“There is a dead-lock—a dead-lock somewhere!” Touchtone exclaimed to himself over and over. Some of the telegrams had been duplicated. Two to other persons at Ossokosee—Farmer Wooden one of them—were added. They had no available New York acquaintances. Further dispatches were useless. If the enigma had a simple answer it was as effective as one in which lay a tragedy. The silence might any moment explain itself as a calamity or a burlesque. Must they wait another day for a solution—or for none?
“We wont do that, I think, Gerald,” he said. “No. If this delay keeps on we will leave here to-morrow and start for home, the Ossokosee. Even if we find the doors shut in our faces we’ll find people glad to take us in, forlorn creatures that we are.” There was not much mirth in his laugh.
“I—I think we’d better go home,” said Gerald; and this prospect brightened him a little.
Mr. Banger was on jury duty all that day, and, much to his disgust, he was locked up for the night with eleven other good and true men. He sent word to his viceroy, Joe, that he “couldn’t tell when Wilson Miller (the town undertaker) would know black wasn’t white, and let them all get home to their business—it was all his pig-headedness!” But about ten o’clock Mr. Banger was released and made his way back, quite put out with life and with the ways of administering justice in these United States. He had not thought of Philip and Gerald and of their mysterious detention. But it surprised him to now infer, from what Joe said, that they had not yet been able to get replies from their friends.
“Things must be decidedly out of order somewhere,” he exclaimed to Joe, as they were sitting together in the office, chatting about the day’s affairs. From the bar-room came the sound of a few voices, and the hotel was settling down for the night.
“Does that young fellow seem to have as much money about him as he’d ought to—by what he said to me?”
“I don’t know,” Joe replied. “You told me not to bother ’em.”
“I wonder if his story is all made out of cloth that will wash? To look at either of the two would make one suppose so. But I’ve been sold before now by people, old and young.”
As he spoke Philip walked in sight. He had left a package in the office, and came down-stairs for it. He looked pale and anxious.
“Nothing turned up yet?” queried Mr. Banger. “Odd! I should think you’d feel quite nonplused.”