Grandy. "Now I know he ain't square."
At the hotel Ruthven was given a pleasant welcome. He was shown to a comfortable room, and after a while was supplied with a good supper. That night he slept like a top, undisturbed by any apprehensions or surmises about either the Barton package or Weasel Morrison. When he came down to breakfast next morning, the landlord handed him a newspaper as he started into the dining room.
"It's a daily from Helena," the landlord explained, "and just got here."
Ruthven seated himself at the table, ordered ham and eggs, buckwheat cakes and coffee, and began reading while he waited for his breakfast. A moment later his eye caught a headline: "Big Scare at Burt City!" And below that line was this: "Division Superintendent Durfee Holds Up a Train to Look for Infernal Machine and Finds Pair of Boots."
Ruthven whistled in astonishment; then he began to read, forgetting all about his breakfast.
CHAPTER VIII.
A PAIR OF SIX-GUNS.
THE article was not a long one, but some enterprising press association had evidently got hold of the facts and telegraphed them all over the State. Very likely Durfee and Harrington, in view of the failure of their expedition to make good their fears, had released the information they had been keeping to themselves. If so, on reading that press report they must have regretted taking the public, into their confidence. The paper treated the affair as a huge joke.
- Not often is it the lot of a pair of boots to throw a scare into the division superintendent of a railroad and the traveling agent of an express company, and yet that is precisely what a pair of tan bluchers with eighteen-inch tops did to Messrs. Durfee and Harrington. Furthermore, on account of those boots a passenger train was held up for an hour until it could be overtaken by a special, and one entire division of a railroad experienced an attack of cold chills and was generally set by the ears. Messrs. Durfee and Harrington had an idea that the package containing the boots contained a clockwork bomb, and it seemed necessary for the two to overhaul the package in person before the boots exploded!
Here followed a brief and more or less serious account of the wild pursuit of Seventeen by the party in the way car, and of the overpowering relief experienced by Durfee and Harrington when they found the tan bluchers in the package instead of an infernal machine. And then came this illuminating bit:
- Two weeks ago a package was received by the express agent in Monte Carlo, Montana. It weighed three pounds when the agent took it in, and the weight had jumped to five pounds when he sent it out. In some way a clock of peculiar construction had been smuggled into the package, for the messenger heard a ticking inside, and the agent vows there was no such ticking while the package was being taken over the counter. Be this as it may, the innocent-appearing parcel "let go" in the town of Duane, making kindling of one perfectly good express car, but, fortunately and miraculously, injuring no one, not even the messenger. Durfee and Harrington had this matter in mind when they started in pursuit of the boots. In the circumstances, they are excusable. But suppose the package had really contained a bomb, and that the bomb had exploded while the passenger train was waiting at the Bluffton station to be overhauled. In that event, Durfee might have been sorry he had not wired the messenger to throw the package from the car with a pair of tongs while No. 17 proceeded on about its business.
"Jupiter!" murmured Ruthven as he laid aside his paper and started in on his breakfast. "So that was the reason for Harrington's rush for the superintendent's office, and the chase after Seventeen! The explanation of the cause of that fiasco, however, doesn't shed a ray of light upon the true mystery of that Barton package. Its weight be-
