Archie had not taken Fitzgerald’s joshing about the robbery with anything like his usual good grace. He had been palpably annoyed, and his assumption of careless laughter had seemed a little forced.
Then there was Joblots. Where did he come in? It did not seem possible that any human being could be such an absolute ass, though once or twice in his life Dick had met fellows with mannerisms of which the dapper little fellow had made a very good copy. But Merriwell had an instinctive feeling that he was nothing but a copy. For some reason he was playing a part, and Merriwell felt sure that the real man was something far different from his outward appearance. He had been interested in McCormick from the very first. All evening he had been watching him—covertly, to be sure, but none the less constantly. Was it possible that he could be following Archie?
Jellison, too, was a puzzle. The absurdity of a man’s coming alone to such a deserted spot as this and landing there late at night, simply because he wanted to take a few days’ rest, was palpable. There must be some ulterior motive, and a very strong one at that, to cause him to do what he had done; but, try as he would, Dick could not fathom it. Presently his mind left Jellison and leaped back to McCormick.
Archie’s only brother had been sentenced to two years in State’s prison. He had been at liberty for six months. To be sure, both Archie and his brother swore that the latter had been wrongly convicted, that some one high up in the bank had in reality stolen the money and then succeeded in weaving such a web of false evidence around the innocent man that he had been convicted and sentenced, the thief himself escaping scot-free.
That was possible. It was also possible that both men had lied. They might have inherited a single bad streak—an irresistible tendency to steal, perhaps. Such things had been known. Jim might have committed the actual robbery and Archie helped him get away with the spoils.
So Merriwell tossed about through the long hours of the night, struggling between his innate loyalty and devotion to his friend and the evidence of his eyesight and his common sense. At last, toward morning, he fell into a troubled sleep and dreamed strange, fantastic dreams in which Archie and Jellison and Percy Joblots were mixed up in a vague, shadowy, perfectly idiotic manner with a fountain of silver dollars which spouted out of the stone hearth of the dining room and filled the whole house.
He awoke when the first beams of the morning sun streamed through the open window and slanted across the bed. He was on the floor in a twinkling, dragging the blankets off Brad and causing the Texan to awake with a grunt and a shiver.
“Come out and take a plunge,” Dick invited him. “It’ll clear the cobwebs out of your brains.”
To tell the truth, he felt more need of that process than did his chum; for his cogitating of the night before had brought no satisfactory solution to the problem which was perplexing him, and he was in quite as much of a quandary as ever regarding the stand he sought to take.
“B-r-r!” chattered Buckhart. “I reckon I might as well, pard. I couldn’t be much colder than I am now. Come on.”