"Why, hello, there, Patsy!" he said. "I didn't know you'd be waiting for me, or I'd have come a-running—why, what's the matter here, anyhow?"
The junior partner's wife had shaken herself loose and averted her face when her husband had attempted to fold her in his arms. He stared at her for a moment, and then he stared at his mother-in-law.
"What's up, mom?" he asked his wife's mother. "What have I been and gone and done now, I'd like to know? Did I leave the water running in the bathroom before starting for Washington, or have you lost my bull-pup again, that you all look so queer—or what the deuce is it all about?"
Neither of the women vouchsafed him any reply, and he turned to his senior partner.
"I say, Topknot, look here; are you in on this?" he said to his senior partner, who was twiddling his thumbs and looking very much confused. "Did I rob a bank in my sleep last week, or have the papers come out and accused me of being a member of the Ice Trust, or"——
"My boy," the senior partner interrupted, judiciously rising and taking the mysterious telegram from the inside pocket of his frock coat, "the telegraphic message which I have in my hand, and which, I regret to say, I opened this morning, knowing that you would not be back in New York until late in the afternoon, has been the occasion, owing to its somewhat mysterious contents, of the seeming"——
"Let's see it, Topknot," said the junior partner, reaching for the telegram.
He spread it out and glanced over its two lines. By the time he got through reading it he was in a frenzy of excitement. He jerked his watch out and looked at it.
"I've just got time," he muttered to himself, hastily. "I'll just about be able to make it. Patsy, you stay here with your mother until I get back. I'll be back in twenty minutes or half an hour. Tell you all about it when I get back," and he was out of the office door and down the steps like a boy breaking out of a little red schoolhouse for recess.
A vacant cab happened to be passing just as he got outside, and he hailed the driver and darted into the vehicle.