And then Dick chanted, lisping:
Sure, Dick agreed. I got it from the Rancher and Stockman, that got it from the Swine Breeders Journal , that got it from the Western Advocate, that got it from Public Opinion , that got it, undoubtedly, from the little girl herself, or, rather from her Sunday School teacher. For that matter I am convinced it was first printed in Our Dumb Animals .
The bronze gong rang out its second call, and Paula, one arm around Dick, the other around Rita, led the way into the house, while, bringing up the rear, Bert Wainwright showed Lute Ernestine a new tango step.
One thing, Thayer, Dick said in an aside, after releasing himself from the girls, as they jostled in confusion where they met Thayer and Naismith at the head of the stairway leading down to the dining room. Before you leave us, cast your eyes over those Merinos. I really have to brag about them, and American sheepmen will have to come to them. Of course, started with imported stock, but Ive made a California strain that will make the French breeders sit up. See Wardman and take your pick. Get Naismith to look them over with you. Stick half a dozen of them in your train-load, with my compliments, and let your Idaho sheepmen get a line on them.
They seated at a table, capable of indefinite extension, in a long, low dining-room that was a replica of the hacienda dining-rooms of the Mexican land-kings of old California. The floor was of large brown tiles, the beamed ceiling and the walls were whitewashed, and the huge, undecorated, cement fireplace was an achievement in massiveness and simplicity. Greenery and blooms nodded from without the deep-embrasured windows, and the room expressed the sense of cleanness, chastity, and coolness.
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, heres some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the Big House. Ive seen the servants dining-room. Forty head sit down to it every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. Its a boarding
house in itself. Some head, some system, take it from me. That Chiney boy, Oh Joy, is a wooz. Hes housekeeper, or manager, of the whole shebang, or whatever you want to call his job and, say, it runs that smooth you cant hear it.
Forrests the real wooz, Naismith nodded. Hes 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. Its man-size quarters, and its 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. Dont 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. Hed met you somewhere before South Africa, wasnt it? Or the Philippines?
Thats 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.
Heavens he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed each other by three days at Levuka I was sailing the Wild Duck then. He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard Im Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and out of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons. The cruiser, after shelling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa, steamed out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did deliver those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him was at the Café Venus two years ago.