I made an amazing discovery.
“Lookit!” I yipped, holding up a roll of greenbacks that I had found in the leg’s hollow stomach.
Yes, sir, it was real money. Not one-dollar and two-dollar bills, either, but tens and twenties—dozens and dozens of them, rolled tightly together. [[182]]
CHAPTER XVII
BACK TO THE ISLAND
In unscrewing the marked leg of the lock tender’s old fashioned piano, it had not been the intention of my curious companion to run off with it. For he had no right to do that. It was stealing, sort of. Certainly, as he admitted to me later on, he wouldn’t have taken the leg out of its owner’s house if he had known that it was full of money.
He had been led to the piano leg out of curiosity. Having seen the Harmony Hustler turn it, he had wanted to turn it. That, he had concluded, was the way into its secret.
But whatever scattered ideas he and I may have had bearing on the leg’s probable secret, I can truthfully state that our discovery of the money was a smashing surprise. We hadn’t dreamed of a thing like this. And had we made the discovery of the roll of greenbacks while in the house the chances are that we would have dropped the leg in a hurry. For it would have [[183]]been our natural thought that here was the piano owner’s hoardings. The piano leg was his savings bank.
But it was a mighty lucky thing, as we found out later on, that we did sort of run off unintentionally with the piano leg, to learn, when our excitement in our escape had somewhat subsided, of its surprising contents. For in the act we saved the money from falling into the killer’s thieving hands. More than that we probably saved a man’s life.