第42章

"My dear fellow," said the consul, somewhat impatiently, "I know nothing about him, and you ought to know that by this time.""I thought YOUR FRIEND, Sir James, might have told you," continued Custer, with significant emphasis.

"I have not seen Sir James for two months.""Well, Malcolm's a crank--always was one, I reckon, and is reg'larly off his head now. Yes, sir; Scotch whiskey and your friend Sir James finished him. After that dinner at MacFen's he was done for--went wild. Danced a sword-dance, or a strathspey, or some other blamed thing, on the table, and yelled louder than the pipes. So they all did. Jack, I've painted the town red once myself; I thought I knew what a first-class jamboree was: but they were prayer-meetings to that show. Everybody was blind drunk--but they all got over it except HIM. THEY were a different lot of men the next day, as cool and cautious as you please, but HE was shut up for a week, and came out crazy.""But what's that to do with his claim?"

"Well, there ain't much use 'whooping up the boys' when only the whooper gets wild.""Still, that does not affect any right he may have in the property.""But it affects the syndicate," said Custer gloomily; "and when we found that he was whooping up some shopkeepers and factory hands who claimed to belong to the clan,--and you can't heave a stone at a dog around here without hitting a McHulish,--we concluded we hadn't much use for him ornamentally. So we shipped him home last steamer.""And the property?"

"Oh, that's all right," said Custer, still gloomily. "We've effected an amicable compromise, as Sir James calls it. That means we've taken a lot of land somewhere north, that you can shoot over--that is, you needn't be afraid of hitting a house, or a tree, or a man anywhere; and we've got a strip more of the same sort on the seashore somewhere off here, occupied only by some gay galoots called crofters, and you can raise a lawsuit and an imprecation on every acre. Then there's this soul-subduing, sequestered spot, and what's left of the old bone-boiling establishment, and the rights of fishing and peat-burning, and otherwise creating a nuisance off the mainland. It cost the syndicate only a hundred thousand dollars, half cash and half in Texan and Kentucky grass lands. But we've carried the thing through.""I congratulate you," said the consul.

"Thanks." Custer puffed at his cigar for a few moments. "That Sir James MacFen is a fine man.""He is."

"A large, broad, all-round man. Knows everything and everybody, don't he?"1

"Big man in the church, I should say? No slouch at a party canvass, or ward politics, eh? As a board director, or president, just takes the cake, don't he?""I believe so."

"Nothing mean about Jimmy as an advocate or an arbitrator, either, is there? Rings the bell every time, don't he? Financiers take a back seat when he's around? Owns half of Scotland by this time, Ireckon."

The consul believed that Sir James had the reputation of being exceedingly sagacious in financial and mercantile matters, and that he was a man of some wealth.

"Naturally. I wonder what he'd take to come over to America, and give the boys points," continued Custer, in meditative admiration.

"There were two or three men on Scott's River, and one Chinaman, that we used to think smart, but they were doddering ijuts to HIM.

And as for me--I say, Jack, you didn't see any hayseed in my hair that day I walked inter your consulate, did you?"The consul smilingly admitted that he had not noticed these signs of rustic innocence in his friend.

"Nor any flies? Well, for all that, when I get home I'm going to resign. No more foreign investments for ME. When anybody calls at the consulate and asks for H. J. Custer, say you don't know me.

And you don't. And I say, Jack, try to smooth things over for me with HER.""With Miss Elsie?"

Custer cast a glance of profound pity upon the consul. "No with Mrs. Kirkby, of course. See?"The consul thought he did see, and that he had at last found a clue to Custer's extraordinary speculation. But, like most theorists who argue from a single fact, a few months later he might have doubted his deduction.

He was staying at a large country-house many miles distant from the scene of his late experiences. Already they had faded from his memory with the departure of his compatriots from St. Kentigern.

He was smoking by the fire in the billiard-room late one night when a fellow-guest approached him.

"Saw you didn't remember me at dinner."