Boys -- Juvenile fiction; New England -- Juvenile fiction; Villages -- Juvenile fiction
At another shop he bought a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Then a neat
mustache appeared on his upper-lip, a college society pin on his
neck-tie, a little cane in his hand, and thus attired he could have
passed muster anywhere as a young collegian of the first water, and
even old “Prosper” himself might have passed him without a suspicion of
his identity.
He turned aside after that, from the busier thoroughfares, for he felt
the need of a little thinking, and quickly found himself sauntering in
front of a gray-stone building, facing an open square thickly dotted
with trees.
“I know,” he said to himself, “that’s the old University. I wish I knew
all the things they teach there. Never was at school in my life, but
I’ve picked up a good deal, for all that.”
Bar was only half right.
He had been in a terrible school, indeed, and had grown to be a
remarkable sort of fellow, simply by refusing to learn the evil part of
the lessons his “professors” had tried to teach him.
Still, he was greatly in need of the other kind of “lessons,” and he
felt it bitterly, as he stood and looked up at the gray stone building.
His attention was suddenly diverted by a loud exclamation not many
paces from him, and he turned in time to see a shabbily dressed
fellow pick up from the sidewalk what seemed to be a very heavy and
well-filled pocketbook.
“Some old trick,” Bar was saying to himself, when the stranger turned
to him with the pocketbook in his hand, remarking, furtively:
“Big find that, sir. Just see how full it is. No end of bank notes, and
all big ones. There’ll be a whopping reward offered for it.”
“You’re in luck, I should say, then,” drawled Bar, in his character of
collegian. “Of course you’ll advertise it?”
“Yes, sir, ought to be advertised,” rattled the stranger; “but I can’t
stay to do it. I’m off for Boston to-night. Couldn’t stay on any
account. Tell you what I’ll do. You look like a gentleman. Feel sure
you’ll see that the right man gets it. Square and honest. You take it
and divide the reward. Won’t be less’n a hundred, sure’s you live.”
“Not less than that, certainly,” drawled Bar. “Let me look at it?”
“No right to open it, I s’pose,” said the stranger quickly, as Bar
poised the pocketbook in his open hand.
“No,” said Bar. “Private papers, perhaps. No business of ours, you
know. All right, you give me your Boston address and I’ll send you your
half soon as I get it.”
So saying, Bar slipped the prize into his inside coat-pocket with a
movement so nearly instantaneous that there was no chance for any
interference, but the stranger’s countenance fell in spite of himself
as he stammered:
“Well, no, sir, that won’t do, exactly. I’m going on North from Boston.
Tell ye what I’ll do. You give me fifty dollars down. It’s good
security for that. You may get five hundred, for all I know. You keep
it all and it’ll only cost you fifty. You didn’t find it, you know. It
was all my luck.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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