“I’ve lost the bank,” he said abruptly. “And all the club money in it. I had it before we started to build the snowman, and now I can’t find it.”
“Isn’t it in your house?” asked Jess.
Fred explained where he and Artie had looked.
“Well, I never heard of such a thing!” said Jess. “My good glove and your bank gone! Somebody must have picked them up—that’s all.”
“Carrie Pepper was out here when we started to look,” Artie announced.
“Then she found it!” cried Jess. “I’m going right over now to her house and ask her to give me back my glove. You come along, Fred, and make her give you the bank. That’s the same as stealing, to take things like that.”
“It isn’t stealing to take one glove,” protested Artie.
“’Tis, too,” insisted Jess. “What good is one glove? No good at all! Carrie Pepper knows those gloves are new. She has to give it back to me, that’s all there is to it.”
“Well, you take my advice and go mighty slow about accusing any one of taking your glove,” said Fred, earnestly. “I’d no more go to her and ask her for the bank than I’d fly. I might as well come right out and say she stole it.”
“She took Polly’s pin, didn’t she?” Jess demanded.