Nobody answered her because all of them were sure they would have to return along the same route.
Nancy hurried in front of the group and walked up to the cabin door. She knocked. No one replied. She pounded loudly but in vain.
“Nobody home,” she said. “Unless someone’s hiding in there.”
Nancy added that it was possible Ned was a prisoner and could not make a sound. He must be rescued!
She tried the door and finding it unlocked, she walked in. Her friends followed. No one was in sight.
All gasped in astonishment. The one-room cabin was a fully equipped electronic laboratory with two cots, a small stove, and well-stocked shelves of canned food.
“Well, Sherlock Holmes,” said George to Nancy, “what are your thoughts now?”
Before replying, Nancy began to examine the laboratory. Burt and Dave did also. There were all sorts of gadgets, and open notebooks with numbers which meant nothing to the visitors.
Meanwhile, Bess had been looking around. She announced that there were no clothes in the place. “Do you suppose whoever lives here knew we were coming and skipped out?” she asked. “Otherwise why would anyone leave all this good food—meat, eggs, milk, and bread? I could eat some of it right now.”
Presently Burt and Dave called to the girls to come to a corner of the lab.
“We’ve discovered a remote-control outfit, and here’s the sending set.”
“And over there,” Dave added, “are a computer and programming tapes.”
“Are you saying,” George spoke up, “that the robot copter was kept here and its movements were controlled from this cabin?”
“It looks that way.”
Bess asked, “Do you think Ned, Crosson, and the red-haired nut were in the copter we saw flying away from here?”
“I have a strong feeling,” Nancy said, “that Crosson and the red-haired nut are one and the same person. I believe that Ned in his note was trying to tell us that Crosson is crazy and dangerous.”
Dave reminded the others that they were just doing a lot of guessing. “We haven’t come across one single thing around here to prove who the occupants are.”
Nancy agreed with Dave and said that it was important they try to find out. “Let’s all hunt for a clue,” she proposed.
Everyone went to work. There was complete silence for a long time.
Nancy looked under both cots and pulled them from the wall. Suddenly her eyes fastened upon a mark which had been cut into the wood of the wall. At first glance it seemed to be a W. Was it someone’s initial?
She called her friends’ attention to it and they came over to look at the initial. Nancy squinted her eyes and stared at it.
Suddenly she said, “This isn’t a W. I’m sure it’s two N’s. And that could stand for Ned Nickerson!”
Bess, George, and the boys leaned over to examine the mark. They all agreed that indeed it was NN.
“This is where Ned must have slept,” Burt said. “And I’m convinced he was taken away in the copter we saw leaving here.”
“Do any of you think he’ll be brought back?” Dave spoke up. “I don’t.”
No one did, but Burt and Dave were inclined to think that Ned’s captor might return. They were of the opinion that he would not leave the valuable equipment unguarded for long, although the possibility of it being taken in this forsaken place was slim.
Nancy was quiet for several minutes while the rest searched some more. When they reported that there were no other clues, she told the group that a possibility of getting to the main road without hiking there had just occurred to her.
“What is it?” Bess asked eagerly. “I certainly would like to be rescued from this creepy place!”
“The quicker the better,” George added.
Nancy turned to the boys. “Do you think we could possibly contact the police over the two-way radio set here? We could tell them our suspicions regarding this cabin, and the take-off of the copter.” She looked at Bess and grinned. “If they come by helicopter, they might even give us a ride back to our car.”
Dave offered to try contacting headquarters.
CHAPTER XII
Hidden Notes
BURT and Dave bent over the sending set, trying to figure out how the various gadgets worked.
“This is a complicated one,” Dave remarked.
George, who had had a little coaching along these lines from her father, an electronic engineer, made several valuable suggestions.
“Where are the call letters?” she asked.
The young people examined every inch of the set but could find none.
“I wonder whom the kidnapper was calling? Some pal? Or a member of a Cyclops gang?” George asked.
The boys said they wished they knew and went on with their examination, hoping desperately to get the set to respond. Finally they hit the right combination and in a moment Burt’s signal was answered.
He said, “Calling from station without call letters. Who are you?”
The listener seemed reluctant to reply and asked, “Why don’t you have call letters? Everybody does.”
“We’re in trouble here. Owner is away. No clue to call letters,” Burt told him.
The ham radio operator turned out to be answering from a town not far away.
Burt told him he was calling from a swamp and then said, “There are five of us here. It’s near Arbutus. Will you phone the police department and ask if they’ll come out here? We’ve made an important discovery about a missing person.”
Nancy stood listening. She began to shake her head to indicate that Burt had told enough. He nodded and put a finger over his lips to indicate he understood.
“Will you please do this for us?” Burt asked the ham. “I’m Burt Eddleton. I attend Emerson College. You can check there if you like.”
The man said he would be glad to help and asked, “Where are you?”
Burt gave him directions from Arbutus, then said, “Over.”
Nancy and her friends hoped fervently that the ham would not think the message was some kind of a joke and pay no attention to it.
“There’s nothing we can do but wait,” said Bess with a sigh.
“In the meantime,” Nancy spoke up, “we can continue searching this place.”
All but Nancy went outside to look for clues. She felt that if Ned had been outdoors, he would have tried to escape and not bothered, or had time, to leave a clue.
“More than likely he was kept in one spot, either chained up or threatened with dire punishment if he tried to get away. We know he used this cot,” Nancy thought, gazing at it for a full minute.
She decided to pull the cot apart to see if anything was hidden inside. First she took off two blankets, shook them vigorously, and looked over every inch of them.
She found nothing. Next, Nancy picked up the mattress and laid it on the floor. To her amazement, she saw dozens of small note-pad sheets with Ned’s writing on them lying on the springs. Eagerly she picked up one and read the message which looked as if it had been hurriedly scrawled.
