“Have your laugh, you old married hyena!” grunted the late-comer in the sentimental field. “I can’t get back at you because I didn’t happen to be around when you were making seventeen different kinds of a donkey of yourself over old Hiram Fairbain’s daughter—as I have no doubt you did. But that’s neither here nor there; the young woman I’m speaking of tagged me, and I’m It; I’ve been It ever since that first day on the eastbound train.”
“And you say she stopped off in Brewster?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t meet her?”
“No. You’ve been calling me an amateur detective, Dick; I’m a fake! That girl and the people she was with just vanished into thin air the minute they hit the platform at the Brewster station. I lost them as completely as if they had stepped off into space.”
“So you came back, later, to hunt her up?”
“I did; or to try to get some trace of her—just that.”
“Of course, it says itself that you have found her.”
Sprague’s mellow laugh rumbled deep in his chest.
“Richard, I have been here seven weeks, and I found her—just three days ago! In all my knocking around with you and Starbuck and Stillings and the rest of you, not one man in the bunch has thought it worth his while to tell me that there is a cottage settlement of Eastern summer people up in the mountains on Lake Topaz. I had to blunder around and find out for myself, as I did last Wednesday, when Starbuck took me up to your mine on Mount Geechy.”