I have often reflected that if it had not been for my long promised visit to my aunt up in Kingston, New York, these very extraordinary events which I purpose to narrate would never have occurred. To be sure, the silent stranger, as we called him, would still have pursued his grim course in the tragic business. But I would have been none the wiser for that. And Tom Slade would not have had the thrilling experience (dear to his adventurous heart) of participating in it. I have found some amusement in speculating on just what might have happened if I had not stumbled into the prelude of that black drama; or rather, I should say, plunged my young friend headlong into it. For to tell you the truth I was either sitting in my wicker chair on the porch or playing golf while the whole strange affair was unfolding. More particularly have I derived amusement from thinking how my Aunt Martha was, as one might say, remotely involved in the story. Not that she ever defied an outlaw or dug for buried treasure, for she is one of the mildest and sweetest old ladies that ever lived. But if she had not insisted on my making good the old, neglected promise to visit her in her little cottage in that quaint old city up the Hudson, why there would have been nobody to confront Slick Somers and send him sprawling to the ground. I am fond of telling my Aunt Martha that she was really the one who did that. Then she always lays down her knitting and tries gently to show me how my reasoning is defective. Well, in any case, I started to spend a quiet, restful week with her, and I landed plunk in the middle of the eighteenth century. For here you shall find outlaws quite as bold as Jesse James or Robin Hood, and treasure too, if those are the kind of things you care about. And it all began with my trip to see Aunt Martha up in Kingston. So I shall begin the tale of these adventures with a certain fair morning in the springtime when I set forth from my home in New Jersey and drove up the state road past the picturesque old water wheel at Arcola, and so on through Allendale and Ramsey to Suffern, which is just across the New York state line. North of this point the Ramapo Hills close in about the road and soon the highway takes a winding course among rugged mountains. Now the road is shadowed by precipitous heights, now a fair expanse of rolling country unfolds before the eye. I think it must be in the neighborhood of Sloatsburg that the country to the east thickens into a mountainous wilderness. Beyond that flows the lordly Hudson whose general course I was following. I suppose those intervening wooded heights are what they call the Hudson Highlands. I knew that zigzagging in and out among those dense hills, this way and that, was the freakish boundary line of the Interstate Park, which forever sets a resolute limit against the sneaking advance of civilization.