“Well, the job’s put through, all right,” Hank was saying, as the three sat outside a small tent in front of which was a smoldering fire, about which the remnants of a meal were scattered.

“Yes, but now we’ve got to tackle the hardest part of it,” said Jack, knitting his brows.  “I’ve got the letter written and here it is.”  As he spoke he drew from his pocket a sheet of paper.  “The question is who to send for the money when the time comes.”

“Oh, Hank is the man,” said Ben, without an instant’s hesitation.  “We must not appear in this at all.”

“Oh, I am the man, am?” put in Hank, with no very gratified inflexion in his voice; “and what if I am caught?  I’m to go to prison, I suppose, while you fellows get off scot-free.”

“As for me,” said Sam Redding, who was pale and looked scared, and whose eyes, too, were red-rimmed and heavy as if from lack of sleep, “you can count me out.  I want nothing to do with it.  You’ve gone too far, Jack, in your schemes against the boys.  I’m through with the whole thing.”

“Well, if you’re that chicken-hearted, we don’t want you in it at all,” sneered Jack, although he looked somewhat troubled at his follower’s defection.  “All we want you to promise is not to split on us.”

“Oh, I won’t peach,” promised Sam readily.

“It will be better for you not to,” warned Bill Bender; “and now let’s figure this thing out, and quickly, too.  We haven’t got any too much time.  They’ll have discovered the kid has gone by this time and the alarm will be spread broadcast.”

“I thought, when he yelled like that last night, we were goners sure,” remarked Jack, scowling at the recollection.  “It’s a good thing those kids sleep as hard as they do, or we’d have been in a tight fix.”

“Oh, well, no good going back to that now,” dissented Bill.  “How was the young cub when you left him, Hank?” he asked abruptly.

“Oh, he’d got through crying, and was lying nice and quiet on his bunk,” remarked Hank, with an amiable chuckle, as though he had just performed some praiseworthy act, instead of having left little Joe Digby locked in a deserted bungalow on an island some little distance from the one on which the conversation related above was taking place.

“Well, that’s good,” said Bill; “although crying, or yelling, either, won’t do him much good on that island.  He could yell for a week and no one would hear him.”

“No; the water’s too shallow for any motor boats to get up there,” agreed Hank.  “I had a hard job getting through the channel in the rowboat, even at high water.”

“Is the house good and tight?” was Jack’s next question.

“Tight—­tight as the Tombs,” was Hank’s answer, the simile being an apt one for him to use.  “The door has that big bolt on the outside that I put on, besides the lock, of which I carried away the key, and the shutters are all nailed up.  No danger of his getting away till we want him to!”