"What do you make of that?" asked Jack, handing him the paper.

"Not very much," answered the judge, looking it over. "There seems to be a smudge of dirt on it, that is all."

"Nor I," chimed in the officer. "Nothing there."

"Looks to me like finger marks," said Rand.

"That's it, exactly!" cried Jack excitedly. "Look at it this way!"

"I see," said the judge, "some one has left the impression of a dusty hand."

"It was a small hand, too," went on Jack, "not much bigger than mine."

"That seems right, too," a.s.sented the judge, "but what do you make of it?"

"It was a boy or a small man who made it," continued Jack.

"That's logical," agreed the judge, "but--"

"That may be," criticized the officer, "but I don't see that it leads anywhere."

"One minute," returned Jack, "his hand was dusty because he came in through a dusty way."

"Plato, thou reasoneth well," laughed the judge, "but we are still up against the original puzzle. What was that way?"

"How long since these windows have been opened?" asked Jack, going to one of the windows that looked on the wall of the next building.

"Not in years, I think," answered the judge. "Why?"

Without replying Jack opened one of the windows and looked out; then going to a second he did the same.

"You don't think that they came in that way, do you?" questioned the officer.

"What do you expect to find, Jack?" asked Rand.

"There you are!" he cried triumphantly, when he came to the third window; "there is where they got in!"

"How do you make that out?" demanded the judge.

"See there!" replied Jack, "this window sill is almost free of dust, while the others have half an inch or so on them. It was rubbed off of this one by some one climbing through; see, there is the print of a hand---"

"By the shade of c.o.ke, I think you are right!" exclaimed the judge, "but how in the world could any one get up to this window?"

"A boy might work his way up between the walls," answered Jack.

"Lots of boys could do it."

"I guess you have hit it," a.s.sented the officer. "Then the boy opened the doors and the others walked in as easily as if they owned the place. A man with one eye could see it now."

"And went out the same way," concluded the judge. "But why did they need to make such a mystery of it?"

"Wanted to give us something to think about, I guess," hazarded the officer. "Perhaps they wanted to make it look like an inside job.

Looks as if there were two or three men and a boy mixed up in it.

That's a due, anyway, and I will send word around the country to look out for them."

"Do you think that they came from around here?" asked Rand.

"Don't think so. I don't think we have any one here smart enough to pull off a job like that. h.e.l.lo, what now?" as Jack, acting upon a sudden thought, rushed from the room. "What is he after now?"

"I don't know, I'm sure," answered Rand. "Just thought of something, I guess. He often does that when he has an idea strike him."

"Here he comes back," said the officer a moment later, when Jack was heard bounding up the stairs. "I wonder what he has got now?"

"Found something more?" questioned the judge, when Jack came into the room with a rush.

"Found these between the buildings," replied Jack, showing a thin steel wedge and a small steel cold chisel. "It just happened to strike me that they might have forgotten something, so I took a look around and I found these."

"Some of the tools they used on the safe," said the officer, taking them. "Nice bit of work they are. It wasn't any burglar who made them. Now, if we could find where they were made we might get on the track of these fellows."

"Why, I saw one just like that in Wilson's blacksmith shop the other day," observed Rand.

"Wasn't just like it, was it?" asked the officer.

"Looks like the same one," replied Rand, taking the chisel in his hand.

"Guess they wouldn't look so much alike if they were together,"

demurred the officer, though he noted it down with the thought, "That's clue worth following."

"See if you can find anything else," suggested the judge, but a careful search about the office failed to reveal any more clues, and the boys finally went off to see, as Jack expressed it, what they could pick up on the outside.

"Come in again, Jack," said the judge when the boys were leaving, "always glad to see you. You have cleared up part of the mystery, anyhow. You are so much better a detective than we are," he added laughingly, "that I don't know but what we shall have to put the case in your hands."

"Oh, it wasn't anything, judge," responded Jack, "just putting two and two together."

CHAPTER XI

FORMING THE PATROL

"Don't you think," began Pepper.

"Why not, Pepper?" asked Rand.

"What objection is there to our thinking?"

The four boys were, a couple of days later, on their way back to the town from the river, where they had been for an early morning swim.