f accepting the invitation for you all, as there is
nothing to do around here, and I have a hunch that something good will
come of it."

"I'll be glad to go. You know how much I like the town. I wouldn't care
if I never saw one again."

"It's all right, then. We'll start in the morning. I am more than
anxious to go now, especially as Billings tells me he has invited
several other people to be his guests."

"Who are they?"

"You remember the girl who slipped the note into my pocket in the St.
Louis station, and the young fellow with the pointed beard. Well, I saw
them both in town this morning. The girl ran away from me on the street,
jumped into a carriage, and drove away."

"There's nothing about you to cause a girl to run." Stella looked up at
Ted in a teasing way.

"That'll be all right," said he. "But a few minutes after I saw the
fellow with the pointed beard coming out of the private office of
Norcross, the president of the bank that was robbed of the forty
thousand dollars. He went by me like a rocket, as if he were afraid of
me."

"Sure it was he?"

"Positive. But the strange part of it was my interview with the banker.
He acknowledged that the bank had been robbed of the money, and
identified the bill dropped by Checkers in his flight, as one of the
shipment, but when I announced that it was a counterfeit, he went all to
pieces, and, after trying to bluff me into giving him the note, wanted
to buy it, asking me to name my own price."

"What does that mean, I wonder?"

"It means, that this case of the robbery and the murder of the express
messenger is not the simple thing I thought. There is a crime within a
crime."

"What in the world do you mean?"

"Just this, Norcross, the banker, is mixed in the crime, and Heaven only
knows how many more men quite as prominent as he. The express-robbing
syndicate is a strong one, and hard to beat."

"But you'll beat it yet. I know you."

"Thank you for your faith and encouragement, Stella. But it's going to
be a hard pull, and it will take all of us to do it."

"What do you think of it now?"

"My idea is, that the alleged forty thousand dollars was not real money
at all, and that Norcross was trying to double-cross the very men he was
standing in with."

"Still, I hardly understand."

"Well, Norcross agreed with the members of the syndicate to ship forty
thousand dollars to St. Louis, which was to be stolen en route by the
syndicate's own men. They