“Don’t quote me to excuse yourself.”  Aunt Caroline sailed serenely on.  “At least preserve the courage of your convictions.  There is certainly something the matter with Benis.  He has answered none of my letters.  He has completely ignored my lettergrams.  To my telegram of Thursday telling him that I had been compelled to discharge my third cook since Mabel for wiping dishes on a hand towel, he replied only by silence.  And the telegraph people say that the message was never delivered owing to lack of address.  Easy as I am to satisfy, things like this cannot be allowed to continue.  My nephew must be found.”

“But we don’t know where to look for him,” objected her victim weakly.

Aunt Caroline easily rose superior to this.

“We have a map, I hope?  And Vancouver, heathenish name! must be marked on it somewhere.  If not, the railroad people can tell us.”

“But he is not in Vancouver.”

“There—­or thereabouts.  When we get there we can ask the policeman, or,” with a grim twinkle, “we can enquire at the asylums.  You forget that my nephew is a celebrated man even if he is a fool.”

The doctor gave in.  He hadn’t had a chance from the beginning, for Aunt Caroline could answer objections far faster than he could make them.  They arrived at the terminus just four days after the expeditionary party had left for Friendly Bay.

If Aunt Caroline were surprised at finding more than one policeman in Vancouver, she did not admit it.  Neither did the general atmosphere of ignorance as to Benis daunt her in the least.  She adhered firmly to her campaign of question asking and found it fully justified when inquiry at the post-office revealed that all letters for Professor Benis H. Spence were to be delivered to the care of the Union Steamship Company.  From the Union Steamship Company to the professor’s place of refuge was an easy step.  But Dr. Rogers, to whom this last inquiry had been intrusted, returned to the hotel with a careful jauntiness of manner which ill accorded with a disturbed mind.

“Well, we’ve found him,” he announced cheerfully.  “And now, if we are wise, I think we’ll leave him alone.  He is camping up the coast at a place called Friendly Bay—­no hotels, no accommodation for ladies—­he is evidently perfectly well and attending to business.  You know he came out here partly to get material for his book?  Well, that’s what he’s doing.  Must be, because there are only Indians up there.”

“Indians?  What do you mean—­Indians?  Wild ones?”

“Fairly wild.”

Aunt Caroline snorted.  She is one of the few ladies left who possess this Victorian, accomplishment.  “And you advise my leaving my sister’s child in his present precarious state of mind alone among fairly wild Indians?”

“Well—­er—­that’s just it, you see.  He isn’t alone—­not exactly.”

“What do you mean—­not exactly?”

“I mean that his—­er—­secretary is with him.  He has to have a secretary on account of never being sure whether receive is ‘ie’ or ‘ei.’  They are quite all right, though.  The captain of the boat says so.  And naturally on a trip of that kind, research you know, a man doesn’t like to be interrupted.”