“The way who planned it?” inquired Laurie.
“Well, the way we planned it, then.”
“Hold on! Whose idea was it in the first place, partner?”
“Oh, don’t be so fussy! Anyway, you couldn’t have done it without me!”
“I never said I could. But you’ve got a lot of cheek to talk about the way you—”
Polly clapped her hands to her ears. “I’m not being told how it was done, and I do want to know. Go on, Ned.”
“Well, it was done like this. You see, Laurie was tied to the chair, and I was hiding out at the other end of the garden. Then Lew Cooper put the screen around the chair.” Polly nodded. “Then I started toward the platform, and every one turned to look at me.” Polly nodded again. “Well, right behind the platform was the bulkhead door into the cellar. When Cooper shouted to me to come on, two fellows who were on the stairs waiting pushed the door open, grabbed Laurie, chair and all, and whisked him down cellar. Then they put another chair, just like the first one, behind the screen, and when Cooper pulled the screen away, there it was, just as if Laurie had somehow untied himself and—and vanished! Of course, if any one had been looking at the screen instead of at me just then, he might have seen what was going on, although it was pretty dark behind there and he mightn’t have. Anyway, no one was, I guess. The trick depended on the—the faint similarity between us. Lots of fellows who knew us were on to it, but the folks from the village were puzzled for fair!”
“Indeed they were,” agreed Polly. “They just couldn’t understand it at all!”
“It would have been better,” mused Laurie, “if we could have taken the screen away and showed the empty chair before Ned came into sight; but there didn’t seem to be any way of doing that. We had to have the people looking the other way, and we had to work quick. As it was, I was half killed, for Wainwright and Plummer were in such a hurry to get the other chair up there that they just dumped me on my back! And then they ran upstairs through the kitchen to see the end of it, and I was kicking around down there for five minutes!”
“Well,” said Ned, a few minutes later, “I’m not finding out what to do with this.” He opened one hand and exposed some bills and two ten-cent pieces folded into a wad. “Your mother says she won’t take it, Polly—that she didn’t understand we were going to pay her for the cream-puffs. Gee, we wouldn’t have thought of asking her to make them for nothing!”