Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/194

 learned heads of Chamboro pondered and argued and disputed for many a month to come.

Two weeks later, however, when Lionel Clarence secretly unearthed a pair of velvet trousers and a little white night-gown from the hollow log where they had lain so long, he found that the Upper River gang had already been there, and had visited on him the tightest and hardest assortment of knots in the history of the Hole. So he decided, at Lonely's mild suggestion, that the two garments should remain in the log for all time, and nothing more be said about them.

If Doctor Ridley had his suspicions in the matter, that kindly old assuager of pain and anxiety said nothing about them, in public.

When he was sewing five neat little cat-gut stitches in Lonely O'Malley's shoulder, however, after an unhappy performance in knife-throwing (in emulation of one of the peerlessly beautiful Mexican ladies attached to the circus side-show), the shrewd old practitioner put a number of more or less disconcerting questions to his patient, as to Lionel Clarence and his swimming abilities. Getting nothing out of