"That's exactly what you do, I guess!" remarked Bess, ruefully. "And I can see that he thinks you're fine. He said the other night that you were 'some good sport,' and that's praise—from him! I'm going to try and act differently toward him from now on. But, oh! his language is so dreadful and slangy! It irritates me to pieces, and I just can't help snapping at him when he talks that way!"
"Do you know," said Corinne, "I've noticed a queer thing about him. When he's very much in earnest and forgets himself completely, especially in this mystery business, he hardly uses any slang at all,—just talks like any one else! I believe he'll grow out of all that, later, when he's learned that it isn't the way the worth-while people talk. But he's bright—bright as a steel trap; and think where we should have been in this affair if it hadn't been for him!"
Meanwhile, all unconscious that he was a subject of such animated discussion, Alexander was pursuing his researches in grim earnest; and at length, in the course of a week or so, he announced that a meeting might be called and he would make his report. When they had gathered expectantly the following afternoon, he came in with an armful of books and settled down on the floor before the open fire.
"Now, don't go boosting your hopes sky-high!" he remarked, noting the tense expectancy of their attitudes. "I ain't doped out anything so very wonderful—"
"Oh, haven't you, Alexander?" exclaimed Margaret, disappointedly. "I thought you must have found something great, the way you've been grunting and chuckling and talking to yourself all this time when you read in the evenings!"
"Sorry to give you the cold shower, kiddie! I've done the best I could; and if I was chuckling and grunting, it was because I'd struck some ripping hot stuff in the way of adventures. Say! that Bermuda history is some little jig-time! I started to wade through it, thinking it'd be as dry as tinder, and you can knock me down with a plate of pancakes, but it was rich! Started right in with the greatest old shipwreck, when old Admiral Somers and his men got chucked off on this uninhabited island! Gee! it was as good as 'Robinson Crusoe,' that we're reading about in school. Then they had a rip-snorting old mutiny, and started in to build another ship, and all that sort of thing! And later on, after they'd gone home to England and come back and settled in a colony there, they started up some witchcraft, and ducked a lot of gabby dames and hung some more, and—"
"But, Alexander," interrupted the impatient Margaret, "you can tell us all about that some other time. What I want to know is, did you find out anything that seemed to be connected with our mystery?"
"That's right, kid! We'll get down to business, and do our spieling afterward. Well, I didn't strike a blooming thing that seemed to be even a forty-second cousin to our affairs till I got down to the year 1775; and then I hit the trail of a piker called Governor Bruère, who was the reigning high Mogul in Bermuda just then. He was some pill, too, you can take it from me! And everybody seemed to hate him like poison, he was such a grouch. Well, it was just about the time when the Revolution busted out in the U. S. Washington was up there around Boston, keeping the British on the jump. But he was scared stiff, because gunpowder was so short. There were only about nine rounds left for each American soldier. But they were chucking a good bluff, and of course the British weren't wise to it.
"Just about then, somebody put Washington on to the fact that down in Bermuda there was a whole mint of gunpowder concealed somewhere in the government grounds, and it wouldn't be so hard to get hold of it. At the same time, too, the Bermudians were pretty nearly starving, because they got all their food supplies from America, and since the war broke out, England had cut them off at the meter. So Washington doped it out that here was a good chance to make an exchange. He sent a couple of fellers to tell the Bermudians that, if they'd give him that powder, he'd send them a whole outfit of eats. And you'll admit that was square enough!
"But wouldn't this jar you! When they got there, they found the whole place up in the air and the governor sizzling around like a cannon-cracker, because some one had got in ahead of them, stole the powder, and carted it off to America! They just turned tail and beat it for home and mother as quick as they could, before the governor got wind of their business! So long as Washington got the powder, they should worry!