decided to ask you to help me."

His words aroused the curiosity of the other boy more than ever.

"What's this you're talking about?" he exclaimed. "A mystery is there
now, Carl? Why, I thought it might all be about that coming around so
often of Mr. Amasa Culpepper, who not only keeps the grocery store but
is a sort of shyster lawyer, and a money lender as well. Everybody
says he's smitten with your mother, and wants to be a second father
to you and your sisters and brothers."

"Well that used to worry me a whole lot," admitted Carl, frankly,
"until I asked my mother if she cared any for Amasa. She laughed at me,
and said that if he was the last man on earth she would never dream of
marrying him. In fact, she never expected to stop being John Oskamp's
widow. So since then I only laugh when I see old Amasa coming around
and fetching big bouquets of flowers from his garden, which he must
hate to pull, he's so miserly."

"Then what else has cropped up to bother you, Carl?" asked Tom.

The other heaved a long-drawn sigh.

"My mother is worried half sick over it!" he explained; "she's hunted
every bit of the house over several times; and I've scoured the garden
again and again, but we don't seem to be able to locate it at all. It's
the queerest thing where it could have disappeared to so suddenly."

"Yes, but you haven't told me what it is?" remarked Tom.

"A paper, Tom, a most valuable paper that my mother carelessly left on
the table in the sitting room day before yesterday."

"What kind of a paper was it?" asked Tom, who always liked to get at
the gist of things in the start.

"Why, it was a paper that meant considerable to my mother," explained
Carl. "My father once invested in some shares of oil stock. The
certificate of stock was in the safe keeping of Amasa Culpepper, who
had given a receipt for the same, and a promise to hand over the
original certificate when this paper was produced."

"And you say the receipt disappeared from the table in your sitting
room, without anybody knowing what became of it?" asked Tom.

"Yes," replied Carl. "This is how it came about. Lately we received
word that the company had struck some gushers in the way of wells, and
that the stock my father had bought for a few cents a share is worth a
mint of money now. It was through Amasa Culpepper my mother first
learned about this, and she wrote to the company to find out."

"Oh! I see," chuckled Tom, "and when Mr. Culpepper lea