"'Nothing that you think!' said Sam, looking him square in the face, a peculiar glitter in his eye that some of his workmen knew when there was any trouble in the mine. 'Let us drink to his health. He is not accustomed to being out, and the wine has perhaps gone to his head.'"
MacWhirter reached for his pipe, knocked the bowl against the brickwork of the big fireplace to free it from its dead ashes, and turned again to the circle about him. At the same instant the back-log settled itself with a sigh of satisfaction, and a crackling of sparks—the fire's applause, no doubt—filled the hearth.
"Is that all?" broke in Boggs.
"Not quite," Mac answered. "All for that night, and all for the next day, so far as Tim was concerned, for the old fellow shut himself up in his room and said he was sick, and Sam had to leave for Mexico without seeing him."
"What did the others think?"
"Just what you would have thought, and did, when I told it awhile ago. That's why I asked you. The millionnaire believed, of course, Tim had stolen it, and so did the physician. Made such an impression on the new directors present that Sam smothered his intended surprise and left his speech unfinished.
"Three months after that Sam came back to New York with more opals, many of them much larger and finer than the one which had so mysteriously disappeared. He arrived after everybody had gone to bed—Tim Peaslee among them—and remembering the dinner, and where he had eaten it, and how good it was, he got into a cab and drove to Solari's. The head waiter looked him over for a moment—he still wore the same sombrero—and went out and got the clerk, who asked him his name; and then Solari came in and asked him more questions and laid the lost opal in his hand. It had been found under a corner of the carpet when it had been taken up and shaken the week before, and Solari had been trying ever since to find some way of letting Sam know.
"It was now eleven o'clock, but that didn't make any difference to Sam. He laid a five-dollar bill on the table to pay for the supper he had ordered and hadn't time to eat, made a rush for the door, jumped into a cab and drove like mad to Bond Street. The outer door was open. He mounted the stairs three steps at a time and banged away at Tim's door. It happened to be Tim's night for working over his accounts, and he was still up.
"'I've got it, Tim—rolled under the carpet. Here it is. Let me hug you, you old fraud! Where's Miss Ann? I want to see her. Go and dig her out of bed, I tell you!'