"I don't know. I never thought to ask him. And he doesn't live here either, but has just come down from Alaska, and was going off in the one-o'clock train. I do know, though, that he is the very finest chap I ever met, and I only hope I'll have a chance some time to pay back his kindness to me by helping some other poor boy."
"It is funny," remarked Bonny, meditatively, "that your friend and my friend should both have just come from Alaska."
"Isn't it?" replied Alaric; "but then they are travelling together, you know."
"I didn't know it, though I ought to have suspected it, for they are the kind who naturally would travel together--the kind, I mean, that give a fellow an idea of how much real goodness there is in the world, after all--a sort of travelling sermon, only one that is acted instead of being preached."
"That's just the way I feel about them," agreed Alaric; "but I wish I hadn't been so careless about this ball. It may be one that he values for association's sake, just as I did the one we left in that Siwash camp."
"Let me have it a moment," said Bonny, who was looking curiously at the ball.
Alaric handed it to him, and he examined it closely.
"I do believe it is the very one!" he exclaimed. "Yes, I am sure it is. Don't you remember, Rick, the burned place on your ball that came when Bah-die dropped it into the fire the first time you threw it at him, and how you laughed and called it a sure-enough red-hot ball? Well, here's the place now, and this is certainly the very ball that introduced us to each other in Victoria."
"How can it be?" asked Alaric, incredulously.
"Well," said Alaric, finally convinced that his comrade was right, "that is the very most unexplainable thing I ever came across, for I don't see how it could possibly have come into his possession."
While discussing this strange happening, the lads approached the hotel in which one of them had been made to suffer so keenly a few hours before. He dreaded the very thought of entering it again, but having made up his mind that he must, was about to do so, when his attention was attracted to a curious scene in front of the main entrance.
A small, wiry-looking man, evidently a foreigner, was gesticulating, stamping, and shouting to a group of grinning porters and bell-boys who were gathered about him. As our lads drew near they saw that he held a small open book in his hand, from which he was quoting some sentence, while at the same time he was rapidly working himself into a fury. It was a French-English phrase-book, in which, under the head of instructions to servants, the sentence "_Je désire un fiacre_" was rendered "Call me a hansom," and it was this that the excited Frenchman was demanding, greatly to the amusement and mystification of his hearers.