"And pray, remember on your side, that you are to give those documents into the hands of the governor. Come along."
They met the watchman in the corridor and he saluted them and passed on. Bosworth strode eagerly forward in his anxiety to prick the bubble of Griswold's pretensions.
Griswold threw open the door of the governor's reception-room, and they blinked in the stronger light that poured in from the private office. There, in the governor's chair by the broad official desk, sat Barbara Osborne reading a newspaper.
"Your Excellency," said Griswold, bowing gravely and advancing; "I beg to present the attorney-general!"
"Barbara!"
The papers fell from the attorney-general's hands. He stood staring until astonishment began to yield to rage as he realized that a trap had been sprung upon him. The girl had risen instantly and a smile played about her lips for a moment. She had vaguely surmised that Griswold would charge Bosworth with the loss of the papers, but her associate in the conspiracy had now given a turn to the matter that amused her.
"Barbara!" blurted the attorney-general, "what game is this—what contemptible trick is this stranger playing on you? Don't you understand that your father's absence is a most serious matter and that in the present condition of this Appleweight affair it is likely to involve him and the state in scandal?"
Barbara regarded him steadily for a moment with a negative sort of gaze. She took a step forward before she spoke and then she asked quickly and sharply:
"What have you done, Mr. Bosworth, to avert these calamities, and what was in your mind when you pried open the drawer and took out those papers?"
"I was going to use the requisition—"
"How?"
"Why, I expected—"
"Mr. Bosworth expected to effect a coup for his own glory during the governor's absence," suggested Griswold.
"How?" and Barbara's voice rang imperiously and her eyes flashed.
"Send this unknown person, this impostor and meddler, away and I will talk to you as old friends may talk together," and he glared fiercely at Griswold, who stood fanning himself with his hat.
"I asked you how you intended to serve my father, Mr. Bosworth, because you sent me this afternoon a letter in which you threatened me—you threatened me with my father's ruin if I did not marry you. You would take advantage of my trouble and anxiety to force that question on me when I had answered it once and for all long ago. Before this stranger I want to tell you that you are a despicable coward and that if you think you can humiliate me or my father or the state by such practices as you have resorted to you are very greatly mistaken. And further, Mr. Bosworth, if I find you interfering again in this matter I shall print that letter you wrote me to-day in every newspaper in the state! Now, that is all I have to say to you, and I hope never to see you again."
"Before you go, Mr. Bosworth," said Griswold, "I wish to say that Miss Osborne has spoken of your conduct with altogether too much restraint. I shall add, on my own account, that if I find you meddling again in this Appleweight case, I shall first procure your removal from office and after that I shall take the greatest pleasure in flogging you within an inch of your life. Now go!"
The two had dismissed him, and before Bosworth's step died away in the hall, Griswold was running his eye over the papers.
"That man will do something nasty if he is clever enough to think of anything."
"He's a disgusting person," said Barbara, touching her forehead with her handkerchief.
"He's all of that," remarked Griswold, as he retied the red-tape round the packet of papers. "And now, before we leave we may as well face a serious proposition. Your father's absence and this fiction we are maintaining that he is really here can not be maintained forever. I don't want to trouble you, for you, of course, realize all this as keenly as I. But what do you suppose actually happened at New Orleans between your father and the governor of North Carolina?"
She leaned against her father's desk, her hands lightly resting on its flat surface. She was wholly serene now, and she smiled and then laughed.
"It couldn't have been what the governor of North Carolina said to the governor of South Carolina in the old story, for father is strongly opposed to drink of all kinds. And in the story—"
"I've forgotten where that story originated."
"Well, it happened a long time ago, and nobody really knows the origin. But according to tradition, at the crisis of a great row between two governors, the ice was broken by the governor of North Carolina saying to the governor of South Carolina those shocking words about it's being a long time between drinks. What makes the New Orleans incident so remarkable is that father and Governor Dangerfield have always been friends, though I never cared very much for the Dangerfields myself. The only tiffs they have had have been purely for effect. When father said that the people of North Carolina would never amount to anything so long as they fry their meat it was only his joke with Governor Dangerfield—but it did make North Carolina awfully mad. And Jerry—she's the governor's daughter—refused to visit me last winter just on that account. Jerry Dangerfield's a nice little girl, but she has no sense of humor."
