That is absolutely untenable. Rad is incapable of such an act in the
first place, and in the second, he was not in the house when the robbery
occurred."

"Ah! Then you know that? And where was he, pray?"

"That," said I, "is his own affair; if he did not tell you, it is
because it is not connected with the case."

"So! It is just because it _is_ connected with the case that he did not
tell me. I will tell you, however, where he spent the night; he drove to
Kennisburg--a larger town than Lambert Corners, where an unusual letter
would create no comment--and mailed the bonds to a Washington firm of
brokers with whom he has had some dealings. He took the bag of coin and
several unimportant papers in order to deflect suspicion, and his
opening the safe the night before for the hundred dollars was merely a
ruse to allow him to forget and leave it open, so that the bonds could
appear to be stolen by someone else. Just what led him to commit the act
I won't say; he has been in a tight place for several months back in
regard to money. Last January he turned a two-thousand dollar mortgage,
that his father had given him on his twenty-first birthday, into cash,
and what he did with the cash I haven't been able to discover. In any
case his father knows nothing of the transaction; he thinks that Radnor
still holds the mortgage. This spring the young man was hard up again,
and no more mortgages left to sell. He probably did not regard the
appropriation of the bonds as stealing, since everything by his father's
will was to come to him ultimately.

"As to all this hocus-pocus about the ha'nt, that is easily explained.
He needed a scapegoat on whom to turn the blame when the bonds should
disappear; so he and this Cat-Eye Mose between them invented a ghost.
The negro is a half crazy fellow who from the first has been young
Gaylord's tool; I don't think he knew what he was doing sufficiently to
be blamed. As for Gaylord himself, I fancy there was a third person
somewhere in the background who was pressing him for money and who
couldn't be shaken off till the money was forthcoming. But whatever his
motive for taking the bonds, there is no doubt about the fact, and I
have come to you with the story rather than to his father."

"It is absolutely impossible," I returned. "Radnor, whatever his faults,
is an honorable man in regard to money matters. I have his word that he
knows no more about the robbery of those bonds than I do."

The det