While Myles was thus engaged Billings was also perfecting a plan that he proposed to carry out alone that very night. As he was already at work upon it when Myles returned to the hotel the latter could not find his versatile companion, and wondered where he was. This wonder increased when he did not appear at supper-time, and had not been seen or heard from at eleven o’clock, when, tired of waiting for him, Myles went to bed.
It was broad daylight when he awoke with a start to find a most disreputable, dirty, and weary-looking, but triumphant Billings standing at his bedside, and holding out for his inspection a soiled and crumpled envelope. As he took it wonderingly, a folded paper dropped from it. It was the identical note signed “A Friend in Need” they had been so anxious to obtain, but which they had given up for lost.
“Good for you, Billings!” he cried joyfully. “But when, where, and how did you get it?”
“Last night, where you lost it, and by asking for it,” replied Billings, soberly.
“Oh, come, old man, you know what I mean. Sit down and tell me all about it, there’s a good fellow.”
“Well,” said Billings, pretending he was not just as anxious to tell his story as Myles was to hear it, “if I must I suppose I must, but”—here he gave a prodigious yawn—“I’m powerful sleepy. You see I wanted to get hold of that bit of paper, and I was pretty certain if it still existed it would be found in the possession of your cabin friend Bill. So last evening I took a walk out that way. I got to the place about sunset, and, as usual, it was closed and deserted. Then I just lay low and waited. I have had many a lonely night-watch in the city since I became a reporter, waiting for some folks to die, for others to be born, and for more to be arrested, but that wait out there in the woods, with only the hoot-owls for company, beat them all for pure, unadulterated loneliness. Scared! I never was so scared in my life, and the noises that scared me most were generally made by crickets or frogs, or other wild beasts of that kind.
“However, they say all things come to him who waits, and so all sorts of things came to me; among them a man and a dog.”
“Bill and Tige,” interrupted Myles.
“How do you know? Were you there?”