Vern tried to think quickly. “But—don’t you want——”
“No, I don’t!” Creighton stood up, glaring fiercely. “No! No! I want the Blosses to lose that game. Never mind why! That’s none of your business. You want to hold your job. All right. Throw that game. If you don’t, the first thing I’ll do the following Monday morning will be to fire you.”
“But I haven’t done anything to warrant——”
“Bah! What are you doing here this time of night? Do you think the police will lake your word before they take mine? You’ve got folks somewhere. How will they like it when they hear you’ve been hauled into a police station for being a petty thief? I can do it all right, and I will—if you don’t throw that game. Think it over. Don’t try to double cross me, because it can’t be done. That’s all.”
Uneasy and troubled, Vernon Judd spent his trip to the boarding house trying to figure out a solution for the mystery. What was the tangled undercurrent? Was Creighton doing all this simply to win a few dollars by betting? The notion was ridiculous. Then what was the answer?
On the table in the front hall of the boarding house lay a note from his father that thickened his difficulties. It had come by the late mail. It ran:
Dear Vern: Glad to learn from your letter that you’ve been doing so well. As long as you have held out over five months already, I am going to make this the test. Win or lose this Bloss job—that is the deciding factor in our wager as to the stuff of which you are made. There is no reason why you should be fired from Bloss & Company, and you must not let yourself be fired. Stay with them till the six months are up—or don’t come back.
Freeman Judd.
Vern crumpled the letter in his hand. A pretty mess he had gotten into! All his notions of honesty and sportsmanship recoiled at the thought of throwing the game. Yet if he did not——