“What was the business?”
“Oh, it was a girl.”
“What did she do?”
“It wasn’t what she did so much as what she said. It was this way. I was in Pittsburg one rainy day and I fell in with a girl; she wasn’t more’n eighteen and down on her luck. She asked me the way to somewhere or another and that’s how we started off. She’d had nothing to eat that day and I took her into a coffee shop and stuffed her up with buckwheat cakes and truck and then she told me her story. Said she had to meet her father at the station that evening and he was old and infirm and they had to look for rooms. Well, it seems, somehow or another, I was mug enough to help her look for rooms and stand as a reference and lend her twenty dollars, and when the police stepped into the rooms I got for them that night and took the grey wig and patch over his eye off her father he was Sam Brown, the biggest tough out of N’ York, with five thousand dollars’ worth of stolen diamonds on him. I managed to clear myself, but the press had got the story and I tell you, Bud, I was guyed out of Pittsburg and it hurt worse than kicking.”
“They don’t go in for sentiment in Pittsburg.”
“Nope, steel goods.”
“Well, come along,” said George, “this isn’t prospecting the island.”
They got up and shook the sand from themselves and started along the spit; then, returning, they began to climb. The Wear Jack came into view, anchored beyond the kelp, then as they got higher and above the promontory that hid the next bay, they saw the Chinese junk of the night before. She was anchored a little way out. On the sands of the bay stood three strange looking little pyramids, tents evidently, and about the tents people were moving.
“Now what in the nation are those Chinks doing?” said Hank. He unslung his binoculars he had brought with him and leveled them at the far-off tents.