“Let bygones be bygones, Jerry,” advised his brother reporters. “You cannot bring back your friend John Dinsmore, and there is little use in letting him spill your blood, too.”
“No matter what you say, my friends, there will be a reckoning between me and Challoner at no distant day. I will hound his footsteps night and day, until I find an opportunity which suits my purpose, and then—well, John Dinsmore’s difference with that man will be avenged. It will be either Raymond Challoner’s life or mine.”
“I, too, imagine that I have seen his face somewhere before,” said one of the other reporters, slowly, “but, like you, Gaines, my memory baffles me, for the time being, to place him, but it will assuredly come to me sooner or later.”
Raymond Challoner had not been talking to the trio five minutes before it suddenly dawned upon him who two of them were—the one, John Dinsmore’s second in that midnight duel on the sands of Newport; and the other one—well, that reporter had been on hand when he had been arrested for a crime which would have landed him on the gallows if he had not made his escape in a manner challenging the daring of Claude Duval himself.
He had made haste to leave them the instant their identity had dawned upon him, and he felt reasonably sure that they had failed to recognize him—a fact for which he thanked his stars.
“Now for pretty Jess and a speedy marriage with her,” he ruminated, as the carriage rolled down the avenue. “I see I must hurry matters and shake the dust of New York off my feet speedily.”
CHAPTER XXXIV.
UNDER THE MASK OF FRIENDSHIP.
“I know not now, nor never knew,
Why lives so linked were rent apart!
But this I know, that only you,