old piece of rolling junk has had a past; I admit it. It’s been through adventures.”

dropped in his tracks

“My mother doesn’t believe in adventures, because somebody gets dead,” little Alf piped up in that funny way he has.

“Well somebody got dead here, all right,” I told him. “I wish we knew all about it.”

“Look—look here!!” Pee-wee fairly yelled. “Here’s the hole!”

Look—look here!

Here’s the hole!

He had pulled a little wooden button, something like a cork, out of the woodwork at the side of the car, just a little below the window-sill, and was wriggling his finger in a little round hole that the daylight showed through.

“Now you see!” he shouted. “Talk about dark pasts——”

“You’re right, Kid,” I said; “we have to take off our hats to this old car. It has Blackhead’s old schooner Mary Ann beaten twenty ways. You win.”

Mary Ann

“We’ve got to—you know—what do you call—it—fathom the mystery,” he said.

you

“I guess there isn’t any mystery, Kid,” I told him. “But there must have been some wild scene, all right.”

Honest, I can’t tell you which had me more interested, that little round hole or the letter. Anyway, it seemed as if one proved the other. I could just see how the bullet had come in there and hit that fellow’s arm, and kind of, I could see him leaning out of the window and I could see one of those fellows dead and the other one trying to limp away, and the train starting with two men dead on it, and another one dying. You bet, Pee-wee was right; if that old car could only talk….

“It happened before we were born,” Pee-wee said.

“Yop,” I said; “jiminy, you can’t stop thinking about it, can you? This very same old car that we’re sitting in was rattling along maybe a mile a minute, to get to a place where there was a hospital.”

Gee whiz, we forgot all about measuring for the lockers, and just sat there in the car, gaping around. It seemed kind of different than 

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