Page:The purple pennant (IA purplepennant00barb).pdf/98

Rh a boy in blue pajamas staring fascinatedly across at him with very wide, round eyes. In which case doubtless he would have suspected that he was under surveillance!

Perry was still looking when his mother's voice summoned him to action. Regretfully he withdrew his gaze and hurried off to the bathroom. When he returned the safe-breaker was still there, but he had finished his breakfast and was smoking a short pipe, still busy with the paper, and so Perry was obliged to leave him, and when he had finished his own repast and raced upstairs again the opposite window was empty. Perry set off to school fairly weighted down with the startling news he had to tell Fudge Shaw, and hoping beyond everything that he would be fortunate enough to meet with that youth before the bell rang. He wasn't, however, and not until the noon hour did he find a chance to unburden himself. Then, while he and Fudge, together with some two hundred other boys—not to mention an even larger number of girls—sat on the coping around the school grounds and ate their luncheons, he eagerly, almost breathlessly, recounted the story of what he had seen.

Fudge was plainly impressed, and he asked any number of searching and seemingly purposeless