“Look out, Jane, it might be a house snake, though I didn’t know we ever had them here.”
“’Tisn’t any snake—it’s a mouse nest. There are four baby mice—I can feel them. I’m going to put them in my pocket.”
The children were so excited over the mice that they left the papers to Dick Harding.
He carried them to the window and ran through them hastily.
“Pshaw, nothing but old newspapers—wartime papers most of them, with long lists of men killed and wounded. Ugh—they certainly are gruesome!”
Dick dropped the pile and turned to have a look at the mice.
“Say,” he added a moment later, staring at the minute heap of paper and its tiny occupants which Chicken Little had deposited on a chair, “there’s writing on some of those scraps! They aren’t all newspapers. Are you sure you found everything there was, Chicken Little?”
Jane wasn’t sure, so Sherm took the lantern and went back to look. He found nothing, however, except a few scraps of paper.
In the meantime Dick Harding was running over the newspapers more carefully, taking them one at a time to see if any letters or documents could have been tucked away among them. He straightened up with a sigh of disappointment as he finished.