“That’s pretty close to slang!” warned Case.
“Not so you could notice—that is, not intended as such,” corrected the boy with a grin as he took a cup of steaming coffee from Alex’s hand and sat back in his chair with a look of contentment on his face.
“Now what about it?” asked Alex, when the cup was empty.
“Well, when I ran up, the man gave a vicious yank and got something away from the boy. It looked like, a leather bag. The boy let out a great cry and fell flat down on his face. I saw his face just a minute, looking like a snowflake in the mud, it was so white and so small.
I thought the thing which had been taken from him must mean a lot, to cause him to look like that, and so I left him lying there and chased on after the man. It looked to me like a case of highway robbery, and I just ached to get my hands on the man.”
“What is that in your hand?” asked Case, indicating a brown object which was half concealed in Clay’s coat-sleeve, but which dropped down to his palm, and lay with an end resting there.
“Never you mind!” Clay answered, with a chuckle as he drew the object up the sleeve and out of sight. “Just wait a minute. I overtook the man, who couldn’t run at all, but lumbered along like an old cow, and tripped him up by— Oh, you know how to drop and catch a fellow by the ankles! He went down kerflop in the muck, where wagons had broken the pavement and cut the earth into a puddle. I didn’t stop to see if he was hurt, but picked up the thing I had seen him take from the boy and started back with it.
“When I got back to the place where I had left the boy, with his pale face in the dirt, he wasn’t there, so I just brought the object along with me, for safe keeping, of course,” he added, with a laugh as he drew a brown leather bag from his sleeve and held it up to the light.
“That’s certainly a brown leather bag!” exclaimed Case. “What’s in it?”
“It must be something valuable, with all the fuss that’s been made over it,” Alex suggested. “Open up!”
“Of course I do; I peeked in as I came along.”
“Certainly not!” Case ventured. “Just fake stones, like the glad-hand men carry. They couldn’t be real diamonds, hustled about in the rain like this!”
“But they are real diamonds,” insisted Clay. “If I ever saw the real thing this is it.”