“You didn’t do it, did you?” asked Charlie Ford, rumpling up his red hair. Charlie was not at all ashamed of his red hair. His sister Mazie called it “auburn,” but Charlie himself stuck to plain “red.”
“Do it? I should say not!” cried Harry. “I didn’t come within a mile of it, and our folks just laughed at me.”
“And yet how easy Professor Rosello did it,” observed Henry Blake.
“Yes, and he didn’t have any machinery or truck on the stage to do it with, as he had for his other tricks,” remarked Tom Simpson. “All he had was a plain slate, same as the little kids use in our school.”
“It must have been a trick slate,” said Harry. “That’s the only way I can account for the figures getting on it.”
“No, there wasn’t any trick about the slate,” declared Charlie Ford. “I was sitting right up front, and he passed the slate to me first, to look at. There wasn’t a sign of a number on it when I had it.”
“And you handed it right over to Mr. Burton to hold, didn’t you?” asked Tom.
“Yes; and Mr. Burton held it until the figures came out on it—under the handkerchief, of course. It sure was a good trick.” Charlie shook his head in wonderment.
“I’d like to know how it was done,” said Henry Blake. “But I don’t s’pose he’d tell us if we asked him. He’s in town yet. I saw him around the hotel when I came past a little while ago.”
“It isn’t very likely he’d tell us how he did it,” said Harry. “That’s the way he makes his living—by doing magical tricks—and it isn’t to be supposed that he’d give away his secrets. But all the same——”