I have always maintained that my boys were clever, particularly Ralph, but I never gave even him credit for being as clever as he really is, until certain events transpired which I shall briefly relate.

      Both the boys were fond of outdoor exercises, particularly cycling, and were boys in every sense of the word. Tom was eighteen and Ralph was a year younger. In their studies they kept abreast, for while Ralph was the younger he was far more clever than Tom, although he was not nearly so studious. Time and time again I have found Tom at his studies while Ralph was reading romances. I had often rebuked Ralph for this but without apparent good results. At the time of which I am writing he had become enamored of the tales of A. Conan Doyle. I tried to show him the folly of light reading and particularly the reading of such impossible tales as those of Doctor Doyle. It was of no avail, however, for the boy not only kept on reading them but insisted on relating the detective tales to me and arguing, that, while they were not true, they were at least possible. He even went so far as to say that in reading them one learned habits of observation and analysis that would stand him in good stead in life. I finally gave up arguing with him.

      But to my story. After having accumulated a moderate fortune in speculation early in life, I decided that I had all the money that I needed for the rest of my days and resolved to retire to a country home and there indulge myself in my love for books and nature, make my wife happy, and personally educate my two sons. Ten happy years had been spent thus when I began to realize that the constantly decreasing rates of interest and the constantly increasing expenses of two boys, already nearly fitted for college, would soon compel me to eat into my original capital or deny myself and my wife luxuries that we had been accustomed to for years.

      I must increase my capital. That was plain. I learned, by chance, one day that a new railroad had secured a charter to enter Chicago — which was less than a hundred miles from my home — and that it would, at a point within a few miles of my home, cross another railroad that did not go near Chicago. This was inside information and I readily perceived the value of it. At the junction of the two roads there would be a freight yard, a depot, and a little village. If I could gain possession of the land there I would have a sure and a safe investment.

      I knew that the largest part of the land in that vicinity was owned by an illiterate old German who had acquired it when the place was a wilderness, and that he had tenaciously held on to it. After I had advanced many arguments and offered a sum considerably more than the land was worth for farming purposes, he consented to sell. I had the abstracts looked up and every detail of the transaction settled except the actual transfer. The German, whose name was Schmidlap, could barely read, scarcely scrawl his name in German characters, and was utterly ignorant of business. Like most men who are ignorant of business he was suspicious and cautious. In this case his caution took a peculiar form. He insisted that the money must be paid in cash. Unwilling to cross him in any particular I readily agreed to his demand. He was to come to my home prepared to make the transfer one afternoon in the early fall and I, accompanied for safety's sake by my two sons, went to Chicago and drew out the money necessary for the purchase, $27,500. Of this sum $5,000 was in gold eagles which I got, thinking that if at the last moment the Teuton should hesitate to go on with the deal, as I half feared he would, the sight of the gold would act as an incentive to go ahead. I would have gotten the whole sum in gold but for the fact that it would have weighed too much to have been carried without much inconvenience. As it was the money with the valise in which I carefully locked it weighed close to twenty-five pounds.

      When I got home I put the valise containing the money in my desk, a roll-top office desk, in the library and there with the boys and my wife awaited the advent of Schmidlap. He was to be at my house at 4 o'clock but it was over an hour before he put in an appearance. At last we saw him driving down the road in a farm wagon, and alone. Had it been any one else who was coming to carry away so large a sum of money, it would have surprised me to see him alone, but in Schmidlap it did not. We could hear him stop before the door. My wife showed him into the library and left the room. To my "good afternoon" he made no reply but glanced around and finally said, "Have you got the money?"

      I replied that I had; whereupon he blurted out, "Let me see it."

      I unlocked the desk and taking the valise to a table opened it and laying the bills to one side poured the gold out and let him feast his eyes on it. He looked, and looked, and then dug his hands into the heap. After he had feasted his eyes for as long a time as I thought necessary to impress him with the value of it, I swept the money into the valise again and locking it set it on my desk and inquired, "Where are the deeds?"

      "The deeds!" he exclaimed, in a tone of dismay; "the deeds!" and rushed out into the hall where we heard him give a terrified shriek and fall heavily to the floor.

