“‘Sure Mike, I do,’ he said, and swung his bag into his left hand and
gave me a hearty right hand. My face must have shown that something
was wrong, for he drew me out of the crowd, put down his travelling
bag, and asked me, oh, so quietly, what was wrong. His quiet manner
calmed me. As briefly as I could I told him. He grasped the situation
in a lightning-like flash. ‘Go back to him,’ he said. ‘Keep cool. I’m
on to the job.’ Had I been on to my job I’d never have got in that
cab. The morning paper says he’s a baron all right. It says he’s a
lunatic all right, too. And he has been sent to a private asylum.
“He took his arrest quietly. It was so unexpected it dazed him. I was
so limp after it was all over that Bobby Haralson took me over to the
Waldorf and made me drink a milk punch. Then he brought me home. We
had a heavenly time, and I promised not to be naughty again.
“At the door, he didn’t come in; he said good-bye with that smile
that lights and warms up his face—you remember I told you how
reticent and sort of impersonal he is—and he said next time I wanted
an adventure just send out a wireless and he would answer. I didn’t
tell him about you, Caroline. You have tried so hard to make a hoyden
into a lady that I did not reveal my identity.”
_December 8th._
What an odd, spoiled Bobby! I have a letter from him. Last fall—the
afternoon I went to town and came back with the ill-fated gown—I
sent him the picture. The P. M. (Particularly Mean) letter was the
little note that demanded its return after we failed to meet in our
promenade down in our yard. Bobby expects an answer by return mail—it
is in every confident line of his letter. Mr. Robert Haralson,
spoiled darling of your town, once an old lady of my acquaintance
sent her husband across the mountain to get some “camfire” for her.
The gum was dissolved in whiskey. He drank it and was very sick. I
was present when, convalescent, he humbly asked for chicken soup. The
old lady, with uplifted forefinger said, “Nary a chicken will ye git.”
See, Mr. Robert Haralson? as you New Yorkers say.
Bobby’s confident letter says:
As I write, at my left hand is a basket of letters. I have just
taken from the basket the last nice one you wrote me and the
awfully mean one you wrote afterward. The others run back a month
or two and none are answered yet. My right arm is resting on a
cushion, and I am writing with three fingers.
I have been away. In my accumulated mail there were a couple of
letters from you, and the photo you sent in the lot. The next
morning after I got back I had to send for a doctor. I had got a
knock on my blamed old elbow and she swelled up as big as a prize
beet at the Roseboro County Fair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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