting the ice away!” Greg cried.

Chunks and fragments of ice flew in all directions. Suddenly the last of the barrier gave way, and Chet had to kill the engine at once so that the sled would not push right into the enclosure.

Greg was already peering inside. Two figures lay motionless on the ground.

“Frank and Joe!” he exclaimed, terror in his voice.

Chet looked at his friends' still bodies a second, then sprang into action.

“Come on, Greg. Give me a hand!”

The Hardys were carried out into the pale warmth of the winter morning sun. Frank and Joe were still breathing. With Greg and Chet giving first aid, they quickly recovered consciousness. Feebly Frank murmured:

“Have Kurt arrested!”

“You go ahead and take care of that, Greg,” Chet ordered. “I'll bring the boys. It'll have to be a slow, easy ride.”

Greg waited long enough to help bundle Frank and Joe aboard the sled, then he raced off on foot. Halfway to the school he met Benny Tass.

“What's the big hurry?” the boy asked.

Forgetting that Benny might still be loyal to Kurt, Greg blurted out the story of the near-fatal kidnapping of the Hardys. All the color drained from Benny's face.

“Have you seen Kurt?” Greg demanded.

“A little while ago,” Benny answered. “He asked me where you and Chet were going, and I told him you were looking for the Hardys.”

“Come on. We're going to his room,” Greg commanded.

But the headmaster was not there. Greg called the police, then he and Benny rushed from one end of the school to the other without finding any trace of the missing man. They concluded that he must have realized that things were closing in on him and had fled.

As they abandoned their search, Chet slowly maneuvered the sled to the main entrance. Willing hands helped move the Hardys into the school infirmary. Fortunately, the nurse had returned from her vacation.

“They'll be all right, with some treatment and rest,” she told the others.

Before Frank and Joe went to sleep, Greg assured them that the police had been alerted to be on the lookout for Kurt.

By the next morning, neither of the Hardys was any the worse for his harrowing experience, and the police came to take full statements from both boys. Since Kurt had not been found, Frank and Joe insisted upon lending a hand. Besides capturing the criminal, they were determined to recover the will!

As Greg and Chet came to the infirmary door, they met the boys just coming out. In their haste the Hardys ran full tilt into their friends.

“Thought you were sick,” Chet gasped, recovering his balance.

“Come on with us!” Joe cried. “We think we know where Kurt is!”

To Chet's and Greg's amazement, they went to the second floor, then disappeared into the study hall. Frank pushed back the secret panel and flashed a light inside the dark room. Everyone peered in.

“Kurt's not here,” Joe announced in disappointment.

But Frank's sharp eyes had noticed a pile of rugs which had not been there the day before. Stepping into the room, he lifted the rugs to reveal a crouching figure.

The wily headmaster!

Kurt never had a chance to move. He was surrounded and yanked to his feet by the four husky boys. Still defiant, he tried to shake them off, asking what right they had to apprehend him.

“You answer that,” Frank said.

As he stabbed a hand into the man's inside coat pocket Kurt struggled and cursed.

“The will!” Frank cried gleefully as he retrieved the envelope. Handing it to Greg, he said, “Your grandfather left his entire estate to you!”

Greg was too dumbfounded to speak. Joe told him how they had found the document, only to have it snatched from them.

“How can I ever repay you?” the happy heir cried. “Money could never make up for risking your lives to help me.”

The Hardys smiled. “Don't try,” Frank said. “We like catching criminals.”

Kurt, completely beaten, confessed everything Frank and Joe had suspected about his nefarious efforts to deprive Greg of his rightful inheritance.

In desperation he had had the ice fort built, hoping to imprison the young detectives.

“I'm Dilleau,” he admitted. “When I was a student here, I was caught stealing. Elias Woodson gave me a tongue-lashing, for which I have hated him ever since. I determined to get revenge and tried to sell some of his valuable books, but he found me out and I was expelled.”

Kurt went on to say that he had planned for years to come back and be headmaster-maybe even succeed in taking the school away from its owner. But, in the meantime, he had run afoul of the law and had spent some time in prison.

