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"Yes, that's the main mystery, ain't it?" says I. "But your flower bed is about ready, ain't it?" I got to admit that there's some drawbacks to being a 100 per cent perfect private see. Not that I mind making myself useful around the general offices. I'm always willin' to roll up my sleeves any time and save the grand old Corrugated Trust from going on the rocks.
And then the Old Man was delightful; he smiled all over his face until its features were one vast mass of corrugated wrinkles; then he waved his hand a little to the other side, and finally congratulated himself on being in the happy position of being even partially corroborated by gentlemen of opposite opinions, Whereupon, of course, the whole House laughed, including the very member whom the Old Man had thus toasted.
Robert and me are puttin' the finishin' touches to a quarterly report, who should drift into the Corrugated general offices but F. Hallam Bean, all dolled up in an outfit that he must have collected at some costumers. Anyway, I ain't seen one of them black cape coats for years, and the wide-brimmed black felt hat is a curio.
It so chanced that a remarkably small monkey was seated among the boughs of a neighbouring tree, eating a morsel of fruit, when Letta's first scream sounded through the grove. Cocking up one ear, it arrested its little hand on the way to its lesser mouth, and listened. Its little black face was corrugated with the wrinkles of care it might be of fun, we cannot tell.
Then he hurled the fragment of iron far along the lane, so that it bounded upon a strip of corrugated roofing in a yard twice removed from his own, and fell clattering among a neighbor's rubbish. A short exclamation came from the detective in the lane. He could be heard walking swiftly away in the direction of the disturbance.
That get-up would be good for a quiet smile even over in Canarsie; but when you come to plant it in the midst of such a sporty aggregation as the Corrugated carries on the payroll why, you've got the comic chuckles comin' over fast. "Say, Piddie," says I the second morning, after watchin' it blow in, "who's the seed, eh?" "That?" says Piddie. "Oh, that's old Dudley."
I sure would be busy if I did more, for here in the Corrugated general offices we have fifteen or twenty more or less expert key pounders most of the time. Besides, it's Mr. Piddie's job to worry over 'em, and believe me he does it thorough. But somehow this little Miss Joyce party was different. I expect it was the baby blue tam-o'-shanter that got me noticin' her first off.
We used to ride morning and evening on the flat country which surrounds Mafeking, where no tree or hill obscures the view for miles; and one then realized what a tiny place the seat of government of the Bechuanaland Protectorate really was, a mere speck of corrugated iron roofs on the brown expanse of the burnt-up veldt, far away from everywhere.
'Had gone for the dollars, said Macrae. They had wandered from rocky desert isle to desert isle, in the archipelago of the Hebrides, meeting at night with a swift attendant yacht. Usually they had slept on shore under canvas; the corrugated iron houses had been left behind at 'The Seven Hunters, with the champagne, to alleviate the anxiety of Mr. Macrae.
All he can do is hire 'em and fire 'em, and even that's turnin' his hair gray. It'll all work out one way or another, I expect." It does, too. But not exactly along the lines I was looking for it to develop. First off, Lester quits the Corrugated. As he'd been on the same job for more'n six years, and gettin' worse at it right along, the blow didn't quite put us out of business.
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