And nothing more could they worm out of him.

I shall be pleased to recount to you the quality of this joke, this
madcap idea. You will find it lacking neither amusement nor
denouement. Already I have put forth the casual observation that from
Paris to the third-precinct police-station in Washington is several
thousand miles.




V

THE PLOT THICKENS


At dinner that night I met my hero face to face for the first time
in eight years, and for all his calling me a duffer (I learned of
this only recently), he was mighty glad to see me, slapped me on the
back and threw his arm across my shoulder. And why shouldn't he have
been glad? We had been boys together, played hooky many a school-time
afternoon, gone over the same fishing grounds, plunged into the same
swimming-holes, and smoked our first cigar in the rear of my father's
barn; and it is the recollection of such things that cements all the
more strongly friendship in man and man. We recalled a thousand
episodes and escapades, the lickings we got, and the lickings others
got in our stead, the pretty school-teacher whom we swore to wed when
we grew up. Nobody else had a chance to get a word in edgewise. But
Nancy laughed aloud at times. She had been a witness to many of these
long-ago pranks.