“They must have taken the Crowley clock too,” Nancy told herself with a sinking heart. “If they have, I’ll never set eyes on it!”
A feeling of desperation came over the girl as she realized that again she had been thwarted. It seemed almost as though a cruel fate had ordained that the mystery of the missing Crowley will should forever remain unsolved.
“It’s barely possible the robbers overlooked the clock,” Nancy thought hopefully.
She began to look about in nooks and corners of the bungalow. She opened closets and poked about in drawers, but her search was in vain. She found no clock.
As Nancy returned to the bedroom, she regarded it meditatively. Why had the robbers left this one room practically untouched? Certainly the furniture was as valuable as that which they had taken. Unquestionably, the thieves had intended to strip the room, for they had rolled up the rug.
“I wonder if they heard me coming and were frightened away?” Nancy asked herself. “I didn’t see a sign of their truck, and yet I’m sure they couldn’t have left here many minutes before I arrived.”
As the thought occurred to her, she glanced uneasily over her shoulder. She realized that she was buried in a wilderness some miles from the nearest house, and the knowledge that unscrupulous men were in the vicinity was anything but reassuring.
“What if those robbers should still be around here?” flashed through her mind.
As Nancy Drew listened tensely, the very silence of the empty house was startling. A strange feeling came over her.