Norris turned with a start and stared Dick in the face.
"How did you get possession of him?" he asked sharply.
"Well, what if I bought him?"
"Do you mean that you are making up to him what Barry's dirty hands
have failed to give? You are bribing him to act as your spy?"
"I do not suppose there is any harm in my hiring a private detective."
"That depends on whether he is already a public official, and on how you
pay him, and what you pay him for."
"Ellery, those fellows have sentries and pickets and fortifications and
guns always in battle-array against us and our kind. The only thing to
do is to gather hosts and ammunition on the other side."
"True. But there isn't any use in fighting dishonesty with dishonor.
Dick, don't lower your standard to the mere flinging of mud."
But Dick did not appear to listen. His eyes were caught by one of the
passing couples and he sprang to his feet.
"Let's follow the stream a little farther," he said, moving as he spoke.
"The gorge grows wilder and more enticing the farther you go."
He walked hurriedly down the path, and Ellery, whose mind seldom leaped,
but progressed by orderly steps, followed in some bewilderment. An
instant before Dick's face had worn the profound air of a man on whose
shoulders rested mighty problems. Now every movement was boyish and
exultant. He laughed to himself. The stream thundered and one does not
ask a friend to shout out his minor moods, so Ellery forbore to
question.
Suddenly the brook burst through overhanging cliffs of party-colored
sandstone out of its thread-like gorge into the wide chasm of the
Mississippi. A small steamer lay at anchor and tooted a discordant horn
to signify to the world that she intended to be up and doing. A crowd of
phlegmatic-faced revelers stood upon the bank and watched her with
absorbed indifference, while a smaller number pushed aboard and prepared
for true joy by laying in a store of cracker-jack and peanuts at a
diminutive counter.
"Just in time!" Dick ejaculated and he shoved Ellery on to the swaying
deck as the hawsers were swung loose.
They whirled out into mid-stream and exchanged the fine feminine
delights of the brook for the bold masculine ones of the great river,
whose craggy banks rose high, like fortifications, forest-crowned.
Tangles of woodbine, clematis and bitter-sweet sprawled down over
striated rocks. The boat twisted its way through a current that boiled
up from below in whirlpools. Here and there huge logs plunged downward
like water-monsters, as they threaded between wooded islands, where
meek-looking cottontails squatted and twiddled their noses at the
passing craft; on, on, until, far off, loomed the boldest highest cliff
of all, its top crested by a quaint old slit-windowed round tower of a
fort, once a border defense against Chippewa and Sioux, now backed by
the sleek lawns of well-groomed officers.