“Well, what if I bought him?”
“Do you mean that you are making up to him what Barry’s dirty hands have failed to give? You are bribing him to act as your spy?”
“I do not suppose there is any harm in my hiring a private detective.”
“That depends on whether he is already a public official, and on how you pay him, and what you pay him for.”
“Ellery, those fellows have sentries and pickets and fortifications and guns always in battle-array against us and our kind. The only thing to do is to gather hosts and ammunition on the other side.”
“True. But there isn’t any use in fighting dishonesty with dishonor. Dick, don’t lower your standard to the mere flinging of mud.”
But Dick did not appear to listen. His eyes were caught by one of the passing couples and he sprang to his feet.
“Let’s follow the stream a little farther,” he said, moving as he spoke. “The gorge grows wilder and more enticing the farther you go.”
He walked hurriedly down the path, and Ellery, whose mind seldom leaped, but progressed by orderly steps, followed in some bewilderment. An instant before Dick’s face had worn the profound air of a man on whose shoulders rested mighty problems. Now every movement was boyish and exultant. He laughed to himself. The stream thundered and one does not ask a friend to shout out his minor moods, so Ellery forbore to question.
Suddenly the brook burst through overhanging cliffs of party-colored sandstone out of its thread-like gorge into the wide chasm of the Mississippi. A small steamer lay at anchor and tooted a discordant horn to signify to the world that she intended to be up and doing. A crowd of phlegmatic-faced revelers stood upon the bank and watched her with absorbed indifference, while a smaller number pushed aboard and prepared for true joy by laying in a store of cracker-jack and peanuts at a diminutive counter.