to walk he was not sure he would ever turn back; he
would just walk on and on into a kinder environment than this.

After all, it is impossible to walk in that fateful way in a crowded
city thoroughfare. Besides, one passes so many confectioners with their
mingled temptation and disgust. Pudge rode on the trolley as far as
the city limits. Here there was softer ground underfoot and a hint
of melancholy in the fields. A flock of crows going over gave the
appropriate note.

Off there to the left, set back from the road among dark, crowding
trees, stood a mysterious house. Pudge always insisted that he had
known it for mysterious at the first glance. It had a mansard roof and
shutters of a sickly green, all closed; there was not a sign of life
about, but smoke issued from one of the chimneys.

Here was an item potent to raise the sleuth that slumbers in every boy,
even in such well-cushioned bosoms as Pudge Sheridan's.

He paused in his walk, fell into an elaborately careless slouch, and
tacked across the open country toward the back of the house. Here he
discovered a considerable yard fenced with high boards that had once
been painted the same sickly green as the shutters, and a great buckeye
tree just outside, spreading its branches over the corner furthest from
the house.

Toward this post of observation he was drifting with that fine
assumption of aimlessness which can be managed on occasion by almost any
boy, when he was arrested by a slight but unmistakable shaking of one of
the shutters, as though some one from within were trying the fastenings.

The shaking stopped after a moment, and then, one after another, the
slats of the double leaves were seen to turn and close as though for a
secret survey of the field. After a moment or two this performance was
repeated at the next window on the left, and finally at a third.

Here the shaking was resumed after the survey, and ended with the
shutter opening with a snap and being caught back from within and
held cautiously on the crack. Pudge kicked clods in his path and was
pretentiously occupied with a dead beetle which he had picked up.

All at once something flickered across the ground at his feet, swung two
or three times, touched his shoe, traveled up the length of his trousers
and rested on his breast. How that bosom leaped to the adventure!

He fished hurriedly in his pocket and brought up a small round mirror.
It had still attached to its rim a bit of the r