The Hilltop Boys Part 22

"Somebody has made a miscalculation here. I wonder who it is?"

"Smith is out of the question," remarked the doctor. "You are not studying Greek or Latin, are you, Smith?"

"No, sir," and the boys laughed again for Jesse W. Smith was not even in the Latin grammar as yet.

"Have any of the rest of you bearing the initials J. S. a translation in your desks?" the doctor asked. "I will take your word for it."

"No, sir," answered Sawyer and Sharpe.

"I have none, sir," said Jack, "but if you wish to search my desk you are at perfect liberty to do so. In fact, I will search it myself."

"That is not necessary, Sheldon," replied the doctor quickly, but Jack was already hunting through his desk, taking out everything at hand in a rapid fas.h.i.+on.

"Of course it is not!" sputtered Harry. "No one accuses him of----"

"Here is a translation, sir," said Jack, suddenly, when he came to the bottom of his desk, "but I need not tell you that it does not belong to me. It is a Caesar."

"Sheldon has been out of Caesar all this term," exclaimed Percival. "It is absurd to think that the pony----"

"Might it have belonged to you at some time, Sheldon?" asked the doctor, not noticing d.i.c.k's interruption. "I do not say that it did, you understand."

"No, sir, it might not. I never used a translation in my life and never will!"

Jack was hurriedly examining the book as he spoke and now noticed that the fly leaf was torn out, evidently in haste, the edges being ragged and a bit of writing on one of them.

"This bo----" was on one line and "erty of" on the next.

"I give you my word of honor, Doctor, that this is not my property,"

said Jack, "but I would like to keep it for the present," and he put the little book in his pocket.

"Very well, Sheldon," said Dr. Wise. "You are clearly exonerated from this charge."

"But Jack has something up his sleeve as well as in his pocket, believe me," whispered Billy Manners to Arthur.

CHAPTER XVII

THE MATTER SETTLED

Lessons were resumed and no more was said concerning the charge against Jack or any of the boys having the same initials, Sawyer and Sharpe being ready to turn out their desks for the doctor's satisfaction but not being required to do so.

Jack's friends did not believe in his guilt, even without his saying that the book was not his and they all regarded the affair as a very clumsy one.

"Whoever it was ought to know that Jack was not in Caesar," said Harry.

"If he had put in a translation of something Jack was doing at this time there would have been more reason."

"And n.o.body sends an anonymous letter who has any s.p.u.n.k," muttered Billy Manners. "The doctor would have done right to have paid no attention to it but he is a good old fellow and wants to do right by all."

"I'd like to know what Jack is going to do about it," thought d.i.c.k. "He won't let it rest. I have an idea who did this for it was just his clumsy way of working that betrays him but I won't say anything."

When the forenoon recess arrived, the boys generally went out upon the campus but Jack went straight to the cellar where the negro coachman and general caretaker was at work cleaning up.

"What do you do with the papers and stuff you sweep up of a morning, Bucephalus?" asked Jack.

"Ah gather them in a receptickle fo' de puppose, sah, and den Ah communicate dem to de fiah, sah," answered the man.

"Have you done so as yet?"

"Ah have not yet consigned the rubbish to the fiah, sah. Dere it is in dem baskets yondah. You done lose something, sah?"

"No, I want to find something," replied Jack.

He went over to the waste paper baskets standing on the floor in one corner and began to turn out their contents.

"The fellow may have torn out the fly leaf before," he thought, "but it looks like a fresh tear. If so, and he did not keep the leaf or throw it away somewhere it will probably be here."

Turning out the bits of torn paper, old exercises and other things, Jack looked carefully at every sc.r.a.p in search of the missing fly leaf.

"It's only a fool who would put his name in a translation, to betray him at any time," he mused, "but there are just such fools in the world."

There were many bits of paper which were obviously not the one he wanted and he pa.s.sed them over rapidly and threw them aside.

He came upon more than one crumpled bit and picked them up but upon smoothing them out found that they were not the thing he wanted.

At length he saw a tight ball of crumpled paper which he was about to pa.s.s over as being nothing and then took up and unrolled carefully.

Smoothing it out he saw that it was a piece of book paper and was written on.

When it was nicely smoothed out and laid upon the inside of the book found in his desk and now produced from his pocket, he read the following inscription written in a scrawly hand:

"This book is the property of Peter Herring, Hilltop. Don't steal."

The torn edges fitted perfectly and the letters remaining on the inner edge of the leaf were followed regularly by those on the other side.

"That accuses Peter Herring all right," said Jack. "This is his book and if he did not put it in my desk who would? At any rate, it will be safe enough to make the accusation."

Putting the book back in his pocket, the torn leaf being now in its place, Jack went up stairs and out upon the grounds.

There were some of his chums at a little distance and Herring and Merritt were just going around the corner of the building toward the barn, being evidently engaged in earnest conversation.

Jack waited a minute and then followed them into the barn.

"Maybe it didn't work all right," Herring was saying, "but folks'll suspect him just the same."

"It wouldn't have went all right if I hadn't seen your name in it,"

snapped Merritt, "and made you tear it out before you slipped it in his desk last night."