“The rascal shall suffer for it if we catch him!” he announced, with a grimness that would have delighted Aaron Rushton and confirmed him in his admiration for the doctor’s sternness. “I’ll dismiss him. I’ll disgrace him. I’ll make such an example of him that nothing of the kind will ever happen in this school again.”
His eyes flashed under his shaggy brows, and the fist he brought down on the desk clenched till the knuckles showed white.
“But what could have been the motive?” he asked, as he grew more composed. “Of course, we can understand why some one might want to know the questions that were going to be asked. But why did they take the whole package? One slip would have done as well as fifty. Then, too, they might know that if the whole package were taken, you would simply call the examination off, as soon as you had missed them, and make out a new set of questions. Then they’d have had all their trouble and risk for nothing.”
“It is curious,” answered Raymond. “If the idea was simply to get advance information to help some boy through with the test, the only way to do it was to take one copy and leave the rest of the slips there, trusting me not to notice that the package had been tampered with.
“My theory is that he meant to do this, but perhaps was frightened away by some sound, and didn’t have time to do it. In that case, he may take out one of the slips and try to put the package back to-night. The examination doesn’t take place till day after to-morrow, and he may figure that I haven’t missed them. As a matter of fact, it was only by the merest chance that I did miss them to-day.”
“Well, let us hope that he will try it,” said Doctor Rally. “We’ll have Sluper stay in your office all night and nab him if he comes.”
Sluper came back from his trip to town and reported that Kelly knew nothing of the matter. Nor had he heard of anything among the boys that might throw light on the mystery.
He kept a careful watch that night in Professor Raymond’s office, but without result.
The next day there was something in the atmosphere of Rally Hall that made every one feel that a storm was brewing. The air was electric with signs of trouble. Nothing had been allowed to leak out, but any one could see that something was the matter, though without the slightest idea of what it was.
Doctor Rally was more snappy and gruff than they had ever seen him, and Professor Raymond went about his work in a brooding and absent-minded way, that, with him, was most unusual.