"The Overland leaves at two-thirty,"
he murmured. "I'll have just time to pack a suit case." And he
picked up his hat and fled with the celerity and singleness of purpose
of a tin-canned dog.
Cappy Ricks woke from his mid-afternoon doze to find his son-in-law
shaking him by the shoulder.
"Well, young man," Cappy began severely, "so you're back, are you?
Give an account of yourself. Where the devil have you been for the
past two weeks? Why did you go, and why did you have the consummate
nerve to leave Florry behind you? Why, you hadn't been married two
months--"
"I couldn't take her with me, sir," Matt protested. "I wanted to, but
she would have been in the way. You see, I knew I was going to be
busy night and day."
Cappy Ricks slid out to the edge of his swivel chair; with a hand on
each knee he gazed at his smiling son-in-law over the rims of his
spectacles. For fully a minute he remained motionless.
"Matt," he demanded suspiciously, "what the devil have you been up
to?"
Matt raised a huge forefinger.
"Number one," he began: "I bought the Oriental Steamship Company's
freighter Narcissus, seventy-five hundred tons' register, for two
hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, and in a month she'll be in
tiptop shape and ready for sea.
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