“Foiled again!” I said, just as the paper slipped down. “Blackbeard, the pirate chief, refuses to give up the paper telling where the treasure is concealed. Sir Harris gnashes his teeth in rage!” That was just the way it was in the photo-play.
All the while, Pee-wee was very carefully moving the pencil so as to lift the paper, and each time the paper slipped down again. And all the while he kept waving us back. At last he got hold of the corner of it with his fingers and hauled it out.
“Ha, ha!” I said, rolling my voice kind of-you know. “Sir Harris wrenches the tell-tale paper from——”
“It’s dated before you were born!” Pee-wee fairly shouted. “It’s a letter! Now you see! You said it was a time table. Look what it says in it—look!”
Gee whiz, he couldn’t have half read it when he handed it to me. There wasn’t any envelope, only an old sheet of paper, all yellow, and it had been folded so long that it almost fell apart where it was creased. It was filled with writing in lead pencil and it was so old and dirty that I could hardly read what it said. I guess Pee-wee would have stumbled through it himself, except that one thing that his eye happened to hit first of all, knocked him out.
“Now you see!” he said, all out of breath, he was so excited; “now you see! Look there!”
He pointed the pencil to one part of the letter where it said, bags of gold.
“And look there, too,” he panted out, all the while pointing with the pencil, “‘dropped in his tracks with a mortal wound.’ So now; you think you’re so smart, with your wheelbarrows and sewing machines! You don’t—you don’t find bags of gold in time tables and commutation tickets—do you? You make me tired! This is a—a—deep laid plot, that’s what it is. You know what mortal wounds are, I hope!”
“All right, Kid,” I said; “you win. Only don’t stab me a mortal wound with the lead pencil, and give me a chance to read it.”
“If—if—if bags of gold aren’t romance,” he shouted; “then, what is? Tell me that.”