A moment later Detective Sergeant Flannagan ventured a rearward glance to note how Byrne was receiving the joyful tidings which the newspaper article contained.
“Well, I’ll be!” ejaculated the sleuth, for Billy Byrne was already a hundred yards away and breaking all records in his dash for the sitting-room he had quitted but a few minutes before.
It was a happy and contented trio who took the train the following day on their way back to New York City after bidding Bridge goodbye in the improvised hospital and exacting his promise that he would visit them in New York in the near future.
It was a month later spring was filling the southland with new, sweet life. The joy of living was reflected in the song of birds and the opening of buds. Beside a slow-moving stream a man squatted before a tiny fire. A battered tin can, half filled with water stood close to the burning embers. Upon a sharpened stick the man roasted a bit of meat, and as he watched it curling at the edges as the flame licked it he spoke aloud though there was none to hear:
Just for a con I’d like to know (yes, he crossed over long ago;
And he was right, believe me, bo!) if somewhere in the South,
Down where the clouds lie on the sea, he found his sweet Penelope
With buds of roses in her hair and kisses on her mouth.
“Which is what they will be singing about me one of these days,” he commented.
Colophon
The Mucker
was published in 1921 by
Edgar Rice Burroughs.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Kevin Palm,
and is based on a transcription produced in 1995 by
Judith Boss, David Widger, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
The Mucker,
a painting completed in 1921 by
J. Allen St. John.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
November 18, 2023, 11:26 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
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Uncopyright
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