Mac smiled and a laugh went round. Poor old Tim Peaslee stealing Sam Collins's or anybody else's opal to straighten out a deficiency in his account was about as absurd a deduction to those who remembered him, as Diogenes losing his lantern in the effort to scrape acquaintance with a thief.
Marny, his face blue-white with his tramp through the snow, and Jack Stirling, in a new English Macintosh, now entered, shook their wet garments, filled their pipes from the yellow jar, and dragged up chairs to join the half-circle, the puffs of their newly filled pipes adding innumerable wavy lines to the etched plate of the atmosphere.
"Mac has got the most extraordinary story, Marny, that you ever heard," cried Wharton. "What do you think of old Tim Peaslee helping himself to Sam Collins's jewelry?"
"Never heard of Peaslee or Collins in my life," answered Marny, dragging his chair closer and opening his chilled fingers to the blaze. "Jack may, he knows everybody—some he oughtn't to. Who are they, burglars or stockbrokers?"
"Why, Collins, who has that opal mine in Mexico. Old Tim was for years the book-keeper of the Exeter Bank. You must have known Peaslee," persisted Wharton.
Marny shook his head, and Wharton turned to Mac.
"Begin all over again, old man, and we'll take a vote. Marny's head is as thick as one of his backgrounds."
"At the beginning?" asked MacWhirter, between the puffs of his pipe, freshly lighted now that his story had been told.
"Yes, from the time Sam Collins came to New York—everything."
Mac laid his pipe once more on the mantel, threw an extra stick on the fire from the pile by the chimney, raked the ashes clear of the front log, and resumed his position on the rug. Now that the circle was larger and he had been challenged to give every detail he intended to make his second telling of the extraordinary story more interesting, if possible, than the first.