“I’m sorry, sir.  I was only thinkin’ about havin’ it clean before breakfast.  There was the bricks, sir, two of ’em; and a pile of soot and some bits of trash wid no meanin’—­”

“Did you find my two thinieth I picked up on the track yesterday?” asked Dicky.  “Ethels made me throw away all the thingth in my pocket and my thinieth went too.”

“What does he mean by his ’shinies’?” asked Mr. Emerson.

“He picked up a lot of stuff yesterday when we were hunting arrow heads and walking to Rosemont by the short cut over the track.  When I was putting Mrs. Schuler’s storm cape on him I emptied out his pocketful of trash into the fireplace.”

“What did the shinies look like, son?” inquired Dicky’s grandfather.

Dicky was entering into an elaborate and unintelligible explanation when Moya took the bits of brass from the gourd.

“Would these be the shinies?” she asked.

Mr. Emerson took them from her and examined them carefully.

“I rather think the explanation of the explosion is here,” he decided.  “You say you picked these up on the track, Dicky?”

“Yeth, I did, and Ethel threw them away,” repeated the youngster who was beginning to think that he had a real grievance, since his “shinies” seemed to have some importance.

“These are two of the small dynamite cartridges that brakemen lay on the track to notify the engineer of a following train to stop for some reason.  They use them in stormy weather or when there is reason to think that the usual flag or red light between the rails won’t be seen.”

“Dynamite!” exclaimed Ethel Brown, looking at her hand as she remembered that she had not been especially gentle when she tossed the contents of her brother’s pocket into the fireplace.

“There is enough dynamite in a cartridge to make a sharp detonation but not enough to do any damage, unless, as happened here, there were two of them in a small space that was enclosed on three sides—­”

“The trash was blown out on the floor of the room,” interrupted Mr. Schuler.

“—­by walls that were none too strong.  With a wind such as last night’s knocking down the chimney at the top and bricks setting dynamite cartridges into action below I only wonder that the old thing is standing at all this morning.”

They gazed at it as if they expected the whole affair to fall before their eyes.

“I’ll call up the brickmason and find out when he can come to examine it; he may have to rebuild the entire chimney.”

Mr. Emerson was moving toward the hall where the telephone was when his eye fell on Elisabeth sitting contentedly on the floor close to the wall turning over and over something that gleamed.

“What have you got there, small blessing?” he asked, stooping to make sure that she was not intending to try the taste of whatever it might be.

“Hullo!” he cried, straightening himself.  “Hullo!” and he held up his discovery before the astonished eyes of the group.