“Great Scot!” I cried.
“‘Sh!” he whispered. “Anyone about?”
“They’re all down at breakfast.”
He gave a sigh of relief, sank into my chair, and closed his eyes. I regarded him with pity. The poor old boy looked a wreck.
“I say!” I said, touching him on the shoulder.
He leaped out of the chair with a smothered yell.
“Did you do that? What did you do it for? What’s the sense of it? How do you suppose you can ever make yourself popular if you go about touching people on the shoulder? My nerves are sticking a yard out of my body this morning, Reggie!”
“Yes, old boy?”
“I did a murder last night.”
“What?”
“It’s the sort of thing that might happen to anybody. Directly Stella Vanderley broke off our engagement I——”
“Broke off your engagement? How long were you engaged?”
“About two minutes. It may have been less. I hadn’t a stop-watch. I proposed to her at ten last night in the saloon. She accepted me. I was just going to kiss her when we heard someone coming. I went out. Coming along the corridor was that infernal what’s-her-name—Mrs. Vanderley’s maid—Pilbeam. Have you ever been accepted by the girl you love, Reggie?”
“Never. I’ve been refused dozens——”
“Then you won’t understand how I felt. I was off my head with joy. I hardly knew what I was doing. I just felt I had to kiss the nearest thing handy. I couldn’t wait. It might have been the ship’s cat. It wasn’t. It was Pilbeam.”
“You kissed her?”
“I kissed her. And just at that moment the door of the saloon opened and out came Stella.”
“Great Scott!”
“Exactly what I said. It flashed across me that to Stella, dear girl, not knowing the circumstances, the thing might seem a little odd. It did. She broke off the engagement, and I got out the dinghy and rowed off. I was mad. I didn’t care what became of me. I simply wanted to forget. I went ashore. I—It’s just on the cards that I may have drowned my sorrows a bit. Anyhow, I don’t remember a thing, except that I can recollect having the deuce of a scrap with somebody in a dark street and somebody falling, and myself falling, and myself legging it for all I was worth. I woke up this morning in the Casino gardens. I’ve lost my hat.”
I dived for the paper.
“Read,” I said. “It’s all there.”
He read.
“Good heavens!” he said.
“You didn’t do a thing to His Serene Nibs, did you?”
“Reggie, this is awful.”
“Cheer up. They say he’ll recover.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It does to him.”
He read the paper again.
“It says they’ve a clue.”
“They always say that.”
“But—My hat!”
“Eh?”
“My hat. I must have dropped it during the scrap. This man, Denman Sturgis, must have found it. It had my name in it!”
“George,” I said, “you mustn’t waste time. Oh!”
He jumped a foot in the air.
