“Not so you could notice—that is, not intended as such,” corrected the boy with a grin as he took a cup of steaming coffee from Alex’s hand and sat back in his chair with a look of contentment on his face.
“Now what about it?” asked Alex, when the cup was empty.
“Well, when I ran up, the man gave a vicious yank and got something away from the boy. It looked like, a leather bag. The boy let out a great cry and fell flat down on his face. I saw his face just a minute, looking like a snowflake in the mud, it was so white and so small.
I thought the thing which had been taken from him must mean a lot, to cause him to look like that, and so I left him lying there and chased on after the man. It looked to me like a case of highway robbery, and I just ached to get my hands on the man.”
“What is that in your hand?” asked Case, indicating a brown object which was half concealed in Clay’s coat-sleeve, but which dropped down to his palm, and lay with an end resting there.
“Never you mind!” Clay answered, with a chuckle as he drew the object up the sleeve and out of sight. “Just wait a minute. I overtook the man, who couldn’t run at all, but lumbered along like an old cow, and tripped him up by— Oh, you know how to drop and catch a fellow by the ankles! He went down kerflop in the muck, where wagons had broken the pavement and cut the earth into a puddle. I didn’t stop to see if he was hurt, but picked up the thing I had seen him take from the boy and started back with it.
“When I got back to the place where I had left the boy, with his pale face in the dirt, he wasn’t there, so I just brought the object along with me, for safe keeping, of course,” he added, with a laugh as he drew a brown leather bag from his sleeve and held it up to the light.
“That’s certainly a brown leather bag!” exclaimed Case. “What’s in it?”
“Guess!” was the provoking answer.
“It must be something valuable, with all the fuss that’s been made over it,” Alex suggested. “Open up!”