"Plenty of bills," he observed.
He took the money out and made it into one roll, and this he held in his hand. Rapidly he went through the other compartments of the wallets. He came across the queer card which Mr. Liggins had given Jack.
"Might as well take that along," he said to himself. "No telling what it is, but it might come in handy. I might want to pretend I belonged to the order, for it looks like a lodge emblem. I'll stow that away."
The thief laid the wallets and the money down on the floor, while he reached in a pocket to get a card case in which he carried his few valuables. He placed the odd bit of pasteboard inside this.
"Now to toss the wallets aside and skip with the cash," he murmured, and suiting the action to his words he began to move softly into the corridor.
It was a good thing that nature had endowed John with a nervous temperament, and had made him a light sleeper. For, at that instant, or maybe a little before, some peculiar action on the Indian's nerves conveyed a message to his brain.
It was not a clear and definite sort of message, in fact it was rather confused—in the same shape as a dream. John seemed to be riding a big cow pony down a steep incline, after a big buffalo on whose back sat a dark, smooth-shaven man. The same man, John thought in his dream, he had seen in the elevator that evening.
And while John was riding for dear life after the buffalo, he thought he saw the strange man turn back and go to where the three boys had left their coats on the grassy bank of Lake Rudmore. John fancied he gave up his pursuit of the buffalo to leap off and run to where the thief was stealing his own and his comrades' possessions.
The shock of leaping from the back of a swiftly running pony, and rolling head over heals as a result, awoke John, or, rather, the peculiar action of his dream did. He sat up in bed with a jump, just in time to see the thief putting the money into his pocket, and, with the three wallets, steal out into the corridor.
It must have been the continuance of the dream that made John act so quickly. He leaped out of bed, half asleep as he was, and, with a yell that sounded enough like an Indian warwhoop to startle his two companions, he made a dash for the man.