Herrick smiled and patted her hand affectionately.
“You will give me no peace until I do, so I will go,” he said.
It was a sober little crowd that sat around the dining-room table at Athens that night. Though their joy had been very great at the safe coming of Hard and Clara in Mendoza’s car, it had been tinged with gloom at the non-arrival of Scott and Polly. Jimmy Adams was reported much improved.
“That Chinaman doesn’t cook any more,” confided Mrs. Van to Clara. “He’s had a rise in life and he just sits and meditates. Awful people to meditate—the Chinese. What they find to think about I can’t see, but it seems to make ’em happy.”
Clara’s mind, however, was upon the absent. “I can’t see what could have happened to them. They didn’t fall in with Angel Gonzales, that we know,” she said. “I’m dreadfully worried about them.”
“Hello!” It was O’Grady’s voice. “Here comes horses down the road—two of them. I believe it’s our folks.” And he bolted out into the moonlight, followed by the others.
It was, and a more exhausted and bedraggled couple it would have been hard to find.
“Look like a pair of forty-niners,” said O’Grady, “on the last lap of the trip.”
Scott rolled out of the saddle while Hard lifted Polly to her feet.