“How do you know that?”
“Oh, I know,” the boy laughed.
They all went back to their beds, but it was some time before several of them resumed their interrupted slumbers. Tess, the innocent cause of it all, fell off to dreamland with Ruth’s arm around her in the rather cramped quarters, for the bunks were not intended to accommodate two. But once Tess was breathing deeply and regularly, Ruth slipped back to her own apartment, pausing to whisper to Agnes that Tess seemed all right now.
Ruth remained awake for some time, her mind busy with many things, and mingled with her confused thoughts were visions of the mule driver, Hank Dayton, signaling to some tramp confederates in the woods the fact that all on board the Bluebird were deep in slumber, so that robbery might be easily committed.
“Oh, but I’m foolish to think such things,” the Corner House girl told herself. “Absolutely foolish!”
And at last she convinced herself of that and went to sleep.
The next morning Neale and Mr. Howbridge, with Hank to help, made a careful examination of the soft earth on the river bank under Tess’s window. They saw many footprints, and the stub of a cigarette.
But the footprints might have been made by themselves when they had moored the boat the evening before. As for the cigarette stub, though Hank smoked, he said he never used cigarettes. A pipe was his favorite, and neither Mr. Howbridge nor Neale smoked.
“Some one passing in the daytime before we arrived may have flung the stub away,” said the lawyer. “I think all we can do is to ascribe the alarm to a dream Tess had.”
The little girl had forgotten much of the occurrence of the night when questioned about it next morning. She hardly recalled her dream, but she did insist that a man had looked in her window.