“I should like to go to the cable office for a minute or two,” Kit said, when they were done with the barber. “I don’t want to keep all this pleasure to myself.”
But writing a cable message home, when every word cost more than a day’s salary, was no easy matter. The first one he wrote contained sixteen words, and that was far too long. After many trials he got it reduced to nine, in this fashion:—
Silburn, Huntington, Conn.
Father much improved. Knows me.
Kit.
“That tells them that I have found him, and that we are both all right,” he reflected. It was just like Kit that the first real extravagance he ever committed was for his mother and Vieve, not for his own pleasure. The message cost him nearly thirty dollars.
“Who is that to?” his father asked, as he handed the telegram to the clerk.
“To mother,” Kit replied. “It’s just to let her know that we are all right.”
“And where is mother?” was the next question.
“Why, at home, in Huntington,” Kit answered, thinking that now were coming the questions that the doctor had said were sure to come sooner or later. But he was mistaken. His father looked perplexed, as though trying hard to think about something, but walked out of the office with them without saying more, stroking what the barber had left of his beard.
On the way up the street to the consul’s office, however, he stopped and seized Kit by the arm.
“Kit,” he said, “what place is this?”