of their employees at heart.”

The others grinned back at him, all but Ken and Sandy who looked soberly at each other over the table. The same thought was in both their minds. An attempted burglary in Brentwood and a mysteriously unlocked door in Holt’s New York apartment, both on the same night, seemed a remarkable coincidence. Sandy opened his mouth to speak.

But Ken, shaking his head slightly, got to his feet. “Are we all vacationing today?” he asked. “Or are we going down to the office?”

“I hope you’re not all planning to vacation under my feet,” Mom said frankly. “I’ve got a lot to do today.”

“We can take a hint,” Pop replied with dignity. “Come on, Holt. There’s not much work on tap for today, but we can yarn at the office as comfortably as we can here. You two,” he added to Sandy and Ken, “have to take you-know-what to you-know-where.”

“I hope you’re referring to that disreputable-looking shoe box on the sideboard,” Mom said. “I’d like to have somebody take it somewhere out of my way.”

“Know what’s in it, Mom?” Bert asked.

“No. And I haven’t the slightest curiosity,” Mom told her older son.

“Not much, you haven’t!” Bert said. “I’ll bet you spent half an hour this morning trying to see through the cardboard.”

“I have other things to do with my time, especially on a busy day like this,” Mom assured him. “For example, there are the dishes to be done. But of course if you’re all going to be here, you might—”

Pop was on his feet. “We’re on our way, ma’am. On our way. Come on, Holt, you drive down with Bert and me.”

Ken and Sandy took the shoe box with them when they left a few minutes later, but they didn’t go directly to Sam Morris’s shop. They went to the office first.

“We think you ought to know about something that happened last night, Pop,” Sandy said abruptly, when he and Ken joined the others in the Brentwood Advance office. “Ken came downstairs in the middle of the night and—”

“No!” Bert leaped to his feet with an expression of mock horror. “You mean he found Mom peeping in the box?”

Sandy didn’t even laugh. “Tell them, Ken.”

Ken made his report as brief as possible. “You can see the scratches on the lock yourselves,” he concluded, “when we go back to the house.” He turned to his father. “And if somebody also broke into your apartment last night, Dad, it certainly looks—”

Bert’s laugh interrupted him. “It’s not enough for you two to imagine one burglar. Oh, no—you can do better than that.”

“Nobody tried to burglarize my apartment, Ken,” Holt said. “I just didn’t lock it properly myself.”

“How do you know?” Ken asked. “Can you be sure, Dad?”

“Doesn’t it seem strange,” Sandy put in, “that the minute you land in the country somebody breaks into the house where you’re staying, and at the same time your own apartment is mysteriously—”

Bert was still laughing. “You’re just not used to the way these two carry on,” he told Ken’s father. “Every time they see a doughnut they begin to worry about who stole the middle out of it. Anything for a mystery—that’s their philosophy.”

“Now wait a minute,” Pop said mildly. “It does sound as if there might be a sneak thief around Brentwood. We don’t have them often, but I suppose Christmas is a likely time, with everybody’s house full of presents. I’ll call Andy Kane and tell him to alert the force. That satisfy you?” He looked at Ken and Sandy. “But I will not,” he added, “call the New York police chief with a similar suggestion. So you two just take your dark suspicions out of here, and get over to Sam Morris’s while he’s still got time to fix that catch.”

Ken and Sandy looked at each other. Ken smiled first.

“All right,” he said. “I guess that does make sense. Come on, Sandy. But save your best stories until we get back, Dad.”

As soon as they arrived at the jeweler’s shop they were glad they had waited no longer. The place was crowded with customers, all wearing the harried expression of those who have delayed their Christmas shopping until the last possible moment. Sam Morris and his two clerks looked equally harried as they tried to wait on several people at a time.

Ken and Sandy chose the least crowded area along the glass-topped display counter that bisected the store lengthwise, running back toward Morris’s partitioned-off workroom at the rear. After they had waited for a few minutes, Sam, hurrying past with a heavy mahogany mantel clock, noticed their presence.

“I’ll be with you as soon as I can, boys,” he murmured. He put the clock down in front of a woman several feet away, told her to take her time examining it, and came back to where Ken and Sandy stood.

“This is the box, Sam,” Sandy explained, lifting it out of its carton. “The catch broke when it fell. See?”

Sam studied the injury, murmuring, “Nice workmanship. Nice. Yes—ought to be able to fix that all right.”

A hand holding a wrist watch thrust itself between the two boys, and a voice behind them said politely, “Excuse me. Could you put a new crystal in this watch while I wait?”

Down the counter the woman studying the mahogany clock called out, “Mr. Morris, I think I like the one you showed me first. May I see that again?”

“I’ll be right back,” Sam muttered, and hurried away.

“I certainly picked a fine day to break the crystal of my watch,” the man behind the boys said, and they turned to smile sympathetically into his pleasant middle-aged face. “If it weren’t such a good timepiece, I’d let it go for a while, but I hate to have it get dirty.”

When Sam hurried back, looking more harried than ever, he shook his head at the customer behind the boys. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m mighty busy today, and it takes quite awhile to cement a crystal into place.” He took the small iron box from Sandy’s hands.

The owner of the watch spoke up quickly. “Don’t bother with cement,” he said. “If you could just snap a crystal into place, I could get it cemented after Christmas, in New York. I’m just passing through Brentwood and—”

Sam shrugged. “All right. I could do that. Come back in about half an hour.” He took the watch. “You too,” he added to the boys. “I’ll try to have this ready by then. Won’t take me long—if I just have a chance to get at it.” He moved rapidly toward the partition at the rear.

“He’s certainly an accommodating gentleman,” the owner of the watch said, as all three of them began to edge their way through the crowd together.

“He certainly is,” Ken agreed. “If I owned a store I wouldn’t open the doors on Christmas Eve.”

“See you in half an hour,” the man said with a friendly wave as they separated on the sidewalk to go in opposite directions.

Back at the office they found Richard Holt in the middle of one of the lively tales he always brought back from his trips. “And they found that the phones in the police chief’s own office were being