“Yes, I knaow. But he hed very special business this last time. Naow look at this telegram.”
The two took the oblong sheet, and read:
“New York—Oct. 21. 942 A.M. Unexpectedly easy sailing. Found clue to money almost without looking. Fancy now must been sixteen instead ten. Hope return to-night. Ansdell.”
“Well, still I am in the dark,” John said, after reading and re-reading the dispatch. “What is it all about? I suppose you understand it.”
“I’m beginnin’ to see a leetle ways threw th’ millstone, I think, myself,” replied Beekman. “But it’s all so uncert’n yit, I don’t want to say nothin’ thet I can’t back up later on.”
Seth too had been busily pondering the dispatch, and he said now, with a flushing face: “I know what you think! You and Ansdell have got an idea there was foul play!”
“Well, yes, it ain’t much more’n an idee, yit;” assented Beekman.
“What do you base your idea on?” demanded John, full of a nameless, growing fright lest there might be something further which Seth’s confession had not revealed.
“Jest you wait one day more,” said the Boss of Jay County, grimly, “one day more ’ll dew. Then I miss my guess ef we ain’t in shape to tell yeh. Fust of all, there’s got to be a post-mortem.”
John’s impulse was to say that he and Seth had already agreed upon this, but a second thought checked his tongue.