suffered greatly for a little time; but as the weeks passed and people began to forget the disturbance that they had never quite understood, Harvey Jarreth began to come into his own again.
He was jauntily dressed as ever today, in the light grey clothes that made his sandy complexion still sandier, and that by their extreme of fashion showed just how many years they lagged behind the present mode. His straw hat was a little frayed and battered at the edges, but he wore it at just such a cheerful angle as when Billy had first seen him.
“Well, Captain,” he began genially, “that was a queer business about that city friend of mine, wasn’t it? And the joke of it is that it looks just now as though you had been right about him. That’s pretty funny. Ha, ha!”
“It will go right on being just as big a joke,” returned the Captain sourly. “You had better go home and practice laughing at it until you can manage something better than that cackling you’re doing now. It takes a lot of learning for a man to know how to laugh at himself.”
Jarreth’s thin face flushed and he shifted his feet uneasily.
