“To the mines!” gasped the other. “For heaven’s sake, what do you mean? You left me out in the middle of the jungle!”
Once more the Frenchman went off into a fit of laughter. “Why, they left you within fifty yards of the place!” gasped Dr. Anselme’s brother. “They did not take you in, as they thought there might be some trouble made about the matter and we were anxious to get out of it without any.”
Then in a few words Roberts told what had happened to him since that adventure.
“I thought I was doing something very heroic in rescuing that man,” he exclaimed. “Please apologize to the doctor for the whack I gave him.”
Dr. Anselme protested that the blow was nothing at all, though Roberts fancied that he could see him wince at the mere recollection of it. Nothing more was said about that, however, and, still laughing about the man’s strange adventures, the doctor turned to the door on one side and flung it open, disclosing the same familiar dining-room.
“Sir, I pardon you,” he said, and his brother interpreted, “now sit again with us at our table, I beg of you.”
“Here’s one for you, ’Squire, that I’ll betcha you can’t answer,” tantalizingly said Hi Spry, as the Old Codger added himself to the roster of the Linen Pants and Solid Comfort Club. “‘When tomorrow is yesterday, today will be as far from the end of the week as was today from the beginning of the week when yesterday was tomorrow. What is today?’”
“Today, Hiram,” grimly returned the veteran, “is the day that I’m goin’ to ask you to return to me them three dollars and thirty-five cents that you borrowed from me over two months ago, with the promise that you’d pay ’em back the then-comin’ day-after-tomorrow, which went mizzling down the corridors of time quite a spell ago without fetchin’ me the money. That’s what day this is, Hiram, although I prob’ly shouldn’t have mentioned it if you hadn’t tried to humiliate me in public by springin’ a question on me that you was pretty sure I couldn’t answer.”
CRAWFORD—Why do you object to the methods of our benevolent millionaires?
CRABSHAW—Because in distributing their surplus wealth they don’t give it back to the people they got it from.
BY WILL N. HARBEN _Author of “Abner Daniel,” “The Substitute,” “The Georgians,” etc._