CHAPTER XI

When Tom entered the newspaper office after attending to the freight matter as well as several errands, he saw Brent sitting on a stool before a high table with a great bound volume of newspapers before him. His lanky legs were drawn up, his feet resting on a high rung of the stool, a pencil was over his ear, and his prosaic spectacles and studious air were so at odds with the adventurous role he had given himself that even sober Tom was fain to smile.

“Shhh,” said Brent, never looking up. “I have it; it was hiding in a Sunday edition. I crept stealthily through the Saturday issue and—”

“No fooling,” said Tom expectantly; “have you really found it?”

He stood at Brent’s side gazing at a heading which seemed to visualize to him the event which old Dyker had recalled in his rambling talk. The hazy reminiscence seemed brutally clear and definite now with this cold announcement before him. And as he read, not only the event was confirmed but the guilt fixed as well.

CRAZED YOUTH KILLS BENEFACTOR, the glaring heading read.

Tom glanced at the top of the yellowed sheet and saw that the issue was of a date fourteen years back. The thing had occurred before Temple Camp was dreamed of and when he was a hoodlum in Barrel Alley.

“Satisfactory?” said Brent in his funny way. Tom did not answer; he was too engrossed in reading.

“Henry Merrick,” the article ran, “was found murdered in his home yesterday. He had been struck with some blunt instrument while in his library and was lying partly under his writing table quite dead when the body was discovered by his aged housekeeper, Miss Martha Wildick, on returning at seven o’clock from a church meeting.

“All indications point to the guilt of one Anson Dyker, a youth of seventeen years who is known to have called at the house between five and five-thirty and who shortly before six o’clock was seen to emerge from a kitchen window and hurry through the thick shrubbery in back of the Merrick home.

“It is known that between five and seven o’clock Mr. Merrick was alone in the house save for the presence of this youth. It is probable that the crime was committed with one or other of several ornate fireplace instruments, for these, a shovel and pair of tongs and poker, were found strewn upon the floor. An overturned chair was the only other indication 

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