"Now, if someone finds you before you come to, you'll look like a fellow
that has been drinking and fighting," muttered Truax under his breath. "If
you come to and get back to the yard without help, you'll walk unsteadily
and have that smell about your clothes. Usually, it needs only a breath of
suspicion to turn folks against a boy!"
[Illustration: Down Dropped the Bag.]
Down Dropped the Bag.
Pausing only long enough to learn that Jack's pulses were beating, and
that the submarine boy was breathing, Truax stole off into the night,
carrying the bag of sand under his overcoat. At one point he paused long
enough to empty the sand from the bag over a fence. The bag itself he
afterwards burned in the open fireplace in the room assigned to him at
Holt's Hotel.
For twenty minutes Jack Benson lay as he had been left. Then he began to
stir, and groan. Then he opened his eyes; after a while he managed to sit
up.
"Ugh!" he grunted. "What's the odor? Liquor! How does that happen? Oh, my
head!"
He got slowly to his feet, using the board fence as a means to help steady
himself. Then, though he found himself weak and tormented by the pain in
his head, Benson managed to feel his way along the fence until he came to
the opening made by the loose board.
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