“I escaped,” the man explained. “Then I had my face operated on and grew this goatee. When I came back here, Woodson didn't recognize me. I showed him some phony papers and sold him the idea of giving me the job of assistant headmaster. I had a lot of theatrical gear and used to disguise myself to do a little thievery.

“Old man Woodson made the mistake of telling me about that gold mine and I resolved to get hold of it. One evening I saw his will and knew I would have to destroy it. But Mr. Woodson was cleverâhe took the will out of his desk and hid it.”

Kurt then told how, shortly before Woodson's death, the old man told him he was devising a puzzle so that no one could steal the estate from his grandson.

“Maybe he suspected me,” Kurt said, then went on, “I surprised Woodson in the library making a sheet with cutouts. Just then a student called me. When I got back, the paper was gone and the old man was lying in a faint. He died the next day.”

“And you found the cutout sheet on the river?” Frank asked him.

“Yes. I thought it would throw your father and everyone else off the track if I made a fake one and said Mr. Woodson had given it to me.”

Presently plainclothesmen came to arrest Kurt. They planned to keep him at Bayport headquarters until the authorities of the prison from which he had escaped arrived to take charge.

Chet was sure nothing so exciting would ever happen again, but he and the Hardys soon became involved in another thrilling adventure,
The Hooded Hawk Mystery.

Since Benny Tass and Skinny Mason already knew so much about the case, they were told the details.

“Kurt was the one who knocked Joe out at the hut while you were asleep, Benny,” Frank said. “He waited until my brother went outside for wood, then slugged him, hid his skis and dragged him off to the boathouse before you woke up. He also conked me near the Teevans' cottage, with Benny's help.”

As Benny, conscience-stricken, looked down at the floor, Greg took up the story. “Kurt was the one who put the poison in my coffee and then stuck a yellow feather under the cup. Needless to say, he never reported the incident to the police.”

Benny became more ashamed. “To think I fell for that stuff about the Yellow Feather being a person!” he groaned.

“We all did,” Greg said.

Young Woodson told Benny that he was convinced Kurt's warped sense of humor was partly responsible. The headmaster had apparently enjoyed leading him on about the Yellow Feather and the play on the words miner and minor.

“Another one of his jokes,” Frank stated, “was jimmying the lock on his own office door and planting my scarf there.”

“Kurt probably hastened my grandfather's death with exaggerations about the bad financial conditions here at the school,” Greg remarked. “And he tried to scare me off with a lot of phony threats.”

“But how about the time Chet was knocked out in the tool shed?” Benny inquired.

“Kurt did that, too,” Frank replied, “with a dart from one of his propulsion guns. And he fired harpoons at us from Rocky Point.”

“And remember the time we got the yearbook back from you,” Joe could not resist needling Tass. “That same night Kurt was prowling around our house. Dad barely missed catching him.”

“I'm sorry I ever got mixed up with him,” Benny said. “I've learned my lesson, fellows. Say, I wonder if Kurt was the one who tipped that ladder the night I started to climb to your room.”

“No,” said a voice familiar to the Hardy boys. They turned to see their father standing in the doorway. “As a matter of fact,” Mr. Hardy went on, “I was the one.”

Grinning, the famous detective told Benny that for a few minutes he had thought the ladder climber was the Yellow Feather.

“Me!” Benny exclaimed.

Frank introduced his father to Greg Woodson, who thanked him and his sons for their clever detective work.

Mr. Hardy smiled. “The case was an unusual one. Coming back to my old school to work on a mystery and learning that a secret entrance to the tower had been built was exciting in itself.” He turned to Frank and Joe. “Mr. Woodson's old friend in Winnipeg told me this. I was afraid the Yellow Feather might imprison one of you in the tower.”

He suddenly laughed heartily. “Do you know,” he added, “this is the first time a criminal ever came to me as Kurt did and asked me to help him catch himself!”

“So there wasn't really any Yellow Feather after all,” Chet spoke up.

“Except the mine,” the detective said. “And, Greg, there's plenty of gold left!”

Greg's eyes glistened. “I'll go out there after graduation. Want to come along, fellows?”

There was a chorus of “Do we!”