"I can tell him we're here, then," murmured Tom, crossing the room to where a telephone apparatus rested against the wall.
"Don't," prompted Dick. "Mr. Baldwin has sent his orders. You can 'phone him between three and three-thirty to-day. Mustn't bother him at any other time."
"That's right, is it?" demanded Halstead, looking half-suspiciously at Davis.
"Quite right," nodded the latter youth, gravely. Dick was older than the others, being nineteen, as against a general average of sixteen years for the other boys. Dick was different in another respect. While the other five boys followed motor boating as a means of livelihood, depending upon their earnings, young Davis, the son of a ship-builder of Bath, Maine, was at all times well supplied with money. Dick's outline for the future included a possible college course, and then breaking into the ship-building business with his father. It was not yet quite decided whether young Davis should omit the college part of the plan. In the meantime, the elder Davis believed that an active membership in the Motor Boat Club would be the best possible training to fit his son for a position in the ship-yard.
"Well, if those are the instructions, then," replied Captain Tom, returning to his chair, "we'll wait until a few minutes after three."
"And now it's half-past eleven," said Jed, consulting his watch. "Luncheon will not be served until one. We can wait here as well as anywhere. Say, fellows, I'm just crazy to hear some good old yarns of what you others have been through."
With that, yarn-spinning became the order of the day. The young men were still at it when they went down to the gorgeous dining room of the Palace Hotel. The air about their table was thick with yarns all through the meal.
While they sat around the table, absorbed in one another's stories, a dark-visaged, well-dressed man of thirty started to enter the dining room. Just at the threshold, however, he paused, for his glance had alighted on a profile view of Captain Tom Halstead at one of the tables in the center of the dining room.
"That's the cub who struck me this morning," muttered the dark-faced one, drawing back. "I want to know who he is. I want to place him—I want to meet him and settle the account for that blow and the disappointment it brought about!"
Tom Halstead turned around, a moment later, but he did not see the man he had knocked from the train that morning at the Sixteenth Street station in Oakland. That worthy had drawn quickly back out of sight, and was now looking about for some hotel employé to question.