“Hello,” he greeted. “You ought to be comfortable here.” He threw down a partly filled sack. “Mussels. All I could get. The tide's not low enough yet.”
Saxon heard Billy muffle an ejaculation, and saw painted on his face the extremest astonishment.
“Well, honest to God, it does me proud to meet you,” he blurted out. “Shake hands. I always said if I laid eyes on you I'd shake.—Say!”
But Billy's feelings mastered him, and, beginning with a choking giggle, he roared into helpless mirth.
The stranger looked at him curiously across their clasped hands, and glanced inquiringly to Saxon.
“You gotta excuse me,” Billy gurgled, pumping the other's hand up and down. “But I just gotta laugh. Why, honest to God, I've woke up nights an' laughed an' gone to sleep again. Don't you recognize 'm, Saxon? He's the same identical dude -- say, friend, you're some punkins at a hundred yards dash, ain't you?”
And then, in a sudden rush, Saxon placed him. He it was who had stood with Roy Blanchard alongside the automobile on the day she had wandered, sick and unwitting, into strange neighborhoods. Nor had that day been the first time she had seen him.
“Remember the Bricklayers' Picnic at Weasel Park?” Billy was asking. “An' the foot race? Why, I'd know that nose of yours anywhere among a million. You was the guy that stuck your cane between Timothy McManus's legs an' started the grandest roughhouse Weasel Park or any other park ever seen.”
The visitor now commenced to laugh. He stood on one leg as he laughed harder, then stood on the other leg. Finally he sat down on a log of driftwood.
“And you were there,” he managed to gasp to Billy at last. “You saw it. You saw it.” He turned to Saxon. “—And you?”