“All that he told you is square as a die, fellers,” Josh went on. “And they’ve been mighty kind to me, I give you my word. I didn’t know where I was when I came out of the doze; but they asked me a lot of questions, and in that way we got to be right well acquainted.”
“H’m! you see,” the man who had called himself Sidney Bliss hastened to say, “we had some good reasons for feeling suspicious toward your party, Jack.”
“I don’t know why,” returned the boy, instantly. “We’ve come all the way down the coast from Philadelphia, and never once bothering ourselves about anybody else’s business. George, here, got into rather a little fever because he said you seemed to be watching us through the glasses whenever we happened to come near each other, but it was none of our business, and I wouldn’t let it bother me.”
That was as plain an invitation for an explanation as could be imagined; and apparently so the other looked at it.
“Well, after learning just who you were, and that you couldn’t have the least connection with Lenox and his crowd, we had to laugh at our suspicions,” Bliss went on to say.
“We don’t happen to know anybody by the name of Lenox, do we, boys?” Jack took occasion to remark.
“Nixy, not,” Jimmy asserted, after his usual manner, while George, too, shook his head in the negative.
“Only Lenox I ever knew was a sickly little chap who went to the same boarding school I did about six years ago,” he remarked.
“Well, Josh says you’re all from out Mississippi way,” the man continued, glibly; “and this Lenox is a New Yorker. Besides, he’s a man of about forty, and not a boy at all. Belongs to the same club Carpenter and myself do; and thereby hangs the tale that sent us away down here, and made us eye your crowd with suspicion.”