Billy probably did not know it, but he came as near having tears in his voice as a deep-voiced young man with some pride can come and not really sob.
This added to Mrs. Schmitz’s own zeal. She had been thinking to some purpose. “We shall find him! Soon! He shall play—save your drama!” She started up.
“I’m the one. It’s up to me to do the trick. I wish I could see how.” Sydney clenched his hands harder, and his perplexed scowl grew deeper.
“I’ll tell you—I’ll advertise.”
Then Sydney astonished them by making the longest speech they had ever heard from him. “This job of finding Max is mine. If I hadn’t been yellow clean through I’d have been there in the anteroom when Walter Buckman played his mean trick; been there to hit back, to come out with Max, to make him come home with me. Five minutes with you, Mrs. Schmitz, would have put him steady again. He’s no coward, but he feels things a lot—his skin’s thinner than my thick hide, and—”
“Stop! You shall not call mine Seedney names.”
He nodded grimly and continued. “But I was jealous of him, that’s what. Jealous from that first night when you put him in the best room, Mrs. Schmitz. Even after you talked it out of me the day you gave me my new room, and I thought I had the little deev killed and buried for good, he came to life like a cat on one of her nine laps. I hated Max because everything he did was fine. He could please everybody, play, do things right the first time—Oh, it’s no use talking about that any more. I’ve got to do the fair thing now—find him, find him!”
“We’ll do it. We’ll advertise,” Mrs. Schmitz declared again.
“There’s danger he won’t read the papers. Wouldn’t a detective be better?”
“Gee! That’ll be the trick!” Billy approved; “but it will take a lot of money.”