CHAPTER XXIV.

JACK SURRENDERS TO THE “ENEMY.”

Anybody strolling into the dining room of the Hamilton Hotel after the dinner hour three nights later would have seen an amusing sight. The big room was being prepared as if for another dinner, when, as everybody knew, the regular diners had all been and departed. Nevertheless, instead of waiters clearing the tables and porters mopping up, here were the employees of the fashionable caterer of the town directing the waiters in assembling the tables down the center of the room into one long table, some putting on snowy linen and setting out silver and plate and flowers, others placing banks of flowers along the walls.

Rangy old Jack Hannaford, looking vastly different and uncomfortable in black coat and white collar, peered into the room and then precipitately withdrew. In his retreat he bumped into several other old-timers, likewise bent upon viewing the metamorphosis of the dining room, and they chaffed him unmercifully.

“Look at him all duded up.”

“Wouldn’ta knowed ye, Jack.”

“Huh. That ain’t Jack Hannaford. That’s an undertaker. Where’s the corpse?”

“It’s you that is mistaken. He’s the corp himself. See how white he is.”

This last witticism drew a roar of appreciative laughter.

“Think ye’re smart, don’t ye?” said Jack, beginning with dignity and ending in companionable mirth. “Waal, fellers, I look like I feel.”

Jack was going to the “party.” So were seven spruce young men in white ducks donned by command invitation instead of their hot uniforms, who entered the lobby at that moment. The foremost saw Hannaford and hailed him, and the old Texan at once deserted his tormentors to join the newcomers.

“Le’s sit down, boys,” invited Hannaford, “nobody but ourselves ain’t come yet.”

With comfortable sighs, all eight sank into chairs which were drawn in a semi-circle. Jack looked around the group. None of the aviators with whom he had shared the honor of Ramirez’s capture and the rounding-up and scattering of the Smuggling Band was absent.

“Ain’t seen you since that night, Captain,” said Hannaford, his deep voice booming as he sought ineffectually to modulate it, and addressing himself to Captain Cornell. “We got a minute’s time before the party begins. Lay ’er out for me. What happened?”

So then Hannaford was told of how three De Havilands, each with its crew of two men, had gone cruising through the moonlight of that memorable night, high above the silvery reaches of the Rio Grande, to a landing near Carana; how there the members of the Border Patrol, commandeering a battered flivver, had piled into it and departed down river in time to round up a full dozen of Ramirez’s band before ever a boat had put out across the river for the purpose of transferring the Orientals into the United States, and had sent the others flying.

“You know the rest, Jack,” said Captain Cornell. “The fellows that we rounded up were all Mexicans lured from Don Ferdinand’s mine by Ramirez with specious promises of the much gold they would receive. They’re still in jail, but I expect that Uncle Sam will make it easy for them, inasmuch as they were not caught in the act and as they had not yet brought Orientals into the country. Besides, Don Ferdinand needs them back at his mine, and he and the Mexican Consul are making representations which ought to carry weight. How about Ramirez?”

“With him and his two lieutenants,” Hannaford said, “it’s some different. We got enough on ’em to hang ’em. And good riddance, too, if it could really be done—but it cain’t.”

Captain Cornell laughed. “You bloodthirsty old villain.”

But Hannaford did not even smile. “I know him, you don’t. Listen, let me tell you, it’s a mighty good thing them boys took a hand.”

“They’re the real stuff, Jack,” Captain Cornell agreed heartily, and his companion nodded. “The real stuff,” he said. “But, say, Jack, what’s the reason for their giving us this party tonight?”

Hannaford looked mysterious but confessed ignorance. “Only,” he added, “don’t fool yourselves none. This party ain’t bein’ give for us, or I miss my reckonin.’ We’re only the lookers-on.”

“Great guns,” cried Captain Cornell, half rising from his chair, and gazing toward the doorway. “Look who’s here.”

All eyes followed his gaze. And, truly, the vision entering the lobby was worth attention. It was Rafaela, leaning on her father’s arm, but a Rafaela so gloriously beautiful and so quaintly dressed in Spanish costume—or was it merely a touch here and there, such as the lacy black mantilla, which made her costume appear so much more picturesque than that of the more Americanized beauties who followed her?—that she took away the collective breath of the entire group.

