I had stooped into the aisle and was picking up the piece of paper which he had accidentally dropped as he passed Hutchins.  I opened it and read aloud to Tish and Aggie, who had wakened:—­

“’Afraid you’ll not get away with it!  The red-haired man in the car behind is a plain-clothes man.’”

Tish has a large fund of general knowledge, gained through Charlie Sands; so what Aggie and I failed to understand she interpreted at once.

“A plain-clothes man,” she explained, “is a detective dressed as a gentleman.  It’s as plain as pikestaff!  The boy’s received this warning and dropped it.  He has done something he shouldn’t and is escaping to Canada!”

I do not believe, however, that we should have thought of his being a political spy but for the conductor of the train.  He proved to be a very nice person, with eight children and a toupee; and he said that Canada was honeycombed with spies in the pay of the German Government.

“They’re sending wireless messages all the time, probably from remote places,” he said.  “And, of course, their play now is to blow up the transcontinental railroads.  Of course the railroads have an army of detectives on the watch.”

“Good Heavens!” Aggie said, and turned pale.

Well, our pleasure in the journey was ruined.  Every time the whistle blew on the engine we quailed, and Tish wrote her will then and there on the back of an envelope.  It was while she was writing that the truth came to her.

“That boy!” she said.  “Don’t you see it all?  That note was a warning to him.  He’s a spy and the red-haired man is after him.”

None of us slept that night though Tish did a very courageous thing about eleven o’clock, when she was ready for bed.  I went with her.  We had put our dressing-gowns over our nightrobes, and we went back to the car containing the spy.

He had not retired, but was sitting alone, staring ahead moodily.  The red-haired man was getting ready for bed, just opposite.  Tish spoke loudly, so the detective should hear.

“I have come back,” Tish said, “to say that we know everything.  A word to the wise, Mister Happier Days!  Don’t try any of your tricks!”

He sat, with his mouth quite open, and stared at us:  but the red-haired man pretended to hear nothing and took off his other shoe.

None of us slept at all except Hutchins.  Though we had told her nothing, she seemed inherently to distrust the spy.  When, on arriving at the town where we were to take the boat, he offered to help her off with Aggie’s cat basket, which she was carrying, she snubbed him.

“I can do it myself,” she said coldly; “and if you know when you’re well off you’ll go back to where you came from.  Something might happen to you here in the wilderness.”

“I wish it would,” he replied in quite a tragic manner.

[As Tish said then, a man is probably often forced by circumstances into hateful situations.  No spy can really want to be a spy with every brick wall suggesting, as it must, a firing-squad.]