The clerk opened a gate at the end of the counter and Matt walked through and into the storeroom. There he saw the boat, securely crated. Between the bars of the crate he read the name Sprite, lettered on the bow.
By that time the king of the motor boys was too far gone for words. Leaning against the wall of the room, he bent his head and drummed a tattoo on his brow with his fingers.
"Who's the shipper?" he finally managed to ask.
"I don't know whether the way bill has it right or not, but the name of the consignor is down as Ping Pong. It reads like a joke. Eh?"
Matt left the room and retired to the other side of the counter in the office.
There was no joke about it. "Ping Pong" might look to the express agent like a fake name, but it was bona fide for all that.
Ping Pong was the name of a Chinese lad whom Matt had befriended in San Francisco. The Celestial had won the Sprite in a raffle, and had turned the boat over to Matt on condition that Matt would allow Ping Pong to work for him. Ping and the Sprite had disappeared mysteriously before the young motorist left 'Frisco, and that was the last seen of either the Chinaman or the boat until now. And here the boat had turned up in that Madison office of the express company with transportation charges of $262.50 to be collected!
The idea of sending a power boat, engine and all, by express, in a heavy crate, was a piece of folly of which even a ten-year-old American boy would not have been guilty. But Ping was a Chinaman, and probably he thought Matt was a millionaire.
"Goin' to take it or leave it?" inquired the agent as Matt walked back and forth across the office turning this new development over in his mind. "The charges ain't any more than what they always are—three times the merchandise rate."