"Let me have it a moment," said Bonny, who was looking curiously at the ball.
Alaric handed it to him, and he examined it closely.
"I do believe it is the very one!" he exclaimed. "Yes, I am sure it is. Don't you remember, Rick, the burned place on your ball that came when Bah-die dropped it in the edge of the fire the first time you threw it to him, and how you laughed and called it a sure-enough red-hot ball? Well, here's that place now, and this is certainly the very ball that introduced us to each other in Victoria."
"How can it be?" asked Alaric, incredulously.
"I don't know, but it surely is."
"Well," said Alaric, finally convinced that his comrade was right, "that is the very most unexplainable thing I ever came across, for I don't see how it could possibly have come into his possession."
While thus discussing this strange happening, the lads approached the hotel in which one of them had been made to suffer so keenly a few hours before. He dreaded the very thought of entering it again, but having made up his mind that he must, was about to do so, when his attention was attracted to a curious scene in front of the main entrance.
A SMALL MAN WAS GESTICULATING TO A GROUP OF GRINNING BELL-BOYS.
A small wiry-looking man, evidently a foreigner, was gesticulating, stamping, and shouting to a group of grinning porters and bell-boys who were gathered about him. As our lads drew near they saw that he held a small open book in his hand, from which he was quoting some sentence, while at the same time he was rapidly working himself into a fury. It was a French-English phrase-book, in which, under the head of instructions to servants, the sentence "Je désire un fiacre" was rendered "Call me a hansom," and it was this that the excited Frenchman was demanding, greatly to the amusement and mystification of his hearers.