“Signs?” asked Nick.
“Not our signs,” said Chick, “though they seem to look as if there had been an attempt to make one. But, chief, I’ll bet my life that this is the same chalk we use.”
Nick bent down over the spot, and saw that the pavement was made of red brick; that it would have been difficult to have made one of the signs that they used between them, and that in this case the marks only seemed to have been hastily made without any form whatever.
He stood up erect, looking at Chick.
“Could those marks have been made by Ida?” asked Nick.
“I am guessing that they were,” said Chick. “Anyhow, I gave Ida a piece of that chalk, and told her she ought to always carry it with her, for she could not know how useful it might become.”
“Let’s look a little farther,” said Nick.
“Wait a minute,” said Chick. “If any one comes, play drunk.”
Backing up against a tree, Chick suddenly lifted that fine, manly voice his friends knew he had, in a popular song of the day, that rang out on the night air as clear as a bell.
He had sung but a verse, when two men suddenly appeared at the corner beyond them, say a hundred feet away, and Nick began to urge him to come home and not make a holy show of himself in the street, saying that they’d have the cops down on them if he didn’t stop it.