'No-o-o,' he said, and followed it with a smoke-ring. 'Twenty months at
the Cape is my limit. Say, murder ain't the soul-shatterin' event those
nature-fakers in the magazines make out. It develops naturally like any
other proposition.... Say, 'j'ever play this golf game? It's come up in
the States from Maine to California, an' we're prodoocin' all the
champions in sight. Not a business man's play, but interestin'. I've got
a golf-links in the park here that they tell me is the finest inland
course ever. I had to pay extra for that when I hired the ranche--last
year. It was just before I signed the papers that our murder
eventuated. My Lord Marshalton he asked me down for the week-end to fix
up something or other--about Peters and the linen, I think 'twas. Mrs.
Zigler took a holt of the proposition. She understood Peters from the
word "go." There wasn't any house-party; only fifteen or twenty folk. A
full house is thirty-two, Tommy tells me. 'Guess we must be near on that
to-night. In the smoking-room here, my Lord Marshalton--Mankeltow that
was--introduces me to this Walen man with the nose. He'd been in the War
too, from start to finish. He knew all the columns and generals that I'd
battled with in the days of my Zigler gun. We kinder fell into each
other's arms an' let the harsh world go by for a while.
'Walen he introduces me to your Lord Lundie. _He_ was a new proposition
to me. If he hadn't been a lawyer he'd have made a lovely cattle-king. I
thought I had played poker some. Another of my breaks. Ya-as! It cost me
eleven hundred dollars besides what Tommy said when I retired. I have no
fault to find with your hereditary aristocracy, or your judiciary, or
your press.
'Sunday we all went to Church across the Park here.... Psha! Think o'
your rememberin' my religion! I've become an Episcopalian since I
married. Ya-as.... After lunch Walen did his crowned-heads-of-Europe
stunt in the smokin'-room here. He was long on Kings. And Continental
crises. I do not pretend to follow British domestic politics, but in the
aeroplane business a man has to know something of international
possibilities. At present, you British are settin' in kimonoes on
dynamite kegs. Walen's talk put me wise on the location and size of some
of the kegs. Ya-as!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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