Lemon arose and, going to a table, secured a tobacco pouch and a book of cigaret papers. As he rolled a cigaret Ned observed that the middle finger of his left hand carried, just below the nail, a blue spot, as if he had been using a typewriter since cleaning his hands. Ned noticed it particularly, as he himself used a double keyboard machine and usually smutted that finger on the ribbon when he rolled the platen.
“Well,” Lemon said, “I’ll have to ask you to excuse me now. I’ve been off on a long country tramp. You see how mussed up I am. I think I crawled through briar patches and wire fences and fell into cow ponds.”
Ned turned away without a word, with plenty of food for thought in his mind.
CHAPTER VIII.—FATE OF THE STEAK A LA BRIGAND.
Jimmie lay stretched at full length under one of the discolored shelter tents in a little cup in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Frank and Pat and Jack were moving restlessly about, looking up at the blue sky expectantly. Ned had not returned from his trip to San Francisco, and the boys were anxious as to his safety.
“He should have taken me with him,” Jimmie drawled, presently, when Frank threw himself down by the tent. “Then he’d have been all right.”
“It is a wonder that he got along in the world at all before he fell under your protecting care,” Frank replied, with a grin.
“Oh, he managed in some way,” Jimmie answered, “but he never got up in the world until he took me into partnership,” with a wink at his chum.
“He’s been up in the world since then, all right,” Frank said, suggestively.