find clipping. Are the facts straight and have the
missing bonds turned up? If not, don't you want me to run down and
find them for you? Should like to meet an authenticated ghost.
Wouldn't be a bad Sunday feature article. Give it my love. Is it a
man or lady? Things are also moving nicely in New York--two murders
and a child abducted in one week.

"How are crops?
"Yours truly,
"T. P.
"Wire me if you want me."

The clipping was headed, "Spook Cracks Safe," and was a fairly accurate
account of the ha'nt and the robbery. It ended with the remark that the
mystery was as yet unsolved, but that the best detective talent in the
country had been engaged on the case.

I tossed the letter to Radnor with a laugh; he had already heard of
Terry's connection with the Patterson-Pratt affair.

"Perhaps we couldn't do better than to get him down," I suggested; "he's
most abnormally keen at ferreting out a mystery that promises any
news--if any one can learn the truth about those bonds, he can."

"I don't want to know the truth," Radnor growled. "I'm sick of the very
name of bonds."

And this had been his attitude from the moment the detective left. My
own insistence that it was our duty to track down the thief met with
nothing but a shrug. Another person might have suspected that this
apathy only proved his own culpability in the theft, but such a
suspicion never for a moment crossed my mind. He was, as he said, sick
of the very name of bonds, and with a person of his temperament that
ended the matter. Though I did not comprehend his attitude, still I took
him at his word. There was something about Rad's straightforward way of
looking one in the eye that impelled belief. As I had heard the Colonel
boast, a Gaylord could not tell a lie.

The things a Gaylord could and could not do, were, I acknowledge, to a
Northern ethical sense a trifle mystifying. A Gaylord might drink and
gamble and fail to pay his debts (not his gambling debts; his tailor and
his grocer); he might be the hero of many doubtful affairs with women;
he might in a sudden fit of passion commit a murder--there was more than
one killing in the family annals--but under no circumstances would his
"honah" permit him to tell a lie. The reservation struck me somewhat
humorously as an anti-climax. But nevertheless I believed it. When Rad
said he knew nothing of the s