He picked his way cautiously across the floor, and looked out. . . . In the moonlit roadway, right beneath, a girl—Fancy Tabb—was dancing a fandango, the while in her lifted hand she waved a white parcel.
"Ah, there you be!" she hailed, catching sight of him. "I've found 'em!"
"Found what?"
"Your papers! . . . I couldn' sleep till I told you: and I had to fetch
Mr Benny along—here he is!"
"Good evening, Captain," spoke up Mr Peter Benny, stepping out into the roadway from the doorway where he had been explaining to 'Bias. "It's all right, sir. Your papers are found."
"Good evening, Benny! Tis kind of you, surely,"—Cai's voice trembled a little. "What's the hour?" he asked.
"Scarce midnight yet. I reckoned maybe you might be sittin' up, frettin' over this—'Twas the child here, though, that found it out and insisted on bringing me."
"After we'd locked up," broke in Fancy, "and just as I was packin' Dad off to bed, it came into my head to ask him—'I suppose you don't know,' said I, 'of anyone's havin' been to master's safe without my bein' told?' He thought a bit, and 'No,' says he; 'nobody 'cept myself, an' that but once. 'You?' says I, 'and whoever sent you there?' 'Why, the master hisself,' says Dad.—Who else?' 'But what for?' I asks, feelin' as you might have knocked me down with a feather. 'I meant to ha' told you,' says Dad, 'but it slipped my mind. 'Twas one afternoon, when you was out on your walk. I heard Master's stick tap on the plankin' overhead so I went up, thinkin' as he might be wantin' his tea in a hurry. He told me to open the safe an' take out a packet o' papers from the top shelf; which I did.' 'What papers?' said I 'How should I know?' says Dad: 'I don't meddle with his business—I've seen too much of it in my life. I didn' even glance at 'em, but locked the safe again, an' put 'em where he told me—which was in the japanned box by his chair!' 'Why,' says I,' that's his Insurance Box as he called it—the same as I handed to Mr Benny only yesterday, to take away and sort through!' . . . After that, as you may guess, I was like a mad person till we'd taken down the bolts again and I'd run to Mr Benny's."
"Ay," chimed in Mr Benny, "I was upstairs and half-undressed: but she had me dressed again an' down as if 'twas a matter of life and death. . . . And when we got out the box, there the papers were, sure enough. After that—for I saw their value to you—no one with a human heart could help running along with her, to bear the news. . . . So here we are."
"'Bias!" called Cai softly. "Didn' I hear 'Bias's voice below there, a while since?"