“Yes. Dad found that out in his investigations. Dad suspected all along that there was some connection between Snackley and the house on the cliff, especially when he found that Snackley and Polucca had been related. He went out to find out what he could, but the smugglers saw him and captured him.” “What about that fellow they had imprisoned in the cellar?” questioned Biff Hooper. “Didn’t you say Snackley was just going to kill him when your father saved him?” “That was the young fellow we saved in the bay that day. The young chap who told us his name was Jones. It wasn’t his real name, at all. His name is Yates and he was one of the smugglers.” “Why was Snackley chasing him that day?” asked Perry Robinson. “It seems that Yates got angry because he didn’t get his full share of the money from the last smuggling trip, so he threatened to tell the police on Snackley. The smugglers locked him up, but he got away in one of the motorboats, so they chased him and ran him down. They thought to have killed him in the explosion or else drown him, but Joe and I managed to bring him ashore. We left him at the Kane farmhouse, but the smugglers came along next day and kidnapped him. They kept him prisoner in the cellar of the Polucca place after that.” “I still can’t understand about those yells and shrieks we heard the first day we were out at the farmhouse,” put in Phil Cohen. “That was just to frighten us away. One of the men in the gang is a sort of half-wit and they had him posted there to frighten people off by yelling and shrieking whenever any one showed up around the place. He was the chap who stole our tools from the motorcycles,” explained Frank. “But after our visit there,” added Joe, “they thought it was too dangerous and that there might be an investigation, so they put Redhead and his wife and one of their men there to pose as renters of the place.” “So there weren’t any ghosts after all,” exclaimed Jerry Gilroy. “Nary a ghost,” laughed Frank, “Snackley explained everything this morning in a confession. The whole gang is locked up, even to Li Chang. Yates, the young fellow they had kept prisoner so long, told the whole story first. He turned state’s evidence and told how long the smuggling had been going on, how Snackley had made use of the house on the cliff after killing Polucca, how he fixed up the tunnels in the cliff—he told everything. It seems that Polucca had the smuggling idea in the first place and he spent years fixing up those caves and tunnels. When everything was ready, he called in Snackley, but Snackley didn’t like to share with any one who had a right to a voice in the affair, so he killed the old man, took his money, and brought the smuggling gang in there.” “Yates told all that?” “He told so much of it that Snackley saw there was no use bluffing any longer, so he admitted the whole story.”