“Leave it to you?”
“Well, I expect I can get back your pencil as easily as you can, if they’ve got it. You’re sure they have got it?”
“I’m certain Master Coote took it; certain as I stand here. What they’ve done with it among them I can’t say.”
“Well, don’t be in a hurry. I’m a monitor, you know, and it’s as much to my interest to follow the thing up as to yours. If you’ll take my advice, you won’t be in a hurry to prosecute. Wait a week.”
“Very good, sir,” said the bookseller, to whom it was really a relief to postpone final action for a day or two, at least. If Pledge, meanwhile, should succeed in bringing the culprit to book, it would still rest with Mr Webster to decide whether to make an example of him or not Pledge departed, and the bookseller turned to dust his shop out for the day. In this occupation he had not proceeded far, when his brush, penetrating into a crack in his counter, caused something within to rattle. Being a tidy man, and not favouring dust or dirt of any sort, even out of sight, he proceeded to probe the hole in order to clear away the obstruction, when, to his amazement and consternation, he discovered, snugly lying in the hollow, the lost pencil-case!
Mr Webster’s first thought was, “Artful young rogues! They’ve brought it back, and hidden it here to escape punishment!”
And yet, when he came to think of it, all the dust in that hole could not have settled there during the last half-hour; nor—and he was sure of this—had either of the boys, on their last two visits, been anywhere near that side of his shop.
After all, he had “run his head against a stone wall,” and narrowly escaped ruining himself as far as Templeton was concerned. For he knew the young gentlemen of that school well enough to be sure, after a blunder like this, that the place would soon have become too hot to hold him.
Mr Webster positively gasped at the thought of his narrow escape, and forgot all about Pledge, and the culprit, and the culprit’s friends, in his self congratulation.
About mid-day, however, he was suddenly reminded of them all, by the vision of Dick darting into the shop.