“Oh, I guess he’s convinced all right. Once we get out of school he’ll probably give his permission. Why, this is a good sign right now, isn’t it? He asked us to deliver these papers for him in Willowville. He’s letting us help him.”

“I’d rather get in on a real, good mystery,” said Frank. “It’s all right to help Dad, but if there’s no more excitement in it than delivering papers I’d rather start in studying to be a lawyer and be done with it.”

“Never mind, Frank,” comforted his brother. “We may get a mystery all of our own to solve someday.”

“If we do we’ll show that Fenton Hardy’s sons are worthy of his name. Oh boy, but what wouldn’t I give to be as famous as Dad! Why, some of the biggest cases in the country are turned over to him. That forgery case, for instance. Fifty thousand dollars had been stolen right from under the noses of the city officials and all the auditors and city detectives and private detectives they called in had to admit that it was too deep for them.”

“Then they called in Dad and he cleared it up in three days. Once he got suspicious of that slick bookkeeper whom nobody had been suspecting at all, it was all over but the shouting. Got a confession out of him and everything.”

“It was smooth work. I’m glad our suggestion helped him. The case certainly got a lot of attention in the papers.”

“And here we are,” said Joe, “plugging along the shore road on a measly little errand to deliver some legal papers at Willowville. I’d rather be on the track of some diamond thieves or smugglers⁠—or something.”

“Well, we have to be satisfied, I suppose,” replied Frank, leaning farther over the handlebars. “Perhaps Dad may give us a chance on a real case sometime.”

“Sometime! I want to be on a real case now !”

The motorcycles roared along the narrow road that skirted the bay. An embankment of tumbled rocks and boulders sloped steeply to the water below, and on the other side of the road was a steep cliff. The roadway itself was narrow, although it was wide enough to permit two cars to meet and pass, and it wound about in frequent curves and turnings. It was a road that was not often traveled, for Willowville was only a small village and this shore road was an offshoot of the main highways to the north and the west.

The Hardy boys dropped their discussion of the probability that someday they would become detectives, and for a while they rode on in silence, occupied with the difficulties of keeping to the road. For the road at this point was dangerous, very rough and rutty, and it sloped sharply upward so that the embankment leading to the ocean far below became steeper and steeper.

“I shouldn’t want to go over the edge around here,” remarked Frank, as he glanced down the rugged slope.

“It’s a hundred-foot drop. You’d be smashed to pieces before you ever hit the shore.”

Even as he spoke the automobile flashed into sight.