"Well, we'll just have to wait and see. He knows his own business best, and it's ten chances to one we're worrying over nothing, but I have a sort of a hunch that there's a nigger in the woodpile."
Mrs. Hardy, however, was not alarmed.
"Oh, he'll walk into the house when we're least expecting him," she laughed reassuringly. "You boys are just anxious to get to work on the Snackley case. Perhaps that's what he's working on now, he'll probably come back with a lot of information."
"We'd rather he'd let us in on that," returned Joe.
"And keep you out of school! Oh, no. He doesn't mind letting you do detective work as long as it's in your spare time."
So the Hardy boys had to make the best of it. They concealed their impatience during the remainder of the week, doing their school work faithfully. The following week was the start of vacation, and the lads were deep in examinations for several days so that they had not much time to think of detective activities.
But on Friday afternoon the mystery of their father's absence took a strange turn.
They came back from school to find their mother sitting in the living room, carefully examining a note that she had evidently just received.
