“But some one must keep watch here all the time,” Bob declared. “You see whoever did it may try it again, and we may get a chance to catch him, although I doubt it. I hardly think he’d dare try it a second time.”
Sam readily agreed to watch through the night, saying that he would have to be up a good part of the night anyway to give the horses medicine as he had the past two nights. He said that he had had a good long nap that morning and would not miss the sleep.
By this time it was beginning to get dark and they knew that within a few minutes the men would be coming in from the cutting. So the boys decided to go to the office and talk over this latest development while waiting for the supper horn.
“It ought not to be a very difficult matter to trace that arsenic,” Bob declared as he lit the kindling in the office stove. “You see white arsenic is not very common around here, and if it was bought in Skowhegan or any other small town, whoever sold it would be pretty sure to remember it. Of course if the fellow sent to Boston or to some other big city for it, it would complicate matters. But I’m counting on the idea that he did not think that it would be found out.”
“This is going to be real detective work, isn’t it?” Jack said as he filled the stove with wood.
“It’s a job that’s apt to take a long time,” Bob declared soberly. “You see it means canvassing all the drug stores within a big radius of here; that is, unless we hit on the right one early in the game.”
Just then the horn called them to supper, but as soon as the meal was over they returned to the office where they sat and discussed plans until Tom returned shortly after ten o’clock.
“What luck?” Jack asked, as the foreman pushed open the door.
“Sure and it’s jest as I expected. Nary a horse fer love nor money. But I got yer father on the ’phone and he’s a goin’ ter see what he kin do,” and Tom threw himself into a chair in front of the stove. “And what ye byes bin doin’?” he asked.
They told him, first of their visit to Big Ben, and the Irishman chuckled with delight as he learned of the man’s discomfiture.