Part 10

"Oh, Mr. Hopworthy!" she responded with a smile, an automatic smile, self-regulating and self-adjusting, like the phrase that followed, "I am so glad you were able to come." And turning to her husband, she announced, too sweetly to leave her state of mind in doubt:

"Jack, here is Mr. Hopworthy, your aunt's old friend."

With her eyes she added:

"Fiend, behold your work!"

Jack grasped the stranger's hand and wrung it warmly.

"I'm glad you're out again," he said. "Now tell my wife just how you left Aunt Bates." And so saying he backed toward the door, for he could be resourceful on occasion. Two minutes later when he reappeared his face was wreathed in smiles.

"It's all serene," he whispered to his wife. "They have crowded in another place at your end. We'll make the best of it."

Perhaps it occurred to Clara that things to be made the best of were oftenest crowded in at her end, but she had no time to say so, for Pierre had come into his own again--Madame was served.

Jack led, of course, with scintillescent Mrs. Ballington, he having flatly refused to take in the Countess. Jack's point of view was always masculine, and often elementary.

The Countess followed with a Mr. Walker, who collected eggs, and was believed to have been born at sea, which made him interesting in a way. Then came Maude Penfield, preceding Lena Livingston, according to the tonnage of their husbands' yachts. In truth, the whole procession gave in every rank new evidence of Clara's kindly forethought. For herself, she had not only the Extraordinary, but, by perverse fate, another.

"Mr. Hopworthy," she explained, bringing both dimples into play, "a very charming girl has disappointed us. I hope you don't mind walking three abreast."

Clara's untruths were never compromises. When they should be told, she told them, scorning to keep her score immaculate by subterfuge. "Though the Recording Angel may be strict," she often said with child-like faith, "I am convinced he is well-bred."

The pleasant flutter over dinner cards ended as it should in each guest being next the persons most desired--each guest, but not the hostess. For Jack's resourcefulness having accomplished the additional place, stopped short, and his readjustment of the cards, which had been by chance, had brought the Envoy upon Clara's left and given to Mr. Hopworthy the seat of honor.

For a moment Clara hesitated, hoping against hope for someone to be taken ill, for almost anything that might create an opportunity for a change of cards. But while she stood in doubt the diplomat most diplomatically sat down. Beyond him the Countess was already drawing off her gloves as though they had been stockings, and further on the gentleman born at sea seemed pleased to find his dinner roll so like an egg.

It was one of those unrecorded tragedies known only to woman. The failures of a man leave ruins to bear testimony to endeavor; a woman's edifice of cobweb falls without commotion, whatever pains its building may have cost.

"I gave you that seat," said Clara to the diplomat in dimpled confidence, "because the window on the other side lets in a perfect gale of draught."

"A most kind draught to blow me nearer my hostess's heart," he answered, much too neatly not to have said something of the sort before.

Fortunately both the Envoy and the Countess appreciated oysters, and before the soup came, Clara, outwardly herself again, could turn a smiling face to her unwelcome guest. But Mr. Hopworthy was bending toward Maude, who seemed very much amused. So was the man between them, and so were several others.

Already he had begun to make himself conspicuous. People with broad mouths always make themselves conspicuous. She felt that Maude was gloating over her discomfiture. She detected this in every note of Maude's well-modulated laugh, and could an interchange of beakers with the stranger have been sure of Florentine results, Clara would have faced a terrible temptation. As it was, she asked the Envoy if he had seen the Automobile Show.

He had, and by good luck machinery was his favorite topic, a safe one, leaving little ground for argument. From machinery one proceeds by certain steps to things thereby created, silk and shoes and books, and comes at length, as Clara did, to silverware and jewels, pearls and emeralds. And here the Countess, who mistrusted terrapin, broke in.

She had known an emerald larger than an egg--Mr. Walker looked up hopefully. It had been laid by Royalty at the feet of Beauty--Mr. Walker, who had been about to speak, resumed his research, and the Countess held the floor.

