"Have you found that anything is missing from here?" inquired Mrs.
Farnum, while Mr. pollard searched and explained at the same time.
The inventor now halted before his desk, rummaging.
"Yes," he answered, dryly, though with a slight quaver in his voice. "The thief found and departed with the drawings of a most important new device, originated by Benson and his friends and finished by myself. I'd rather lose a large sum of money than those drawings."
At about this time Jacob Farnum was prowling carefully about the spot that Mr. Emerson had named. He waited there, in hiding, for a long time, ere Messrs. Melville and Emerson came along. He let them pass, then followed slyly, in accordance with Broughton Emerson's directions of that afternoon.
"Now, what on earth does this all mean?" wondered Jacob Farnum, unable, despite his curiosity, to regard this expedition without a feeling of considerable disgust with himself. "Confound it, it's unmanly, this spying on someone else! It makes me feel like a rubber-soled detective, a thug or a labor picket trying to 'warn' a workman with a lead-stuffed club! Yet Emerson is a gentleman, or I've been fooled. It must be all right, I suppose."
The night was dark, and the moon not yet quite due to rise. When it did come up above the horizon it was certain to be more or less obscured by the clouds hanging there.
While Messrs. Melville and Emerson stepped off along the road, Jacob Farnum was forced to keep behind bushes and other natural objects of cover, which increased the boatbuilder's uneasy feeling that he was, doing something well nigh dishonorable.
At last, however, the two capitalists stepped off the road, concealing themselves in a clump of bushes as though by previous understanding.
"It looks like a prearranged meeting of some sort," reflected the boatbuilder, after having crept close enough to be able to see and to overhear.
Five minutes went by. Then Don Melville, narrowly escaping running into
Mr. Farnum, appeared suddenly before his father and Mr. Emerson.