After that they folded up lunch box and paper bag and looked up a truly good eating place to enjoy a real lunch.
In Jimmie’s room at home was a great, old-fashioned, over-stuffed rocking chair. It was frayed and moth-eaten but oh, so comfortable! When the day was over and supper done, Jimmie loved to sit in this chair with feet propped up on the window sill, there to listen to the robins chirp, to watch twilight darken into night, and think things through.
There was plenty to think about these days. As he sat there a few hours after his truck chasing expedition with Tom, he found himself in a somber mood.
It was all well enough, he was thinking, to dream of having a part in bringing criminals to justice, but when you were up against the real thing——
“Ah, that’s different,” he sighed.
And then, of a sudden, his spirits and determination rose. “We’ll get him!” he murmured. “We will!”
He was thinking of the Silent Terror. Even now a thrill ran up his spine as he seemed to hear those words, “As you are!”
His determination at this moment to do his full duty was stronger than ever, for the papers that day had carried broad headlines about the Silent Terror’s last attack. Jimmie had read how a girl, little older than himself, had been sent from a laundry to bring the payroll. On her return she cut through an alley. They had found her four hours later wandering only half-conscious and hysterical, empty-handed and murmuring about a man and a bubble.
“What man? What bubble?” they had asked. To these questions she found no answer. But to all it was plain that the Silent Terror had struck again.
“I took his picture,” Jimmie groaned. “And got only an ear. An ear! It may be well enough for a whiz of a detective like Tom Howe, but who else could tell that ear if he saw it? Practically no one.”