"Well!" says I, "well!"
Johnson pushed through the excited bunch and took the gray-haired feller by the arm.
"Say, Wash," he says, "you're havin' too good a time all by yourself. Let us in on it, won't you? Your friends are goin' some; no use to run after them. Who are they?"
Washburn knocked the ashes from his cigar and smiled. He'd been cool as a no'thwest breeze right along.
"Well," he says, "the masculine member used to be called Fred Francis. He was steward of the Conquilquit Country Club on Long Island for some time. He cleared out a year ago with a thousand or so of the Club funds, and we haven't been able to trace him since. He was a first-class steward and sharp as a steel trap—but he was a crook. The woman—oh, she went with him. She is his wife."
[CHAPTER XII—JIM HENRY STARTS SCREENIN']
A whole month more went by afore Jim Henry Jacobs was well enough to come home. When he got off the train at the Ostable depot, thin and white and lookin' as if he'd been hauled through a knothole, I was waitin' for him. Maybe we wa'n't glad to see each other! We shook hands for pretty nigh five minutes, I cal'late. I loaded him into my buggy and drove him down to the Poquit House and took him upstairs to his room, which had been made as comf'table and cozy as it's possible to make a room in that kind of a boardin'-house.
He set down in a big chair and looked around him.
"By George, Skipper!" he says, fetchin' a long breath, "this is home, and I'm mighty glad to be here. Where'd all the flowers come from?"
"Mary is responsible for them," I told him. "She thought they'd sort of brighten up things."