The lad took it, and came hurrying back with it half full of liquid,
having spilled the rest on his hasty trip. Jack managed to get a
little between Cora's lips, and it revived her. She opened her eyes,
noted that Walter was holding her, and her face flushed slightly.
"I'm--I'm all right now," she declared as she tried to stand
upright.
"Better get in the car and sit down," advised Jack.
She assented, and rather limply got into the tonneau of her machine.
She drank some more water, and presently was herself again.
"How silly of me to nearly faint," she said with a wan smile. "But
when I saw the pocketbook--empty--it was enough--"
"I should say so," interrupted Belle. "Who would ever have thought
of finding it in your toolbox, Cora?"
The words seemed fraught with strange import.
"Was it really in the tool-box, Walter?" Cora asked.
"On top of the tire pump and the lifting-jack," replied Walter.
"And empty--that's the queer part of it," commented Belle. "I guess
that's what shocked you as much as anything, Cora. Now, if it had
had the twenty thousand dollars in it--"
"It's strange that the wallet should have been there--in my
tool-box--at all," murmured Cora.
"It certainly is," added Jack. "What can it mean--to find it in
Cora's car?"
"Is this the one Ed Foster lost?" asked Diddick. "We heard
something about it."
"The same one," answered Walter as he picked the wallet from the
road where it had fallen. "See, it has his name on it."
"I feel creepy--almost as if something supernatural had put it into
my tool-box," said Cora in a curiously quiet voice.
"More likely some unnatural person did it," spoke Jack quickly. "Yet
who in the world would do it? If I had seen--"
He stopped suddenly, leaving the sentence unfinished.
"And it was on top of the pump and jack," mused Cora, after a quick
look at her brother. "I haven't used the pump since--let me see--"
"Since the day of the collision--the day when the pocketbook was
lost," interrupted jack. "You pumped up a tire just before the race,
so that the pocketbook must have been placed there right after the
robbery."
"Or loss," added Walter. "Some one may have found the wallet, taken
out the money and bonds, and then thrown the empty pocketbook away."
"That some one threw it in a curious place," remarked Elizabeth
dryly.
"Indeed, they did," observed Cora. "It looks--"
She hesitated.
"Oh, you might as well say it--before some one else does," put in
Jack. "It looks mighty suspicious, Cora."
There was a vindictive air about him. He seemed to challenge an
accusation against his sister.
"I'm sure there was no need to say that," spoke Walter. "It may be
a mere--er--"
"Coincidence," finished Cora.
"A queer coincidence," quoth Jack. "Incidentally, some one got the
money, all right. We must hurry home and tell Ed."
"I wonder what he'll think?" asked Cora.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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