with a shudder.  The only ray of comfort she had was the fact that Nyoda and the Winnebagos stood by her stanchly.  “I can bear it,” she said to Nyoda forlornly, “knowing that you believe in me, but if you ever went back on me I couldn’t live.”  Nyoda urged her no more to tell her secret, for she suspected that it concerned some one else whom Hinpoha would not expose, and trusted to time to solve the mystery and remove the stain from Hinpoha’s name.

The excitement over, school settled down into its old rut.  Joe Lanning’s father sent him away to military school and Abraham’s father began to use his influence to have him reinstated.  Mr. Goldstein put forth such a touching plea about Abraham’s having been led astray by Joe Lanning and being no more than a tool in his hands, and Abraham promised so faithfully that he would never deviate from the path of virtue again, now that his evil genius was removed, if they would only let him come back and graduate, that he was given the chance.  Nothing new came up about the cutting of the wires except that the end of a knife blade was found on the floor under the place where the hole had been made in the wall.  There were no marks of identification on it and nothing was done about it.

One day, Dick Albright, in the Physics room on the third floor of the building, stood by the window and looked across at a friend of his who was standing at the window of the Chemistry room.  The two rooms faced each other across an open space in the back of the building, which was designed to let more light into certain rooms.  This space was only open at the third and fourth floors.  The second floor was roofed over with a skylight at this point.  It was after school hours and Dick was alone in the room.  So, apparently, was his friend.  Dick raised the window and called across the space to the other boy, who raised his window and answered him.  From talking back and forth they passed to throwing a ball of twine to each other.  Once Dick failed to catch it, and falling short of the window, it rolled down upon the roof of the second story.

Dick promptly climbed out of the window, and sliding down the waterspout, reached the roof and went in pursuit of the ball.  One of the windows opening from the third story onto this open space was that in the electric room, and it was under this window that the ball came to a standstill.  As Dick stooped to pick it up he found a knife lying beside it.  He brought it along with him and climbed back into his room.  Then he pulled it out and looked at it.  It was an ordinary pocket knife with a horn handle.  On one side of the handle there was a plate bearing the name F. Boyd.  “Frank Boyd’s knife,” said Dick to himself.  “He must have dropped it out of the window.”  Idly he opened the blade.  It was broken off about half an inch from the point.  Dick began to turn things over in his mind.  A piece of a knife blade had been found in the electric room.  A knife