While he waited for Miss Jerry Dangerfield to appear Mr. Thomas Ardmore read for the first time the constitution of the United States. He had reached the governor's office early, and, seeking diversion, he had picked up a small volume that bore some outward resemblance to a novel. This proved, however, to be Johnston's American Politics, and he was amazed to find that this diminutive work contained the answers to a great many questions which had often perplexed him, but which he had imagined could not be answered except by statesmen or by men like his friend Griswold, who spent their lives in study.
He had supposed that the constitution of a great nation like the United States would fill many volumes, and be couched in terms bewildering and baffling; and it was perhaps the proudest moment in Mr. Ardmore's life when, in the cool and quiet of the May morning, in the historic chambers of the governor of North Carolina, it dawned upon him that the charter of American liberty filled hardly more space than the stipulations for a yacht race, or a set of foot-ball rules; and that, moreover, he understood the greater part of it, or thought he did. Such strange words as "attainder" and "capitation" he sought out in the dictionary, and this also gave him a new sensation and thrill of pleasure at finding the machinery of knowledge so simple. He made note of several matters he wished to ask Griswold about when they met again; then turned back into the body of the text and had read as far as Burr's conspiracy when Jerry came breezily in. He experienced for the first time in his life that obsession of guilt which sinks in shame the office-boy who is caught reading a dime novel. Jerry seemed to tower above him like an avenging angel, and though her sword was only a parasol, her words cut deep enough.
"Well, you are taking it pretty cool!"
"Taking what?" faltered Ardmore, standing up, and seeking to hide the book behind his back.
"Why, this outrageous article!" and she thrust a newspaper under his eyes. "Do you mean to say you haven't seen the morning paper?"
"To tell you the truth, Miss Dangerfield, I hardly ever read the papers."
"What's that you were reading when I came in?" she demanded severely, withholding the paper until she should be answered.
"It's a book about the government, and the powers reserved to the states and that sort of thing. I was just reading the constitution; I thought it might help us—I mean you—in your work."
"The constitution help me? Hasn't it occurred to you before this that what I'm doing is all against the constitution and the revised statutes and all those books you see on the shelf there?"
"But the constitution sounds all right. It seems remarkably reasonable. You couldn't ask anything fairer than that!"
"So are the ten commandments fair enough; but you're on the wrong track, Mr. Ardmore, if you're trying to support the present administration with stupid things in books. I don't follow precedents, Mr. Ardmore; I create them."
"But I should think you would have to be awfully careful not to mix up the business of the executive and judicial branches of the government. I think I heard Grissy speak of that once, though I'm not certain. Grissy knows more than almost any other living man."
"I don't doubt that your friend is a well-educated person, but in times like these you've got to rise above the constitution; and just now it's more convenient to forget it. There's a constitution of North Carolina, too, if you're looking for constitutions, but in good society such things are not mentioned. Papa always refers to the constitution with tears in his eyes when he's making speeches, but papa's very emotional. If I could make a speech I should tell the people what I think of them—that they're too silly and stupid for words."
"You are right, Miss Dangerfield. I have felt exactly that way about the people ever since I was defeated for alderman in New York. But let me have the paper."
She turned to the morning mail while he read, and opened the envelopes rapidly. Such of the letters as she thought interesting or important she put aside, and when Ardmore finished reading a double-leaded telegram from Columbia, in which the governor of South Carolina was quoted as declaring his intention of taking immediate steps for the apprehension of Appleweight, she was still reading and sorting letters, tapping her cheek lightly meanwhile with the official paper-knife.
"Here, Mr. Ardmore," she said, drawing a paper from her pocket, "is the answer to that telegram we sent yesterday evening. Suppose you read that next, and we can then decide what to do."
She was making the letters into little piles, humming softly meanwhile; but he felt that there was a storm brewing. He read the message from Columbia a number of times, and if the acting governor had not been so ominously quiet he would have laughed at the terse sentences.