There was a date on the paper. The day Ned was kidnapped!
The note said, “Cannot understand why I was kidnapped when Cyclops could have stolen what he wants if he had waited a little longer.”
There were other notes written the following day. One read: “Am being pretty well fed and comfortable, but this madman threatens me with a gun whenever I move.”
There was a daily series of notes telling of Ned’s treatment, how one ankle was chained to the bed, and his captor’s endeavors to keep him away from the lab even when he let him get a little exercise.
Nancy came across an entry with no date on it, but the contents were very enlightening. It said that his kidnapper had prepared the robot helicopter for a flight to Nancy Drew’s home.
Ned had begged to see the copter and the man had finally consented and taken him outside. “When my captor was not looking I slipped a note to Nancy onto the floor.”
Nancy was elated. “That’s mystery number one cleared up!” she murmured.
At this point Bess and George came into the cabin to see if Nancy had learned anything. They were astounded at her discovery of the notes.
“It puzzles me,” Bess said, “why the name Crosson doesn’t appear in any of these notes.”
George replied that it could mean the kidnapper was not Crosson after all. “And he never told Ned his name.”
Nancy decided to copy the notes in case the police should come and want them. She had just finished when the girls became aware of a whirring sound in the air. Quickly Nancy stuffed both sets of notes into her pocket. Then she restored the bed to its normal look and went outside.
A police helicopter was arriving. As soon as it set down, the young people went over to talk to the men. The ham had done what he had promised!
“Tell us everything that has happened,” one of the officers said, after three men had alighted.
As quickly as possible, Nancy gave them the highlights of the story and showed them the notes Ned had written, and her copies of them.
“This looks serious,” the captain remarked. “I’ll take your copies to turn over to the FBI. If we need the originals, I’ll let you know. What’s the registration number of the copter?”
Nancy replied, “We didn’t see it today. But the one we saw the first time turned out to be a fake.”
After hearing the story, two of the three officers decided to stay at the cabin in case the suspected kidnapper returned. The pilot told the young people he would take them to their car and to climb aboard.
In a short time Nancy and her friends were delivered to the automobile. They thanked him and he wished them luck. He warned the young people to be careful in their future sleuthing. “The kidnapper sounds like a bad one.” The pilot flew off and Burt took the wheel of Nancy’s car.
When they reached the fraternity house, Bess could hardly wait to get under the shower. She had said nothing more about her sudden spill in the swamp, but she felt very itchy.
The other girls washed and changed too, then joined the boys for dinner. When they finished eating, Burt and Dave said that they had to attend a night lecture.
“Sorry not to be here to entertain you girls,” Dave said. “But we’ll make up for it some time. Promise.”
Bess laughed. “I’ve had enough entertainment for one day! See you when you get back from your lecture.”
She and George went off to talk to some of the other boys. Nancy was torn between her desire to stay with them and a sudden feeling of curiosity about Ned’s notes. There might be some clues in them which she had not noticed!
In the guest room she sat down and reread the notes, then examined each one through her magnifying glass. But she could detect no hints to Ned’s whereabouts, nor to why he had been kidnapped.
Nancy sat staring into space. Then on a sudden hunch she closed the door to the hall and turned off all the lights. She almost yelled aloud in surprise. Drawn in the corner of one note in fluorescent ink was an exact duplicate of the mysterious glowing eye she had seen at the Anderson Museum!
“How strange!” Nancy thought.
She began to wonder whether Ned had put this on the paper sometime before his kidnapping, or if by some ruse he had been able to use certain materials in the cabin’s lab.
Then Nancy remembered that one note indicated Ned was not allowed far from his cot. The paper with the glowing eye must have been from a note pad her friend was carrying when he arrived at the isolated cabin.
“The message on the paper doesn’t light up, so it probably has nothing to do with the glowing eye,” she thought.
Nancy had just turned all the lights back on when the door opened and George and Bess came in.
Instantly Nancy said, “I’ll show you something very interesting. Turn off all the lights!”
When Bess and George saw the glowing eye on the paper, they stared in disbelief. Nancy told them she wondered if Ned had put the glowing eye on the sheet as some sort of clue for her.
“What I wish I could do right now is figure out where he is at this moment. Oh dear! We came so close to rescuing him.”
Bess put an arm around Nancy. “Don’t be sad. We’ll track him down yet.”
George suggested that the kidnapper probably would bring Ned back to the cabin as soon as he thought it was safe.
“He’ll never guess that two officers are there waiting to capture him and set Ned free,” she said.
Bess, who had been staring at the glowing eye, asked Nancy if she thought the drawing on the notepaper might indicate something special about his work.
“Yes. I think Ned has invented something unique and tried it out on this paper,” Nancy replied as she turned on the light. “It may or may not have anything to do with the glowing eye in the museum. When he found it worked, he began to make a bigger and better one. At that point someone decided to get hold of the invention and put it to his own use, maybe even sell the formula.”
Just then Burt and Dave entered the room. At once George suggested that they close the door and turn off the light.
The boys laughed. Dave said, “What’s going on?”
“Wait until you see something amazing Nancy found,” George replied.
The boys were as astounded at the discovery as the girls had been.
“It may not be long before we hear something important,” Bess told the boys. “Ned’s kidnapper may go back to that cabin and be captured by the police.”
Nancy, however, said she had a different idea.
“What is it, Nancy?” George asked excitedly.
CHAPTER XIII
The Escape
“HERE is my idea,” Nancy said to her waiting friends. “We’re sure Crosson uses the old farmhouse. If he’s the kidnapper, he might have taken Ned there.”
“It’s a good guess,” George conceded.
Bess suggested that maybe Crosson would put Ned in the clothes chute. No one would be likely to look for a missing person in that spot.