or not eating all of your lunch after I found it, I suppose you were
going to say," put in the man, with a smile. "Very well, then I'll
accept," and he bowed, not ungracefully.

He had the good taste--or was it bashfulness--to go over to a little
grove of trees to eat his portion. Grace wanted to take him a cup of
chocolate--which they made instead of tea--but Betty persuaded her not
to. The girls ate their lunch, to be interrupted in the midst of it by
the man who called a good-bye to them as he moved off down the road.

"He's going," remarked Amy. "I wonder if he had enough?"

"I think so," replied Betty. "Now, girls, we must hurry. We have been
delayed, and--"

"I'm so sorry," put in Mollie. "It was my fault, and--"

"Don't think of it, my dear!" begged Grace. "Any of us might have
forgotten the lunch, just as you did."

As they walked past the place which the tramp had selected for his dining
room, Betty saw some papers on the ground. They appeared to be letters,
and, rather idly, she picked them up. She looked into one or two of the
torn envelopes.

"I wouldn't do that," said Grace. "Maybe those are private letters. He
must have forgotten them. I wonder where he has gone? Perhaps we can
catch him--he might need these papers. But I wouldn't read them, Betty."

"They're nothing but advertising circulars," retorted the Little Captain.
"Nothing very private about them. I guess he threw them all away."

She was about to let them fall from her hand, when a bit of paper
fluttered from one envelope. Picking it up Betty was astonished to read
on the torn portion the words:

"_I cannot carry out that deal I arranged with you, because I have had
the misfortune to lose five hundred dollars and I shall have to_--"

There the paper, evidently part of a letter to someone, was torn off.
There were no other words.

"Girls!" cried Betty, "look--see! This letter! That man may be the one
whose money we found! He has written about it--as nearly as I can recall,
the writing is like that in the note pinned to the five hundred dollars.
Oh, we must find that tramp!"

"He wasn't a tramp!" exclaimed Grace.

"No, I don't believe he was, either," admitted Betty. "That's what he
meant when he spoke of his disguise, and looking for something. He's
hunting for his five hundred dollars. Oh, dear! which way did he go?"

"Toward Middleville," returned Amy.

"Then we must hurry up and catch him. We can explain that we have
his mone