“I do not know what to make of this,” said Mr. Leonard, as he sat with a bank-book and a package of canceled checks in his hand. “I am positive that my account is not overdrawn. This settlement makes me five hundred dollars short, where I should have at least one thousand dollars to my credit.”

“It is very strange,” said Mr. Wilson. “We have never found an error in our account with the Mechanic’s Bank before.”

“They paid my check without hesitation?”

“Certainly. They would have paid it if it had been ten thousand. Your credit is unsullied.”

“I don’t understand this, and don’t like it,” said Mr. Leonard, gravely. “Let us go over these checks and deposits. The bank may be in error. I have here my private check-book, which Will has just brought from my house; I think it likely some personal check of mine may have gone to the wrong bank. Call off the checks, and I will compare them with the check-book entries.”

They proceeded to do so, Mr. Leonard taking the memoranda and his bookkeeper called out the amounts and dates of the checks.

“Fifteen hundred and seventy-three,” he repeated. “I don’t find that. What date is it?”

“May 23d.”

“Are you sure? There is no such check of that date in either book. To whose order is it drawn?”

“To Gilbert, Cook & Co., or bearer,” said Mr. Wilson, looking up with a glance in which a doubt was struggling.

“But we owed them no such amount. They were paid in full on the 15th,” said Mr. Leonard, in excitement. “And they never would have asked for a check to be drawn to bearer. Let me see that.”

He snatched it out of Mr. Wilson’s hand, in his excitement.

“By Heaven!” cried the merchant, rising hastily to his feet. “I never wrote that signature. It is a forgery.”

The two men looked at each other with half affrighted glances.

“Can it be possible?” cried Mr. Wilson.

“Possible? It is a fact!” was the vehement answer. “The signature is good. I might be deceived by it myself, only that I know I did not write it. This is a bad business, Wilson.”

“A terribly bad business,” was the reply. “Who could have done it? There is a black sheep in our midst.”

“Can there be?” said the merchant, turning pale as he thought of the late robbery from his safe. “Do you suspect any one?”

“No one but yourself, sir,” said Wilson, in his slow, stilted manner. “I suspect you of undue faith in human nature. If you choose to take into your store a street boy of notorious character, what can you expect?”

“What do you mean?” said Mr. Leonard, in arms for his protege.

“I mean that that boy’s coming here was not without an object. I suspected from the first that he might have been sent here as the tool of some designing knaves, who knew your easy disposition.”

“You have no right to talk this way, Wilson.”

“Indeed I have,” said the clerk, with energy. “There is plainly a thief in your store. Yet the character of everybody here has been proved by years of trust. Two weeks ago you introduced here a boy of very doubtful antecedents, and in that two weeks two serious robberies have been consummated. What is the natural conclusion?”

“Where is the boy? Let us have him here,” said Mr. Leonard, moving angrily to the door.

“No, no! that is no way to act,” cried Wilson. “He is a keen knave; you will put him on his guard.”

“You are right. I was going to act hastily. It does look suspicious for the boy. But I cannot believe him guilty without positive evidence.”

“You must go a different way to get it. Give this matter to the detective, along with the other. I warrant he will make something of it.”

“I will do so,” said Mr. Leonard. “This troubles me sadly, Wilson. After fifteen years of business to find myself suddenly the sport of a daring thief and forger. What can be done?”

“Nothing, but to watch and wait,” said Wilson, calmly. “I do suspect that boy. I firmly believe that he is the stool-pigeon of some bold and expert villains. I see nothing we can do now but to have him closely watched, and learn all his associations. That the detective can do far better than we.”

“We will leave it in his hands, then,” said Mr. Leonard, closing his check-book with a determined snap.

Meanwhile the subject of this conversation was giving a touch of his quality to the salesmen.

“Say what you please,” he remarked, “but Mr. Leonard does live gay. Never seen a finer shanty; and there’s no end to the roses and posies around it. Had a high old run through the woods, and come across a highfalutin’ gal, you bet.”

“Did you fall in love with her?”

“Maybe so; though I can’t see it’s any of your biz. She was scrumptious, I tell you. She lives with Mr. Leonard. The old man had his back up when I come back, ’cause I staid so long.”

“He laid you out then?”

“He told me I had to finish counting them Milton cloths. I told him the store would be shut up afore I got half through. He said he couldn’t help that, it was my fault for staying so long.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“I’m goin’ to count them, if it takes me all night.”

“You needn’t mind them. They have already been counted,” said Mr. Johnson, a salesman who had approached during this talk. “Mr. Leonard will let you free from the task.”

“Mebbe he’d best wait till he’s asked!” said Will, resolutely. “I don’t blow hot and cold with no man, and I don’t let no man blow hot and cold with me. He laid it onto me heavier than suits me, and now I’m going to let him see that I can do as I’m told. I don’t keer if everybody in the store has counted them cloths. That’s my job and I’m bound to put her through.”

Will hastened to the cellar stairs, and down into the basement, where the cases of cloth in question stood, freshly opened.

He labored on an hour, for two hours, in lifting the heavy rolls of cloths from the cases, counting, and replacing them. It was quite dark here, and he lit the gas at the start. He did not, in fact, know how long he had been engaged, when the light suddenly dimmed and went out.

Will stood in almost utter darkness, only a faint light entering at the narrow window. He ran to turn off the gas, not understanding what put it out. As he did so he heard the clang of a door overhead.

The truth rushed to his mind. The store had been shut and fastened, the gas turned off as usual at night, and everybody had gone home, quite forgetting that he was still in the cellar.

Will was inclined to be superstitious, and a sense of fright came upon him as he found himself alone in this lonely, dark room. He groped his way to the stairs and tried the door. It was firmly bolted. All his efforts could not move it. He called out at the top of his voice, but no answer came back.

“I’m a reg’lar rat in a cage,” he muttered, as he made his way to the windows, thinking to break a pane and call for help. But they faced on a deserted alley, and he feared if even he should bring aid, it would only be to be arrested as a thief.

“I wonder if there is any ghosts in these diggin’s, as some of the men say?” he muttered, looking fearfully around. “I don’t like it a bit. I’ve never been in such a ’tarnal scrape in my life. Blame their eyes, they know’d I was down here, why didn’t they call me up? I believe it was done a-purpose. If I don’t be even with some of them yet, you can sell me.”

But even a cornered coward grows brave, and Will was no coward. The superstitious dread could not long hold the mastery over his bold spirit. It was not long before he threw off the fears which had troubled him.

“I ain’t no baby, to be skeered by a shadder,” he said. “Let what will come I’m goin’ to have a snooze anyhow. I dunno what’s the reason a feller couldn’t sleep as sound here as in my little eight-by-ten hole at home! Bet I make a soft bed, and that there ain’t no ghost or sich bothers itself to waken me up.”

The bed did not lack softness, after he had opened and spread out yard after yard of rich, soft goods on the floor, using some of the heavy cloths he had been counting as a substratum.

But his slumbers were not sound, for reasons which we have not space to give here. What Will saw, and what happened to him that night in the gloomy cellar, must be left for future chapters to declare.