Chapter IV: The Paper Clue

Now and then there are episodes in life which, when they are past and one comes to look back on them, seem more like dreams than actual occurrences. This matter of the Chinaman, the Eye of Buddha, the sailor, and the glass balls looked particularly unreal to Motor Matt and Joe McGlory.

When Matt opened his eyes, he found himself in a hammock. For a minute or two he lay quiet, trying to figure out how and when he had got into the hammock, and where Joe was, and just how much of a dream he had had.

The hammock was strung between a couple of trees, and from a distance came a subdued chatter of voices, and the low, soft strains of an orchestra.

Matt sat up in the hammock and looked in the direction from which the sounds came. The lofty, porticoed front of a huge hotel was no more than two hundred feet away. Men in flannels and women in lawn dresses were coming and going about the porticoes, and the music was wafted out from inside the building.

The young motorist's bewilderment grew, and he brushed a hand across his eyes. Then he looked in another direction. Two yards from the tree supporting one end of the hammock, the ground broke sharply into a precipitous descent, falling sheer away for a hundred feet or more. He could look off over a rolling country checkered with meadows and grainland and timber patches, with a river cutting through the vista and holding the scene together like a silver ribbon.

He drew a long breath, and swerved his gaze to the right. Here there was another hammock, one end of it secured to the same tree that helped support Matt's airy couch, and the other end to a third tree which formed an acute angle with respect to the other two.

In this second hammock was McGlory. Like Matt, he was sitting up; and, like Matt again, he was staring.

Leaning against one of the three trees, were the two motor cycles.

"Joe!" cried Matt. "Is that you?"

"Hooray!" exclaimed the cowboy, with sudden animation. "I was just waiting for you to speak, in order to make sure I wasn't still asleep. Jumpin' jee-whiskers, what a dream I've had!"

"Where are we?" inquired Matt.

A puzzled look crossed the cowboy's face.

"Don't you _sabe_ that?" he returned.

"No."

"Shucks! That's just the question I was going to bat up to you."

"How did we get here?"

"I'm by, again. But, sufferin' brain-twisters, what a dream I've had!" He began laughing softly to himself.

"What sort of a dream was it?" went on Matt.

"Funnier'n a Piute picnic! It was all mixed up with a fat Chinaman, and a yellow cord, and a ruby called the Eye of Buddha, and a one-eyed sailor, and--and a couple of glass balls. Oh, speak to me about that! Say, pard, but it was a corker! The fat chink was doing all sorts of funny stunts, tumbling off a bike, and all over himself."

"There wasn't any dream about it," declared Matt, swinging his feet to the ground with sudden energy.

The laugh died out of McGlory's face, and a blank look took its place.

"Go on!" he scoffed, not a little startled.

"Two fellows couldn't have the same kind of a dream," persisted Matt, "and I went through identically the same things you did. That proves they were _real_! But--but," and Matt's voice wavered, "how did we get here?"

"There are the motor cycles we used when we buzzed out of Catskill Landing," and McGlory brightened as he pointed to the two wheels.

"I see," mused Matt, drumming his forehead with his knuckles. "Nobody seems to be paying much attention to us," he added, his eyes on the groups around the hotel porches.

"Not a terrible sight, and that's a fact," agreed McGlory. "But why should they, pard? They don't know us."

"Somebody must have brought us here and laid us in the hammocks. The last I remember we were down and out. Now, Joe, a move of that kind would naturally stir up a commotion."

"Well, yes," admitted the cowboy, going blank again, "Are you and I locoed, Matt, or what?"

"Come on and let's try and find out."

Matt started for a man who was sitting in a canvas chair smoking a cigar and nursing a golf club on his knees. McGlory trailed after him.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said Matt, halting beside the chair, "but have you been here long?"

"Two weeks," was the answer with a hard stare. "I come to the Mountain House every summer, and spend my va----"

"I mean," interrupted Matt, "were you sitting here when my friend and I were brought in?"

"Brought in? You weren't brought in. You two rode in on those motor cycles, leaned them against the tree, and preëmpted the hammocks."

"Sufferin' lunatics!" breathed McGlory. "I reckon we'd better call somebody in to look at our plumbing, pard."

"What appears to be the trouble?" went on the stranger, politely curious.

"It just 'appears,' and that's all," rambled the cowboy. "If we could only get a strangle-hold on the trouble, and hog-tie it, maybe we could take it apart, and see what makes it act so."

The stranger sprang up, grabbed his golf stick, and looked alarmed.

