Tom was the first one to speak up.
“I was asleep at the switch,” he said, talking more to himself than to us, “not to have suspected it.”
Scoop turned quickly.
“Not to have suspected what?” he inquired.
“Last Friday noon,” our new chum told us, “that man came to our back door peddling books. And that same night some one tried to steal the talking frog. Don’t you see the connection, fellows? The soap man is a spy of Gennor’s. That’s why he’s hanging around here, peddling books one week and soap the next. His peddling is just a blind.”
We were excited.
“For almost two weeks,” Tom told us, “the [[53]]sway-backed horse has been stabled in the deserted mill. I saw it there and wondered whose animal it was. But I never connected it with the book agent or suspected that its owner, a spy of the enemy’s, was hiding in the upper part of the mill, watching our house.”
Scoop was thinking.
“Posselwait,” he murmured, repeating the soap man’s name. “Ajax Posselwait. Um.…” He started down the road under a sudden idea. “Come on, fellows,” he grinned. “We’ll go over to Mrs. Kelly’s house and sell her some Bubbles of Beauty.”
I laughed when he said that. For Mrs. Kelly, who lives in the country, is one of the plainest-looking women you can imagine. She has a fat, freckled face and red hair. Her husband, an old friend of Dad’s, was killed in a runaway the year I started to school.