“Oh!” Bob was connecting some things in his mind. “He came here one evening and demanded the money, and you gave him a parcel and then realized he didn’t give you a receipt. You tried to chase him on your motorcycle and got into an accident.”
“I thought you were watching, but I was too excited and upset to care,” agreed Griff. “Yes, I had borrowed from all the fellows I knew, and had scraped every cent out of my savings account, and I had the money. But he didn’t give any receipt, and when I finally got over the smash of the motorcycle and went to ask for it he declared I’d paid him with a package of wadded, folded paper and not money!”
“But it was money,” declared Bob. “Unless you changed it, because I caught you wrapping up something green the day I came into the engine assembling room.”
“It was money, all right enough,” Griff asserted. “But he wanted it twice. Well, I had promised my father that I wouldn’t go with that crowd any more, and I had been weak and went against my promise. So I couldn’t go to him about it.”
“If you had, and made a clean breast of it, he would have gotten you out of this scrape.” Bob had to say that much.
“I don’t think so!” Griff was morose. “He’s got so much worry on his mind about the plant and all that’s happened that he’s jumpy and nervous and suspicious and he’d throw me out of here, and maybe send me away from home. And I am trying to go straight. I will—I make a vow on that!—if once I can get out of this scrape. I’ve learned a lesson.”
“But that fellow at the roadhouse knows you’re afraid of your dad, I guess,” asserted Curt.
“Yes, and when I said I had paid the money——”
“I overheard that,” Al stated, and related what he had heard through the open office window at The Windsock.
“You fellows have been on the job!” There was a note of admiration in Griff’s voice, then he sobered and went on. “Yes, that fellow, out there, knows about me being afraid of Father, and he said if I didn’t have the money tonight, before midnight, he’d tell my ‘old man’ as he calls Dad. They’re opening a dance place and he said the cash was essential tonight.”