The Return of Harley

Morning comes to a hidden cabin in the hills above Odyssey, and two very poor criminals are arguing about it. Jones has spent the night in a motel instead of hiking back in the dark, which Thompson thinks is about as smart as hanging out a sign. Worse, Jones caught up with Jack Davis in his own backyard and then let him go again, after bluffing the boy into silence with a threat: keep quiet, or you will never see your friend again. It is a fine plan except for one detail. They do not have Jack's friend. Thompson climbed down the steep embankment after the motorcycle crash and found the bike but no rider, so he hid the machine, swept the cave clean, and dragged a branch behind the van to wipe out the tire tracks. Now the two of them can only wait for the boss, who is due that afternoon.

The missing rider, meanwhile, is waking up sore in a strange bed on a farm. Angus McKinney found Officer David Harley wandering the road the day before, bruised and half collapsing, and carried him home. McKinney is generous with breakfast and cheerfully useless in an emergency, since he does not believe in telephones and does not own one. As the fog clears, Harley remembers where he was headed and why it matters, and he talks his host into driving him toward town.

Back in Odyssey, Jack tells his parents he is sorry and that his story about men and boxes and a secret cave was only his imagination running away with him. His father is proud of him for owning up. The moment the house is empty, Jack takes a flashlight and heads straight back to the cave. Deep inside he digs a half buried bottle out of the dirt, one with a little cabin printed on the label, and nearly jumps out of his skin when Whit's voice comes out of the dark. Whit has been thinking about Jack's story all night, and he has been busy: a length of cable wire lying beside the road with its ends bent into loops, two trees with the bark torn off at the same height on either side of the road, and Officer Harley's motorcycle down the embankment under a pile of leaves. Jack's pretending collapses, and the truth spills out. Whit explains that the men are bootleggers, that hundreds of bottles like Jack's are stacked further back in the cave, and that the boys stumbled into the middle of a pickup. The two of them turn toward the police station and walk right into Jones and Thompson.

Whit warns the pair that the man they think they kidnapped is a police officer, which rattles them enough that they blurt out that they never had him at all. Jack grabs a bottle and swings; Whit takes hold of it, the glass breaks across his hand, and Jack wraps it in his handkerchief. Herded toward the van with nothing left to try, Whit tells Jack to pray, and pray hard.

At Whit's End, Connie is puzzling over a driving test question when the answer comes from Officer Harley himself, standing there very much alive. Learning that Whit has gone back up to the cave alone, Harley borrows the old truck and asks Connie to bring the police up behind him. At the cave he reads the ground like a page: scuff marks from a struggle, a broken bottle with a cabin on the label and blood on the glass, fresh tire tracks curving into a clump of bushes that turn out to be fake, hiding a whole second road. A mile off, on the side of the hill, sits the cabin. Harley leaves a message for the police and sets up a small surprise for the men in the van.

Inside the cabin, Whit has already worked out most of the operation and is needling his captors about the rest when the door bangs open and Harley orders everyone to freeze. For one bright second the rescue is complete. Then another voice tells Harley to freeze instead, and it belongs to Angus McKinney - the kindly farmer who fed him breakfast, and the boss of the whole bootlegging ring. He came up the back way for still supplies and has been listening the entire time. Whit asks how he could, and McKinney shrugs it off. "Business is business."

He sends Jones and Thompson away with the loaded van and an address, and he is still deciding what to do with his prisoners when there is a crash outside. The van has hit a cable strung across the road and gone spinning down the embankment. In the instant McKinney looks away, Harley takes him, and the police arrive to collect a ring they have been chasing for months without a single lead. Harley hands the credit right back to the people who earned it, especially Jack, and Jack says the thing that matters most to him: he is just glad Mr. Whittaker believed him. Explaining all of this to his parents is going to be another matter, and Whit offers a gentle truth for the walk home, that doing what is right sometimes costs something first. Jack, undaunted, asks for another motorcycle ride. Harley promises him one as soon as the bike is repaired, turns down Connie's offer to drive everyone back to town, and cannot resist pointing out the burned out taillight on Whit's truck. Ignorance of the law, as he always says, is no excuse.