“Sure, we understand—don’t we, Tom?” said Roy.
Tom said nothing his eyes were fixed on the girlish trinkets which lay in confusion on the bed.
“I think it was too mean of them,” Mary said.
“I’d ask papa to give them my ruby out of his safe if they’d only bring that back!”
“Where did Tom go?” asked Westy, noticing that Tom had left the room.
“I guess maybe he’s afraid he might meet Mr. Temple,” whispered Dorry Benton. “I don’t believe he wants to see him, and I don’t blame him.”
Tom had gone downstairs and around the house to the pantry window. Nothing was farther from his thoughts than John Temple, but in those few minutes upstairs something had been said which recalled to his mind something else which had been said in the same half-doubtful, half-trustful voice, many weeks before. “Will you promise to toss it back?” And out of the past he heard a rough, sneering voice answer, “Sure, didn’ I tell yer?” The words, “If they’d only bring that back,” seemed almost to counter-felt that haunting voice out of the past, and they stung Tom Slade like a white-hot coal.
The rubber ball, which had been the subject of the half-pleading question, had gone the way of most rubber balls, and the memory of the episode would have gone the way of all such memories in the hoodlum mind, except that something had happened to Tom Slade since then. He was familiar now with Paragraph I, Scout Law, and was presently to show that he had pondered on other paragraphs of that law as well.
Outside the pantry window was a nail keg and on this Tom sat down. It was in a jog formed by an angle in the back of the house, and there was not much danger of being seen from any of the rear ground floor windows, for these were all of heavy cathedral glass. The ground beneath them was littered with nails and shavings; a scrap or two of colored glass and some little bars of lead lay strewn about where the men had been working.
Presently he heard voices and guessed that his companions were leaving. Then he heard the honk of an auto horn and caught a fleeting glimpse of a gray car rolling up the private way toward the porte-cochere. He heard other voices, the excited greetings of Mrs. Temple and Mary, and the sonorous and authoritative tones of John Temple.