When shrewd men persist in passing up an apparently cinch proposition, dont even try to find out whats the matter with it. In this six-cylinder age no really good opportunity runs loose for twenty-four hours.
The blow has fallen, said Agnes with mock seriousness; but you must remember that you brought it on yourself. You have complained to me of your fathers carefully-laid plans for your course in progressive bankruptcy, and he left in my keeping a letter for you covering that very point.
Not in a gray envelope, I hope, groaned
Bobby.
In a gray envelope, she replied firmly, going across to her own desk in the library.
I had feared, said Bobby dismally, that sooner or later I should find he had left letters for me in your charge as well as in Johnsons, but I had hoped, if that were the case, that at least they would be in pink envelopes.
She brought to him one of the familiar-looking missives, and Bobby, as he took it, looked speculatively at the big fireplace, in which, as it was early fall, comfortable-looking real logs were crackling.
Dont do it, Bobby, she warned him smiling. Lets have the fun together, and she sat beside him on the couch, snuggling close.
The envelope was addressed:
No boy will believe green apples hurt him until he gets the stomach-ache. Knowing you to be truly my son, I am sure that if I gave you advice beforehand you would not believe it. This way you will.
I remember one painful incident of about the time I put on knickerbockers, he mused. Father told me to keep away from a rat-trap that he had bought. Of course I caught my hand in it three minutes afterward. It hurt and I howled, but he only looked at me coldly until at last I asked him to help. He let the thing squeeze while he asked if a rat-trap hurt. I admitted that it did. Would I believe him next time? I acknowledged that I would, and he opened the trap. That was all there was to it except the raw place on my hand; but that night he came to my room after I had gone to bed, and lay beside me and cuddled me in his arms until I went to sleep.
Bobby, said Agnes seriously, not one of these letters but proves his aching love for you.
I know it, admitted Bobby with again that grim smile. Which only goes to prove another thing, that Im in for some of the severest drubbings of my life. I wonder where the clubs are hidden.
He found one of them late that same night at the Idlers. Clarence Smythe, Silas Trimmers son-in-law, drifted in toward the wee small hours in an unusual condition of hilarity. He had a Vandyke, had Mr. Smythe, and was one who cherished a mad passion for clothes; also, as an utterly impossible climber, he was as cordially hated as Bobby was liked at the Idlers, where he had crept in while the window was open, as Nick Allstyne expressed it. Ordinarily he was most prim and pretty of manner, but to-night he was on vinously familiar terms with all the world, and, crowding himself upon Bobbys quiet whist crowd, slapped Bobby joyously on the shoulder.
Generous lad, Bobby! he thickly informed Allstyne and Winthrop and Starlett. If you chaps have any property youve wanted to unload for half a lifetime, heres the free-handed plunger to buy it.
Hows that? Bobby wanted to know, guessing instantly at the humiliating truth.
That Westmarsh swamp belonged to Trimmer, laughed Mr. Smythe, so bubbling with the hugeness of the joke that he could not keep his secret; and when Thorne, after pumping your puffy man, told my clever father-in-law you wanted it, he promptly bought it from himself in the name of Miles, Eddy and Company and put up the price to three hundred an acre. Besides taking the property off his shoulders youve given him nearly a ten-thousand-dollar advance for it. Fine business!
Great! agreed blunt Jack Starlett. Almost as good a joke as refusing to pay a poker debt because it isnt legal.
Bobby smiled his thanks for the shot, but inside he was sick. The game they were playing was a parting set-to, for the three others were leaving in the morning for Stanleys hunt, but Bobby was glad when it was over. In the big, lonely house he sat in the study for an hour before he went to bed, looking abstractedly up at the picture of old John Burnit and worrying over this new development. It cut him to the quick, not so much that he had been made a fool of by clever real-estate men, had been led, imbecile-like, to pay an extra hundred dollars per acre for that swamp land, but that the advantage had gone to Silas Trimmer.
Moreover, why had Silas put a prohibitive valuation upon that north eight acres? Why did he want to keep it? It must be because Silas really expected that his tract would be drained free of charge, and that he would thus have the triumph of selling it for an approximate
six thousand dollars an acre in the form of building lots. In the face of such a conclusion, the thought of the cement wall that he had ordered built was a great satisfaction.