IN WHICH DICK FINDS LUKE MASLIN IN BAD COMPANY AND OVERHEARS A SHADY
SCHEME.
“Tramps!” ejaculated Dick, in some dismay. Then he added, in a
perplexed tone: “What are we going to do? They’ve got possession of the
only decent room in the house.”
“Maybe there’s only one of them,” suggested Joe, hopefully.
“Even so; he has as much right there as we have, if it came to an
argument.”
Joe scratched his head and admitted the fact.
“We’ve simply been trespassers on the property ourselves from the
start,” said Dick.
“Well, what are we going to do about it?” asked Fletcher as Dick pulled
up under the trees by the side of the road a short distance from the
gate.
“Wait here till I come back,” and the young driver handed the reins to
his chum and descended from his perch.
Vaulting the rail fence, he approached the old building by a flank
movement across the weed-encumbered yard.
He picked up a large, flat stone and placed it beneath the window.
Stepping on it, he peered through the dirt-begrimed window into the
room.
A fire was burning in the grate, and gathered about the stove were
three figures, two of whom were boys.
They were not tramps.
The man, who had at that moment a bottle glued to his lips, was bearded
and wore a coarse fur cap.
As the man dropped the flask into a pocket of his jacket he made some
remark and lifted the stove-lid with a stout twig.
The end boy reached for some broken branches, rose and began to stuff
these into the grate.
The glare of the blaze shone full in his face, and Dick gave a gasp of
astonishment.
He recognized the freckled features of Luke Maslin.
“Gee whiz! What’s he doing here?” muttered the boy outside.
Naturally his curiosity was greatly excited.
It was a strange place and strange company for the son of Silas Maslin
to be found mixed up with.
What did it all mean?
“I never knew Luke to be away from home before, and here he is thirty
miles from Cobham’s Corner,” murmured Dick. “There’s something queer
about it.”
The cold night wind whisking about the building soon made the young
watcher’s position one of discomfort.
“They act as if they intended to stay a while,” he said to himself.
“I’d like to discover what their intentions are.”
Dick thought a moment; then he went round to a door which he knew
opened on an entry that communicated with the kitchen.
He removed his shoes and cautiously entered the house.
The door at the end of the entry leading into the kitchen was partly
open, and through this door the boy plainly heard the sound of
conversation.
He tiptoed his way to the door, and through the crack between the upper
and lower hinges he got a good view of the intruders.
As the trio spoke in their ordinary tones, Dick heard every word they
said.
“I didn’t agree to go into any such thing as this when I left home,”
said Luke, in a tone of plain remonstrance.
“It ain’t what you agreed to do; it’s what you got to do, now you’re
with us,” spoke up the whiskered man, with a fierce glance at the
storekeeper’s son, evidently bent on intimidating him.
“What you kickin’ about, Luke,” interjected the other youth, whom Dick
thought he identified as a certain bad boy of Walkhill village named
Tim Bunker. “A feller that’ll steal five dollars off his old man ain’t
got no reason to grumble when he’s showed how he kin make twenty times
that much without any risk to mention.”
The speaker leaned forward and squirted a stream of tobacco juice into
the fire, while the bearded man nodded his approval.
“I didn’t steal five dollars,” said Luke, doggedly. “I borrowed it from
the till because I needed it, and I was going to put it back when I got
it again.”
“Ho, ho! That ain’t the way you give it to me first. You told me how
slick you got away with it, ’cause you wanted it to buy a gun you saw
advertised in a Syracuse paper, and your old man wouldn’t give you the
price. Then you said the old man found out he was a fiver to the bad
and charged Dick Armstrong with stealing it. He skipped out ’cause he
couldn’t prove he didn’t take it and didn’t wanter go to jail for what
he didn’t do. And you ain’t heard nothin’ from him since, have you?”
“No, we haven’t,” growled Luke.
“After doin’ all that damage, now you want to preach us a sermon
ag’inst helpin’ ourselves to a nice little bunch of dough that’s just
waitin’ to be put in circulation after lyin’ in old Miser Fairclough’s
strong-box these forty years. He’s a peach, ain’t he, Mudgett?”
appealing to the man beside him, who at that moment was taking another
drink from his flask.
“A born chump,” admitted Mudgett, wiping his lips with the cuff of his
jacket. “I’m disappointed in him, Tim.”
“So’m I. Thought he had more backbone. And it’s such an easy snap, too.
Just like pickin’ up money, ain’t it?” grinned the Bunker boy.
“That’s what it is,” replied Mudgett, complacently. “It was a clever
idea of mine to send that old miser a letter telling him his brother,
who lives in Walkhill, was dead and had left him the bulk of his money.”
“That’s right,” grinned Bunker. “Fairclough has been waitin’ for his
brother to die for twenty years or more. It’s the only thing that could
have got him away from his house.”
“And now all we’ve got to do is to walk in and help ourselves,” said
Mudgett.
“That’s all,” winked Tim Bunker. “It’s almost a shame it’s so easy.”
The young rascal chuckled and thumped Luke on the back.
“Brace up,” he cried to Mr. Maslin’s graceless son. “You’re one of us
now in this scheme, and Mudgett won’t hear of you backin’ out at the
last minit.”
“But I don’t want nothing to do with it,” protested Luke.
“That doesn’t make no matter of difference whether you want to or not,”
said Mudgett, in a threatening voice. “You’re in this thing right up to
your neck, for you delivered that letter to Fairclough himself, and he
won’t forget that when he comes back and finds out what happened while
he was away. You can’t go back to Cobham’s without the certainty of
being arrested on sight.”
The bearded man stated the case with such brutal frankness that Luke
turned white and began to whimper.
“Shut up, will you!” thundered Mudgett, reaching over and grabbing Luke
by the collar. “Stop your snivelling, or I’ll break every bone in your
body.”
The storekeeper’s son was frightened into silence.
“When do we start, Mudgett?” asked Bunker, fishing a cigarette from his
pocket and lighting it.
“We’ll start now, I guess. It must be close on to nine o’clock. There
isn’t much danger of anyone seeing us on the road after that hour.”
Dick, who had been an amazed listener of the foregoing conversation,
concluded it was time to withdraw.
When he got outside he found the light had been extinguished in the
kitchen, and he took that as a sign that the trio were on the move.
Fearing his presence might be detected in the yard if he attempted
to recross it to the fence, he crept under a corner of the porch and
waited.
Mudgett and the two boys appeared almost immediately and walked out to
the road.
Dick was in a sweat lest they might discover the team where it had been
waiting a good half-hour for him to return.
But they turned up the road without looking in the other direction,
and when Dick reached the gate he could just make out their figures
disappearing in the distance.