“Well, it was a tableau for a moment, after the mutual discovery in that library. There was a half mask on the table, which Jimmy had removed while he was sorting the spoil. He always was a cool proposition, you remember.”
“Yes. That is how he got his name of Bare-Faced Jimmy.”
“He didn’t lose his presence of mind, just then, either. He stooped and picked up the gun from the floor, dropped it into one of his pockets—and sat down again upon the chair where he had been seated when she interrupted him.”
“Just like him.”
“The rest of the story I will tell just as Nan told it to me.”
“All right.”
“She said: ‘For a moment I didn’t know what to do. Until that instant it had never occurred to me that Jimmy was alive. I had not a doubt that he was dead. But there he was, as natural as ever, as handsome as ever, as cool and self-contained as ever, and just as daring as he used to be in the old days.’
“‘Sit down, Nan,’ he said to her; and she sat down.
“‘I thought you were dead,’ she told him, and he laughed in his pleasant way, and replied that he was as good as an army of dead men. Then she pointed at the jewels on the table, and at the other things that he had gotten together.
“‘At your old tricks?’ she asked him, and he nodded.