She wore a bracelet given her by a potentate, whose title suggested snuff, as a reward for great devotion to his cause, and its exhibition occupied a course.

Meanwhile the hostess, as with astral ears, heard snatches of the conversation all about her.

"And do you think so really, Mr. Hopworthy?"

"Oh, Mr. Hopworthy, were you actually there?"

"Please tell us your opinion----"

Evidently Jack's aunt's acquaintance was being drawn out, encouraged to display himself, made a butt of, in point of fact! This came from taking Maude Penfield into her confidence. There was always a streak of something not exactly nice in Maude. As Clara, with her mind's eye, saw the broad Hopworthian mouth in active operation, she felt--the feminine instinct in such matters is unerring--that Butler Penfield cherished every phrase for future retaliation at the club, and Lena Livingston, who never laughed, was laughing. After all, if foreigners are often dull, at least they have no overmastering sense of humor.

"My Order of the Bull was given me at twenty-six," the Envoy was relating, and though the story was a long one, Clara listened to it all with swimming eyes.

"Diplomacy is full of intrigue as an egg of meat," it ended, and once more Mr. Walker looked up hopefully.

Again the hostess forced herself to turn with semblance of attention to her right. But Mr. Hopworthy did not appear to notice the concession. He did not appear to notice anything. He was haranguing, actually haranguing, oblivious that all within the hearing of his resonant voice regarded him with open mockery. Jack in the distance, too far away to apprehend the truth, exhibited his customary unconcern, for Jack's ideals were satisfied if at his table people only ate enough and talked. And perhaps it was as well Jack did not comprehend.

"To illustrate," the orator was saying--fancy a man who says "to illustrate." "This wine is, as we may say, dyophysitic"--here Mr. Hopworthy held up his glass and looked about him whimsically--"possessed of dual potentialities containing germs of absolute antipathies--" Even Jack, could he have heard, must have resented the suggestion of germs in his champagne.

"Perhaps you would rather have some Burgundy with your duck," suggested Mrs. Fessenden with heroic fortitude, and Mr. Hopworthy checked his train of thought at once.

"Aye, Madam," he rejoined, "there you revive an ancient controversy."

"I am sure I did not mean to," Clara said regretfully, and Mr. Hopworthy smiled his most open smile.

"A controversy," drawled Lena Livingston, "how very odd!"

"It was indeed," assented Mr. Hopworthy, and went on: "Once, as you know, the poets of Reims and Beaune waged war in verse over the respective claims of the blond wine and the brunette, and so bitter grew the fight that several provinces sprang to arms, and Louis the Fourteenth was forced to go to war to keep the peace."

It was pure malice in Maude to show so marked an interest in a statement so absurd, and it was fiendish in the rest to encourage Mr. Hopworthy. Even the most insistent talker comes in time to silence if nobody listens.

"Oh, M. Hop--Hop--Hopgood," cried the Countess, "if you are a savant, perhaps you know my Axel!"

"And have you taken out a patent for your axel?" asked the diplomat, whose mind reverted to mechanics.

The Countess favored him with one glance through her lorgnettes--a present from the exiled King of Crete--and straightway took her bag and baggage to the hostile camp. For, of course, the young Count Axel was known to Mr. Hopworthy, or at least he so declared.

"Please tell me how you won your Order of the Bull," said Clara to the diplomat, her one remaining hope.

"I think I mentioned that just now," he answered, and conversation perished.

And thus the dinner wore away, a grim succession of demolished triumphs. When after an æon or two Clara gave the signal for retreat, she sought her own reflection in the glass to make sure her hair was still its normal brown.

"Clara," said Mrs. Penfield, when the ladies were alone, "you might at least have warned us whom we were to meet."

Mrs. Fessenden drew herself erect. Her breath came fast, her eyes were bright, and she had nearly reached the limit of forbearance toward Maude.

"Mrs. Penfield--" she began with dignity, but Maude broke in.

"I must have been a baby not to have recognized the name."

Clara hesitated, checking the word upon her lips, for with her former friend, to be inelegant was to be sincere.

"I do not understand," she substituted prudently.

