Aladdin and Company Part 5

"Thought it was the sheriff with a summons, eh? Well, I guess hardly!"

said Jim. "Mr. Trescott, I want you to shake hands with our old friend Mr. Barslow."

A heavy figure detached itself from the group, and, as it approached, developed indistinctly the features of a brawny farmer, with a short, heavy, dark beard.

"Wal, I declare, I'm glad to see yeh!" said he, as he grasped my hand.

"I'd a'most forgot yeh, till Mr. Elkins told me you remembered my whalin' them Dutch boys at a scale onct."

I had had no recollection of him; yet form and voice seemed vaguely familiar. I a.s.sured him that my memory for names and faces was excellent. After being duly presented to Mrs. Barslow, he urged us to alight and come in. We offered as an excuse the lateness of the hour.

"Why, you hain't seen my family yet, Mr. Barslow," said he. "They'll be disappointed if yeh don't come in."

I suggested that we were staying for a few days at the Centropolis; and Alice added that we should be glad to see himself and Mrs. Trescott there at any time during our stay. Elkins promised that we should all drive out again.

"Wal, now, you must," said Mr. Trescott. "We must talk over ol' times and--"

"Fight over old battles," replied Jim. "All the battles were yours, though, eh, Bill?"

"Huh, huh!" chuckled Bill; "fightin's no credit to any man; but I 'spose I fit my sheer when I was a boy--when I was a boy, y' know, Mrs.

Barslow, and had more sand than sense. Here, Josie, here's Mr. Elkins and some old friends of mine. Mr. and Mrs. Barslow, my daughter."

She was a little slim slip of a thing, in white, and emerged from the shrubbery at Mr. Trescott's call. She bowed to us, and said she was sorry that we could not stop. Her voice was sweet, and there was something unexpectedly cool and self-possessed in her intonation. It was not in the least the speech of the ordinary neat-handed Phyllis or Neaera; nor was her att.i.tude at all countrified as she stood with her hand on her father's arm. The increasing darkness kept us from seeing her features.

"Josie's my right-hand man," said her father. "Half the business of the farm stops when Josie goes away."

My wife expressed her admiration for Lattimore and its environs, and especially for so much of the Trescott farm as could be seen in the deepening gloaming. The flowers, she said, took her back to her childhood's home.

"Let me give you these," said the girl, handing Alice a great bunch of blossoms which she had been cutting when her father called, and had held in her hands as we talked. My wife thanked her, and buried her face in them, as we bade the Trescotts good-night and drove home.

"That girl," said Jim, as we spun along the road in the light of the rising moon, "is a crackerjack. Bill thinks the world of her, and she certainly gives him a mother's care!"

"She seems nice," said Alice, "and so refined, apparently."

"Been well educated," said Jim, "and got a head, besides. You'll like her; she knows Europe better than some folks know their own front yard."

"I was surprised at the vividness of my memory of Bill's youthful combats," said I.

Jim's laugh rang out heartily through the Brushy Creek gorge.

"Well, I supposed you remembered those things, of course," said he, "and so I insinuated some impression of the delight with which you dwell upon the stories of his prowess. It made him feel good.... I'm spoiling Bill, I guess, with these tales. He'll claim to have a private graveyard next.

As harmless a fellow as you ever saw, and the best cattle-feeder hereabouts. Got a good farm out there, Bill has; we may need it for stock yards or something, later on."

"Why not hire a corps of landscape-gardeners, and make a park of it?" I inquired sarcastically. "We'll certainly need breathing-s.p.a.ces for the populace."

"Good idea!" he returned gravely. And as he halted the equipage at the hotel, he repeated meditatively: "A mighty good idea, Al; we must figure on that a little."

We were tired to silence when we reached our rooms; so much so that nothing seemed to make a defined and sharp impression upon my mind. I kept thinking all the time that I must have been mistaken in my first thought that I had never known the Trescotts.

"Their voices seem familiar to me," said I, "and yet I can't a.s.sociate them with the old home at all. It's very odd!"

As Alice stood before the mirror shaking down and brushing her hair, she said: "Do you suppose he thought you in earnest about that absurd park?"

"No," I answered, "he understood me well enough; but what puzzles me is the question, was _he_ in earnest?"

In the middle of the night I woke with a perfectly clear idea as to the ident.i.ty of the Trescotts! Prescott, Trescott! Josie, Josephine the "Empress"! And then the voice and figure!

"Why are you sitting up in bed?" inquired Alice.

"I have made a discovery," said I. "That man at the Stock Yards meant Trescott, not Prescott."

"I don't understand," said she sleepily.

"In a word," said I, "the girl who gave you the flowers is the Empress!"

"Albert Barslow!" said Alice. "Why--"

My wife was silent for a long time.

"I knew we'd meet her," she said at last. "It is fate."

CHAPTER VI.

I am Inducted into the Cave, and Enlist.

"Here's the cave," said Jim, at the door of his office, next morning.

"As prospective joint-proprietor and co-malefactor, I bid you welcome."

The smiles with which the employees resumed their work indicated that the extraordinary character of this welcome was not lost upon them. The office was on the ground-floor of one of the more pretentious buildings of Lattimore's main street. The post-office was on one side of it, and the First National Bank on the other. Over it were the offices of lawyers and physicians. It was quite expensively fitted up; and the plate-gla.s.s front glittered with gold-and-black sign-lettering. The chairs and sofas were upholstered in black leather. On the walls hung several decorative advertis.e.m.e.nts of fire-insurance companies, and maps of the town, county, and state. Rolls of tracing-paper and blueprints lay on the flat-topped tables, reminding one of the office of an architect or civil engineer. A thin young man worked at books, standing at a high desk; and a plump young woman busily clicked off typewritten matter with an up-to-date machine.

"You'll find some books and papers on the table in the next room," said Jim, as I finished my first look about. "I'll ask you to amuse yourself with 'em for a little while, until I can dispose of my morning's mail; after which we'll resume our hunt for resources. We haven't any morning paper yet, and the evening _Herald_ is shipped in by freight and edited with a saw. But it's the best we've got--yet."

He read his letters, ran his eyes over his newspapers and a magazine or two, and dictated some correspondence, interrupted occasionally by callers, some of whom he brought into the room where I was whiling away the time, examining maps, and looking over out-of-date copies of the local papers. One of these callers was Mr. Hinckley, the cashier of the bank, who came to see about some insurance matters. He was spare, aquiline, and white-mustached; and very courteously wished Lattimore the good fortune of securing so valuable an acquisition as ourselves. It would place Lattimore under additional obligations to Mr. Elkins, who was proving himself such an effective worker in all public matters.

"Mr. Elkins," said he, "has to a wonderful degree identified himself with the material progress of the city. He is constantly bringing here enterprising and energetic business men; and we could better afford to lose many an older citizen."

I asked Mr. Hinckley as to the length of his own residence in Lattimore.

"I helped to plat the town, sir," said he. "I carried the chain when these streets were surveyed,--a boy just out of Bowdoin College. That was in '55. I staged it for four hundred miles to get here. Aleck Macdonald and I came together, and we've both staid from that day. The Indians were camped at the mouth of Brushy Creek; and except for old Pierre Lacroix, a squaw-man, we were for a month the only white men in these parts. Then General Lattimore came with a party of surveyors, and by the fall there was quite a village here."

Jim came in with another gentleman, whom he introduced as Captain Tolliver. The Captain shook my hand with profuse politeness.

"I am delighted to see you, suh," said he. "Any friend of Mr. Elkins I shall be proud to know. I heah that Mrs. Barslow is with you. I trust, suh, that she is well?"