“We heard the French corvette was somewhere up in those waters,” Brentin replied, “and thought it safer not. We should have come to look for you here at once, only we calculated you couldn’t possibly arrive till to-morrow. But what about Parsons? What’s the matter with your telling us all about Parsons?”
“Poor Teddy!” I sighed, and everybody looked shocked. I had scarcely made up my mind whether to say he was dead, or in prison for life, when Teddy himself suddenly fell in among us on his hands and knees. He looked so ghastly, with his white face and red cactus scars—to say nothing of his extraordinary way of entering—that the ladies began to scream, and Bob Hines fell over backward.
“Teddy!”
“Hush! Hush! Hush!” hissed Teddy. “Bailey Thompson!”
“Im-pawsible,” snarled Brentin. “He’s in Minorca.”
“I say it’s Bailey Thompson. I saw him from outside, just coming in.”
“Alone?”
“Yes. Keep quiet!”
We all huddled close together and kept as still as death.
“I couldn’t be mistaken,” Teddy whispered. “He’s got on the same clothes and carrying the shawl, and he was looking about him, just as he used at Monte Carlo.”