ook. Mechanically I nudged the
stuff away with the torch itself. What lay there turned me cold. It was
the 1920 diary!

My fingers relaxed; the flashlight fell with a thump, as I let out an
exclamation of dismay. A sleepy voice inquired from the bed,

"Hi, you Jerry! What you up to in here?"

For answer, I dragged out the book, went over to the bed, and switched
on the reading lamp there. Worth scowled in the glare, and flung his
arms up back of his head for a pillow to raise it a bit.

"Yeah," blinking amiably at the volume. "Meant to tell you. Found it
to-day when I was down in the repair pit at the garage. It had been
stuck in the drainpipe there."

"And I suppose," I said savagely, "that if I hadn't come onto it now,
you'd have burned this, too."

"Don't get sore, Jerry," he said. "I saved it," and he yawned.

I had an uncontrollable impulse to have a look at that last entry, which
would record the bitter final quarrel between this boy and his father.
No difficulty about finding the spot; as I raised the book in my hands
it fell open of itself at the place. I looked and what I saw choked
me--got cross-wise in my throat for a moment so no words could come out.
I stuck the book under his nose, and held it there till I could whisper.

"Worth, did you do this?"

The last written page was numbered 49; on it was recorded the date,
March sixth; the weather, cloudy, clearing late in the afternoon; the
fact that the sun had set red in a cloudless sky; and it ended abruptly
in the middle of a phrase. The leaf that carried page 50 had been torn
out; not cut away carefully as were those leaves in the earlier book,
but ripped loose, grabbed with clutching fingers that scarred and
twisted the leaf below!

He shoved my hand away and stared at me. For a moment I thought
everything was over. Certainly I could not be a very appealing sight,
standing there sweating with fear, my hair all stuck up on my head where
I'd clawed it, shivering in my nightclothes more from miserable
nervousness than from cold; but somehow those eyes of his softened; he
gave me one of the looks that people who care for Worth will go far to
get, and said quietly,

"You see what you're doing? I told you I didn't steal the book, so that
clears me in your mind of being the murderer. Now you're after me about
this torn-out page. If I'd torn it out and stolen it--you and I would
know what it would mean."

"But, boy--," I began, when he suffered a cha