"There must be a mistake about this. He wouldn't have used 'diverting' that way; that's insulting!"
"So you appreciate its significance, do you, Mr. Ardmore? The iron enters your soul, does it? You realize that I have been insulted, do you?"
"I shouldn't put it that way, Miss Dangerfield. Governor Osborne would never have sent a message like that to you—he thought he was sending it to your father."
"He's insulted me and every other citizen in the Old North State; that's who he's insulted, Mr. Ardmore. Let me read it again;" and she repeated the telegram aloud:
"'Your extremely diverting telegram in Appleweight case received and filed.' I think it's the extremely that's so perfectly mean. The diverting by itself would not hurt my feelings half so much. He's a good deal smarter man than I thought he was to think up a telegram like that. But what do you think of that piece in the newspaper?"
"He says he's going to catch Appleweight dead or alive. That sounds pretty serious."
"I think it's a bluff myself. That telegram we sent him yesterday must have scared him to death. He was driven into a corner and had to do something to avoid being disgraced, and it's easy enough to talk big in the newspapers when you haven't the slightest intention of doing anything at all. I've noticed that father talks the longest and loudest about things he doesn't believe at all."
"Is it possible?" whispered Ardmore incredulously.
"Of course it's possible! Father would never have been elected if he'd expressed his real sentiments; neither would anybody else ever be elected if he said beforehand what he really believed."
"That must have been the reason I got defeated for alderman on the reform ticket. I told 'em I was for turning the rascals out."
"That was very stupid of you. You've got to get the rascals to elect you first; then if you're tired of office and don't need them any more you bounce them. But that's political practice; it's a theory we've got to work out now. Governor Osborne's telegram is much more important than his interview in the newspapers, which is just for effect and of no importance at all. He doesn't say the same things in the telegram to father that he said to the reporter. A governor who really meant to do anything wouldn't be so ready to insult another governor. The newspapers are a lot of bother. I spent all yesterday evening talking to reporters. They came to the house to ask where papa was and when he would be home!"
"What did you tell them?"
"I didn't tell them anything. I sent out for two other girls and we all just talked to them and kept talking, and gave them lemon sherbet and ginger cookies; and Eva Hungerford played the banjo—you don't know Eva? Of course you don't know anybody, and I don't want you to, for it would spoil you for private secretary. But Eva is simply killing when she gets to cutting up, and we made those reporters sing to us, and all they say in the papers, even the opposition papers, this morning is that Governor Dangerfield is in Savannah visiting an old friend. They all tell the same story, so they must have fixed it up after they left the house. But what were you doing, Mr. Ardmore, that you didn't come around to help? It seems to me you don't appreciate the responsibilities of being secretary to a governor."
"I was afraid you might scold me if I did. And besides I was glued to the long distance telephone all evening, talking to my manager at Ardsley. He read me my letters and a lot of telegrams that annoyed me very much. I wish you wouldn't be so hard on me, for I have trifling troubles of my own."
"I didn't suppose you ever had troubles; you certainly don't act as though you ever had."
"No one who has never been brother-in-law to a duke has the slightest idea of what trouble is."
"I've seen the Duke of Ballywinkle's picture in the papers and he looks very attractive."
"Well, if you'd ever seen him eat celery you'd change your mind. He's going down to Ardsley to visit me; for sheer nerve I must say my relations beat the world. I got my place over here in North Carolina just to get away from them, and now my sister—not the duchess, but Mrs. Atchison—is coming down there with a lot of girls and Ballywinkle has attached himself to the party. They'll pass through here to-day, and they'll expect to find me at Ardsley."
"If the duke's really coming to our state I suppose we ought to recognize him officially," and Jerry's eyes were large with reverie as she pondered her possible duty.
"Do something for him!" blazed Ardmore. "I hope you don't labor under the delusion that a duke's any better than anybody else? If you'd suffered what I have from being related to a duke you'd be sorry to hear he was even passing through your state, much less stopping off for a couple of weeks."
