“Who was anxious to get it?” Tom wanted to know.
“Captain Hawkesbury, sir. He come to me the day after I’d taken the basket from his room, and asked to have all his litter brought back. He said he’d mislaid some valuable documents. I didn’t let on anything, but I gave him a bag of papers where I had emptied his basket. That wasn’t among ’em, though,” and he pointed to the pasted deed on Tom’s bed.
“I’d taken that out beforehand,” Flack said, with a very human wink. “And as it had your name on it before it had Captain Hawkesbury’s, I thought you had the best right to it.”
“I have,” Tom said. “Thank you very much.”
He was fired with new energy now. If the document was valuable enough to cause the old army officer to make such an effort to get it back, Tom was glad he himself had it again.
“The captain was quite put out when he brought back the papers he’d looked over,” went on Flack. “He asked me if I was sure there weren’t any more. I gave him all the refuse I had in the cellar, for I only burn the papers once a week. He went over it all, and pretty dusty and dirty he got, too. But he didn’t find it. I took good care of that.”
“I’m glad you did,” Tom replied. “It’s quite a complicated matter,” he went on. “Captain Hawkesbury is mistaken in thinking this paper is his. It belongs to me.”
The young cadet did not want Captain Hawkesbury to stand in too bad a light before the janitor, and that was why he made the qualifying statement he did. There was time enough yet to prove certain points.
Flack went out, leaving Tom in a rather bewildered state of mind. One fact stood out clearly. The document must have suddenly assumed new importance to justify Captain Hawkesbury’s making such an effort to regain possession of it. He had torn it up in a fit of anger and thrown it in the basket.
“Evidently he was going to let it stay there,” Tom reasoned. “Then something came up that made him want to get it back. Now what could that have been? And why is this paper of any value?”