"Did you immediately leave the vicinity of the bank?" asked the boy.
"No," replied Chester. "We walked about the building until after twelve o"clock."
"Did you hear any significant sounds?" asked Will.
"Pistol-shots," was the reply.
"Then you knew what had taken place?"
"Yes, sir, we thought we did."
"What next?"
"While we stood at the side door of the bank, wondering what we ought to do, Mr. Fremont"s son came running up the steps. At first I felt disposed to give him some intimation as to what had taken place, but I hadn"t the courage to do so. He opened the side door with a key and entered, and we left the city and the state. We came here, and I was dazed by a fall, but this last hurt has corrected the injury done by the first one."
"There you are!" said Will. "The case is closed. The Boy Scouts may as well go back to Chicago now. There"s one more mystery. Who built the fire in your old cave?"
"I did before the last fall," Wagner said.
"Of course, we can stay here and fish and hunt if we want to," laughed Will, "and I think it may be well to do so for a week or so, but right now we have come to The Ending of the Trail."
The boys spent two very pleasant weeks in Wyoming without further annoyance. When they returned to Chicago, Wagner and Chester went with them. The case against young Fremont fell to the ground as soon as the testimony of Wagner and his son was taken, and the innocence of the escaped convict was established so thoroughly to the satisfaction of the police that he was never tried again.
The boys saw both Wagner and Chester were provided with congenial situations. After the boys had been in Chicago a couple of weeks they met Katz and Cullen on Clark street. The detectives flamed red in the face at sight of the boys, but were very humble when addressing them.
"We have forgotten what took place in Wyoming," Katz said significantly.
"And so have we," replied Tommy. "No one here knows anything about it!
It was rather a mean trick to play on you, but we had to do something to get Wagner to testify in the Fremont case."
"Forget it!" cried Katz, and the two went on their way, after receiving their badges from Tommy.
The boys had been in Chicago not more than a month when a letter from the famous criminal lawyer brought them to his office again.
"Are you boys ready to take a trip to the north?" he asked. "I want you to go way up into the Hudson Bay country and do a little work that a group of Boy Scouts can do better than any one else in the world."
"Sure, we"ll go!" answered Will. "We were saying last night that we were getting tired of hanging around Chicago."
The boys started away the very next day. What they saw and did on the journey will be found in the next volume of this series ent.i.tled:
Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds; or, The Signal from the Hills.
The End.