ught you said Professor Gehren couldn't tell you where Craig had
gone."

"No more he could. So I've got to find out for myself. Here's the way
I figure it out: The two men have been engaged in some out-of-door work
that is extra hazardous. So much we know. Harvey Craig has, I'm afraid,
succumbed to it. Otherwise he'd have sent some word to Professor Gehren.
He may be dead or he may only be disabled by the dangerous character of
the work, whatever it was. In any case our mysterious foreign friend
has probably skipped out hastily. Now, I propose to find the railroad
station they passed through, coming and going, and interview the ticket
agent."

"You've got a fine large contract on your hands to find it."

"Not so large, either. All we have to do is to look for a place that is
very isolated and yet quite near New York."

"How do you know it is quite near New York?"

"Because Harvey Craig went there and back between noon and two o'clock,
Professor Gehren says. Now, we've got to find such a place which is
near a stretch of deserted, swampy ground, very badly infested with
mosquitoes. I'd thought of the Hackensack Meadows, just across the river
in Jersey."

"That is all very well," said Bertram; "but why mosquitoes?"

"Why, the poisoned and swollen face and hands both of them suffered
from," explained Average Jones. "What else could it be?"

"I'd thought of poison-ivy or some kind of plant they'd been grubbing
at."

"So had I. But I happened to think that anything of that sort, if it had
poisoned them once, would keep on poisoning them, while mosquitoes they
could protect themselves against, if they didn't become immune, as they
most likely would. As there must have been a lot of 'skeeters' to do the
kind of job that 'Smith's' face showed, I naturally figured on a swamp."

"Average," said Bertram solemnly, "there are times when I conceive a
sort of respect for your commonplace and plodding intellect. Now, let
me have my little inning. I used to commute--on the Jersey and Delaware
Short Line. There's a station on that line, Pearlington by name, that's
a combination of Mosquitoville, Lonesomehurst and Nutting Doon. It's in
the mathematical center of the ghastliest marsh anywhere between Here
and Somewhere else. I think that's our little summer resort, and I'm
yours for the nine A. M. train to-morrow."

Dismounting from that rather casual accommodation on the following day,
the two friends found Pearlington to cons