“Hello!” he cried. “What’s this mean? Some one has been here while I was gone.”
A moment later he had reached the private drawer which he always kept locked. One glance showed him that it had been pried open and the lock broken. The contents of this drawer, however, had not been scattered upon the floor. Everything was there—everything save one thing.
It was about the time when Merriwell made this discovery that Duncan Ditson entered his own room and found Bern Wolfe waiting for him there.
“Hello!” exclaimed Dunc, in surprise. “Forgot about you in the excitement. Say, do you know what happened? Well, Merriwell went into that game and won it with a corking hit in the ninth inning. Isn’t that just his luck?”
“Don’t talk to me about luck!” snarled Wolfe. “I’m sore! I’m disgusted!”
“Eh? What’s happened? Did you try to get hold of that confession?”
“Try?” rasped Bern, producing an envelope and flinging it on the study table. “I should say I did! There it is!”
“There it is? Then what’s the matter? What ails you?”
Wolfe caught up the envelope, and drew forth the sheets of paper it contained.
“What ails me?” he hissed. “Just take a look at this! Here’s that valuable confession!”
He spread out the sheets of paper, and Ditson gazed at them in surprise, for apparently there was not a line of writing upon them.
“Confession?” muttered Duncan. “What are you talking about? There’s nothing there.”
“There was once. Look here—look close. Here, you can see the faintest tracing of a word. There, you can see part of another word. There was writing on this paper once. Why, I can even see a bit of my own signature down in this corner, but it’s gone. It’s faded. It’s no good to any one now.”
Looking intently at the paper, Ditson was able to make out the faint tracing of a few detached words upon it.
Suddenly Duncan smote his clenched right fist into his left palm.
“Well, if that wasn’t a slick trick on the part of Lynch!” he cried. “He wrote his confession with sympathetic ink.”
“Yes. That’s ink that will fade and vanish entirely, a few days after it is used. I was with him when he bought it. He told me he had a girl to whom he was writing letters, and, as he feared she might not destroy his letters, he was taking care to use the kind of ink that would prevent those epistles from ever rising like ghosts to haunt and confuse him. Wolfe, we’re a couple of blamed fools!”