a car as he would have called
"Moloch" in the days when his hand was against Capital. Before we'd been
back very long at Awepesha it arrived, bearing the lady and her host,
but not Mr. Storm. He had preferred to travel independently, it seemed,
and I rather liked him for it. No sooner were the introductions and
first politenesses over between the newcomers and Larry, however, than
Storm appeared. I had rather expected that he would "doll himself
up"--as they say in this dear land of ours--for the visit in high
society; but he had made no change, not even a tall collar.

Mrs. Shuster, enraptured with Larry and in an ecstasy between these
three men she could think of as "in her train," presented "Mr. Peter
Storm to Mr. Moore." "A hero of the _Lusitania_ and _Arabic_," she
added, "and going to be my secretary."

Larry held out his hand, and, as he shook the Stormy Petrel's, stared at
him. "I seem to know your face," he said. "And yet--I can't place it. Do
you know mine?"

"I think if I'd ever seen it I shouldn't have forgotten," returned our
Ship's Mystery. I noticed that he did not say he hadn't seen it or that
he had forgotten. And I vividly recalled how Pat, too, had had the
impression that Storm's eyes were familiar--associated with some memory
of long ago. Neither she nor her father, however, appeared to find any
double meaning in his reply.

Well, to make a long story less long, Mrs. Shuster and Mr. Caspian had
put their heads together over the hotel idea. Both had taken advantage
of Peter Storm's brief absence to forget that it had originated in his
brain. They spoke of "our plan," and for the moment he claimed no
credit, as I should have been tempted to do. It was only when they began
to develop the said plan upon lines evidently different from those
agreed upon with him that he roused himself.

"In thinking it over," Ed Caspian explained to Larry, "Mrs. Shuster and
I have decided that the simplest thing would be for me to advance any
capital necessary to start the hotel enterprise: advertising and a lot
of things like that. All in a business way of course. Miss Moore can
give me a mortgage----"

"I beg your pardon," the S. M. cut him off in a voice quite low but keen
as a knife. "The hotel suggestion was mine, wasn't it, Miss Moore?"

"Yes," Pat assented, "it certainly was." She looked from one man to the
other, puzzled and interested.

"I shouldn't have made the suggestion if I weren't more or less of an