Free Air Part 21

"Do you need anything, with your office and your club?"

"Why, Claire!"

"I'm sorry. That was horrid of me."

"Yes, it was. Though I don't mind. I'm sure we've all become meek, missing you so. I'm quite willing to be bullied, and reminded that I'm a mere T.B.M."

She had got herself into it; she had to tell him that he wasn't just a business man; that she had "just meant" he was so practical.

"But Jeff is no longer the practical one," he declared. "Think of Claire driving over deserts and mountains. But---- Oh, it's been so lonely for us. Can you guess how much? A dozen times every evening, I've turned to the telephone to call you up and beg you to let me nip in and see you, and then realized you weren't there, and I've just sat looking at the 'phone---- Oh, other people are so dull!"

"You really miss----"

"I wish I were a poet, so I could tell you adequately. But you haven't said you missed me, Claire. Didn't you, a teeny bit? Wouldn't it have been tolerable to have poor old Jeff along, to drive down dangerous hills----"

"And fill grease-cups! Nasty and stick.u.m on the fingers!"

"Yes, I'd have done that, too. And invented surprises along the way. I'm a fine surpriser! I've arranged for a motor-boat so we can explore the lake here tomorrow. That's why I had you wait here instead of coming on to Kalispell. Tomorrow morning, unfortunately, I have to hustle back and catch a train--called to California, and possibly a northern trip. But meantime---- By now, my driver must have sneaked my s'prises into the kitchen."

"What are they?"

"Guess."

"Food. Eats. Divine eats."

"Maybe."

"But what? Please, sir. Claire is so hungry."

"We shall see in time, my child. Uncle Jeff is not to be hurried."

"Ah--let--me--see--now! I'll kick and scream!"

From New York Jeff had brought a mammoth picnic basket. To the fried chicken ordered for dinner he added sealed jars of puree of wood pigeon, of stuffed artichokes prepared by his club chef; caviar and anchovies; a marvelous nightmare-creating fruit cake to go with the whipped cream; two quarts of a famous sherry; candied fruits in a silver box. Dinner was served not on the dining-porch but before the fire in the Barmberrys' living-room. Claire looked at the candied fruits, stared at Jeff rather queerly--as though she was really thinking of some one else--and mused:

"I didn't know I cared so much for these foolish luxuries. Tonight, I'd like a bath, just a tiny bit scented, and a real dressing-table with a triple mirror, and French talc, and come down in a dinner-gown---- Oh, I have enjoyed the trip, Jeff. But my poor body does get so tired and dusty, and then you treacherously come along with these things that you've magicked out of the mountains and---- I'm not a pioneer woman, after all. And Henry B. is not a caveman. See him act idolatrously toward his soup."

"I feel idolatrous. I'd forgotten the supreme ethical importance of the soup. I'll never let myself forget it again," said Mr. Boltwood, in the tone of one who has come home.

Claire was grateful to Jeff that he did not let her go on being grateful. He turned the talk to Brooklyn. He was neat and explicit--and almost funny--in his description of an outdoor presentation of _Midsummer Night's Dream_, in which a domestic and intellectual lady weighing a hundred and eighty-seven stageside had enacted Puck. As they sat after dinner, as Claire s.h.i.+vered, he produced a knitted robe, and pulled it about her shoulders, smiling at her in a lonely, hungry way.

She caught his hand.

"Nice Jeff!" she whispered.

"Oh, my dear!" he implored. He shook his head in a wistful way that caught her heart, and dutifully went back to informing Mr. Boltwood of the true state of the markets.

"Talk to Claire too!" she demanded. She stopped, stared. From outside she heard a nervous pit-pit-pit, a blurred dialogue between Mr. James Barmberry and another man. Into the room rambled Milt Daggett, dusty of unpressed blue suit, tired of eyes, and not too well shaved of chin, grumbling, "Thought I'd never catch up with you, Claire---- Why----"

"Oh! Oh, Milt--Mr. Daggett---- Oh, Jeff, this is our good friend Milt Daggett, who has helped us along the road."

