In his curiosity Larry forgot the caution he had hitherto used. His foot touched a piece of wood, dislodged it, and rattled it against a stone. It made quite a noise.
“What’s that?” exclaimed the man with the box.
“Someone’s coming,” replied the one with the pick.
“I’ll see what it is,” the third man said, as he started toward Larry. But the boy did not wait to note what would happen when the man got to him. He sped off softly through the darkness, and when he saw a part of a wall just ahead of him he dropped down behind it. The man passed him on the run, but did not think of looking behind the masonry. After looking about him, as well as he could in the darkness, the man returned.
“A cat or a dog, I guess,” was the reply. “Nobody after us, anyhow. Go ahead and bury the stuff or, first thing we know, someone will spot us, and that would never do.”
“They evidently don’t want whatever they are doing known,” thought Larry in his hiding place.
The men worked a little while longer, and then the boy could hear them throwing back the dirt and packing it down. Soon they finished and then, blowing out the light, they departed. Waiting a few minutes to be sure they were out of the way Larry crept cautiously over to where he judged the men had been digging.
But, in the darkness he could not find the place. It would have done him little good if he had, he thought, as he had nothing with which to throw out the dirt again.
He resolved, however, to come back the first chance he had next day, and see if there was anything mysterious in the actions of the three men. In order to better locate the spot Larry took his handkerchief and weighted it down on the ground by a stone.
“This is somewhere near the place,” the boy thought. “I guess I can easily find it in the daytime.”
Then he went home. His mother and the others in the family had gone to bed, and Larry was glad of it, for he did not want to be questioned as to why he was so late coming from night school.
Larry hardly slept for wondering what the men had buried. He thought they might be hiding the evidences of some crime, and then again he reasoned that perhaps, after all, it might turn out to be nothing more than a pet dog or bird that had died.