      Hastily pulling down the cover of the desk I, followed by my sons, rushed into the hall to see what was the matter with him. We found him, apparently unconscious, in a heap on the floor. We raised his head and calling to my wife for stimulants, which were soon brought, we quickly had the satisfaction of seeing him open his eyes. He struggled to his feet and supported by Tom on one side and me on the other and followed by my wife and Ralph he went to the wagon and extracted the deeds from under a blanket on the seat of the wagon. It took but a glance to satisfy him and he hastily put the precious papers in an inside pocket and we all returned to the house. My wife was the first to enter the library. Before I got into the room I heard her give a cry of dismay. Hastening into the room I saw that my desk was open and that the valise containing the money had disappeared.

      For a moment I was motionless with surprise and dismay. It seemed impossible that in the brief time we had been absent from the room anyone could have opened the desk and gotten away with the money. I rushed out of the house and looked in every direction for the thief but there was not a soul in sight. As I returned to the house I met Schmidlap. He reproached me with having played a trick on him, and said that he never believed that I intended to pay him a cent, but was trying to rob him of his deeds. I did not discuss the matter but went on a few steps, when I met my wife. "Go hitch up the horse," she said, "and I will drive to the village, notify the constable, and telegraph to the city for detectives."

      I inwardly blessed her for thinking of things which my brain was too dulled to have thought of. I hitched up the horse and watched her drive away and then returned to the house. Tom and Ralph had both disappeared. I was weak and my brain refused to work. I sat down at the empty desk that but a few minutes before had contained nearly half of my little fortune, bowed my head on my hands, and gave way to my grief in a manner that was, perhaps, childlike but was, nevertheless, natural. I do not know how long I remained in this position. It must have been along time. The first thing that I realized was the presence,/CORR> of Ralph's face as he raised my head from my hands and looked into my eyes.

      "I thought you said Sherlock Holmes was not a possible character," he said.

      I looked at him in a dazed way and asked, "What do you mean, my boy?"

      "I mean this," he said, and held before my eyes the valise that had contained the money.

      I gazed a moment in astonishment, and then seized it, and thrusting the key into the lock opened it. There was the money, the new crisp bills and the clinking gold, When I had sufficiently recovered myself to ask what it all meant, Ralph, in that superior tone that boys will at times assume and which I had so often reproved him for using, began:

      "Sherlock Holmes was not such a wonderful man after all. Anyone could be a Sherlock Holmes if he only had the chance and would use his eyes and his powers of analysis.

      "When I saw that the money was gone, and you ran out of the room, I thought, 'Here is a chance to do what Sherlock Holmes would have done.' Of course I do not pretend to know as much as Sherlock Holmes knew, but I thought that I did know enough for a simple case like this.

      "The first thing that I did was to examine the desk. The thief, whoever he was, either had a key or else forced open the desk, for before you left the room you shut down the cover and locked it. He did not have a key, for the first thing that I discovered were two little triangular shaped indentations on the edge of the cover with the sides of each triangle nearest to the other, parallel to each other. On the top of the desk was a mark evidently caused by a piece of steel about three-quarters of an inch wide. The marks on the top of the desk came just opposite to the marks on the cover. Thinking of instruments that could make such marks I thought of the spanner wrench for our tandem. The marks were plainly made by a spanner wrench.

      "Then I stopped to think how the thief got into the room. He could not have come in the front way without our seeing him and I knew that the back of the house was locked. There was only one other way that he could have gotten in then, and that was by the window. You know that the window was open. I started for it but I knew that the thief had come in that way before I got there for there was dirt on the carpet and the tracks led directly from the window to the desk. In the soft dirt in the flower-bed outside the window I saw footprints. I examined them as Sherlock Holmes used to examine footprints. Across the print of the sole of the shoe were two parallel lines of marks. What could have made them? Surely nothing but the rat trap pedals of a bicycle. The use of a wrench and the prints of the shoes settled the matter. The thief must have been a bicycle rider, and, having a wrench with him, must have had his bicycle, which would also account for his getting out of sight so soon.

      "Then I stopped to analyze some more. Who could have known that the money was there. I was sure that you had told no one outside of this house and I was equally sure that no one in the house had told any one. Then it must have been someone that old Schmidlap had told. Who was there that he knew that rode a bicycle? Why, his son Jake, of course. That explained everything. Of course Schmidlap would not know where you kept the money and if any one was to get at it he must know that. He asked you if you had the money the first thing and you showed it to him. Anyone could look in the window from behind the shrubbery and see where you put it. Then old Schmidlap went out after the deeds and pretended to faint so as to get us out the room. It was clear as day. Schmidlap had conspired to get your money without giving up his land.

