“If they’d only left us our railroad tickets!” mourned Fred.
“That was the dirtiest trick of all,” put in Mouser. “You can understand why they took the money and jewelry. But they probably don’t have any idea in the world of using the tickets.”
“Likely enough by this time they’ve torn them up and thrown them into the fire,” Pee Wee conjectured.
“Don’t speak the word, ‘fire,’” said Bobby. “If we hadn’t seen the light of it through the window, we wouldn’t have gone in there at all.”
“It was all my fault,” moaned Fred. “What a fool stunt it was of me to want to stop there anyway.”
Bobby could easily have said, “I told you so,” but that was not Bobby’s way.
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault,” he said. “It was just our hard luck. We might have done it a thousand times and found only decent people there each time.”
“Lucky I gave that dime to Betty this morning anyway,” grunted Fred. “That’s one thing the thieves didn’t get.”
The remark struck the boys as so comical that they broke into laughter. It was the one thing needed to relieve the tension. It cleared the air and all felt better.
“Talk about looking on the bright side of things,” chuckled Pee Wee.