“Oh, I’ve had a few games of basketball,” he said.
“I bet you’ve been to lots of places,” I told him.
He said, “Well, I’ve attended one or two pink teas and strawberry festivals. Once I was usher at a concert in an Old Ladies’ Home. The wildest time I ever had was umpiring a game of checkers.”
“You didn’t win that Distinguished Service Cross umpiring a game of checkers,” Westy said.
“No, I won that playing hide and seek with Fritzie in No Man’s Land,” he said. “Chuck a little more wood on the fire, Roy.”
I said, “There’s one thing you never told me about, and you promised to tell it, too. It’s an adventure, but it’s a kind of a mystery, too.”
“Well,” he said, “adventures aren’t so much, but I’ll have to make an extra charge for mysteries. The high cost of mysteries is something terrible. I don’t know what the mystery may be, but if you’ll go in the house and get my cigarette case out of the pocket of my coat that’s hanging in the sitting room, I’ll let you have any mystery I happen to have in stock at the wholesale price.”
Oh bibbie, didn’t I scoot in after that cigarette case. He was always smoking cigarettes, that fellow. He told us never to do it, but he was always doing it himself. He said he was too old to reform.
When I came back I said, “It’s about that money of yours—that two hundred dollars that we found in the locker of the house-boat. It made a lot of trouble in Temple Camp, that’s one sure thing. Don’t you remember how you said that you’d tell me all about how you got it, some day?”
He said, “Oh that; that wasn’t an adventure; that was just an episode.”