      "As soon as I had settled that much, I told Tom to go to the barn and get out our tandem, for you know that Jake Schmidlap is a scorcher and won the county championship at the fair only last week. I knew that if we were to catch him soon we would have to be in a hurry. I knew that we could beat him on the tandem, especially as he had that heavy satchel to carry.

      "While Tom was getting the tandem I made sure that Take had his bicycle with him by looking for its tracks. His bicycle has corrugated tires and it is the only bicycle with that kind of tires in the neighborhood. Sure enough I found the tracks of the tires in the road in front of the house. But here was a puzzle. There were tracks in both directions. Then I analyzed. He did not go in the direction of his house for the road in that direction is in plain sight for a mile and we would have seen him when we ran out of the house. He must have gone the other way and gotten around the corner by the maple grove and thus have been out of sight.

      "Jake did not have more than ten minutes start and I felt sure that we could catch him in much less than an hour, and I knew we would have to catch him in that time, or he would have the help of darkness to assist him in his escape. I told Tom that we would have to make our very best time and we laid down to the work. Whenever we came to a cross road we would have to slow down so that we could see whether or not he turned off. He kept right on, however, and after we had examined several cross roads I became satisfied that he would make right for Cedar Grove where he could take the mail train west. You know that it is rather hilly on the road to Cedar Grove and that encouraged me for I kne v that whatever advantage we had over him on a level road would be increased on the hills. We kept on just as fast as we could go until we came to the cross road that leads to the Grove. I was almost tired out by that time and I could see that Tom was no better off, but there were only two miles more at the most, and even then it was a question with me whether we would get to the station in time for the train. We stopped long enough to see that Jake had taken this road and then hurried on as fast as we could. We had not gone far when I looked up from the front seat, as we got to the top of a hill, and saw Jake ahead of us at the top of the next one. He was not more than an eighth of a mile ahead, but that was enough.

      "'There he is,' I said to Tom and we both worked as we never worked before. We never could have gone at the speed we went if it had not been for the big prize at the end of the race. When we had gone a mile more and were within sight of Cedar Grove, we had almost caught him. We were not more than twenty yards behind. Up to this time Jake had not seen us but he heard the whir of the tandem and he looked around. I never saw such a look of terror on any one's face in my life.

      "The valise was hanging over his shoulder hanging by the strap that was on it when you carried it home from bank. He did not lose any time in looking back but he bent over his wheel and worked for dear life. We had been making such a spurt that for a while we actually lost ground. Then he began going up hill and we began gaining on him. My head was all in a whirl with the excitement and work and I could scarcely see where I was steering. We got to the top of the hill not more than ten feet behind him. I could see that he was as tired as we were for he was wabbling.

      "'Give it to her,' said Tom, and I did the best that I could. We were going down that hill at a fearful pace when I saw something that almost made my hair stand on end. Jake was no longer trying to get away from us but was looking behind. All of a sudden I remembered his trick of 'dumping' other competitors in his races on the track. He would get in the lead and then cross over in front of some rider just so that his front wheel would strike Jake's rear one and the poor fellow would go down with his machine. That was what he was trying to do with us.

      "He edged over to one side of the road and I followed him, taking care not to get too close. All of a sudden I saw that he was back-pedaling. It was as much as I could do to get my foot on the front wheel of our tire before we were lapped on his wheel. I could feel the beat of the friction on the tire coming through my shoe just as he, judging that we were close enough, steered his wheel toward the other side of the road. Had he been a moment sooner we would have surely gone down but my foot brake had accomplished its work and he missed us by the closest possible margin. I got my feet on the pedals again and began pumping and called to Tom to do the same. In a minute the high gear of the tandem had brought us alongside of him, and, as soon as we were enough ahead, I began crowding him off toward the ditch. He was right on the edge of the road and just abreast of Tom when he reached out his hand and tried to push us away. He reached for Tom but Tom was smart enough to duck his head and Jake came crashing into our back wheel from the impetus of his own shove.

      "We managed to escape falling but Tom lost his pedals and we went flying down the hill and it was not until we had reached the bottom that we were able to stop the tandem. When we got off we left the wheel lying on the ground and ran back on foot. There was no need to hurry for Jake was lying on the ground insensible. We took the valise and then tried to bring him back to consciousness. While we were working, a farmer came along and we left him to carry Jake to Cedar Grove in his wagon while we got on our tandem and rode home. We did not come back very quickly but here we are.

      "And now, what do you think of Sherlock Holmes?"