On the walls, but not crowded, were a number of canvases--most ambitious of all, in the setting of honor, all in sad grays, a twilight Mexican scene by Xavier Martinez, of a peon, with a crooked- stick plow and two bullocks, turning a melancholy furrow across the foreground of a sad, illimitable, Mexican plain. There were brighter pictures, of early Mexican-Californian life, a pastel of twilight eucalyptus with a sunset-tipped mountain beyond, by Reimers, a moonlight by Peters, and a Griffin stubble-field across which gleamed and smoldered California summer hills of tawny brown and purple- misted, wooded canyons.
"Say," Thayer muttered in an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter, "here's some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the Big House. I've seen the servants' dining room. Forty head sit down to it every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. It's a boarding house in itself. Some head, some system, take it from me. That Chiney boy, Oh Joy, is a wooz. He's housekeeper, or manager, of the whole shebang, or whatever you want to call his job--and, say, it runs that smooth you can't hear it."
"Forrest's the real wooz," Naismith nodded. "He's the brains that picks brains. He could run an army, a campaign, a government, or even a three-ring circus."
"Which last is some compliment," Thayer concurred heartily.
"Oh, Paula," Dick said across to his wife. "I just got word that Graham arrives to-morrow morning. Better tell Oh Joy to put him in the watch-tower. It's man-size quarters, and it's possible he may carry out his threat and work on his book."
"Graham?--Graham?" Paula queried aloud of her memory. "Do I know him?"
"You met him once two years ago, in Santiago, at the Café Venus. He had dinner with us."
"Oh, one of those naval officers?"
Dick shook his head.
"The civilian. Don't you remember that big blond fellow--you talked music with him for half an hour while Captain Joyce talked our heads off to prove that the United States should clean Mexico up and out with the mailed fist."
"Oh, to be sure," Paula vaguely recollected. "He'd met you somewhere before... South Africa, wasn't it? Or the Philippines?"
"That's the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met was on the Times dispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we crossed trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that night in the Café Venus.