"Because you don't like him is no reason why every one else should feel the same way, is it? I've read about the Duke of Ballywinkle and he belongs to one of the oldest families in England, and I've seen pictures of Ballywinkle Castle—"
"Worse than that," grinned Ardmore with rising humor, "I had to chip in to pay for it! And the plumbing isn't yet what it ought to be. The last time I was over there I caught cold and nearly died of pneumonia. I make it a rule now never to visit dukes. You never know what you'll strike when you stay in those ancestral castles, even when they've been restored with some silly American girl's grandfather's money. Those places are all full of drafts and malaria and ghosts, and they make you drink tea in the afternoon, which is worse than being haunted."
"I suppose we might invite his Grace to inspect our militia," persisted Jerry. "It would sound well in the papers to have a real duke inspect the North Carolina troops."
"It would sound better than he would look doing it, I can tell you that. Old Wellington may have been all right, but these new dukes were never made for horseback."
"He might appear in a carriage, wearing his orders and ride the lines that way, with all the troops presenting arms."
"Or you might pin his debts on him and mount him on a goat on the rifle-range and let the sharp-shooters pepper away at him! Please let us not talk about Ballywinkle any more; the thought of him gives me that sinking feeling."
He had opened an atlas and was poring over it with a magnifying glass.
"It's positively funny," he murmured, laughing a little to himself, "but I know something about this country over here. Here's Ardsley, in the far corner of Dilwell County, and here's Kildare."
"Yes; I understand maps. Dilwell is green, and there's the state line, and that ugly watery sort of yellow is Mingo County, South Carolina, and Turner Court House is the county seat of it. Those little black marks are hills on the border, and it's right there that these Appleweight people live, and dance on the state line as though it were a skipping-rope."
"That's exactly it. Now what we want to do is to arrest Appleweight and put him in jail in South Carolina, which relieves the governor of North Carolina, your honored father, of all embarrassment."
She snatched the paper-cutter and took possession of the map for a moment, then pointed, with a happy little laugh.
"Why, that will be only too easy. You see there's Azbell County, where the militia is encamped, just three counties away from Dilwell, and if we needed the soldiers it wouldn't hurt the troops to march that far, would it?"
"Hurt them, nothing!" exclaimed Ardmore. "It will be good for them. You have to give orders to the adjutant-general, and, being engaged to him, he would be afraid not to obey your orders, even if you told him to go in balloons."
"Well, of course, I'd send him an official order; and if he was disobedient I could break our engagement. When I broke my engagement with Arthur Treadmeasure, it was only because he was five minutes late coming to take me to a dance."
"You were perfectly right, Miss Dangerfield. No gentleman would keep you waiting."
"But he didn't keep me waiting! I was sick in bed with a sore throat, and mama wouldn't let me go; but I thought it was very careless and taking too much for granted for him to think he could come poking along any time he pleased, so I ended everything."
It would have interested Ardmore to know the total of Miss Dangerfield's engagements, but the time did not seem propitious for such inquiries; and, moreover, his awe of her as a young person of great determination and force of character increased. She spoke of employing the armed forces of the state as though playing with the militia were a cheerful pastime, like horseback riding or tennis. His heart sank as he foresaw the possibility of the gallant Gillingwater coming out of the Appleweight affair with flying colors, a hero knighted on the field for valor. The remembrance of Gillingwater receiving the salutes of the militia and riding off to the wars to the beat of drums had deprived Ardmore of sleep all night.
"Well, there's the map, and there's that insulting telegram; what are you going to do about it?" asked Jerry.
She seemed to be honestly inviting suggestions, and the very thought of this affected him like wine. He deliberated for several minutes, while she watched him. A delicious country quiet lay upon the old state house; in the tranquil park outside the birds whistled their high disdain of law and precedent. It was no small thing to be identified with a great undertaking like this, with the finest girl in the world; and he could not help thinking of the joy of telling Griswold, the sober professor and sedate lawyer, of this adventure when it should be happily concluded. Never again should Grissy taunt him with his supineness before the open door of opportunity!
"A governor," he began, "is always a dignified person who doesn't bother his head about little things like this unless everybody else has gone to sleep. Now, who's the chief of police in a county like Dilwell—what do you call him?"