"To think, my dear, of you being the first of us to capture Horace Hopworthy and keeping it from me!" cried Maude.

"I am sure I mentioned that we hoped to have him," murmured Mrs. Fessenden.

"So sweet of you to give us such a surprise, it was most delightful," Lena Livingston drawled.

"Your house is always such a Joppa for successful genius," declared Mrs. Ballington, "or is it Mecca? I've forgotten which. How did you come to know he was in town?"

"Jack's relatives in Boston always send us the most charming people with letters," answered Clara. "Shall we take coffee on the balcony? The men are laughing so in the smoking-room we can't talk here with any comfort."

Later--an hour later--when the last carriage-door had slammed, Jack lit a cigarette and said:

"That Hoppy fellow seemed to make a hit."

Clara yawned.

"Yes, he was rather a fortunate discovery," she said, "but, Jack, we really ought to take a literary magazine."

THE MAN WITHOUT A PENSION

He was a dapper little man with a gray pointed beard, and he wore knickerbockers and russet hunting gaiters, nearly new. A jaunty Alpine hat was perched upon his head, and as he pursued his cautious way along the cañon's edge it would be hard to fancy anyone less in touch with his surroundings. He seemed uncertain of the trail, mistrustful of himself, or unaccustomed to mountain atmosphere, for within the last hundred yards of the camp he paused in every dozen steps to listen or to recover breath.

There was no sound anywhere except the moan of pine trees, and no motion but the perpetual trembling in the aspen undergrowth. The greater trees nearly met above the cañon; the lesser clung along its brink, leaning far out to catch the sun and send broken lights and colors to the water far below. Contrasting with the unchanging twilight and boundless solitude of the forest, the meadow where the tents were pitched seemed to blaze with light, and the three small shelters took on the importance of a settlement, whose visible inhabitants consisted of a pair of mountain magpies possessed of an idle spirit of investigation.

The little man coughed a dry inadequate cough to herald his approach, while his foot dislodged a pebble which, rattling down the cañon, sent the magpies to a tree top in affected terror. From under the shelter of his hand he cast a glance about the camp which mastered its small array of unimportant details; two tents, wide open to the air, disclosed elementary sleeping quarters for half a score of men, coarse blankets covering heaps of twigs and pine needles, the bare necessities of a bivouac. The third tent was closed.

Evidently perplexed, the visitor stood still. Had anyone been watching him, say from behind the ragged canvas of the closed tent, he must have seemed a nervous, apprehensive little man. There came a sound which might have been a derisive chuckle and might have been a magpie in the trees. The visitor controlled a start and clenched his hands as though summoning courage. Then loudly as one who gives a challenge, he shouted, "Is there anybody here?"

The voice was resonant for so small a body, and the echoes caught the last word eagerly, and sent it back, clear from the cañon, faint from where the snow peaks cut the blue, deep from the hollow of the timber. "Here! Here!" as though a scattered army answered to a roll call. Immediately there followed another and louder "Here!" distinctly not an echo, and a gruff ungracious laugh.

The multitude of answers must have bewildered the stranger, for he looked everywhere about him, almost stupidly, except toward the only possible hiding place. It needed a second derisive laugh to guide him to the tent whose half-closed flap concealed the only custodian of the camp, a man so tall that in his little shelter he gave the impression of a large animal inadequately caged or in a trap. His black hair fell below the ears; his jaws were hidden by a heavy beard cut square, through some freak of fancy, like the carved beards of human-headed Assyrian beasts.

"Ahem! I beg your pardon," began the little man after another cough.

"What do you want?" returned the other without looking up. He bent above a tin pan of dough, kneading the pliant stuff almost fiercely, with red knotted knuckles and sinewy forearms.

"My name," replied the visitor, "is Sands--Professor Sands of Charbridge University."

The man in the tent rolled his dough into a cannon ball and held it up at arm's length. "Sands," he repeated. "Charbridge University?" And striking his dough with his palm as though it could appreciate a joke, he added, "Well, you look it!"

