“Goodbye, Judy! Goodbye, Irene! Don’t like New York so well that you won’t want to come home!”

“Don’t keep them too long, Pauline! Farringdon will be as dead as so many bricks without them. Even the cats will miss Blackberry. Make him wave his paw, Judy!”

“Don’t forget to write!”

“Goodbye, Pauline! Goodbye, Judy! Goodbye, Irene!”

“Goodbye! Goodbye!”

And Peter’s car was off, bearing the last load of campers back to their home town.

Judy Bolton watched them out of sight. They were taking the familiar road, but she and Irene Lang would soon be traveling in the other direction. Pauline Faulkner had invited them for a visit, including Judy’s cat in the invitation, and they were going back with her to New York.

A long blue bus hove into view, and all three girls hailed it, at first expectantly, then frantically when they saw it was not stopping. It slowed down a few feet ahead of them, but when they attempted to board it the driver eyed Blackberry with disapproval.

“Can’t take the cat unless he’s in a crate.”

“He’s good,” Judy began. “He won’t be any trouble——”

“Can’t help it. Company’s rules.” And he was about to close the door when Judy’s quick idea saved the situation.

“All right, he’s in a crate,” she declared with vigor as she thrust the cat inside her own pretty hatbox. The hats she hastily removed and bundled under one arm.

The driver had to give in. He even grinned a bit sheepishly as the girls took their seats, Pauline and Irene together, “Because,” Judy insisted as she took the seat just behind them, “I have Blackberry.”

The other passengers on the bus were regarding the newcomers with amused interest. A ten-year-old boy brought forth a ball of twine and rolled it playfully in Blackberry’s direction. An old lady made purring noises through her lips. Everyone seemed to be nodding and smiling. Everyone except the serious young man across the aisle. He never turned his head.

Judy nudged the two friends in the seat ahead of her and confided a desire to do something—anything to make him look up.

“Why, Judy,” Irene replied, shocked. “I’ve been watching that man myself and he’s—he’s——”

“Well, what?”

“Almost my ideal.”

“Silly!” Judy laughed. “I’d like to bet he wouldn’t be so ideal if I did something to disturb those precious papers that he’s reading.”

“I dare you!” Pauline said.

Sixteen or not, the dare tempted Judy. It was an easy matter to let Blackberry out of the hatbox in her arms and down into the aisle. The cat’s plumelike tail did the rest.

The man looked up. But, to Judy’s surprise, he looked up with a smile. Irene, all contrition, hastened to apologize.

“No harm done,” he returned good-naturedly and began collecting his scattered papers. Soon he had them rearranged and resumed his reading. There were a great many typewritten sheets of paper, and he seemed to be reading critically, scratching out something here and adding something there.

“You were wrong,” Irene said, turning to Judy. “See how nice he was.”

“I should have known better than to dare a girl like you,” Pauline put in.

“It was horrid of me,” Judy admitted, now almost as interested as Irene in the strange young man. Not because he was Judy’s ideal—a man who wouldn’t notice a cat until its tail bumped into him—but because the papers on his lap might be important. And she had disturbed them.

The man, apparently unaware that the accident had been anybody’s fault, continued reading and correcting. Judy watched her cat carefully until the stack of papers was safely inside his portfolio again.

“That’s finished,” he announced as though speaking to himself. He screwed the top on his fountain pen, placed it in his pocket and then turned to the girls. “Nice scenery, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” Judy replied, laughing, “but you didn’t seem to be paying much attention to it.”

“I’ve been over this road a great many times,” he explained, “and one does tire of scenery, like anything else. Passengers in the bus are different.”

“You mean different from scenery?”

“Yes, and from each other. For instance, you with your ridiculous cat and your golden-haired friend who apologized for you and that small, dark girl are three distinct types.”

Judy regarded him curiously. She had never thought of herself or either of the other girls as “types.” Now she tried to analyze his meaning.

