“Gentlemen, if you will step inside, I’ll make full confession and then give myself up,” the old man said; “for I see there is no use in trying to escape the Boy Scouts. It was I who wrote that treasonable memorandum and I may as well tell you that I have a wireless. I will give you my whole history. I see that my young friend here is a most capable secret service agent.” “We’re only small boys—we belong to the infantry,” I said, for I just couldn’t help blurting it out. Well, we all went inside and I could see that the Commissioner and the detectives kept very near the old gentleman as if they didn’t have much use for his laughing and his pleasant talk. I guess maybe they were used to that kind of thing, and he couldn’t fool them. When we got into his library I saw books all around on the shelves, hundreds of them I guess, and the desk was covered with papers and there was a picture of Mark Twain with “Best regards to Mr. Donnelle,” written on it. Gee whittaker, I thought when I looked around; maybe Mr. Donnelle is a deep-dyed spy all right, but he’s sure a high-brow. “You’d have to take an elevator to get up to him,” I whispered to Pee-wee. “Shhh,” Pee-wee said, “maybe he isn’t dyed so very deep—there’s different shades of dyes.” “Maybe he’s only dyed a light gray or a pale blue,” I said. Then Mr. Donnelle got out a big fat red book that said on it “Who’s Who in America” and, jiminy, I’m glad I never had to study it, because it had about a million pages. I hate biography anyway—biography and arithmetic. Then he turned to a certain page. “Now, gentlemen,” he said, “if you will just read this I will then consent to go with you,” and he smiled all over his face. The four men leaned over and began reading, but Pee-wee and I didn’t because they didn’t ask us and Boy Scouts don’t butt in. “I bet it tells all about German spies and everything, and now he’s going to make a full confession,” Pee-wee said; “maybe our names will be in the New York papers, hey?” “They’ll be more likely to be in the fly-paper,” I said; “there’s something funny about this.” “I bet he was going to blow up some ships,” Pee-wee said. “I bet he’ll blow _us_ up in a minute,” I told him; because I could see that he was saying something to the men while they all looked at the book, and that the whole four of them were laughing—especially Mr. Ellsworth. “It was the elder boy who discovered it,” I heard him say, smiling all the while. “_Good night!_” I said to Pee-wee, “I thought we had a German in custody, but instead of that, we’re in Dutch!” “Will they send us to jail?” he whispered. “I think we’ll get about ten merit badges for this—not,” I said; “he’s no spy.” Well, the men didn’t pay much attention to us, only strolled over to one side of the room and began chatting together, and Mr. Donnelle got a box of cigars and they each took one. “I wouldn’t smoke one of those cigars,” Pee-wee said, “they might be bombs. The Germans are pretty tricky—safety first.”