“Why,” said Mr. Swift, warmly, “this is wonderful, Damon! It surely is an instance of casting your bread on the waters and getting it back after many days.”
“With interest!” chuckled the visitor. “For all I did was to feed Aman Dele and help him find himself——”
“With your usual kindness,” broke in Tom, likewise with enthusiasm.
“Tut, tut!” exclaimed Wakefield Damon, with a gesture of dismissal. “Let me tell you more about that Dele. We sat there in the coffee house and stared at each other and neither of us knew how to make the other understand what he wanted to say. But finally I got it in my head that the first thing was to find out where the fellow came from—what part of the world, you know.”
“Quite true,” murmured Mr. Swift. “That was bright of you.”
“Bless my brain-pan! I should say so,” cried Mr. Damon, with another laugh. “I grabbed him again and led him to the nearest library. He was more scared than ever, if possible. But I got out a big book of maps and we sat down to look them over. This at last made him know I was a friend.
“Dele couldn’t read the names of the countries we looked at; but I knew by his shining eyes that he recognized the shape of some of them. He knew the British Isles. Then we turned the leaves to Sweden and Norway and he began to jabber that strange tongue of his. Then we hit little Denmark, and I was sure we were getting warm,” and once more Mr. Damon broke into laughter.
“But we had turned the pages so fast at first that we skipped Greenland and Iceland and Dele kept shaking his head at every country I showed him. But I was sure it must have a close connection with Denmark, wherever his country lay. So we went back to the beginning and all of a sudden he let out a howl.
“Bless my outlines! he acted tickled to death to see the map of Iceland. Until that time I had had an idea it was as deserted a place as Upper Greenland,” went on Mr. Damon. “Well, bless my pocket atlas! I had spotted the land he had come from I was sure. So I went to the librarian and told him the fix I was in and he actually guessed that Dele was one of those folk who talked like the old Norsemen—like Eric the Red, and Leif Ericksen, and those other Norsemen who swept the seas clean in the old days.
“So we found a couple of books with passages printed in them in Old Norse. When Dele saw them he was tickled pink. He read them as though they were the last edition of the sporting extra!” and Mr. Damon began to laugh once more.