Charlie, with an anxious glance at Captain Hunniwell, cleared his throat loudly.  The captain’s thoughts, however, were too busy with his “riddle” to pay attention to the voices in the living-room.  As he and Phillips entered that apartment Major Grover came into the hall.  He seemed a trifle embarrassed, but he nodded to Captain Sam, exchanged greetings with Phillips, and hurried out of the house.  They found Ruth standing by the rear window and looking out toward the sea.

The captain plunged at once into his story.  He began by asking Mrs. Armstrong if her brother had told her of the missing four hundred dollars.  Charles was inclined to be indignant.

“Of course I haven’t,” he declared.  “You asked us all to keep quiet about it and not to tell a soul, and I supposed you meant just that.”

“Eh?  So I did, Charlie, so I did.  Beg your pardon, boy.  I might have known you’d keep your hatches closed.  Well, here’s the yarn, Mrs. Armstrong.  It don’t make me out any too everlastin’ brilliant.  A grown man that would shove that amount of money into his overcoat pocket and then go sasshayin’ from Wapatomac to Orham ain’t the kind I’d recommend to ship as cow steward on a cattle boat, to say nothin’ of president of a bank.  But confessin’s good for the soul, they say, even if it does make a feller feel like a fool, so here goes.  I did just that thing.”

He went on to tell of his trip to Wapatomac, his interview with Sage, his visit to the windmill shop, his discovery that four hundred of the fourteen hundred had disappeared.  Then he told of his attempts to trace it, of Jed’s anxious inquiries from day to day, and, finally, of the scene he had just passed through.

“So there you are,” he concluded.  “I wish to mercy you’d tell me what it all means, for I can’t tell myself.  If it hadn’t been so—­ so sort of pitiful, and if I hadn’t been so puzzled to know what made him do it, I cal’late I’d have laughed myself sick to see poor old Jed tryin’ to lie.  Why, he ain’t got the first notion of how to begin; I don’t cal’late he ever told a real, up-and-down lie afore in his life.  That was funny enough—­but when he began to tell me he was a thief!  Gracious king!  And all he could think of in the way of an excuse was that he stole the four hundred to buy a suit of clothes with.  Ho, ho, ho!”

He roared again.  Charlie Phillips laughed also.  But his sister did not laugh.  She had seated herself in the rocker by the window when the captain began his tale and now she had drawn back into the corner where the shadows were deepest.

“So there you are,” said Captain Sam, again.  “There’s the riddle.  Now what’s the answer?  Why did he do it?  Can either of you guess?”

Phillips shook his head.  “You have got me,” he declared.  “And the money he gave you was not the money you lost?  You’re sure of that?”

“Course I’m sure of it.  In the first place I lost a packet of clean tens and twenties; this stuff I’ve got in my pocket now is all sorts, ones and twos and fives and everything.  And in the second place—­”