schoolmates was attempting to play a practical joke upon him.

"What's the idea?" he had said. "Why don't you come in the front door
like a human being?"

He had expected an answer in harmony with his question, but to his
surprise the person in the window had immediately scrambled out, jumped
down five feet to the ground and had lost no time in running out of
sight around the corner of the building. Fred Harper had peered out of
the window, still thinking that he had been the victim of a prank, and
had not noticed the loss of his silver sailing trophy until he had
turned on the electric lights and had seen that the place where it stood
on the mantelpiece was vacant. He had then dashed out of the dormitory
in the hope of intercepting the fugitive as he crossed the campus, but
no one was in sight except his schoolmates returning from Lincoln Hall.
To these he reported his loss, and a dozen of the Ridgleyites made a
hurried search of the campus; they investigated all the shaded corners
and unlighted doorways but found nothing that in any way offered a clew
to the identity of the mysterious thief.

Within a week a dozen other thefts had been reported, and no little talk
went the rounds of the school. Poor Jerry, the grizzled old-timer, who
for years had been general helper to Slocum, the head janitor, was an
object of suspicion in the eyes of some of the newcomers at Ridgley.
There was no doubt about it, Jerry did have a most fearsome cast of
features. Mr. Stevens, the English master, once remarked that he
looked like an "amiable murderer." It was an apt description. Jerry
had an expansive smile, but it was bestowed only upon those
Ridgleyites--masters and pupils--who, for some subtle reason, loomed
high in his esteem. All others he glowered upon with an expression
ferocious and uncompromising. It was said that Doctor Wells was head of
the school six months before he gained the reward of the smile that
Jerry bestowed on the elect. But Jerry's heart was in the right place,
and the older members of Ridgley School laughed to scorn the suggestion
that he had any connection with the thefts.

"I'd as soon suspect my own father as Jerry!" said Snubby Turner, "but
that gives me an idea."

What the idea was he revealed to no one except Jerry himself. For some
reason Jerry had taken a great liking to the genial Snubby, and when he
received a call from that young man down in his basement room, his
seamed features took on an expre