“Hugh, I couldn’t begin to repeat what I heard. All of them were excited, and in dead earnest, too. Each one had suggestions to make that sometimes made my blood run cold. Their well-paying business has been closed up, you see, and that’s what makes them so bent on striking a blow to end this silly ‘racket,’ as they contemptuously call the uplift movement.
“And, Hugh, just as I said in the beginning, they’re actually planning to have a robbery committed, and manage it so that some of the stuff that’s taken will be found on a number of the scouts. Just how this is to be done they hadn’t fully settled; but it’s all going to be fixed this very night, so that before another forty-eight hours have passed the dirty game can be worked. Why, I never dreamed so dreadful a thing would come slap up against us scouts. They want the people of Oakvale to suspect us of being common, every-day thieves.”
“Don’t worry, Ralph,” said Hugh, firmly. “I don’t believe the game could have been carried out successfully at any time, even if none of us so much as suspected a thing. Now that you’ve warned us, why, it’s bound to fall flat. Mayor Strunk and the women of this town know the scouts too well to ever believe they’d disgrace their uniforms and honor badges by stealing.”
“Do you know, Hugh, while I lay there straining my ears like everything so’s not to lose much of what those plotters said, I was thinking what a bully thing it would be if the scouts could turn the tables on ’em.”
“You mean, Ralph, fix things so the fellows who actually did the robbery would be nabbed in the act—with the goods on—before they found a chance to deposit any of the plunder in the pockets of the scouts, or at their homes, where it would be found when a search started?”
“That’s what I had in mind,” confessed the other, eagerly.
“It would be just what they deserved,” declared Hugh, “and what some folks would call retribution. We would save ourselves a whole lot of trouble and explanations, and at the same time might get rid of an undesirable bunch of crooked people that Oakvale never would miss.”
“Of course you understand, Hugh, that I was so worked up by what I managed to hear, I felt nervous about staying too long, for fear those men found me out. I tell you they’re mad enough to do almost anything to us scouts. So I concluded it would be wise to creep back, and get out of that same window again before anything happened to me. This I proceeded to do, and say, I breathed free again when I found myself under the blue sky once more.”
“The last you saw of them they were still sitting in the old bowling alley place talking things over, eh, Ralph?”
“Yes, and figuring on how soon they could do that nasty job, too, Hugh. From all I heard they won’t let the grass grow under their feet before getting things moving.”