His telephone bell rang and Bobby turned to it quickly.

"h.e.l.lo, Chalmers!" he began, then laughed. "Beg pardon, Agnes; I thought it was the mayor's office;" he apologized, then listened intently. There were a few eager queries, and when Bobby hung up the telephone receiver it was with great satisfaction. "I haven't seen as much fun in sight since I began my fight on Stone," he declared. "Miss Elliston, who has developed a marvelous new capacity for finding out other men's business secrets through their women folk, has just telephoned me the results of her last night's detective work. It seems that Silas Trimmer, one of the heavy backers of the Middle West Construction Company, has just negotiated a loan upon his stock in the mercantile establishment of Trimmer and Company, my share of which was known as the John Burnit Store until Trimmer beat me out of control. I understand that Trimmer has mortgaged everything to the hilt to go into this waterworks deal."

The bell rang again. This time it was Chalmers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: I'd be tickled black in the face to make good any day]

"Say, Chalmers," said Bobby, "I want you to get me some sort of a legal doc.u.ment that will allow me to take possession of and examine all the books, papers and drawings of the city engineer's department, including the waterworks engineer's office.... Yes, you can, Chalmers," he insisted, against an obvious protest. "There is some legal machinery you can put in motion to get it, and I want it right away. Moreover, I want you to secure me somebody to serve the writ and to keep it quiet."

Then he explained briefly what had been partly discovered and partly surmised. Next Bobby sent for Jolter and laid the facts before him, to the great joy of that aggressive gentleman. Then he called up Biff Bates, and made an appointment with him to meet him at Jimmy Platt's office in half an hour. He would have telephoned Platt, but the engineer had no telephone.

CHAPTER XXVIII

BIFF RENEWS A PLEASANT ACQUAINTANCE AND BOBBY INAUGURATES A TRAGEDY

"Is Mr. Platt in?"

Biff stood hesitantly in the door when he found the place occupied only by a brown-haired girl, who was engaged in the quiet, unprofessional occupation of embroidering a shirtwaist pattern.

The girl looked up with a smile at the young man's awkwardness, and felt impelled to put him at his ease.

"He's not in just now, but I expect him within ten or fifteen minutes at the outside. Won't you sit down, Mr. Bates?"

He looked at her much mystified at this calling of his name, but he mumbled his thanks for the chair which she put forward for him, and, sitting with his hat upon his knees, contemplated her furtively.

"I guess you don't remember me," she said in frank enjoyment of his mystification, "but I remember you perfectly. I used to see you quite often out at Westmarsh when Mr. Burnit was trying to redeem that persistent swamp. I am Mr. Platt's sister."

"No!" exclaimed Biff in amazement. "You can't be the kid that used to ride on the excavating cars, and go home with yellow clay on your dresses every day."

"I'm the kid," said she with a musical laugh; "and I'm afraid I haven't quite outgrown my hoydenish tendencies even yet."

Biff had no comment to make. He was lost in wonder over that eternal mystery--the transformation which occurs when a girl pa.s.ses from fourteen to eighteen.

"Don't you remember?" she gaily went on. "You gave me a boxing lesson out there one afternoon and promised to give me more of them, but you never did."

Biff cleared a sudden huskiness from his throat.

"I'd be tickled black in the face to make good any day," he urged earnestly, and then hastily corrected the offer to: "That is, I mean I'll be very glad to--to finish the job."

Immediately he turned violently red.

"I don't seem to care as much for the accomplishment as I did then,"

observed the girl with a smile, "but I do wish I could learn to swing my nice Indian clubs without cracking the back of my head."

"I got a medal for club swinging," said Biff diffidently. "I'll teach you any time you like. It's easy. Come right over to the gym on Tuesday and Friday forenoons. Those are ladies' mornings, and I've got nothing but real cla.s.sy people at that."

The entrance of Mr. Platt interrupted Biff just as he was beginning to feel at ease, and threw that young gentleman, who always appropriated and absorbed other people's troubles, into much concern; for Mr. Platt was hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked from worry. His coat was very shiny, and his hat was shabby. The dusty and neglected drawing on his crude drawing-table told the story all too well. The engineering business, so far as Mr. Platt was concerned, seemed to be a total failure. Nevertheless, he greeted Mr. Bates warmly, and inquired after Mr. Burnit.