"Never mind my friend, sir," said Matt reassuringly; "we're just a little bit bothered, that's all."

"A little bit!" repeated the stranger ironically; "it looks to me like a whole lot."

"This is the Mountain House, is it?" went on Matt. He was severely shocked himself, but tried manfully to hide it while trying to work out the mystery.

"Certainly, sir," growled the man with the golf stick. "Don't you try to make game of me, young man! I'm old enough to be your father, and such----"

"We are not trying to make game of any one," protested Matt.

"But somebody is making game of _us_," put in McGlory, "and playing us up and down and all across the table. Here in these hills is where Rip Van Winkle went to sleep, ain't it? I wonder if he dreamed about fat Chinamen, yellow cords, one-eyed sailors, and----"

"Cut it out, Joe!" whispered Matt sternly, grabbing his chum by the arm and pulling him toward the hotel. "Can't you see he thinks we're crazy?"

"_Thinks_ we're crazy?" stuttered the cowboy. "Then I've got a cinch on him, for I _know_ we are. Where next?"

"We'll go into the hotel and make some inquiries," replied Matt, noting how the man with the cigar and the golf stick turned in his chair to keep an eye on them. "And for Heaven's sake, Joe," Matt added, "let me do the talking. If you don't, we're liable to be locked up."

"We ought to be locked up," mumbled McGlory. "We're lost, and we ought to be shooed into some safe corral and kept there till we find ourselves. Sufferin' hurricanes! What kind of a brain-storm are we going through, _any_how?"

Matt and McGlory passed through the chattering groups on the porch and entered the lobby of the hotel. The music, which now came to them in increased volume, was accompanied by a clatter of dishes from the dining room. Matt laid a direct course for the counter at one side of the lobby.

"Can you tell me," he asked, leaning over the counter and addressing the carefully groomed clerk, "If there is a gentleman named Tsan Ti staying at this hotel?"

"Come again, please," was the answer. "What was that name?"

"Tsan Ti."

"Where's he from?"

"Canton, China."

"Wears a black cap and a yellow kimono," put in Joe. "Button in the cap--red button. He's the high old Whoop-a-gamus that bossed the temple of What-you-call-um and let the Eye of Buddha get away from him. He _must_ be here."

"Such jocosity is out of place," said the clerk chillingly.

"Sufferin' zero!" muttered McGlory. "I reckon his home ranch is the North Pole. What's jocosity, Matt?"

"Then Tsan Ti isn't here?" asked Matt.

"Certainly _not_. You might try the Hotel Kaaterskill."

"Kaaterskill!" minced McGlory. "Now, what the blooming----"

"Joe," muttered Matt, grasping his chum's arm, and pulling him away. "What's come over you, anyhow? You're acting like a Hottentot."

"That's it!" cried Joe.

"What?"

"The name that one-eyed webfoot had on his cap. Hottentot! Hottentot! Hottentot!"

"Joe!" warned Matt, for the cowboy had sung out the word at the top of his voice. "What _ails_ you? Great spark plugs!"

McGlory brushed a hand across his face.

"I feel like I'd taken a foolish powder, pard," he answered huskily. "Let's get out of here before I make a holy show of myself."

All at sea, they went back to the hammocks and sat down by the two motor cycles.

"And this," remarked McGlory, breaking a long silence, "is what you call turning the trick for Tsan Ti! I told you that letter we received in Grand Rapids was plain bunk. Read it again, pard."

"I've read it thirteen times, Joe," answered Matt.

"Well, read it fourteen times and break the hoodoo."

Matt took the envelope from his pocket, and drew out the inclosed sheet. Then he stared, then whistled, then leaned back against the tree.

"Now it's you who's doped," grinned McGlory. "Can't you read it?"

"Sure," answered Matt; "listen."

"'BUNCE: Be in Purling at ten a. m., Thursday. Show this to Pryne
at the general store in the village, and Pryne will show you to me.
Important developments. Mum's the word. GRATTAN.'"

McGlory threw off his hat, and pawed at his hair.

"Put a chain on us, somebody, _please_!" he gasped. "Where, oh, where, did you get that?"

"Here's a paper clue," said Matt. "I took this out of that cap we found in the road, and, by an oversight, I tucked that letter from Tsan Ti into the cap so the sailor wouldn't notice the original note was missing."

"Then there _was_ a cap," muttered McGlory, "and it _did_ have 'Hottentot' on the ribbon, and you _sure_ took out a note, and it's a cinch there _was_ a sailor. Now, if all that's true, then where, in the name of the great hocus-pocus, is the fat Chinaman?"