“I’ve addled my wits in vain,” Billy Walker confessed, dolefully. “Until there shall have been an accumulation of new intellectual energy on my part, I shall be able to offer you no theory as to the actual hiding-place so ingeniously selected by the late lamented Mr. Abernethey—to whose ashes, peace! While I am thus recuperating, however, you, my children, shall not be idle—oh, by no manner of means. On the contrary, you shall be very busy, indeed, after the method prescribed by inexorable logic.”
“I’m beginning to think that a little luck just now would help more than a lot of logic,” Saxe declared, gloomily.
“Listen to the oracle, anyhow,” David Thwing urged, in his always kindly voice. “You see,” he went on whimsically, “Billy is a specialist in thinking: he doesn’t do anything except think. So, we must respect his thinking. Otherwise, we could not respect our friend at all.” David’s big, protruding eyes, magnified by the heavy lenses of his eyeglasses, beamed benignantly on his three companions.
The one thus dubiously lauded grunted disdainfully.
“Panegyrics apart,” he resumed, in his roughly rumbling tones, “there appears at this time but one course of procedure. To wit: Tomorrow morning, you must start on an exhaustive search of the whole house. Hitherto, you have made only a superficial examination. This has failed miserably. Now, the scrutiny must be made microscopic.”
There could be no gainsaying the utterance. As the speaker had declared, it was the command of the inevitable logic presented by the situation. The hearers gave grumbling assent to the wisdom of the suggestion—with the exception of Roy Morton, who, curled lazily in the depths of the morris chair, was staring vacantly at the elaborate carving of the wainscoting, and smoking an especially fat Egyptian cigarette. Now, he suddenly sat upright, and his gaze was turned on his companions, who had looked up at his abrupt movement. Roy’s eyes were hard; his chin was thrust forward, in the fashion characteristic of him when the spirit of combat flared high, which, to tell the truth, was rather often. He spoke with apparent seriousness, but Thwing, who had been through some adventures of a violent sort in his company, noted that a significant excess of amiability in his tones, which was always to be heard on critical occasions, was now wanting.
“There’s only one simple and sure way to success,” Roy declared authoritatively. “We must burgle.”
There were ejaculations of astonishment from his curious hearers.
“It’s this way,” he explained blandly, fixing his steel-blue eyes grimly on the wondering Billy Walker. “We must rifle the lawyer’s safe. Of course, the lawyer whom Abernethey employed has exact instructions as to how to come on the treasure. All we have to do, then, is to break into his office, carrying an oxy-acetylene blow-pipe, cut open the safe, find the secret instructions, copy them off, and afterward duly retrieve the gold at our leisure; besides,” he concluded, with great complacency, “I know a first-class safe-blower, to help us on the job. I did him a favor once. He’ll be glad to do me a kindness, in turn.”
A chorus of protests came from Saxe and Billy, to which, at last, with much apparent reluctance, Roy yielded, and definitely, though sulkily, withdrew his ingenious predatory plan. But David, the while, chuckled contentedly, for he was apt at a jest—and, too, he had known Roy more closely than had the other two.