this wind, and bust my spine.”

“Um,” says he, kind of satisfied with himself, “it pays to kind of keep your eyes open. But you’ll learn, Wee-wee. A few years knocking around, and you’ll learn to think it over before you take the first proposition offered you.”

We got back safe, but I was some tuckered out, and went down in the cabin where Mr. Topper was reading a book and smoking.

“Say, Mr. Topper,” says Catty, “did you ever hear of a man by the name of Jonas P. Dunn?”

“Jonas P. Dunn!” says he, jumping up like he’d been shot, “Jonas P. Dunn! Where’d you hear that name?”

“Why,” says Catty, “it’s just the man’s name that owns the Porpoise—that black yacht over yonder.”

“His boat!... His boat!... Are you sure?”

“Dead certain; Lloyd’s Register says so.”

Well, sir, Mr. Topper jumped for Mr. Browning’s door and hammered on it and Mr. Browning, who was taking a nap, hollered out kind of cross to know what the racket was, and Mr. Topper says to come out quick. So out came Mr. Browning.

“D’you know who owns that black yacht?” says Mr. Topper kind of sharp.

“No.... Who?... And what of it?”

“Jonas P. Dunn,” says Mr. Topper.

Mr. Browning whistled and then bit his lip.

“Does look as if there was something to worry about, doesn’t it?”

“Jonas P. Dunn is the man I’m more afraid of than anybody else in the world.”

“And that’s his yacht?”

“It says so in Lloyd’s.”

“Well, if that is Dunn’s boat, and I guess it must be, then we want to go mighty easy. Dunn is the kind of a man who sticks to a thing he starts after. He’s got all the money in the world, and he doesn’t care much how he gets more.... Um.... We’ll have to give that yacht the slip.”

“Let’s run now,” says Topper.

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