Potts thinks there may be something in it."

His effort was to seem significant, but those things are apt to fail
with me.

"Oh, I see. Well, that's a good idea, Solon, but you and Mrs. Potts are
slow. Billy Durgin had the same idea last summer while the furniture was
being unloaded. He took a good look at some of those old pieces, and he
confided to me in strict secrecy that there were probably missing wills
and rolls of banknotes hidden away in them. It seems that they're the
kind that have secret drawers. Billy knows a case where a man touched a
spring and found thirty thousand dollars in a secret drawer, 'and from
there,' as Billy says, 'he fled to Australia.' So you can see it's been
thought of. Of course I've never spoken of it, because I promised Billy
not to,--but there's nothing in it."

"Bosh!" said Solon.

"Of course it's bosh. I could have told Billy that, but some way I
always feel tender about his illusions. You may be sure I've learned
enough of the Lansdale family to know that no member of it ever hid any
real money--money that would _spend_--and there hasn't been a will
missing for at least six generations."

"Bosh again!" said Solon. "It isn't secret drawers!"

"No? What then?"

"Well,--it's worse--and more of it."

"Is that all you have to say?" I asked as he stood up.

"Well, that's all I can say now. We must use common sense in these
matters. But--Mrs. Potts has written!" With this cryptic utterance he
stalked out.

There had been little need to caution me to secrecy. I was not tempted
to speak. Had I known any debtor of Miss Caroline's who would have taken
"Mrs. Potts has written" in payment of his account, it might have been
otherwise.

CHAPTER XXI

LITTLE ARCADY IS GRIEVOUSLY SHAKEN

Mrs. Potts had written. I had Solon's word for it; but that which
followed the writing will not cease within this generation or the next
to be an affair of the most baffling mystery to our town folk. Me, also,
it amazed; though my emotion was chiefly concerned with those gracious
effects which the gods continued to manage from that apparently
meaningless sojourn of J. Rodney Potts among us.

Superficially it was a thing of utter fortuity. Actually it was a
masterpiece of cunning calculation, a thing which clear-visioned persons
might see to bristle with intention on every side.

Years after that innocent encounter between an adventurous negro and an
amiable human derelict in the streets of