“Knock on wood.” Billy laughed.
“That’s right. There’s many a slip betwixt rail and tie. Run into town for a couple of days, boy, and see your mother. I’ll look after the house now.”
“Thank you. I—”
“Oh, and you needn’t say I am here.”
Billy was glad of the two days’ visit at home. It had never seemed so pleasantly dainty and quiet; and it was good to spend some time with his family when he was neither sleepy nor in a hurry. He called up some of “the kids” over the wire and began to feel young again. Sydney answered excitedly, and what he said took Billy flying across the town to see him, when he caught a glimmer of a clue to the mystery that had enveloped him all Summer.
“A Postal Telegraph kid I know saw Jim Barney go by one day,” Mumps began, “and that set the boy talking. ‘That’s a crooked one,’ he said, and then he told this story. He said that he took a letter for Kid Barney once late at night to a girl,—a mighty good-looker, he called her,—and the next morning he went to the same place to get another letter; and in both was something hard, a key he thought it was. This made me sit up, and I asked him where the girl lived, and he said East Street, somewhere in the seven hundred block.”
“That’s Erminie!” Billy burst out.
“Sure. And that letter had—”
“That letter was a forged one from me, and it ordered her to take the money and run away, and not let any one know where she was.”
“Jiminy! How do you know that much?”