"Why, hello!" said everybody.
"Hello!" said the Stranger. With a palpable flex of muscle he leaned back against the wainscoting of the door and narrowed his haggard eyes to the cheerful scene before him. "I don't know where I am," he said, "or how I got here. . . . Or who you are." "I can't seem to remember anything." The faintly sheepish smile that quickened suddenly in his eyes, if not distinctly humorous, was at least plucky. "I think I must have had a drink," he said.
"I wouldn't wonder!" grinned Paul Brenswick.
"You are perfectly right," conceded George Keets.
"Have another!" suggested my Husband. "A straight and narrow this time! You look wobbly. There's nothing like coffee."
And still the Stranger stood undecided in the doorway. "I'm not very fit," he acknowledged. "Not with ladies. . . . But I had to know where I was." Blinking with perplexity he stared and stared at the faces before him. "I'm three thousand miles from home," he worried. "I don't know a soul this side of the Sierras. . . . I—I don't know how it happened——"
"Oh, Shucks!" shrugged young Kennilworth. "Easiest thing in the world to happen to a stranger in a new town! 'Welcome to our City Welcome to our City' from night till morning and morning till night again! Any crowd once it gets started——"
"Crowd!" brightened the Stranger. "I—I was in some sort of a—a crowd?" he rummaged hopefully through his poor bruised brain.
From her concentrated interest in a fried chicken-bone, the May Girl glanced up with her first evidence of divided attention.
"Yes! You were!" she confided genially. "It was at the railroad junction. And when the officer arrived, he said, 'I hate like the dickens to run this gentleman in, but if there's nobody to look after him—?' So I said you belonged to me! I saw the crape on your sleeve!" said the May Girl.