“Anyway, you’ve got your two bucks back.”
“A lot I care about that,” I said; “jiminy, I’ve got something better than two dollars, and that’s friends, you can bet.”
Then I showed him the stain on the page of the book and we both sat there gaping at it and thinking.
“I’m hanged if I know,” Westy said; “it would take Tom Slade to dope that out.”
“Maybe Skinny was looking at the book and shut it with the two dollar bill inside,” I said.
“How about the stain?” Westy asked me.
“Jingoes, it’s a puzzle,” I said.
All of a sudden he laid the book down open and laid the bill on it and then he laid the oar-lock on the bill. Then he just sat there like as if he was studying. Pretty soon he said, “We have to get a new copy for the library, anyway. Do you mind if I make another stain on this one? I’ve got a sort of an idea.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
So now I’ll tell you just what he did and you’ll see how it solved the puzzle. And, believe me, you’ll have to admit that Westy’s a pretty smart fellow. If you have an old book you don’t care anything about, you can even try it and you don’t even need an oar-lock. Westy turned to a new place in the book and then he laid the bill down on the right hand page. Then he laid the oar-lock on the bill. “That’s just exactly what you did when you laid the bill down in such a hurry that night you were fixing Skinny up. You laid it on the open book just like that—see?”