attention. "I honestly don't know," said he at last, "whether to take much stock in the story of the suit-case full of swag or not. But it does look as if things in general pointed in that direction. I didn't believe, at first, that your neighbor up there by the lake was anything more than one of these vacation tourists that often go trapsing 'round, even if he wasn't just a chap doing some shooting out of season. But I'm pretty well satisfied now that a lot more than ever I suspected has been going on. Listen here!" With this Link took from between the leaves of a notebook a neatly folded clipping from 44 a newspaper. Clearing his throat, while he opened the clipping and smoothed it over his knee, he proceeded to read aloud. 44 The newspaper item was an Associated Press dispatch dated from ―, the home city of the Longknives Club. Its substance was that Lewis Grandall, teller of the Commercial Trust & Banking Company of that city, was missing from his home. His absence was supposed to be on account of an investigation the Grand Jury had been making in connection with certain city contracts in which he had been interested, not as an officer of the bank, but personally. The disappearance of Grandall, the dispatch stated, had caused a small run on the bank and general uneasiness among the depositors and stockholders. This had later been quieted by a signed statement from the directors stating positively that the company's interests were not involved in any of the missing teller's personal business affairs. "From which it would seem to a man up a 45 tree that one certain Grandall was finding Opal Lake atmosphere good for his constitution," remarked Link Fraley as he finished reading. "But," he went on, "it looks to me a lot more as if he had come up here for his health, so to speak, than to hunt for a bag of the coin of the realm that somebody stole three years ago. The point is, that if the twenty thousand dollars that the road builders should have got, but didn't, was put through a nice, neat and orderly system of being stolen here and there till it all got back to Grandall again, he ain't been letting it lie around the woods and drawin' no interest nearly three years now." 45 "By ginger! I knew that fellow at the clubhouse was Grandall, all right," spoke up Paul Jones. "And you must have hit the nail on the head when you told us in the first place that Nels Anderson was mixed up with him in cheating that whole army of
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