"I don't know, kid," Walker liked this youngster that Alice had already filled his ears with tales about. "But you're in for it. It's tough, these days, getting duplicates of the things. Shall I break the news to the ogre," he nodded in Adair MacKenzie's direction. "He'll explode, but you've just got to take it."
"Here, here, what's eating you two?" Adair MacKenzie came bursting forth from the door he had entered just a few moments before Nan's encounter with the Mexican. "H-m-m, lost your pass, I'll wager." With the uncanny instinct of many peppery old gentlemen, Adair MacKenzie as soon as he saw the baffled expression on Nan's face, jumped immediately to the right conclusion.
"Might have known that would happen. Should have taken care of them all myself. Can't depend on women and girls. Always tell Alice that. Ought to have a safe place to keep things. Old pouch my mother used to strap around her waist was a good idea."
Nan couldn't restrain the smile that came to her eyes at this. She had known one person in her life who tied a bag around her waist. That was grim old Mrs. Cupp, assistant to Dr. Beulah Prescott, principal at Lakeview Hall. Legend had it that Mrs. Cupp had a dark secret the key to which she carried in the black bag which someone, in days long before Nan and Bess descended on Lakeview Hall, had seen. Whether or not it was so, Nan didn't know, but at Lakeview Hall, the words "Keep it a secret" were generally expressed by saying "Put it in the black bag."
"Laughing at me, Miss!" Adair's roar brought Nan out of her reveries. She jumped, and looking up into his face, she winged her way from Lakeview Hall on the shores of the Great Lakes back to Laredo, Texas and the immediate problem of the lost visitor's pass.
"I said you should take care of your things the way I do," he roared again. "See," he pushed his hand inside his topcoat pocket, "Always know where my things--" the end of the sentence was lost in a sputter, as Adair MacKenzie searched frantically in pocket after pocket for his visitor's pass. It was gone!
"W-w-why, somebody's picked my pockets. Can't allow this. Where's a policeman? You, you, why don't you do something instead of standing there and laughing?" Adair shook his cane at Walker Jamieson who was grinning broadly at the spectacle of the old man fuming and sputtering now, not at his own negligence, but at the inefficiency of a government that would allow such things to happen. His tirade against Nan and her carelessness were utterly forgotten.