"Do you mean the sheriff, Mr. Ardmore?"
"Certainly. Now, give me those telegraph blanks, and I'll drop him a few lines to let him know that the government at Raleigh still lives."
It is in the telegram alone that we Americans approach style. Our great commanders did much to form it; our business strategists took the key from them. "I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer" is not more admirable than "Cancel order our number six hundred and eighteen," or "Have drawn at sight." Through the most familiar and commonplace apparatus clicks and ticks the great American epic in phrases concise, unequivocal and apt. Von Moltke, roused at night with news of war, merely waved his hand to the long-prepared orders in his chiffonier and went to sleep again; but the great Prussian has his counterpart in the American magnate who ties up a railroad by telegraph over his after-dinner coffee. Telegrams were, however, with Mr. Thomas Ardmore, something more than a form of communication or a mere literary exercise. Letter-writing seemed to him the most formidable of human undertakings, but with a pad of telegraph blanks under his hand his spirit soared free. All untrammeled by the horror of the day tariff, whose steep slopes have wrought so much confusion and error among the economical, he gave to the wires and the wireless what he never would have confided to a stamp. He wrote and submitted to Miss Jerry Dangerfield the following:
To the Sheriff of Dilwell County,
Kildare, N. C.:What is this I hear about your inability to catch Appleweight and the rest of his bunch? Your inattention to your duties is a matter of common scandal, and if you don't get anxious pretty soon I shall remove you from your job and then some. I shall be down soon to see whether you are pitching quoits at the blacksmith shop or fishing for lobsters in Raccoon Creek, instead of attending to your knitting. Your conduct has annoyed me until I am something more than vexed by your behavior. The eyes of the great North State are upon you. Wire me at length just what you propose doing or not doing in this matter.
William Dangerfield,
Governor of North Carolina.
"What do you think of that?" he asked, his pride falling as she scanned the paper carefully.
"Isn't it pretty expensive?" Jerry inquired, counting the words to ten and then roughly computing the rest.
"I'll take care of that, Miss Dangerfield. What I want to know is whether you think that will make the sheriff sit up."
"Well, here's what father sent him only about a week ago. I found it in his private letter book, and it's marked confidential in red ink."
She read:
"'Act cautiously in Appleweight case. Indictment by grand jury is undoubtedly faulty and Foster threatens trouble in case parties are arrested.'
"And there's more like that! Papa never intended to do anything, that's as plain as daylight. Mr. Foster, the treasurer, comes from that county. He thought papa was going to have to do something, so he's holding back the payment of the state bonds just to frighten papa. You see, the state owes the Bronx Loan and Trust Company that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and if it isn't paid June first the state will be everlastingly disgraced."
"Oh, yes; I'd forgotten about that."
"I don't see how you could forget about it. That must be almost as much money as there is in the world, Mr. Ardmore."
"We've got to raise it, anyhow, even if we go to the pawn-shop. I pawned my watch once when I was in college and Billings—he was my guardian—had shut me off. Grissy—he's my friend—Grissy says pawnbroking is only a more vulgar form of banking. There was a fellow in my class at college who pawned his pawn ticket to get money to pay his laundress, and then gave the new ticket to a poor blind man. He's a big man in Wall Street—has a real genius for finance, they say. But please don't worry about this rascal Foster. We'll put some digitalis into the state's credit when the time comes."
"I think your telegram to the sheriff is all right," said Jerry, reading it again. "If you'll go to the door and whistle for the messenger we'll get it off. I'll sign it with the rubber stamp. Papa hardly ever signs anything himself; he says if you don't sign documents yourself you can always repudiate them afterward, and papa's given prayerful thought to all such things."
Ardmore addressed himself once more to the map. It was clear that the Appleweight gang was powerful enough to topple great states upon their foundations. It had, to Ardmore's own knowledge, driven a governor into exile, and through the wretched Foster, who was their friend, the credit of the state was gravely menaced. The possibilities of the game fascinated Ardmore. He was eager for action on the scene of this usurpation and defiance. Responsibility, for the first time, had placed a warrant of trust in his hands, and, thus commissioned, the spurs of duty pricked his sides.