He wiped his hands upon a strip of burlap bagging which served him as apron, and deliberately surveyed the new comer. "How did you ever get so far from home all by yourself?" he asked with open insolence. A fuller view of his face disclosed incongruous tones of red about the roots of hair and beard, and a long scar on the left cheek.

"I am connected with our geological expedition," Professor Sands explained concisely. "We are camping in the valley, and this morning I ventured to explore the cañon on my own account, and have been tempted farther than I intended."

The large man put his hands upon his thighs and leaned against the tent pole. "So that's it?" he commented patronizingly. "Well, if I was you, I'd stick to camp, and not go roaming in the timber where you might get lost."

"Quite so," the little man assented readily; "but I was told I should surely come upon the railway survey somewhere in the cañon, and I have had your stakes to guide me. The engineers are doubtless working somewhere near here?" he added, taking off his hat to cool his head with its thin gray hair.

The other spat and eyed his visitor with amused contempt. "We don't lay out railroads sitting round the fire," he volunteered. "The boys are working up near timber line, and won't be back till dark, and the teamster's gone to Freedom City for more grub."

"Ah!" remarked the scientist. "Then we are quite alone. I'll rest a little, if I may."

He deposited an army haversack that he carried slung about his shoulder upon a flat boulder just outside the tent door and sat down beside it. "My geological specimens are rather heavy," he went on, wiping his brow. "With your permission I should like to label them before I forget their identity."

The other, with his hands in his overall pockets, took a slouching step beyond the tent to overlook the sack's contents as they appeared--a small steel sorting hammer, a heap of broken bits of float, and a large flask with a silver top. He watched the geologist sort his specimens with an idle interest mingled with contempt--for the trade he did not understand, for the spotless handkerchief, for the physical weakness of the man himself.

"I suppose that's some sort of acid you've got in your bottle?" he speculated presently.

"I beg your pardon?" asked the professor, absorbed in his work; then added as the question's meaning reached him, "Ah, the flask? No, that contains whiskey. I always carry a supply in case of accident." Whistling softly, he marked another specimen, ignoring his host's nearer approach.

"Partner," the latter suggested, "if you'd like a bite to eat, you've only got to say so. That's mountain manners."

The professor glanced up now and with an odd intentness in his look; no doubt his mind was still with his specimens. "You're very kind, I'm sure," he responded courteously; "but I have lunched already on my sandwiches. Thank you, Mr.----" He paused for a name.

The other chuckled with new-found amiability. "You needn't 'Mister' me," he said. "I'm Budd, Jim Budd the Scorcher, and if any man in camp don't like my grub he's got the privilege of going hungry."

"Ah, quite so, quite so," rejoined the scientist. "I'm very sure your cooking is excellent."

"That's what the boys tell me," returned the scorcher; "but, by blood! I've got 'em educated. I'll just set them biscuits to raise, and then we'll have a chat." He re-entered the tent, limping noticeably, and from the interior his voice was heard mingled with the clatter of utensils in blasphemous denunciation of everything about him. During this explosion the scientist from Charbridge made a rather singular experiment.

He rose, and after a cautious glance behind him he crept to the verge of the precipice, looked down into the water swirling over jagged rocks far below, and pulling up a sod of wire grass let it drop, and watched it sink and reappear in single straws that circled and sank again. This done, he went back to his specimens.

The Scorcher's pibrock of vituperation had now changed to a tuneless chant, scarcely less vindictive in its cadence:

Old John Rogers was burnt at the stake; His poor wife cried until her heart did break!

he sang, and the professor's listening face took on an expression out of keeping with the meaningless doggerel, the look of one who responds to an inexorable call.

"'Until her heart did break!'" he murmured. But when Budd appeared again he only asked if he was interested in geology.

"I am if it's the sort that's got silver in it," replied the cook.

"One does not look for silver in sandstone formation," the professor explained.

"Do you mean to tell me the Almighty couldn't put silver in this here red rock?" Jim demanded, from the stone on which he had seated himself.

