n general pointed in that direction. I didn't believe, at
first, that your neighbor up there by the lake was anything more than one
of these vacation tourists that often go trapsing 'round, even if he
wasn't just a chap doing some shooting out of season. But I'm pretty
well satisfied now that a lot more than ever _I_ suspected has been going
on. Listen here!"

With this Link took from between the leaves of a notebook a neatly folded
clipping from a newspaper. Clearing his throat, while he opened the
clipping and smoothed it over his knee, he proceeded to read aloud.

The newspaper item was an Associated Press dispatch dated from ----, the
home city of the Longknives Club. Its substance was that Lewis Grandall,
teller of the Commercial Trust & Banking Company of that city, was
missing from his home. His absence was supposed to be on account of an
investigation the Grand Jury had been making in connection with certain
city contracts in which he had been interested, not as an officer of the
bank, but personally. The disappearance of Grandall, the dispatch stated,
had caused a small run on the bank and general uneasiness among the
depositors and stockholders. This had later been quieted by a signed
statement from the directors stating positively that the company's
interests were not involved in any of the missing teller's personal
business affairs.

"From which it would seem to a man up a tree that one certain Grandall
was finding Opal Lake atmosphere good for his constitution," remarked Link
Fraley as he finished reading. "But," he went on, "it looks to me a lot
more as if he had come up here for his health, so to speak, than to
hunt for a bag of the coin of the realm that somebody stole three years
ago. The point is, that if the twenty thousand dollars that the road
builders should have got, but didn't, was put through a nice, neat and
orderly system of being stolen here and there till it all got back to
Grandall again, he ain't been letting it lie around the woods and drawin'
no interest nearly three years now."

"By ginger! I knew that fellow at the clubhouse was Grandall, all right,"
spoke up Paul Jones. "And you must have hit the nail on the head when you
told us in the first place that Nels Anderson was mixed up with him in
cheating that whole army of men out of their pay," the boy added briskly.

"That doesn't dovetail with what we already know about Murky getting the
money first and then Slider taking it from h