“Oh, that’s just a figure of speech,” said Sam. “Forget it, Poke! Let’s get down to business, everybody. Now, I’m not so all-fired sure Poke really ought to pay all that money. The vase ought to have been in a safer place, if it was so valuable. And I think that’s Varley’s notion, too; and he’s sort of posted, as you might say, about a lot of things.”
“Oh, Varley!” exclaimed Poke, and glanced about him a little apprehensively.
“Varley’s out of the way,” Sam went on. “I guess he understood the club would want a chance to hold a council of war, for he could see that something had gone wrong, even if he didn’t know just what it was.”
“The Shark’s missing, too,” Herman Boyd remarked.
Sam nodded. “So he is. Probably they’ve strolled off together. That’s all right, though. The Shark will stand for anything the rest of us decide to do. It’s a job for all the club, of course, and——”
“How do you make that out?” Poke asked.
“Easily enough. You broke the vase—that’s true. But you wouldn’t have broken it, for you wouldn’t have been at the hotel or giving a dinner if it hadn’t been that you wanted to square the club’s account with Varley.”
“Now you’re talking sense, Sam!” cried the Trojan.
“I know I am. And it’s only sensible for us to treat this thing as hitting the whole club.... That’s all right, Poke! You can say it hit you first, but we feel it hit us afterward. So we ought to pull together, and we will. Now if we all chip in——”
“I can put in ten dollars,” said Tom Orkney promptly.