“Well,” said Barrows, in the evening, when both were fresh and clean, “we’ve got something out of this. Twenty-five hundred apiece. Marsten can whistle for his share now. Let’s go look up our friend Harding.”
They reached Harding’s flashy hotel in due time, and went quietly into the barroom. Harding was there. He was telling a group of his particular friends, with great relish, of the way in which Barrows had been beaten in New London.
“He wouldn’t take my advice,” he ended, “and now he’s up in the tall timber somewhere, broke and looking for a stake. He’ll find it, too, I don’t think.”
“Hello, boys,” said Barrows, breaking in at that moment. “Have one on me. Open up as many bottles of wine as the crowd can drink, barkeep. I guess this will settle the bill.”
And, taking out a roll of bright new yellow bills, he threw down a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. Then he glanced triumphantly at Harding, who was both astonished and crestfallen.
CHAPTER XLII
THE DISCOVERY IN THE VAULT.
Dick Merriwell got up early in the morning that Barrows and his precious friend, Bascom, arrived in New York. He had an engagement with Jim Phillips for an early breakfast at his rooms, to be followed by a swim. When eight o’clock arrived, with still no sign of Jim, Dick was tremendously surprised. Jim was usually the most punctual of men, and the universal coach was inclined to think that something very serious indeed had happened to make Jim break his engagement without sending any word.
When he inquired at Jim’s rooms, he was at first relieved. He learned there of the call Jim had received from his sick friend, and decided that the pitcher, probably finding his friend worse than he expected, had stayed the night with him, and, possibly, overslept, as a result of having been so long awake. But when he went to the other man’s rooms he learned that Jim had left there at one o’clock to go home. There was no accident reported that might have accounted for Jim’s mysterious absence. And Dick, very much perturbed, visited every place in New Haven where Jim, by any imaginable vagary, might have gone. Bill Brady was one of the first of those he looked up, and Bill, quite as anxious as himself, joined the search at once.
But the morning passed without a sign of the missing baseball captain. Harry Maxwell, Watson, Carter, and others had helped to look for him, but none of them had found a trace of his movements after he had left his friend’s rooms to go home.