You get my father to abandon this detective plan, and we'll buckle down together and root out the truth about the robbery." "Well," I promised, "I'll see what I can do; but as the Colonel says, five thousand dollars is a good deal of money to let slip through your hands without making an effort to get it back.

You and I will have to finish the business if we undertake it." "We will!" he assured me.

"We can certainly get at the truth better than an outsider who doesn't know any of the facts.

You switch off the old gentleman from putting it in the hands of the police and everything will come out right." He went off actually whistling again.

Whatever had been troubling him for the past two weeks had been sloughed off during the night, and all that remained now was the danger of detection; with this removed he was his old careless self.