“But I did see him,” protested Perky excitedly. “I saw his head right up there at the curve of the balcony. Had some sort of a cap on and he was peeking over the railing!”
“You imagined it,” said Merriwell. “Anyhow, if you did see someone where the dickens did he get to?”
Davis couldn’t answer that, though, and finally he acknowledged that he might have been mistaken; that since the Gibson affair he had had spies on the brain, so to speak.
The Duke was in the throes of composition that evening, having at last settled down to the writing of the themes, when Cotton, who had disappeared a half-hour before with a vague mention of the library, returned unostentatiously with a book. The Duke glanced up incuriously, his mind on his work, favored Cotton with a brief and somewhat hostile stare, and was in the act of returning his gaze to the paper before him when a detail of the other’s attire caught his eye.
“Did you know you’d torn your coat there at the pocket?” he asked.
Cotton pulled his coat quickly around and looked at the rip.
“Yes, I—I did that this morning,” he answered carelessly. “I caught it on a door knob.”
But The Duke was already immersed again in his labor, scowling at the sheet and muttering as he wrote.
The next day the janitor found a small round window in an alcove off the running-track in the gymnasium swinging open. Not having heard of Davis’s hallucination, however, he merely fastened it again and thought nothing of it.