“No, I don’t think you could. Don’t fall down, now, when I tell you. It is Luke Maslin.”
“Luke Maslin!” exclaimed Joe, stopping stock still in the middle of the road.
“Yes, Luke Maslin,” repeated Dick, enjoying his friend’s astonishment. “He’s in pretty bad company.”
“Why, what’s he doing ’way down here, thirty miles from the Corner?”
“That’s what surprised me at first, but from what Tim Bunker said in the kitchen while I was taking it all in from behind the door, I’ve got a pretty clear idea of the way Luke has got himself into this pickle. It seems he did take that five dollars out of his father’s money-drawer that I was accused of stealing.”
“I guessed he was the thief,” nodded Joe, conclusively.
“Then he foolishly boasted of it to Tim Bunker, thinking he had done a clever thing. Now it looks as if Tim took advantage of this knowledge to force Luke to join him and the man Mudgett in the enterprise they have in hand without letting him know exactly what they intended to do.”
“What makes you think he didn’t know?”
“Because it looked to me as if they’d just been explaining the real situation to him before I came on the scene, for he was kicking against it like a mule.”
“He was, eh?”