Mr. Gubb could see into the stable, but there was not much to see. The stable boy sat at the door, his chair tipped back, until a few minutes after eleven, when one of Joe Henry's drays drove up with a load of baled hay. Philo Gubb heard the voices of the men as they hoisted the hay to the hay-loft, and he saw Joe Henry helping with the hoisting-rope. The hay was water-soaked. Water dripped from it onto the floor of the stable. But nothing exciting occurred, and Philo Gubb was about to consider this a dull evening's work, when Joe Henry appeared in the doorway, a pitchfork in one hand and the slab of pine in the other. He looked up and down the street and then, with surprising agility, sprang across the street toward where Philo Gubb lay hid. With a wild cry, Philo Gubb fled. The pitchfork clattered at his feet, but missed him, and he had every advantage of long legs and speed. His heels clattered on the alley pave, and Joe Henry's clattered farther and farther behind at each leap of the Correspondence School detective. * * * * * "All right, you explain," said Joe Henry sullenly. "Now you ain't to breathe a word of this, cross-your-heart, hope-to-die, Philo Gubb. Nor you neither, Billy," said Pie-Wagon Pete. "Listen! Me an' Joe Henry ain't what we let on to be. That's why we don't want to be follered. We're detectives. Reg'lar detectives. From Chicago. An' we're hired by the Law an' Order League to run down them gools. We're right clost onto 'em now, ain't we, Joe? An' that's why we don't want to have no one botherin' us. You wouldn't want no one shadowin' you when you was on a trail, would you, Gubby?" "No, I don't feel like I would," admitted Philo Gubb. "That's right," said Pie-Wagon Pete approvingly. "An' when these here dynamite gools is the kind of murderers they is, an' me and Joe is expectin' to be murdered by them any minute, it makes Joe nervous to be follered an' spied on, don't it, Joe?" "You bet," said Joe. "I'm liable to turn an' maller up anybody I see sneakin' on me. I can't take chances." "So you won't interfere with Joe in the pursoot of his dooty no more, will you, Gubby?" said Pie-Wagon Pete. "I don't aim to interfere with nobody, Peter," said Philo Gubb. "I just want to pursoo my own dooty, as I see it. I won't foller Mr. Henry no more, if he don't like it; but I got a dooty to do, as a full graduate of the Rising Sun Deteckative Agency's Correspondence School of Deteckating. I got to do my level best to catch them dynamiters myself." Joe Henry frowned, and Pie-Wagon Pete shook his head. "If you'll take my advice, Gubby," he said, "you'll drop that case right here an' now. You don't know what dangerous characters them gools are. If they start to get you--" "You want to read that book--'The Pale Avengers'--I just gave you," said Billy Getz, "and then you'll know more."