Читать книгу Frank Merriwell's Marriage; Or, Inza's Happiest Day онлайн

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“Ten-twenty,” answered Phipps.

“He’ll be here in forty minutes,” said Grafter. “I’m curious to see him.”

Farley Fisher, straight, square-shouldered, military in his bearing, not over twenty-four years of age, standing at a corner of the veranda, smiled a bit scornfully.

“It is amusing to me, gentlemen,” he observed, “to think that any fellow can keep up a fake as long as Merriwell has.”

“Fake?” cried Phipps, excitement bringing a touch of falsetto into his voice.

“Fake?” questioned Grafter, moving his chair to face Fisher more squarely. “What do you mean by that?”

“Just what I said—no more, no less. I am satisfied that Merriwell is a faker.”

Inside an open window of the reading room, which was close at hand, Hobart Manton had been glancing over the pages of a magazine. The words of those outside reached his ears. He dropped the magazine and leaned on the window ledge.

“I agree with you, Fisher,” he said. “Merriwell is the biggest faker in this country, and in many ways the cleverest. You know I’m a Yale man. At college I heard so much of Merriwell and what he had done while there that I grew sick and disgusted. He was successful in fooling almost everybody, it seems.”