“Well, I did not mean it that way. But, all right—a week. And if things do not look different by that time, and you still claim ignorance, you will have to go. That is all there is to it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
At the door Jack turned back. “Mr. Black, you are positive you returned the box to the safe?”
“Positive. It is the last thing I do before going home.”
During spare moments on his wire that morning Jack debated the mystery from every side. Finally he had boiled it down to two conflicting facts:
“First: That the box was placed in the safe the night before, and in the morning was gone; and that, besides the manager, he was the only one who could have opened the safe and taken it. And,
“Second: That, of course, he knew his own innocence.”
The only alternative, then, was that Mr. Black had been mistaken in thinking he had returned the box to the safe.
Grasping at this possibility, Jack argued on. How could the manager have been mistaken? Overlooked the box, say because of its being covered by something?
“Why it may be there yet!” exclaimed Jack hopefully. And a few minutes later, relieved from his wire for lunch, he hurriedly descended again to the manager’s office.