"I'll wait for the sheriff's answer, and if he shows no signs of life I'll go down there this afternoon."
"Then you will undoubtedly be shot!" Jerry declared, as though announcing a prospect not wholly deplorable.
"That has its disagreeable side, but a great many people have to be shot every year to keep up the average, and if the statistics need me I won't duck. I'll call up my man on the telephone this forenoon and tell him to put my forester at Ardsley to work. He's a big fellow who served in the German army, and if he's afraid of anything I haven't heard of it. If we can drive the gang into South Carolina, right along here, you see"—and Miss Dangerfield bent her pretty head over the map and saw—"if we can pass the chief outlaw on to Governor Osborne, then so much the better, and that's what we will try to do."
"But you're only the private secretary, and you can't assume too much authority. I shall have to go to Kildare to visit my aunt, who is a nice old lady that lives there. The fried corn mush and syrup at her house is the best I ever tasted, and if papa should come when he sees that something is being done quite different from what he intended, then I should be there to explain. If you should be killed, Mr. Ardmore, no one would be there to identify you, and I have always thought it the saddest thing in the world for any one to die away from home—"
"It would be sad; but I hope you would be sorry."
"I should regret your death, and I'd make them give you a perfectly beautiful military funeral, with Chopin's funeral march, and your boots tied to the saddle of your horse."
"But don't let them fuss about pulling off the boots, Miss Dangerfield, if I die with them on. It would be all right for you to visit your aunt, but I shouldn't do it if I were you. I once visited my aunt, Mrs. Covington-Burns, at Newport for a week. It was a deep game to get me to marry my aunt's husband's niece, whose father had lost his money, and the girl was beginning to bore my aunt."
"Was she a pretty girl?" asked Jerry.
"She was a whole basket of peaches, and I might have married her to get away from my aunt if it were not that I have made it a life-long rule never to marry the orphaned nieces of the husbands of my aunts. It's been a good rule to me, and has saved me no end of trouble. But if my sister doesn't change her mind, and if she really comes through Raleigh to-day in her car with those friends of hers, she will be delighted to have you join her for a visit at Ardsley. And then you would be near at hand in case some special edict from the governor seemed necessary."
"But wouldn't your sister think it strange—"
"Not in the least, Miss Dangerfield. Nothing is strange to my sister. Nobody ever sprang a surprise on Nellie yet. And besides, you are the daughter of the governor of a great state. She refuses to meet senators, because you can never be sure they are respectable, but she rather prides herself on knowing governors. Governors are very different. Since I read the constitution I can see very plainly that governors are much nearer the people, but I guess the senators are nearer the banks."
"Well, I have some shopping to do, and it's ten o'clock. It would be hospitable to ask you to luncheon, but mama cries so much because she doesn't know where papa is that our meals at the executive mansion are not exactly cheerful functions. And besides"—and she eyed Ardmore severely as she rose and accepted her parasol from him—"and besides, you know our relations are purely official. You have never been introduced to me, and socially you are not known to us."
Caboose 0186, with three box-cars and a locomotive attached, lay in the southeastern yards at Raleigh late in the evening of the same day. In the observatory sat Mr. Thomas Ardmore, chatting with the conductor, while they waited for the right of way. Mr. Ardmore's pockets were filled with papers, and he held half a dozen telegrams in his hand. The freight cars behind him were locked and sealed, and a number of men lounging near appeared to be watching them.
The reply of the sheriff of Dilwell County had precipitated the crisis. That official succinctly replied to Ardmore's message:
Be good and acquire grace.
