“Listen, Paul Bird! You’d better start using your head pretty soon. This detective agency has no place for weak sisters. We run a first-class, efficient detective agency, we do! Don’t we, Frank?” teased Lanky.
“Why kid me?” Paul stuck to his questioning.
“Oh, listen to him! Say, Mr. President, we’ll have to call this operative. He’s a mess!”
This had the effect of quieting Paul, who wondered what could be wrong with his question. Suppose Jed Marmette went to jail, what would become of the jewels?
“Youthful aide-de-camp to the world’s leading detectives, will you kindly notice that when Jed Marmette starts to jail we’ll have the little box of jewels safely back in Mrs. Parsons’ hands?”
Paul said nothing more, yet they had not answered his question for him. For his question must not, of course, include the knowledge which Jed Marmette did not have—that he had been seen burying the jewel box.
Quietly the Rocket drifted along for a while, the motor running slowly and smoothly, Frank making no effort to get back to Columbia in a hurry. He was trying to lay out a plan in his own mind, and held the boat to the center of the stream while he thought it all out.
“You know,” said Frank, speaking to Lanky more than to the other two boys, “those two fellows in the boat that night were the same two who were with Cunningham that same day when he tried to run us down.”
“Sure,” agreed Wallace instantly.
“Next, you remember they dropped a large box of some kind off the Speedaway when I swerved and struck them aft.”