“And that is—?”
“Walker Jamieson, that smart-alecky reporter that we met in San Francisco a couple of years ago. Remember?”
“Remember? Of course I remember and he wasn’t smart alecky. He was kind and sweet and—” But Alice didn’t finish her sentence, for she became conscious of the fact that all the eyes around the dinner table were on her. She blushed prettily.
“Anyway,” she justified herself, “he’ll be a help in handling you, for he’s smart, almost as smart as you are, daddy.”
“A reporter! You mean to say a real newspaper reporter will be down there with us?” Nan couldn’t contain herself any longer.
“Yep, a no good reporter.” Adair MacKenzie tried hard to look disdainful as he said this, but he didn’t succeed very well and both Nan and Bess guessed that he had a genuine regard for the “young scamp” as he called him. “Got to have someone around,” he muttered as he drank his coffee, “to help handle you women, even if it’s a young scalawag who spends all his time tracking down stories for your worthless newspaper.”
“Stories!” Bess and Nan were wide-eyed.
“Now, see here,” Adair shook his finger in the direction of the two young girls, “reporters are no good. They’re a lazy lot that hang around with their feet on desks pretending to think. Think! Why, I never knew one yet that had a thought worth telling, let alone writing.
“This one that you are going to meet is no better than the rest. M-m-m, and no worse either,” he conceded as he noted the expression on Alice’s face. “I asked him to come along because he has a knack of making things lively wherever he is.
“Soon’s he gets those two big feet of his down off his desk, he makes things hum. That’s the way he is, lazy one minute, full of action the next. If there’s absolutely nothing happening, he knows how to stir things up. I rather like a man like that—not that I like him,” he added hastily, “but if we’re going to go across the border this summer, got to have someone like him around. Might just as well be Jamieson as anyone else.”