Mr. Maximilian sounded so ominous that both Bob and Pete gulped. Even Jupe looked uneasy.

“I can’t sell you the trunk,” he said, “because I haven’t got it. It was stolen last night.”

“Stolen! Is this the truth, boy?”

“Yes, sir.” Jupiter proceeded to relate, for the third time that morning, the events of the night before. Maximilian listened intently. Then he sighed.

“Alas!” he said. “I should have come the moment I read the newspaper. You have no clue to the thieves?”

“They got away before we could get close to them,” Jupe said.

“Bad, very bad,” the magician muttered. “To think that the trunk of The Great Gulliver should reappear so strangely, only to vanish again. I wonder why they wanted it.”

“Maybe there is something valuable in it after all,” Bob suggested.

“Nonsense!” Maximilian said. “The Great Gulliver never had anything valuable, poor chap. Except his magic act. There might be some of his old tricks in the trunk, but they would be valuable only to another magician, such as myself. Did I tell you The Great Gulliver was a magician? But of course you guessed it.

“He was not really great, though he called himself that. A small man, roly-poly, with a round face and black hair. He sometimes wore Oriental robes to look like an Oriental wizard. He had one special act and I had hoped that perhaps — but no matter. The trunk is gone.”

He was silent, thinking. Then he shrugged and the money between his fingers vanished.

“My trip has been for nothing,” he said. “Still, there is a possibility you will get the trunk back. If you ever do, remember — Maximilian the Mystic wishes it!”

He fixed penetrating eyes on Jupiter.

“Do you understand, young man! I wish the trunk. I will pay for it if it can be recovered. You will contact me at the Sorcerer’s Club. Is it agreed?”

“I don’t see how we can hope to get the trunk back again,” Pete said.

“Nevertheless, it may happen,” Maximilian insisted. “And if it does, I have first claim to it. Is that agreed, boy?”

“If we should get it back,” Jupiter said, “we won’t sell it to anybody else without talking to you first, Mr. Maximilian. That’s all I can promise. As Pete says, I don’t see how we could possibly get the trunk again. Those thieves are probably a long way away by now.”

“I suppose so.” The magician sounded depressed. “Well, we’ll wait and see what happens. Don’t lose my card now.”

He put his hand into his pocket, seemed surprised, and brought out an egg.

“Now how in the world did that get there?” he asked. “I certainly don’t want an egg in my pocket. Here, boy, catch it.”

He threw the egg towards Pete, who quickly put up his hand to catch it. But in mid-air the egg vanished. It seemed to wink out like a light.

“Hmm,” the magician murmured, “it must have been a dodo’s egg. They’re extinct, you know. Well, well, I must be going. Don’t forget to call me.”

He strode to his car. The Three Investigators half expected something strange to happen as he went, but he simply drove out through the gates and turned down the street. “Wow!” Pete said. “That was some customer!”

“He certainly wanted that trunk badly,” Jupiter added. “I wonder if it’s just because he and The Great Gulliver were both magicians. Or if there’s something special in that trunk that he’d like to have for himself.”

They were pondering this when another car drove in through the gate. At first they thought it was Mr. Maximilian returning. Then they saw it was a smaller car, a little foreign saloon. It stopped, and out stepped a young man, whom they recognized as the reporter who had taken their picture at the auction the previous day. “Hi,” he said, “remember me — Fred Brown?”

“Yes, sir,” Jupiter answered. “What can we do for you?”

“I came to see if you had opened the trunk yet,” the reporter told him. “I think I can get another feature story about that trunk. You see, it may have something special in it. I think it contains a talking skull!”

“A talking skull?” the boys exclaimed together.

Fred Brown nodded. “That’s right. A genuine talking skull. Did you find it?”

Jupiter had to admit they hadn’t found anything in the trunk because it had been stolen. Again he told the story. The reporter frowned.

“Darn!” he said. “There goes my feature! I wonder who took it? Somebody who read the story in the newspaper, I suppose.”

“I suppose so, Mr. Brown,” Jupiter agreed. “Maybe somebody else knew about that talking skull and wanted it. Was it a skull that really talks?”

“Call me Fred,” the reporter said. “I can’t tell you if the skull really talked or not. I just know it was supposed to. You see, I began thinking about that name on the trunk — The Great Gulliver. I was sure I’d heard it before. So I looked it up in the morgue — you know what a newspaper morgue is?”

They nodded. Bob’s father was a newspaper man, so they knew that a newspaper morgue is a room where old news stories, clippings, and pictures are kept on file to be used for research. It is actually a library of facts about people and events.

“Well,” Fred Brown went on, “I decided to look up The Great Gulliver. Sure enough, there were several stories about him. It seems that though he wasn’t very much of a magician, he had one special trick. He had a talking skull.

“A year ago Gulliver just vanished. Into thin air, like one of his tricks. Nobody knows if he died or what. But apparently he left his trunk behind at the hotel, and it came up for auction yesterday and you bought it. I figured that he probably had his magic apparatus in the trunk, including the skull, and it would make a good story.”

“You say he vanished?” Bob asked. “The whole thing is becoming quite mysterious.” Jupiter frowned a bit. “A vanishing magician, a vanishing trunk, and a skull that is supposed to talk. Very mysterious indeed.”

“Now wait a minute, wait a minute —!” Pete protested. “I don’t like the look on your face, Jupe. You’re thinking of turning this into an investigation, and I don’t want to investigate any talking skulls. As far as I’m concerned, such a thing doesn’t exist and I don’t want to learn different.”

“We can’t very well investigate anything now that the trunk is gone,” Jupiter told him. “But I would like to know about The Great Gulliver, Fred.”

“Sure,” the reporter said. He sat down on one of Jupe’s unpainted iron chairs. “I’ll give you the background. Gulliver was a small-time magician, but he had this skull that apparently talked. It would sit on a glass table, with no apparatus around it, and answer questions.”

“Ventriloquism?” Jupiter asked. “Gulliver actually did the talking without moving his lips?”

“Well, maybe. But it would talk when Gulliver was sitting across the room from it, and sometimes even when he was out of the room. Even other magicians couldn’t figure out how it was done. But eventually it got him into trouble with the police.”

“How did that happen?” Bob asked. “Well, Gulliver wasn’t doing very well as a magician so he turned to fortune-telling, which is illegal. He didn’t call it fortune-telling — he called himself an adviser. But he dressed up in Oriental robes and sat in a little room decorated with mystic symbols. For a fee, superstitious people could come and ask the skull questions. He even named the skull after an ancient Greek wise man — Socrates.”

“And the skull answered the questions?” Bob asked.

“So it was said. Supposedly it gave some good advice, too, to people with problems. But Gulliver went too far. Socrates began giving advice on the stock market and things like that, and some people lost money and complained to the police. Gulliver was charged with illegal fortune-telling and sent to jail.

“He was in jail about a year. When he got out, he gave up magic and fortune-telling and got a job as a clerk. Then one day — pouf! Like that he disappeared. There were rumours that some very tough individuals were interested in him — no one knows why. Perhaps they had some criminal scheme they wanted to involve him and Socrates in, and he disappeared to get away from them.”