Jeff's lucid rimless spectacles stared at Milt's wind-reddened eyes; his jaunty patch-pocket outing clothes sniffed at Milt's sweater; his even voice followed Milt's grunt of surprise with a curt "Ah. Mr. Daggett."

"Pleased meet you," faltered Milt.

Jeff nodded, turned his shoulder on Milt, and went on, "The fact is, Mr.

Boltwood, the whole metal market----"

Milt was looking from one to another. Claire was now over her first shocked comparison of candied fruits with motor grease. She rose, moved toward Milt, murmuring, "Have you had dinner?"

The door opened again. A pink-haired, red-faced man in a preposterous green belted suit lunged in, swept his broad felt hat in greeting, and boomed like a cheap actor:

"Friends of my friend Milt, we about to dine salute you. Let me introduce myself as Westlake Parrott, better known to the vulgar as Pinky Parrott, gentleman adventurer, born in the conjunction of Mars and Venus, with Saturn ascendant."

Jeff had ignored Milt. But at this absurd second intrusion on his decidedly private dinner-party he flipped to the center of the room and said "I beg your pardon!" in such a head-office manner that the pink-locked Mystery halted in his bombast. Claire felt wabbly. She had no theories as to where Milt had acquired a private jester, nor as to what was about to happen to Milt--and possibly to her incautious self.

CHAPTER XVII

THE VAGABOND IN GREEN

As Milt had headed westward from b.u.t.te, as he rattled peacefully along the road, conscious of golden haze over all the land, and the unexpectedness of prairie thres.h.i.+ng-crews on the sloping fields of mountainsides, a man had stepped out from bushes beside the road, and pointed a .44 navy revolver.

The man was not a movie bandit. He wore a green imitation of a Norfolk jacket, he had a broad red smile, and as he flourished his hat in a bow, his hair was a bristly pompadour of gray-streaked red that was almost pink. He made oration:

"Pardon my eccentric greeting, brother of the open road, but I wanted you to give ear to my obsequious query as to how's chances on gettin' a lift? I have learned that obsequiousness is best appreciated when it is backed up by prayer and ca'tridges."

"What's the idea? I seem to gather you'd like a lift. Jump in."

"You do not advocate the Ciceronian style, I take it," chuckled the man as he climbed aboard.

Milt was not impressed. Claire might have been, but Milt had heard politics and religion argued about the stove in Rauskukle's store too often to be startled by polysyllabomania. He knew it was often the sign of a man who has read too loosely and too much by himself. He snorted.

"Huh! What are you--newspaper, politics, law, preacher, or gambler?"

"Well, a little of all those interesting occupations. And ten-twent-thirt trouping, and county-fair spieling, and selling Dr.

Thunder Rapids' Choctaw Herbal Sensitizer. How far y' going?"

"Seattle."

"Honest? Say, kid, this is---- Muh boy, we shall have the rare privilege of pooling adventures as far as Blewett Pa.s.s, four to six days' run from here--a day this side of Seattle. I'm going to my gold-mine there. I'll split up on the grub--I note from your kit that you camp nights. Quite all right, my boy. Pinky Parrott is no man to fear night air."

He patted Milt's shoulder with patronizing insolence. He filled a pipe and, though the car was making twenty-five, he lighted the pipe with distinguished ease, then settled down to his steady stride:

"In the pride of youth, you feel that you have thoroughly categorized me, particularly since I am willing to admit that, though I shall have abundance of the clinking iron men to buy my share of our chow, I chance just for the leaden-footed second to lack the wherewithal to pay my railroad fare back to Blewett; and the b.u.mpers and side-door Pullman of the argonauts like me not. Too d.a.m.n dusty. But your a.n.a.lysis is unsynthetic, though you will scarce grasp my paradoxical metaphor."

"The h.e.l.l I won't. I've taken both chemistry and rhetoric," growled Milt, strictly attending to driving, and to the desire to get rid of his parasite.