“Yes, I’m not doubting your word. Only it seems strange. Twice in a week my house has been entered. This time you must have driven the thief off.”
“That’s probably what happened,” Brad agreed. “I certainly rang the doorbell hard.”
“When your place was entered that other time—you really lost money?” Dan asked hesitatingly.
“Certainly, I did. More than two thousand dollars. I kept it in a tin box in a drawer of the dining room buffet.”
Brad and Dan were convinced that the money they had found in the church must belong to Mr. Merrimac rather than to the other claimants. But if such were the case, how could the box ever have been transferred to the church basement? And what had become of it since then?
“You may be receiving a call from the police any minute,” Dan warned the old man. “We called them and reported the thief.”
“Drat it, what did you do that for?” Mr. Merrimac exploded. “Haven’t I enough trouble without being pestered by officers who’ll ask me a hundred questions.”
“I’m sorry,” Dan apologized. “We didn’t know that nothing had been taken. We weren’t even sure that you might not have been slugged.”
“There! I shouldn’t have been so testy,” Mr. Merrimac said. “You did the right thing.”
Dan and Brad decided that nothing could be gained at the moment by speaking to the old man about the church building pledge. It would be far wiser, they thought, to bring up the matter at another time.