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Mr. Gubb, in the three weeks during which the search went on, exhausted all his disguises and every page of the twelve lessons of the Rising Sun Detective Agency’s Correspondence School of Detecting. He was in a condition bordering on despair. Each day he donned a disguise and visited the barn, and saw nothing but scenery and more scenery. He had reached a point where detective skill seemed to fail, and where he feared he might have to go openly to Greasy and ask him whether he was the pirate, or at least go to Maggie and ask her where she had obtained the scarf-pin and the raisins. And that would not have been detecting. Nothing like it was mentioned in the twelve lessons.

A reward of One Hundred Dollars (rewards are always in capital letters) had been offered by the Business Men’s Association for the capture of the pirate craft, but no one seemed likely to earn the reward.

“Say, honest!” said Greasy, “if my boat was workin’ I’d go out alone in her and cop off them hundred dollars. Youse is a detective, Gubb; why don’t youse get to work and grab them dollars?”

“Your boat is not into a workable condition?” asked Philo Gubb.

“She’s all but that,” said Greasy. “She’s hauled up on the levee, rottin’ like a tomato. I tried to sell her to Muller, the grocery feller where Mag gets them raisins you liked, and I tried to trade her for a ring to Calloway, the jewelry man what Mag got my opal scarf-pin of, but I can’t get rid of her nohow. If I had her workin’ I’d find them pirates or I’d know why.”

“I have remembered the thought of something; I’ve got to go downtown,” said Mr. Gubb, and he left Greasy and went to question Mr. Muller and Mr. Calloway. The one admitted selling Mag the raisins, and the other the pin, and thus two perfectly good clues went bad. Mr. Gubb turned toward Fifth Street, when Billy Getz caught him by the arm.

“Come on and hunt pirates,” he said. “The good cruiser Haddon P. Rogers is going to hit a new trail–up-river this time. Come on along.”

Billy Getz escorted him aboard the Haddon P. Rogers and led him straight to the Sheriff on the upper deck.

“Sheriff,” he said, “we’ve got ’em now! This time we’ve got ’em sure. Here’s Gubb, the famous P. Gubb, detective, and after many solicitations he has consented to accompany us. We will have the pirate craft ere we return. P. Gubb never fails.”

The Sheriff smiled good-naturedly.

“Always kidding, ain’t you, Billy,” he said.

The boat started. She steamed slowly up the river, the members of the posse on the upper deck on either side, scanning the shores carefully. Occasionally the ferry-boat backed and ran closer to shore to permit a nearer inspection of some skiff or to view some log left on the shore by the last flood. Billy Getz, standing beside the Sheriff and P. Gubb, called their attention to every shadow and lump on the shore. The boat proceeded on her slow course and reached the channel between an island and the Illinois shore. The wooded bank of the island rose directly from the water, some of the water-elms dipping their roots into the river. There was no place where a boat could be hidden, and the ferry steamed slowly along. Billy Getz poked solemn-faced fun at Mr. Gubb in the most serious manner, and Mr. Gubb was sternly haughty, knowing he was being made sport of. His eyes rested with bird-like intensity on the wooded shore of the island.

“Now, this combination of paper-hanging and detecting has its advantages,” said Billy Getz, with a wink at the Sheriff. “When a man–“

Philo Gubb was not hearing him.

“The remarkableness of the similarity of nature to art is quite often remarkable to observe,” he said to the Sheriff, “and is seeming to grow more so now and then from time to time. That piece of section of woods right there is so naturally grown you might say it was torn right off a roll of Dietz’s 7462 Bessie John.”

He stopped short.

“What’s the matter?” asked Billy Getz nervously.

“Run the boat in there,” said Philo Gubb excitedly. “Those verdures ain’t like 7462 Bessie John; they are 7462 Bessie John.”

The Sheriff stared keenly at the spot indicated by Detective Gubb’s extended hand and, turning suddenly, said a word to the pilot in the house at his side. The ferry veered and ran in toward the island. Not until the boat was nearer the shore than a front row of the orchestra seats to the back drop of a theater did the others on the boat understand. Then the trick was seen and understood. The trees of the shore were not all trees. One group was a painted canvas, copied carefully by Greasy from Dietz’s 7462 Bessie John at the behest of Billy Getz. Stretched across a small indentation of the shore it made a safe screen, unrecognizable a few rods from the shore, and behind this bit of painted forest they found the long, low, black pirate craft–Billy Getz’s motor-boat.

When the Sheriff had torn down the canvas and his men had hoisted and heaved the pirate craft to the broad deck of the ferry, Billy Getz was gone. Riverbank never saw him again, and a half-dozen of his roistering companions also disappeared completely.

“Sometimes occasionally,” said Philo Gubb, as the ferry turned toward town, “the combination of paper-hanging and deteckative work is detrimental to one or both, as the case may be, but at other occasional times they are worth one hundred dollars.”

“That’s right!” said the Sheriff suddenly. “You get that reward, don’t you?”

“Most certainly sure,” said Philo Gubb.