“What are you going to do now?” asked Mr. Hamilton.
“Find Hamilcar Janes,” says Mark, “and thank him, and then see how we can get back home.”
“Any hurry?”
“L-l-like to get there to-night if we can.”
“Tell you what I’ll do,” says Mr. Hamilton. “You take supper with me, and I’ll drive you over in father’s automobile to-night. How about that?”
“Fine,” says I. I began to chuckle. It was the first good, satisfying laugh I had laughed in weeks. “I wonder,” says I, “if Skip’s man Clancy has found out why his car wouldn’t run.”
“I hope not,” says Mark, and his face set with that sort of a stern look he got every time he thought about Skip. “I hope Skip has to walk from Janes’s farm every inch of the w-w-way home.”
That’s just what I hoped myself.
CHAPTER XIX
I don’t know how Jehoshaphat P. got back to Wicksville, but he did get back, because I saw him next noon—passed him so our elbows touched. I couldn’t help looking right in his eye and grinning. I expect it was pretty impudent, but—well, it was a special case. If he’d known what I was grinning about he’d probably have taken me apart and put me together wrong—but he didn’t know. All he knew was that he had a chattel mortgage on the Bazar that was due Friday, and that there wasn’t any chance for us to pay it. One of the worst things a man can do is to know facts that aren’t so.