"No," replied the professor guardedly: "I say only that He did not. However, here is a bit of quartz----"

"Say!" interrupted the cook, "I'm a heap more interested in the specimen you've got in that bottle." He was staring at the polished cap of the flask.

"Indeed, are you?" the other smiled a a tolerant smile. "Then perhaps you will do me the honor----"

Budd seized the flask without a second invitation and raised it to his lips. He drank as dying men drink water, and when he stopped for lack of breath his face was fiery but for the white scar. As he lowered the bottle he met the professor's curious fixity of gaze, and wriggled uneasily before it.

"Say, partner," he remonstrated, "your whiskey's all right; but I'm hanged if I like your eye! By blood! it goes ag'in me!"

"I beg your pardon," said the professor without averting his look. "I have the habit of close observation. And," he proffered the flask afresh, "the more you drink of that, the less I'll have to carry home."

Budd poured a generous portion into a tin cup and stared reflectively at the bright cap. His next remark, mellowed by whiskey, had a genial candor. "Say! if I'd a popped you over, as I had a mind to when you came along the trail, just think what I'd a missed!"

"And so you had a mind to pop me over?" queried the other. "May I ask why?" Having finished his labeling, he was at leisure to regard his companion still more closely.

"There's fellers prowling in the timber I ain't got no use for," the cook explained, drinking. "But you're all right! You haven't got a cigar handy, now, have you?"

The scientist was well supplied, and as the cook bit off the end of a large and black cigar he sighed with satisfaction.

"I get the horrors sometimes," he explained. "I get as scary as a cottontail. Them quaking asps is enough to drive a feller crazy, anyhow."

"There's nothing like a little whiskey in such cases," remarked the professor, filling the extended cup.

"If this keeps up, one of us is liable to get drunk," remarked Budd. "That's a handy flask of yours. Come all the way from New York?"

"From Richmond, I believe," responded the other. "My brother found it on a battle field and sent it home to me."

"I take it you wasn't there yourself," the Scorcher chuckled.

"No," said Professor Sands. "I was in bad health at the time."

"So was a lot of others," sneered Budd. "I wasn't feeling what you might call well myself; but I stuck to it till they biffed me in the leg--the hounds!--and put me out of business."

"Of course, you draw a pension," ventured the professor.

"No," said the cook, "I never asked for no pension. They've given one to about every feller what wasn't dead when the war broke out, but there hasn't been a bill passed yet that takes me in."

"Indeed?" His listener was politely observant.

"Yes, that's the truth," went on the cook. "I declare I feel real dopy or dotty or something. They pensioned every beat that came back with a knapsack full of rebel watches, but they left out old Jim. He don't wear no medals; he don't parade on Decoration Day to scatter posies; he don't get no free beer while the band plays 'Georgia'--'Hurrah for the flag that makes us free!'" he chanted hoarsely. "Hurrah for the Devil! that's what I say. Hurrah for the man without a pension!"

"You interest me," interposed Professor Sands.

"Oh, do I?" cried the cook. "By blood! I've half a mind to interest you more. But don't look at me like that--I tell you, I don't like your eye!" He tried to shield himself from that unmoved gaze. "You're interested, are you? You'd like to put my case before your influential friends back East? You with your little bag of rocks and your little hammer and your gloves! Did you ever in your life see anyone who wasn't a nickel-plated angel? Did you ever run across a real live blackguard out of a story paper? Did you ever see a man who couldn't show his face in a settlement by the light of day, and had to take up any job that kept him out of sight? I don't know why, but I've got to shoot my mouth off now if it hangs me. I've got to blab or go stark mad!"

"I understand," said the professor.

"I was one of them patriots," Budd went on, speaking almost mechanically, as though hypnotized, "who enlisted for the boodle and then skipped out to work the racket somewhere else."

"In point of fact, a bounty jumper," his listener put in.

"Yes," agreed the cook, "that's what I was. They were paying three hundred gold for likely men to go down South and head off bullets, and that beat getting drafted, so I joined. Oh, those were great old days, great old days!"

"How long were you in the service?"