Page:Hugh Pendexter--Tiberius Smith.djvu/329

 Lord, what a mess of lies I have inflicted on the poor lady! I know I'm a few years her senior, but I keep my age locked up in the baggage-room, and if it hadn't been for Little Eva—but there! Quit it. Never mention it. It's over. Curtain. All men, I guess, encounter a daffy spell at some time in their lives, and lucky is he who is near a bar when the fit comes on. Now I'm the showman again and mighty proud of it, and we'll go in and see Little Eva die.' But I noticed he did not discard a handkerchief she had dropped.

"And Miss English was mad. She scolded the captain for presenting Tib, and told him her father would do things once we'd sighted old earth. And the captain was on the anxious seat, for her father was his meal-ticket and had delegated him to fetch out his daughter O. K. But on the next night we began to forget it, when we steamed into the heart of a flying wedge of terrific winds.

"I decided that if ever we got ashore it would be to have the folks come down to the beach and look at us and say, 'How natural they look!' Some of the gingerbread works were carried away the first night of the blow, and whenever the wind let up a bit the live-stock would throw in a few ensembles that made one pray for more breeze. Yet the boat behaved well, and if something hadn't happened to the propeller we'd have come through in rare form.