Gee whiz, I didn’t even know that he had stopped talking. I was just looking into the blaze and I could see the whole thing right there. Maybe it wasn’t true at all, but anyway, I could see it. Especially I could see the old man. That’s just the way it is with camp-fires.

Then, all of a sudden Harry Donnelle poked up the fire and began to laugh. “Funny, hey?” he said.

I said, “Do you think the dead man in the boat stole the money and the letter?”

“The letter happened to be with the money,” Harry said; “I don’t know that I think anything in particular. But how did a sailor with the second finger of his left hand gone, happen to have a letter asking him to wear a ring on that finger. How about the soldier who is warned against going where he will get robbed? Maybe he went, after all, and got robbed. We might start a search for a soldier who happens to have a second finger on his left hand. But then, quite a few soldiers enjoy that distinction. So there we are—up a tree. But here is a sailor with two hundred odd dollars and a letter referring to two hundred dollars. There is something about him wearing a ring on a certain finger and he doesn’t happen to have that finger. Funny.

“Well then, here’s a query—as long as queries don’t cost anything. Might not the sailor have robbed the soldier of his two hundred and odd dollars? And just neglected to destroy the letter that was with it? You see, kids, I just ran plunk into the middle of the thing and I’d like to get hold of one end or the other. Somebody or other got a ring when he went away to war fifty years ago. He lived in a village. Who was he? Whoever he is, he’s having a hard job making two ends meet. If I could find him I think I’d turn over this money to him. Now at the other end of the line, somewhere, is a fellow that ran chances of being robbed—reckless, like your Uncle Dudley. He’s got a ring with President Lincoln’s face cut on it—a cameo. I’d like to find him.

“But you see I haven’t any way of finding either of them. The only thing I’m sure about is that the dead sailor couldn’t have worn the ring. His finger had been gone many years, that’s sure. So what are we going to do about it? I guess we’ll go to bed. But that isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?”

“Funny, hey? Kind of a mystery after all—Skeezeks.”

I guess every one of us lay awake thinking about it that night. Anyway, I know I did. And most all the time till the day we got home, we kept talking about it. Harry Donnelle would always laugh and say maybe there wasn’t anything to it at all and that if he knew who the sailor was, he’d go and give the money to his people—probably.

He said he guessed the camp-fire up at Temple Camp was what started him seeing pictures. But always he would say how it was funny that a man without his second finger should have that letter on him. But he said that as long as there wasn’t any finger, it couldn’t point anywheres, and we should worry.

But just the same all the way home, whenever we started a camp-fire, we’d look into it and kind of see an old soldier with white hair and a blue coat and then we’d see a young fellow, wearing khaki, and a ring with Lincoln’s head cut on it.

In the fire we made near Orange Lake just before we hit Newburgh, we saw a soldier in a kind of a restaurant where there were a lot of sailors and we saw them take something away from him. But that’s always the way it is with camp-fires. Mostly we saw the old soldier.

Harry Donnelle always laughed about it and said the camp-fire was a regular art gallery and he guessed he’d give that unlucky two hundred dollars to an orphan asylum, or to the widows and orphans of the poor garage keepers or to the destitute Standard Oil Company. So it got to be a kind of a joke, and that’s the way it was till the whole thing was solved. And I’m going to tell you all about it, too, but I can’t bother now, because I have to tell you about our hike and the crazy thing that happened next day.