While this dictum had aroused Miss Dangerfield's wrath and indignation, it calmed her fellow conspirator, and for hours Ardmore had poured forth orders by telegraph and telephone. No such messages as his had ever before radiated from Raleigh. The tolls would have bankrupted the commonwealth if Ardmore had not cared for them out of his private purse. His forester, with an armed posse from Ardsley, was already following the streams and beating the brush in search of Appleweight. One car of Ardmore's special train contained a machine gun and a supply of rifles; another abundant ammunition and commissary supplies, and the third cots and bags. The men who loafed about the train were a detail of strike-breakers from a detective agency, borrowed for the occasion. Cooke, the conductor of the train, had formerly been in the government secret service, and knew the Carolina hill country as he knew the palm of his hand. Ardmore had warned his manager and the housekeeper on his estate to prepare for the arrival of Mrs. Atchison, whose private car had come and gone, carrying Miss Geraldine Dangerfield on to Ardsley. Ardmore had just received a message from his sister at some way station, reporting all well and containing these sentences: "She is rather different, and I do not quite make her out. She has our noble brother-in-law a good deal bewildered."
Cooke ran forward for a colloquy with the engineer over their orders; the guards climbed into one of the box-cars, and the train moved slowly out of the Raleigh yards to the main line and rattled away toward Kildare, with Mr. Ardmore, pipe in mouth, perched in the caboose cupola.
A caboose, you may not know, is the pleasantest place in the world to ride. Essentially a thing of utility, it is not less the vehicle of joy. Neither the captain of a trading schooner nor the admiral of a canal fleet is more sublimely autocratic than the freight conductor in his watch-tower. The landscape is disclosed to him in leisurely panoramas; the springs beneath are not so lulling as to dull his senses. If he isn't whipped into the ditch by the humor of the engineer, or run down and telescoped by an enemy from behind, he may ultimately deliver his somber fleet to its several destinations; but he is the slave of no inexorable time-table, and his excuses are as various as his cargoes.
Not Captain Kidd nor another of the dark brotherhood sailed forth with keener zest for battle than Mr. Ardmore. Indeed, the trailing smoke of the locomotive suggested a black flag, and the thought of it tickled his fancy. Above bent the bluest sky in the world; fields of corn and cotton, the brilliant crimson of German clover, and long stretches of mixed forest held him with enchantment. In a cornfield a girl plowing with a single steer—a little girl in a sunbonnet, who reached wearily up to the plow handles—paused and waved to him, and he knew the delight of the lonely mariner when a passing ship speaks to him with flags. And when night came, after the long mystical twilight, the train passed now and then great cotton factories that blazed out from their thousand windows like huge steamships.
When they sought a lonely siding to allow a belated passenger train to pass, the conductor brewed coffee and cooked supper, and Ardmore called in the detectives and trainmen. The sense of knowing real people, whose daily occupations were so novel and interesting, touched him afresh with delight. These men said much in few words. The taciturnity of Cooke, the conductor, in particular, struck Ardmore as very fine, and it occurred to him that very likely men who have had the fun of doing things never talk of their performances afterward. One of the detectives chaffed Cooke covertly about some adventure in which they had been jointly associated.
"I never thought they'd get the lead out of you after that business in Missouri. You were a regular mine," said the detective to Cooke, and Cooke glanced deprecatingly at Ardmore.
"He's the little joker, all right."
"You can't kill him," remarked the detective. "I've seen it tried."
Before the train started the detectives crawled back into their car, and Cooke drew out some blankets, tossed them on a bench for Ardmore, and threw himself down without ado. Ardmore held to his post in the tower, as lone as the lookout in a crow's-nest. The night air swept more coolly in as they neared the hills, and the train's single brakeman came down as though descending from the sky, rubbed the cinders from his eyes, and returned to his vigil armed with a handful of Ardmore's cigars.
For the greater part of the night they enjoyed a free track, and thumped the rails at a lively clip. Shortly after midnight Ardmore crawled below and went to sleep. At five o'clock Cooke called him.
"We're on the switch at Kildare. One of your men is here waiting for you."
Big Paul, the German forester, was called in, and Ardmore made his toilet in a pail of water while listening to the big fellow's report. Cooke joined in the conversation, and Ardmore was gratified to see that the two men met on common ground in discussing the local geography. The forester described in clear, straight-forward English just what he had done. He had distributed his men well through the hills, and they were now posted as pickets on points favorable for observation. They had found along the streams four widely scattered stills, and these were being watched. Paul drew a small map, showing the homes of the most active members of the Appleweight gang, and Ardmore indicated all these points as nearly as possible on the county map he had brought with him.
