“Lord, no!” denied Taylor. “I was just wondering. How long?” he insisted.
“About two weeks. Say, Squint, your brain wasn’t injured in that ruckus, was it?” he asked solicitously.
“It’s as good as it ever was.”
“I don’t believe it!” declared Norton. “Here you’ve started something serious, and you go to rambling about sprained ankles.”
“Norton,” said Taylor slowly, “a sprained ankle is a mighty serious thing—when you’ve forgotten which one it was!”
“What in——”
“And,” resumed Taylor, “when you don’t know but that she took particular pains to make a mental note of it. If I’d wrap the left one up, now, and she knew it was the right one that had been hurt—or if I’d wrap up the right one, and she knew it was the wrong one, why she’d likely——”
“She?” groaned Norton, looking at his friend with bulging eyes that were haunted by a fear that Taylor’s brain had cracked under the strain of the excitement he had undergone. He remembered now, that Taylor had acted in a peculiar manner during the fight; that he had grinned all through it when he should have been in deadly earnest.
“Plumb loco!” he muttered.
And then he saw Taylor grinning broadly at him; and he was suddenly struck with the conviction that Taylor was not insane; that he was in possession of some secret that he was trying to confide to his friend, and that he had begun obliquely. Norton drew a deep breath of relief.