box. “But I can’t. I’ll pay you well to take me to Storm Mountain.”

“I’m sorry, but I have an important engagement in town,” said Bob, as he let his car gather speed. “You’ll have to get some one else.”

“All right,” said the man good-naturedly enough. He turned back to the station, and as he drove off Bob was rather glad that he could conscientiously refuse the service.

“For, to tell the truth,” said Bob to himself, “I don’t altogether like your looks, nor the looks of that box you carry. You may be all right, but I’ve got important papers and I’ve got to look after them.” He made good time to his uncle’s office, and found Mr. Dexter rather anxiously waiting for him.

“Oh, you have them, I see!” exclaimed Mr. Dexter as he took the bundle of papers from his nephew. “Mr. Sheldon was there all right, I take it?”

“Yes, and he said he’d attend to the other matters. But these must be signed before two witnesses by three o’clock.”

“I know it, Bob. I’ll attend to it right away. You had no other trouble, did you—I mean no one stopped you to ask to look at the papers—or anything like that?” Mr. Dexter seemed anxious and nervous.

“No, I wasn’t exactly stopped,” Bob answered. “But there was an old man with a box who wanted me to take him to Storm Mountain.”

“What sort of a man, Bob?” eagerly asked his uncle.

Bob described the individual, and a look of relief came over Mr. Dexter’s face.

“It isn’t any one I know,” he said. “I guess it’s all right, Bob. You may go now. Thanks for attending to this for me. I can look after matters now.”

“Then I’ll go to the ball game,” announced Bob.

He was on his way to the park, taking a short cut along a back road when, in a lonely spot he saw a huddled figure lying beside the road.

“It’s a man!” exclaimed Bob, as he stopped his machine and jumped out. “The man with the box—looks as if he’d been killed!”

CHAPTER II

THE LOG CABIN

Bob Dexter, young as he was, had been through too many strenuous experiences to be turned aside at the thought of a dead man. Besides, this was right in the line of Bob’s ambition, if you get my meaning. That is, he had fully determined to become a detective, and here seemed right at hand a mystery that needed solving. He was first on the scene—a most advantageous thing from a detective’s standpoint.

“I’ve got to keep my wits about me,” thought the lad to himself as he approached the prostrate man who lay suspiciously still and quiet in the grass beside the lonely road.

And while Bob is getting ready to solve what he hopes may be a most baffling mystery, perhaps it would be just as well if I told my new readers a little about the youth who is to figure as the hero of this story.

Bob Dexter’s father and mother died when he was quite young, and his uncle Joel Dexter agreed to care for the lad and bring him up as his own son. Uncle Joel and his wife Aunt Hannah had faithfully kept their promise, and Bob could not have asked for a better home nor for more loving care than he received.

But though loving and kind, Mr. Dexter insisted on Bob “toeing the mark,” as he called it in the matter of work and duties, including attending school. Bob’s uncle was “well fixed” as regards this world’s goods, though not exactly a man of wealth. He was interested in several businesses in Cliffside, including a hardware store he owned. He also loaned money on mortgages and kept a private office over the First National Bank, in which enterprise he was said to own several shares.

Thus Bob grew from boyhood to young manhood, and when he began to develop a taste for detective stories, and, not only that but a desire to solve local crimes and mysteries, Uncle Joel rather “put his foot down,” as he expressed it.

However, when Bob scored a point on the Cliffside police, by finding Jennie Thorp, who, it was supposed, had been kidnaped (though she wasn’t) Bob’s stock went up several points. And when, as I have told you in the first volume of this series, entitled “Bob Dexter and the Club House Mystery,” the youth solved the secret of the Golden Eagle, well, then Uncle Joel “drew in his horns,” as his wife said, and Bob “detected” to his heart’s content.

The Golden Eagle was the mascot of the Boys’ Athletic Club, and when it vanished there was a great deal of astonishment, which only subsided when Bob got the eagle back.

Following that, in the volume just preceding this one, called “Bob Dexter and the Beacon Beach Mystery,” the lad added other laurels.

He and his chums, Ned and Harry, had gone camping at Beacon Beach for their summer vacation. Almost as soon as they arrived they were enveloped in a mystery which did not end until Bob had found out why the beacon in the lighthouse went out so often, and until he had learned what the “yellow boys” were in the wreck of the Sea Hawk.

“And now I seem to be up against something else,” murmured Bob, as he approached the prostrate man in the grass, and caught sight of the brass-bound box lying near his motionless hand. “Just got back from the Beacon Beach trouble and I run into this. Well, the more the better for me—though I hope this poor old chap isn’t dead!”

He wasn’t, as Bob soon discovered. The man was breathing, and when the lad had dashed into his face some water from a nearby spring, and had poured between the stranger’s lips some from a cup Bob carried in his car for use in filling his storage battery, the man opened his eyes, looked at the youth and cried:

“Did he get it?”

“Did who get what?” Bob wanted to know.

The man’s eyes wildly roved the ground about him, and, lighting on the box he breathed a sigh of relief. He reached out a hand, drew the little chest to him and then, slipping it under his legs as he sat up on the ground he put both hands to the back of his head.

“Um!” he murmured, with a wince of pain. “Quite a lump there. Big as a hen’s egg, I guess. Would you mind taking a look, young feller, and seeing how badly I’m cut? Though I guess I’m not cut at all,” he went on, as he looked at his fingers and saw no sign of blood.

“No, you aren’t cut,” said Bob, taking a look as requested. “But what happened to you? Did you fall?”

“Sort of,” admitted the man with a half smile. “But I reckon I was tapped on the head first, or else struck with a rock to help in the falling business. Though they didn’t dare take it after they knocked me out. Rod Marbury’s nerve must have failed him in the pinch. So much the better for me. I told him I’d play fair, but he hasn’t. Now he can whistle for his share! He can whistle for a wind that he’ll never get!” and the old man, who looked but a few degrees removed from a tramp, started to get