garden and why had it been brought there?
These questions he could not answer so easily, and indeed not at all.

While thus meditating, he heard, far away in the frosty air, a puffing
and blowing and panting like an impatient motor-car. Before he could
guess what this was, Braddock appeared, simply racing along the marshy
causeway, followed closely by Cockatoo, and at some distance away by
Lucy. The little scientist rushed through the gate, which he flung open
with a noise fit to wake the dead, and lunged forward, to fall with
outstretched arms upon the green case. There he remained, still puffing
and blowing, and looked as though he were hugging a huge green beetle.
Cockatoo, who, being lean and hard, kept his breath more easily, stood
respectfully by, waiting for his master to give orders, and Lucy came
in quietly by the gate, smiling at her father's enthusiasm. At the same
moment Mrs. Jasher, well wrapped up in a coat of sables, emerged from
the cottage.

"I heard you coming, Professor," she called out, hurrying down the path.

"I should think the whole Fort heard the Professor coming," said Hope,
glancing at the dark mass. "The soldiers must think it is an invasion."

But Braddock paid no heed to this jocularity, or even to Mrs. Jasher, to
whom he had been so lately engaged. All his soul was in the mummy case,
and as soon as he recovered his breath, he loudly proclaimed his joy at
this miraculous recovery of the precious article.

"Mine! mine!" he roared, and his words ran violently through the frosty
air.

"Be calm, sir," advised Hope--"be calm."

"Calm! calm!" bellowed Braddock, struggling to a standing position. "Oh,
confound you, sir, how can I be calm when I find what I have lost?
You have a mean, groveling soul, Hope, not the soaring spirit of a
collector."

"There is no need to be rude to Archie, father," corrected Lucy sharply.

"Rude! Rude! I am never rude. But this mummy." Braddock peered closely
at it and rapped the wood to assure himself it was no phantom. "Yes!
it is my mummy, the mummy of Inca Caxas. Now I shall learn how the
Peruvians embalmed their royal dead. Mine! mine! mine!" He crooned like
a mother over a child, caressing the coffin; then suddenly drew himself
upright and fixed Mrs. Jasher with an indignant eye. "So it was you,
madam, who stole my mummy," he declared venomously, "and I thought of
making you my wife. Oh, what an escape I have had. Shame, woman, shame!"

Mrs. Jasher sta