Touching at practically the same spot where they had landed before, all the boys climbed out and started for the broad lawn of the Parsons estate, Lanky and Frank finding it much easier to make their way this time than during the darkness a few nights before.
Mrs. Parsons was on the lawn, directing the cutting thereof by a burly laborer who was operating a hand-powered lawn-mower. To Frank’s pleasant greeting, she replied:
“What is it that gives me the pleasure of this visit?” speaking very frigidly.
“Clarence Wallace and I have brought three of our friends along, Mrs. Parsons, this morning to see if there is anything we can learn here that might lead to the capture of those men who robbed you.”
“I think the police can do that perfectly well.”
“Perhaps they can,” Frank replied pleasantly. “But it so happens that two of us are decidedly interested in having something done at once.”
“I think something is being done,” she replied.
Frank saw that she had turned completely against him, for she had never been so cold before to him.
“If anything is being done beyond accusing honest boys of dishonest acts and motives, then I have not been informed, and I am much more interested in the information than even you are, Mrs. Parsons, for, you must remember that ‘he who steals my purse steals trash!’”
Whether the semi-quotation was lost on the woman Frank did not know, but he was afterwards to learn.