“Skipped.”

“What?”

“I said skipped.”

“Great Scott!  I’d give a hundred dollars if he hadn’t.”

“Why?”

“What time did he get away?”

“Don’t know, exactly.  Carl was watching him, but he fell asleep almost as soon as they were in the room together, and didn’t wake up until six o’clock this morning, and Farley was gone.  No one knows how he got away or at what time.  It might have been any time.  He probably woke up in the night and saw that Carl was dead to the world, and opened the window, dropped to the ground, and hit the trail.  That’s all I know about it.  But what makes you so anxious about it?”

“Then you haven’t heard the news?”

“Guess not.  What is it?”

“The First National Bank was robbed last night.”

“Great guns!  Creviss’ bank!  That’s the United States depository!”

“The same.”

“What are the details?”

“I rode through town this morning on my way over here to see if being confined for the night wouldn’t make the kid talk, when I saw a bunch of men standing in front of the bank.  I butted in and asked what the excitement was, and they told me that the bank had been robbed.”

“But how?”

“That’s what nobody knows.  When the cashier, Mr. Henson, got to the bank this morning everything apparently was all right.  The doors and windows were fastened, and there was no sign anywhere that the bank had been forcibly entered.  Of course, he didn’t look at these things first.  He went to the vault and opened it at the proper time and examined its contents casually.  Everything seemed to be as usual.  But when, a few minutes later, he went to get out the currency, it was all gone.  He hadn’t counted up when I left there, so no one knows the exact amount, but it was large.”

CHAPTER VIII.

The battle with the bull.

The excitement incident to the mysterious robbery of the Creviss bank was intense.

How had it been done?  This was the question that every one was asking his neighbor.  But none could answer it.

The evening before the robbery had taken place the bank had been closed by the cashier, and by Mr. Creviss himself.

The money, books, and papers, with which the business of the day had been conducted, had been carried into the vault by the cashier, and Mr. Creviss, who was an unusually cautious man, looked into the vault after the cashier came out, to see that everything was in.  Then he closed the vault doors, and turned the handle of the combination, setting the time lock, thus securing the doors from being opened until nine o’clock the next morning.

The only way in which it could be opened, and an almost impossible way, at that, was by blowing it open.

And yet the vault had been robbed, and the vault lock had apparently not been tampered with.