"Hello!" he cried, suddenly. "Say, Jack, look here! Here's a letter postmarked from Woodleigh. That's where you came from, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is!" cried Jack, on the alert, as always, at a sign of any sort from the town where he had spent his boyhood.
"I think we've got a right to open this," said Dick, "though looking at letters that aren't addressed to one is pretty small business, as a rule. However, when people do the sort of thing that these fellows so nearly got away with tonight they don't have a right to expect decent treatment from others."
He looked grave when he had finished reading.
"This letter seems to concern you, Jack," he said. "It's from a lawyer up there, and it's addressed to a man called Silas Broom, at the General Delivery window of the post office in the city here. It says that the boy Jack Danby, about whom Mr. Broom was making inquiries, left Woodleigh some months ago, and has since, it is supposed, been working near here. Now why does anyone want to know about you? And why does this fellow Broom, if that is really his name, have to hear this? He is a great scoundrel, whatever his name is."
"You quit callin' my husband names. Who are you, I'd like to know?"
The older woman emerged suddenly from the hut, in time to hear Dick's last words, and she faced him now like a fury, her arms akimbo, and her eyes snapping. She looked around suspiciously, too.
"Where's Silas?" she asked, angrily. "What have you done with him? Ain't those his clothes there?"
She snatched the clothes up in an instant. Before Dick, who was astonished by her appearance, could check her she had torn the coat from his hands.
"Silas!" she yelled. "Where are you, honey?"