Gus jumped as if he had been shot. He could hardly bring himself to believe that he had heard aright. He had guarded his secret as closely as a boy could. Having no intimate friend to assist him in keeping it, he had not lisped a word of it to anybody; but it had leaked out after all, and Sam seemed to know all about it.
“Tex——” said Gus, drawing a long breath and leaning heavily on the counter, “as!”
“Yes! You have laid your plans to skip out and leave us all in the lurch, but you shan’t do it! I must have what you owe me first; and when you get the money on that check, I will tell you how much I want of it to pay me for the trouble of keeping your secret. I know you didn’t get the money to-day.”
“How do you know that?” stammered Gus, growing more and more astonished and bewildered.
“That’s my business!” was the satisfactory reply.
Just then a customer came in and moved up to Sam’s side of the store, and this gave Gus an opportunity to collect his scattered wits, and think over what Sam had just told him. How in the world had the latter learned his secret? was a question that Gus asked himself over and over again, but without finding any satisfactory answer. It was too deep a mystery for him to solve just then, for he was so utterly confounded that he could not think at all.
“You haven’t started for Texas yet,” and “when you get the money on that check, I will tell you how much I want of it to pay me for the trouble of keeping your secret,” were the words that were constantly passing through the boy’s mind, and he could not drive them out long enough to decide what he ought to do. If he had any means of finding out just how much Sam knew, he might be able to make up his mind to something.
“But I don’t see how I am to find that out,” thought Gus, walking nervously up and down the store, “for of course he won’t tell me, if I ask him. The whole thing bangs me completely. I know I haven’t said a word that would lead him or anybody else to suspect anything; but he has got hold of it somehow, and wants a part of my hundred dollars to pay him for keeping his mouth shut. He shan’t have it! No matter what happens, he shan’t have it, for I don’t know how much I shall need to pay my expenses.”
Both the clerks were kept busy that afternoon, Gus at his counter and Sam in unpacking and arranging a new supply of goods that arrived about one o’clock. Gus could not keep his mind on his work, for he was continually thinking about this last piece of bad luck, and wondering how he should go to work to “pump” Sam, in order to find out just how much the latter knew about his contemplated movements. Once during the afternoon, when the store was clear of customers, he had occasion to pass through the warehouse, where Sam was at work, breaking open the boxes in which the new goods were packed. The latter was at work in his shirt-sleeves, and his coat lay wrong side out upon one of the boxes. As Gus passed by it, something caught his eye. He noticed that there were several letters sticking out of the inside pocket of the coat, and that they were all enclosed in brown envelopes, except one. That envelope was white, and there was something about it that looked familiar. Gus drew nearer to it, and was astonished almost beyond measure to see that it bore his own name in Ned Ackerman’s handwriting!
The whole mystery was made perfectly plain to Gus at once. The letter in question was the last he had received from his friend in Texas—the one in which the check was sent. On the day it arrived, Gus had kept it by him all the afternoon, devoting every leisure moment to reading it, and, instead of taking it home with him at night, as he meant to have done, and as he thought he had done, he left it on the long shelf behind his counter, and Sam had found it there. He had been mean enough to read it, too; and then, instead of putting it back where he found it, he kept it, intending to use it to extort money from Gus.