ones, gazing at his club-mate with
increased interest, "you're the most remarkable specimen of inverted
mentality I've ever encountered. D'you think a cat habitually rounds up
two dozen rats and then chivies 'em out into the street for sport? McCue
didn't have any cat theory. He figured that when rats come out of a
place that way the place is afire. So he turned in an alarm and saved a
two hundred and fifty thousand dollar building."

"Umph!" grunted Spofford. "Well, what's that got to do with the
advertisement I brought you?"

"Nothing in the world, directly. I'm merely trying to figure out, in my
own way, how a mind like yours could see under the surface print into
the really interesting peculiarity of this clipping. Now I know that
your mind didn't do anything of the sort. Come on, now, Algy, who sent
this to you?"

"Cousin of mine up in Harwick. I wish you weren't so Billy-be-dashed
sharp, Average. I used to visit in Harwick, so they asked me to get you
interested in Bailey Prentice's case. He's the lost boy."

"You've done it. Now tell me all you know."

Spofford produced a letter which gave the outlines of the case. Bailey
Prentice's disappearance it was set forth, was the lesser of two
simultaneous phenomena which violently jarred the somnolent New England
village of Harwick from its wonted calm. The greater was the "Harwick
meteor." At ten-fifteen on the night of December twelfth, the streets
being full of people coming from the moving picture show, there was
a startling concussion from the overhanging clouds and the astounded
populace saw a ball of flame plunging earthward, to the northwest of
the town, and waxing in intensity as it fell. Darkness succeeded. But,
within a minute, a lurid radiance rose and spread in the night. The
aerial bolt had gone crashing through an old barn on the Tuxall place,
setting it afire.

Bailey Prentice was among the very few who did not go to the fire. Taken
in connection with the fact that he was fourteen years old and very
thoroughly a boy, this, in itself, was phenomenal. In the excitement
of the occasion, however, his absence was not noted. But when, on the
following morning, the Reverend Peter Prentice, going up to call his
son, found the boy's room empty and the bed untouched, the second
sensation of the day was launched. Bailey Prentice had, quite simply,
vanished.

Some one offered the theory that, playing truant from the house while
his father was engaged in wor