The Gentleman from Indiana - Page 50/212

"Be'n a-lookin' fer you, Mr. Harkless," he said in a shaking spindle of a

voice, as plaintive as his pale little eyes. "Mother Wimby, she sent some

roses to ye. Cynthy's fixin' 'em on yer table. I'm well as ever I am; but

her, she's too complaining to come in fer show-day. This morning, early,

we see some the Cross-Roads folks pass the place towards town, an' she

sent me in to tell ye. Oh, I knowed ye'd laugh. Says she, 'He's too much

of a man to be skeered,' says she, 'these here tall, big men always 'low

nothin' on earth kin hurt 'em,' says she, 'but you tell him to be

keerful,' says she; an' I see Bill Skillett an' his brother on the Square

lessun a half-an-hour ago, 'th my own eyes. I won't keep ye from yer

breakfast.--Eph Watts is in there, eatin'. He's come back; but I guess I

don't need to warn ye agin' him. He seems peaceable enough. It's the other

folks you got to look out fer."

He limped away. The editor waved his hand to him from the door, but the

old fellow shook his head, and made a warning, friendly gesture with his

arm.

Harkless usually ate his breakfast alone, as he was the latest riser in

Plattville. (There were days in the winter when he did not reach the hotel

until eight o'clock.) This morning he found a bunch of white roses, still

wet with dew and so fragrant that the whole room was fresh and sweet with

their odor, prettily arranged in a bowl on the table, and, at his plate,

the largest of all with a pin through the stem. He looked up, smilingly,

and nodded at the red-haired girl. "Thank you, Charmion," he said. "That's

very pretty."

She turned even redder than she always was, and answered nothing,

vigorously darting her brush at an imaginary fly on the cloth. After

several minutes she said abruptly, "You're welcome."

There was a silence, finally broken by a long, gasping sigh. Astonished,

he looked at the girl. Her eyes were set unfathomably upon his pink tie;

the wand had dropped from her nerveless hand, and she stood rapt and

immovable. She started violently from her trance. "Ain't you goin' to

finish your coffee?" she asked, plying her instrument again, and, bending

over him slightly, whispered: "Say, Eph Watts is over there behind you."

At a table in a far corner of the room a large gentleman in a brown frock

coat was quietly eating his breakfast and reading the "Herald." He was of

an ornate presence, though entirely neat. A sumptuous expanse of linen

exhibited itself between the lapels of his low-cut waistcoat, and an inch

of bediamonded breastpin glittered there, like an ice-ledge on a snowy

mountain side. He had a steady, blue eye and a dissipated, iron-gray

mustache. This personage was Mr. Ephraim Watts, who, following a calling

more fashionable in the eighteenth century than in the latter decades of

the nineteenth, had shaken the dust of Carlow from his feet some three

years previously, at the strong request of the authorities. The "Herald"

had been particularly insistent upon his deportation, and, in the local

phrase, Harkless had "run him out of town." Perhaps it was because the

"Herald's" opposition (as the editor explained at the time) had been

merely moral and impersonal, and the editor had always confessed to a

liking for the unprofessional qualities of Mr. Watts, that there was but

slight embarrassment when the two gentlemen met to-day. His breakfast

finished, Harkless went over to the other and extended his hand. Cynthia

held her breath and clutched the back of a chair. However, Mr. Watts made

no motion toward his well-known hip pocket. Instead, he rose, flushed

slightly, and accepted the hand offered him.