Across the lobby Don Ferdinand, impeccably clad in dinner clothes, saw the standing group of aviators clustered about Jack Hannaford, and with a word to Rafaela, he made his way toward them. And then while the aviators gallantly professed themselves captivated, and while Rafaela and her attendant beauties blushed and bowed as prettily as ladies of the Sixties, introductions finally were achieved. Strangely enough, there was a beauty for each, with a handful left over. Even Jack Hannaford, confirmed old bachelor, groaned inwardly, as he saw a duenna—the counterpart of Donna Ana, Jack could have told him—being gently manoeuvred his way.

And Jack, where was he? And Bob and Frank? Ah, there! Coming down the stair; at their heels, Mr. Hampton and Bob’s father. Nor could any of the group, watching the approach across the lobby, guess that for the last hour tall, curly-haired Jack Hampton had been dressing with more painstaking preparations than he had ever bestowed on this operation before in his life. Nor could any have guessed that during that time he had been the target of unmerciful chaffing on the part of his chums—until at length he had attempted to expel them from his room, and a tussle had ensued, and he had been compelled at the end to undertake dressing all over again, for it had left him a ghastly ruin.

No, none of these things could have been surmised from his appearance. For, fortunately, he had not yet donned dinner jacket and vest when the tussle had begun.

A merry clatter of voices rose as the two parties met and mingled, only to be temporarily stilled when Mr. Hampton announced that they would move into the dining room. So in they poured, each gallant aviator doing his best to be a ladies’ man, with a Creole beauty on his arm, and Bob and Frank in the same case, while Jack walked beside Rafaela and neither spoke a word, yet eyes were far more eloquent than any speech could have been. And last of all came the three elders of the party—while the fourth, the real elder of all, old Jack Hannaford, strode fiercely just ahead of them, with the duenna’s fingers resting on his high-crooked arm.

The room was a blaze of light. The decorations miraculously had all been arranged. And down the center, under its canopy of snowy linen, with the silver gleaming and sparkling, ran the long table. Place cards? Yes, here they were. And amid much laughter the various couples found their places.

Then silence, while Mr. Hampton at the head of the table, looking impressive and yet mischievous, lifted his glass—of sparkling grape juice.

“Friends,” he said, “under other circumstances, the announcement I am about to make would come in an utterly different way. But the people involved—oh, yes, there are people involved—lead such scatterbrain lives that the customary manner of announcing engagements must be a bit scatterbrained, too.”

Bob and Frank, standing beside their partners across the table from Jack, looked pointedly at him and Rafaela, grinning widely the while. And in the little pause following Mr. Hampton’s last words, the aviators who had been unaware of what was coming and felt sadly puzzled, caught the significance of that glance. Jack tried to grin back manfully, but it was what his two comrades privately considered a sickly attempt. As for Rafaela, she looked as demure and unconcerned as if not she, but some other of the beautiful girls nodding to her with parted lips, was about to be named.

“I ask you to drink,” cried Mr. Hampton, “to my son and his affianced bride.”

There, the secret was a secret no longer. And in the hubbub that followed, with girls crowding around Rafaela, and the men about Jack, telling him what a lucky fellow he was, the dinner bade fair to be forgotten.

But suddenly a waiter wearing an anxious frown appeared at Mr. Hampton’s elbow, apologetically but firmly pleading for a hearing.

“It’s that crazy fella you says must be master of ceremonies,” he said. “He says you must go on with the dinner or it will be spoiled. He’s out there in the kitchen, tearin’ around like wild. I says no good would come of havin’ one o’ these Spanish chefs in the kitchen, bossin’ everybody. There,” pointing toward the kitchen door—“there he is now.”

Mr. Hampton, lips quirked in a smile, let his gaze travel down the room. In the kitchen door, outlined against the gleaming ranges beyond, stood a figure, arms akimbo. Mr. Hampton said to the waiter, “All right, tell him to begin.” And to the distant figure, he waved a hand, a signal which the latter apparently understood, for he disappeared.

“Ramon says we must begin dinner,” Mr. Hampton announced, turning to Don Ferdinand on his right. And he rapped on the table, and made a similar announcement. “You’ll all have to sit down and be good,” he added, “or the old fellow’s heart will be broken. He wouldn’t let anybody, not even the caterer, oversee this dinner but himself. Says he owes it to Jack for lifting from him a load that oppressed him for years.”