“Jim?” cried I. “He’s got to. Didn’t I take his?”
Presently after, Jim himself arrived, and before he had yet done mopping his brow, he was at me with the accursed subject. “Now, Loudon,” said he, “here we are, all together, the day’s work done and the evening before us; just start in with the whole story.”
“One word on business first,” said I, speaking from the lips outward, and meanwhile (in the private apartments of my brain) trying for the thousandth time to find some plausible arrangement of my story. “I want to have a notion how we stand about the bankruptcy.”
“O, that’s ancient history,” cried Jim. “We paid seven cents, and a wonder we did as well. The receiver——” (methought a spasm seized him at the name of this official, and he broke off). “But it’s all past and done with, anyway; and what I want to get at is the facts about the wreck. I don’t seem to understand it; appears to me like as there was something underneath.”
“There was nothing in it, anyway,” I said, with a forced laugh.
“That’s what I want to judge of,” returned Jim.
“How the mischief is it I can never keep you to that bankruptcy? It looks as if you avoided it,” said I—for a man in my situation, with unpardonable folly.
“Don’t it look a little as if you were trying to avoid the wreck?” asked Jim.
It was my own doing; there was no retreat. “My dear fellow, if you make a point of it, here goes!” said I, and launched with spurious gaiety into the current of my tale. I told it with point and spirit; described the island and the wreck, mimicked Anderson and the Chinese, maintained the suspense.... My pen has stumbled on the fatal word. I maintained the suspense so well that it was never relieved; and when I stopped—I dare not say concluded, where there was no conclusion—I found Jim and Mamie regarding me with surprise.
“Well?” said Jim.