“Wet!” he cried. “I must have gotten some snow in my pocket and it has soaked the letter through. Darn it, the glue on the envelope has come off.”
The envelope had indeed opened and the letter was wet through on one end. He decided to dry the paper and without any intention of looking at its contents pulled the dampened sheets out of the bedraggled envelope and spread them on top of the table.
“There, that will dry in a short time,” he thought. “Then I’ll seal it up and explain about it to Mr. Gates tomorrow.”
The last sheet was turned up toward him. He glanced at it and was about to turn away, when a word struck his attention. He looked down and then hesitated.
“Humph, I musn’t read this,” he thought. “I shouldn’t even have it. But—”
Then he decided to see what the word “cup” was about. He picked up the letter and read the paragraph. It read as follows:
“I understand your anxiety about that trophy cup that has caused all of the trouble, and I will do my best to help you. As long as I and George Long are the only ones who know the full story about that cup, I feel it my duty to help you in any way that I can. I was wondering why you didn’t take the thing to a jeweler and have the bottom scraped, but I can see what that would have meant, and the best thing is to get it away from your house. There is no telling who might some day get ahold of the thing and find out the truth, and with those cadets in the same town such a thing wouldn’t be wise. I will be down to see you in a week’s time, and when I return to Canada I’ll take the cup with me and will keep it safely in my cabin here. When you come to visit me next summer we can scrape the bottom ourselves or we can throw it in the river, whatever you say. Too bad you ever did such an outlandish thing.”
The letter was signed “Oliver Burgess.”
“Now, what the devil can that mean?” puzzled the astonished Don. “It is surely referring to the missing 1933 trophy, but I wonder what all that stuff about the scraping of the bottom means?”