Part 15 (2/2)

While Yeager was joyously fabricating this yarn Blythe had been writing on the back of an envelope. This he now shoved quietly across to me.

He's as well-plucked as they make them, Jack--and straight as a string. Want to make him a proposition to join us?

Those were the lines he had penciled on the envelope. Beneath them I wrote two words: ”Suits me.”

Jimmie's mother had consented to let him go on with us. Now I took him away to get some necessary wearing apparel, leaving Blythe to make a proposition to Yeager.

”Your mother says I'm in full charge of you. That means I'm to lick you whenever you need it,” I told Jimmie, for I had already discovered that my young sleuth needed considerable repressing from time to time.

”Yes, sir. I'll do whatever you say,” agreed Young America, who was long since over his seasickness and was again eager for the voyage.

The Englishman nodded when I saw him an hour later.

”Tom's in with us.”

”He understands this ain't a pleasure excursion, doesn't he?” I asked.

”Folks take their pleasure different, Mr. Sedgwick,” drawled the cowman.

”I shouldn't wonder but I might enjoy this little cruise even if it gets lively.”

”My opinion is that it may get as lively as one of your own broncos,” I explained.

”I'll certainly hope for the worst,” he commented.

I turned Jimmie over to my friends and spent the afternoon with a college cla.s.smate who was doing newspaper work on the _Herald_. In looking up a third man who also had belonged to our fraternity, time slipped away faster than we had noticed. It was getting along toward sunset when I separated from my friends to take the interurban for San Pedro at the big electric station. Before my car reached the port, dusk was falling.

Whistling as I went, I walked briskly down the hill toward the wharf. As I pa.s.sed an alley my name was called. I stopped in my stride and turned.

Then a jagged bolt of fire seared my brain. My knees sagged. I groped in the darkness, staggering as I moved. About that time I must have lost consciousness.

When I came to myself I was lying in the alley and a man was going through my clothes. A second man directed him from behind a revolver leveled at my head. Both of them were masked.

”I tell you it ain't on him,” the first man was saying.

”We want to make dead sure of that, mate,” the other answered.

”If he's got it the d.a.m.ned thing is sewed beneath his skin,” retorted the first speaker.

”He's coming to. We'll take his papers and his pocketbook and set sail,”

the leader decided.

I could hear their retreating footsteps echo down the alley and was quite sensible of the situation without being able to rise, or even cry out. For five minutes perhaps I lay there before I was sufficiently master of myself to get up. This I did very uncertainly, a little at a time, for my head was still spinning like a top. Putting my hand to the back of it I was surprised to discover that my palm was red with blood.

As I staggered down to the wharf I dare say the few people who met me concluded I was a drunken sailor. The _Argos_ was lying at the opposite side of the slip, but two of our men were waiting for me with a boat.

One of them was the boatswain Caine, the other a deckhand by the name of Johnson.

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