“Whom do those horses belong to?” demanded Mr. Wade, sharply.
“Belong to Carrington,” said Richards, shortly. “That was his man. That’s his house at the other end of the street – that big one on the hill.” He jerked his head to indicate that it was back of them, and they turned to see it. It had a large, comfortable, hospitable look, more suggestive of the South than of the North.
“The hotel’s good enough for me,” said Richards, dryly.
Mr. Wade wondered why this sentiment, which had seemed so admirable to him in New York, lost its flavor here on the ground.
As they passed a blacksmith’s shop, the smith was shoeing a Kentucky thoroughbred, who looked at them with an airy unconcern.
“Carrington’s,” said Richards to Mr. Wade’s uplifted eyebrows.
The expression on Mr. Wade’s face was a curious one. Your tourist in Europe now and then wears its twin, on discovering that the United States is renting a second-rate building for an embassy, when other governments own pretentious ones.
“Tell you what,” said Hastings, suddenly. “I think I shall buy a neat little touring car to run around here. Pretty bad grades, but there are half a dozen makes that could take them easily.”
Mr. Wade looked at him with the ever-growing conviction that he was the kind of nephew to have. In spite of his conservatism, he had adopted the auto as he had the telephone.
“Quite right, Laurence,” he said, complacently. “When you order the one you prefer, have the bill sent to me.”
“Going to import a show-fure?” queried Richards, with ironic pleasantry.
Hastings shook his head.
“Never saw one I couldn’t run yet,” he said, cheerfully, “and when I do I’ll send it back to the factory as defective.”
“If he’ll just put in his time running it, it’s all I’ll ask of him,” communed Richards with himself.
At two o’clock of that day Mr. Wade had concluded that all he had ever heard of the enormities of the West was far below the actual fact.
His first grievance had been the dilapidated conveyance; his second the fact that Richards, who for reasons of his own had not tried to make the expedition a bed of roses, had insisted on his getting out a dozen times to see certain offices, the shaft house, and a number of other buildings, about whose use he was extremely hazy. And these pilgrimages had necessitated his walking through fine red dust, which not only reduced his immaculate footgear to its lowest terms, but bordered the bottom of his pale gray trouser legs with a deep red band, which Richards assured him was indelible.
But the crowning enormity came with the dinner at Raegan’s Hotel, which invitation Mr. Wade had felt he could hardly refuse in courtesy.
At the moment they entered the dining room Richards was called to the phone.
“Take these gentlemen down to my table, Maggie,” he said to the head waitress as he turned away.
Mr. Wade regarded this young woman disapprovingly. The curve of her pompadour and the curves of her figure were too aggressively spherical. That her overgenerous bulk could be compressed to the dimensions of her waist seemed to indicate that whalebone had been unduly overlooked in modern mechanics. It hinted, too, though not to Mr. Wade, of a forcefulness of spirit which, seeing in a handkerchief-sized, knife-pleated white apron a legitimate adornment, adjusted the physical, Spartan-like, to its requirements. But Mr. Wade’s mere passive and impersonal dislike quickened to an active rage in that awful moment when she tucked her arm comfortably in his, and promenaded him the length of the dining room to an untidy looking table already occupied by a portly Hibernian, who was engaged in extensive molar exploration with a diminutive wooden pick.
“Friends of Mr. Richards, Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” she said, glibly, and Mr. Wade felt himself released from her muscular arm only to feel the front of a chair pressed with energetic purpose against the back of his knees.
As certain muscles automatically relaxed to enable him to be seated, his stunned sense of propriety recovered consciousness enough to enable him to decide that of all outrages ever perpetrated on a gentleman, this last was the worst.
“Mr. Richards’ friends are my friends,” responded Mr. O’Shaughnessy, cordially.
Mr. Wade looked at Hastings, who was seating himself with outer sobriety and inward hilarity. He comforted himself by taking that sobriety for disgust.
“I suppose you are not out here for your health?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy opined, genially.
“No,” said Mr. Wade, icily.
“What line ar-re you in?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy pursued.
“I fail to understand you,” said Mr. Wade, stiffly.
“What house are you thravelin’ for? What are you selling?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy explained.
That he, Mr. Livingstone Wade, should be taken for a traveling salesman!
“I am a banker,” said Mr. Wade. He felt it due to himself to say as much as that.
“Faro and that face of yours ar-re twins the world over,” said Mr. O’Shaughnessy, genially, closing one eye and looking intelligently at Hastings through the other. Then he cast the toothpick on the floor. “Have a cigar?” he said, hospitably, throwing a couple carelessly on the table as he rose to depart. “Drop in and see me if you get thirsty while you’re here. The palm garden. Two doors up. The house is good for a few yet.”
He stopped to joke with the head waitress a moment on his way out.
Richards, returning, decided that Mr. Wade was pretty well fagged. He had become monosyllabic.
The catsup bottle in the middle of the table, the greasy, lukewarm soup in stone-china bowls, the tasteless profusion of canned vegetables, the dubious-looking water, and the muddy mixture, bitter from long boiling, which the Raegan House called coffee, were only additional affronts to a man already at the limit of his endurance.
His announcement of his intention to spend the rest of the day in the car, and to make it his headquarters during his stay, was delivered with a decision which left no possibility for protest.
What was mere dynamite to such indignities as these!
He stepped into the landau, which Richards had ordered round again, with a sensation of relief, heightened by that gentleman’s statement that he shouldn’t be able to see them again until morning. Richards found Mr. Wade rather exhausting, on his side.
“If you see a fellow in freak clothes on your way back, you can know it’s that son of Carrington’s,” he observed, as he stood on the sidewalk.
Hastings had his foot on the step of the landau, but he wheeled.
“Is Ned Carrington here?” he demanded.
“Been here all summer. Father broke his leg in a runaway and sent for him,” Richards growled.
“Then I think I’ll walk over and see him,” Hastings said promptly, “if you’ll excuse me, sir.”
He smiled confidently at his uncle.
“You shan’t go near him,” said Richards, fiercely, “with that shark of a father of his trying to swindle us every way he can.”
“Whatever his father is, Ned Carrington is a gentleman and my friend,” said Hastings, quietly.
“Tell him he can’t go,” Richards demanded of Mr. Wade. And his insistence was fatal. Mr. Wade would not have influenced his nephew at Richards’ dictation just now if Hastings had announced his intention of going to perdition.
Moreover, he trusted Hastings. And – this is an awful anti-climax – he wanted a nap.
“I hope