"He's always fine," said Biff. "He had me come up here to meet him."

"I should scarcely think he would care to come here after the unfortunate outcome of the work I did for him," said Mr. Platt.

"You mean on old Applerod's Subtraction?"

"You couldn't hardly call it the Applerod Addition, could you?"

responded Jimmy with a smile. "That was a most unlucky transaction for me as well as for Mr. Burnit."

Biff looked about the room comprehendingly.

"I guess it put you on the hummer, all right," said he. "It don't look as if you done anything since."

"But very little," confessed Mr. Platt. "My failure on that job hurt my reputation almost fatally."

Biff gravely sought within himself for words of consolation, one of his fleeting ideas being to engage Mr. Platt on the spot to survey the site of Bates' Athletic Hall, although there was not the slightest possible need for such a survey. In the midst of his sympathetic gloom came in Mr. Ferris and Bobby.

"Jimmy, how would you like to be chief construction engineer of the new waterworks?" asked Bobby, with scant waste of time, after he had introduced Ferris.

Mr. Platt gasped and paled.

"I think I could be urged, from a sense of public duty, to give up my highly lucrative private practice," he said with a pitiful attempt at levity, though his voice was husky, and his tightly clenched hand, where the white knuckles rested upon his drawing-table, trembled.

"Don't build up too much hope on it, Jimmy; but if what we surmise is correct you will have a chance at it," and he briefly explained.

"We're going right out there," concluded Bobby, "and I want you to go along to help investigate. We have to find some incriminating evidence, and you'd be more likely to know how and where to look for it than any of us."

It is needless to say that Jimmy Platt took his hat with alacrity.

Before he went out, with new hope in his heart, he turned and shook hands ecstatically with his sister. Still holding Jimmy's hand she turned to Bobby impulsively:

"I do hope, Mr. Burnit, that this turns out right for Jimmy."

Bobby turned to her abruptly and with a trace of a frown. It was a rather poorly trained office employee, he thought, who would intrude herself into conversation that it was her duty to forget, but Biff Bates caught that look and stepped into the breach.

"This is Nellie, Bobby--that is, it used to be Nellie," he stated with a quick correction, and blushed violently.

"It is Nellie still," laughed that young lady to Bobby, and the puzzled look upon his face was swiftly driven away by a smile, as he suddenly recognized in her traces of the long-legged girl who had been always present at the Applerod Addition, who had ridden in his automobile, and had confided to him most volubly, upon innumerable occasions, that her brother Jimmy was about the smartest man who ever sighted through a transit.

In the hastily constructed frame office out at the waterworks site, Ed Scales, pale and emaciated and with black rings under his eyes, looked up nervously as Bobby's little army, reenforced from four to six by the addition of a "plain clothes man" and Dillingham, the _Bulletin's_ star reporter, invaded the place. Before a word was spoken, Feeney, the plain clothes man, presented Scales with a writ, which the latter attempted to read with unseeing eyes, his fingers trembling.

"What does this mean?"

"That I have come to take possession," said Bobby, "with power to make an examination of every sc.r.a.p of paper in the place. Frankly, Scales, we expect to find something crooked about the waterworks contract. If we do you know the result. If we do not, the interruption will be only temporary, and you will have very pretty grounds for action; for I am taking a long shot, and if I don't find what I am after I have put myself and the mayor into a bad sc.r.a.pe."

Scales thrice opened his mouth to speak, and thrice there came no sound from his lips. Then he laid a bunch of keys upon his desk, shoving them toward Feeney, and rose. He half-staggered into the large coat room behind him. He had scarcely more than disappeared when there was the startling roar of a shot, and the body of Scales, with a round hole in the temple, toppled, face downward, out of the door. It was Scales' tragic confession of guilt. They sprang instantly to him, but nothing could be done for him. He was dead when they reached him.

"Poor devil," said Ferris brokenly. "It is probably the first crooked thing he ever did in his life, and he hadn't nerve enough to go through with it. I feel like a murderer for my share in the matter."