Their lives had certainly been different. Judy and Pauline, although of independent natures, had always felt the security of dependence upon their parents while Irene’s crippled father depended solely upon her. This responsibility made her seem older than her years—older and younger, too. She never could acquire Pauline’s poise or Judy’s fearlessness.

In appearance, too, they were different. Her first vacation had done wonders for Irene Lang. Now her usually pale cheeks glowed with healthy color, and her eyes were a deeper, happier blue. Two weeks of sunshine had tanned her skin and brought out all the gold in her hair.

Pauline, too, had acquired a becoming tan which made her hair look darker than ever and contrasted strangely with her keen, light blue eyes.

The sun had not been quite so kind to Judy. It had discovered a few faint freckles on her nose and given her hair a decided reddish cast. But Judy didn’t mind. Camp life had been exciting—boating, swimming and, as a climax, a thrilling ride in Arthur Farringdon-Pett’s new airplane.

The young man beside Judy was a little like Arthur in appearance—tall, good-looking but altogether too grown-up and serious. Judy liked boys to make jokes now and then, even tease the way her brother, Horace, did. Peter teased her, too.

“Queer,” she thought, “to miss being teased.”

This stranger seemed to like serious-minded people and presently changed the conversation to books and music, always favorite topics with Irene. Then Judy spoke about the work that he was doing but learned nothing except that “finished” in his case meant that he had succeeded in putting his papers back in their original sequence.

“And if you girls were all of the same type,” he added, “I doubt if I would have forgiven you your prank.”

“I guess he doesn’t care for my type,” Judy whispered to the other two girls a little later.

“Mine either,” Pauline returned with a laugh. “At least he wouldn’t if he knew I dared you.”

“Do you suppose,” Irene asked naÏvely, “that he cares for my type?”

She looked very pathetic as she said that, and Judy, remembering Irene’s misfortunes, slid into the seat beside her and put a loving arm about her shoulder.

“I care for your type,” she said. “So why worry about what a stranger thinks?”

“I’m not,” Irene said, belying her answer with a wistful look in the stranger’s direction. He was still absorbed in the mountain of typewritten pages that he held on his knee. It seemed that his work, whatever it was, engrossed him completely. He was again making corrections and additions with his pen. Judy noticed a yellow slip of paper on the seat beside him and called the other girls’ attention to it.

“It looks like a telegram,” she whispered, “and he keeps referring to it.”

“Telegrams are usually bad news,” Irene replied.

The young man sat a little distance away from them and, to all appearances, had forgotten their existence. Girl-like, they discussed him, imagining him as everything from a politician to a cub reporter, finally deciding that, since he lived in Greenwich Village, he must be an artist. Irene said she liked to think of him as talented. A dreamer, she would have called him, if it had not been for his practical interest in the business at hand—those papers and that telegram.

It was dark by the time they reached New York. The passengers were restless and eager to be out of the bus. The young man hastily crammed his typewritten work into his portfolio and Judy noticed, just as the bus stopped, that he had forgotten the telegram. She and Irene both made a dive for it with the unfortunate result that when they stood up again each of them held a torn half of the yellow slip.

“Just our luck!” exclaimed Irene. “Now we can’t return it to him. Anyway, he’s gone.”

“We could piece it together,” Pauline suggested, promptly suiting her actions to her words. When the two jagged edges were fitted against each other, this is what the astonished girls read:

Irene was the first to finish reading.

“Good heavens! What would he know about robbery and murder?” she exclaimed, staring first at the telegram in Pauline’s hand and then at the empty seat across the aisle.

“Why, nothing that I can think of. He didn’t seem like a crook. The telegram may be in code,” Pauline mused as she handed the torn pieces to Judy. “I like his name—Dale Meredith.”

“So do I. But Emily Grimshaw——”

“All out! Last stop!” the bus driver was calling. “Take care of that cat,” he said with a chuckle as he helped the girls with their suitcases.

They were still wondering about the strange telegram as they made their way through the crowd on Thirty-fourth Street.