"Surest thing you know," agreed Marty. "Dad and ma send their best regards."
At that Janice went off into a gale of laughter that was almost hysterical. Her cousin gazed upon her in mild surprise.
"Why, Janice!" he said. "You know they are always hounding me about my manners. What's wrong with that?"
Both father and daughter laughed at this and Marty grinned slowly. Anyway, matters had got altogether too serious for the boy and he wanted somebody to laugh so that he could successfully gulp down his own deeper emotion.
The Madam came forward. She had to be introduced, and the tall, haggard man with his arm in a sling and his shoulder swathed in bandages very plainly impressed favorably the wife of Señor General De Soto Palo.
"Ach, my dear!" she confided to Janice later, "he is such a romantic-looking man! Now, to tell you the truth, as much as I adore the general, me, I could wish him the more distingué looking—ees eet not?"
Of course daddy was a splendid-looking man! Thin and haggard as he was, Janice thought nobody as interesting in appearance as daddy—not even Nelson!
She left it to Marty to relate in particular what had happened to them since they had left Polktown. And it lost nothing in the telling—trust Marty!
"It looks to me as though you two have had quite an adventurous career," Mr. Broxton Day said with twinkling eyes.
He had sat down in the sun, for he was still very weak. His own brief tale, Marty thought, savored of "the real thing."