he briefly explained.
"We're going right out there," concluded Bobby, "and I want you to go
along to help investigate. We have to find some incriminating
evidence, and you'd be more likely to know how and where to look for
it than any of us."

It is needless to say that Jimmy Platt took his hat with alacrity.
Before he went out, with new hope in his heart, he turned and shook
hands ecstatically with his sister. Still holding Jimmy's hand she
turned to Bobby impulsively:

"I do hope, Mr. Burnit, that this turns out right for Jimmy."

Bobby turned to her abruptly and with a trace of a frown. It was a
rather poorly trained office employee, he thought, who would intrude
herself into conversation that it was her duty to forget, but Biff
Bates caught that look and stepped into the breach.

"This is Nellie, Bobby--that is, it used to be Nellie," he stated with
a quick correction, and blushed violently.

"It is Nellie still," laughed that young lady to Bobby, and the
puzzled look upon his face was swiftly driven away by a smile, as he
suddenly recognized in her traces of the long-legged girl who had been
always present at the Applerod Addition, who had ridden in his
automobile, and had confided to him most volubly, upon innumerable
occasions, that her brother Jimmy was about the smartest man who ever
sighted through a transit.

In the hastily constructed frame office out at the waterworks site, Ed
Scales, pale and emaciated and with black rings under his eyes, looked
up nervously as Bobby's little army, reenforced from four to six by
the addition of a "plain clothes man" and Dillingham, the _Bulletin's_
star reporter, invaded the place. Before a word was spoken, Feeney,
the plain clothes man, presented Scales with a writ, which the latter
attempted to read with unseeing eyes, his fingers trembling.

"What does this mean?"

"That I have come to take possession," said Bobby, "with power to make
an examination of every scrap of paper in the place. Frankly, Scales,
we expect to find something crooked about the waterworks contract. If
we do you know the result. If we do not, the interruption will be only
temporary, and you will have very pretty grounds for action; for I am
taking a long shot, and if I don't find what I am after I have put
myself and the mayor into a bad scrape."

Scales thrice opened his mouth to speak, and thrice there came no
sound from his lips. Then he laid a bunch of keys upon his desk,
shoving them