On a warm afternoon Tom, Nicky, Cliff, Bill and Margery stood in the old, rickety shack, its corrugated metal sides almost ready to drop apart.
“You can see for yourself,” said the superintendent. “It looks as if they’ve done some explorin’, at that.” He had been told a good many facts concerning the adventures the chums had been through, the cause for their trip, and some deductions concerning the solution of the mystery of the missing gold dust which Bill, Jack and the chums had figured out.
“They certainly have been hunting for those papers Margery hid,” Tom said. “I guess we are beaten. If they find the papers they will destroy the partnership agreement father got, and change the deeds in some way, and then, of course, neither Margery nor I can do anything.”
“Well, they’ve torn up the old floor boards under the stove,” said Cliff, and Nicky echoed his statement. Jack, who came in, stared out of the dusty, grimy window, with its bit of rag stuffed into a broken pane, and did not seem to care much what was going on. He appeared to be trying to get his newly awakened memory to reveal some further pictures of his past.
“Let’s see if there was anything under the floor—or a place for it,” Bill suggested, but Margery touched his arm.
“I’ve been trying to remember something,” she said, “and I have. Tom, Nicky, Cliff—Bill—” she beckoned them close and whispered. They stared at her.
“The stove isn’t where it was when I hid the—papers!”
“No!” gasped Tom. “Then—where was it before?”
She pointed to another corner.
“The paper may still be under there, then. They haven’t torn up those boards.” Tom started across the floor. He stopped. Nicky was scratching his left ear. At the same instant Margery touched Bill’s arm and they all became very quiet, except Margery who, in a whisper, gasped into Tom’s ear: “Now do just as Bill said to do if Mort or Henry appeared.”