"Here's Raccoon Creek, and my own land runs right through there—just about here, isn't it, Paul? I always remember the creek, because I like the name so much."
"You are right, Mr. Ardmore. The best timber you have lies along there, and your land crosses the North Carolina boundary into South Carolina about here. There's Mingo County, South Carolina, you see."
"Well, that dashes me!" exclaimed Ardmore, striking the table with his fist. "I never knew one state from another, but you must be right."
"I'm positive of it, Mr. Ardmore. One of my men has been living there on the creek to protect your timber. Some of these outlaws have been cutting off our wood."
"It seems to me I remember the place. There's a log house hanging on the creek. You took me by it once, but it never entered my head that the state line was so close."
"It runs right through the house! And some one, years ago, blazed the trees along there, so it is very easy to tell when you step from one state to another. My man left there recently, refusing to stay any longer. These Appleweight people thought he was a spy, and posted a notice on his door warning him to leave, so I shifted him to the other end of the estate."
"Did you see the sheriff at Kildare?"
"I haven't seen him. When I asked for him yesterday I found he had left town and gone to Greensboro to see his sick uncle."
Ardmore laughed and slapped his knee.
"Who takes care of the dungeon while he's away?"
"There are no prisoners in the Kildare jail. The sheriff's afraid to keep any; and he's like the rest of the people around here. They all live in terror of Appleweight."
"Appleweight is a powerful character in these parts," said Cooke, pouring the coffee he had been making, and handing a tin cupful to Ardmore. "He's tolerable well off, and could make money honestly if he didn't operate stills, rob country stores, mix up in politics, and steal horses when he and his friends need them."
"I guess he has never molested us any, has he, Paul?" asked Ardmore, not a little ashamed of his ignorance of his own business.
"A few of our cows stray away sometimes and never come back. And for two years we have lost the corn out of the crib away over here near the deer park."
"They've got the juice out of it before this," remarked Cooke.
"That would be nice for me, wouldn't it?" said Ardmore, grinning—"to be arrested for running a still on my place."
"We don't want to lose our right to the track, and we must get out of this before the whole community comes to take a look at us," said Cooke, swinging out of the caboose.
Ardmore talked frankly to the forester, having constant recourse to the map; and Paul sketched roughly a new chart, marking roads and paths so far as he knew them, and indicating clearly where the Ardsley boundaries extended. Then Ardmore took a blue pencil and drew a straight line.
"When we get Appleweight, we want to hurry him from Dilwell County, North Carolina, into Mingo County, South Carolina. We will go to the county town there, and put him in jail. If the sheriff of Mingo is weak-kneed, we will lock Appleweight up anyhow, and telegraph the governor of South Carolina that the joke is on him."
"We will catch the man," said Paul gravely, "but we may have to kill him."
"Dead or alive, he's got to be caught," said Ardmore, and the big forester stared at his employer a little oddly; for this lord proprietor had not been known to his employees and tenants as a serious character, but rather as an indolent person who, when he visited his estate in the hills, locked himself up unaccountably in his library and rarely had the energy to stir up the game in his broad preserves.
"Certainly, sir; dead or alive," Paul repeated.
Cooke came out of the station and signaled the engineer to go ahead.
"We'll pull down here about five miles to an old spur where the company used to load wood. There's a little valley there where we can be hidden all we please, so far as the main line is concerned, and it might not be a bad idea to establish headquarters there. We have the tools for cutting in on the telegraph, and we can be as independent as we please. I told the agent we were carrying company powder for a blasting job down the line, and he suspects nothing."
Paul left the caboose as the train started, and rode away on horseback to visit his pickets. The train crept warily over the spur into the old wood-cutters' camp, where, as Cooke had forecast, they were quite shut in from the main line by hills and woodland.
"And now, Mr. Ardmore, if you would like to see fire-water spring out of the earth as freely as spring water, come with me for a little stroll. The thirsty of Dilwell County know the way to these places as city topers know the way to a bar. We are now in the land of the little brown jug, and while these boys get breakfast I'll see if the people in this region have changed their habits."
It was not yet seven as they struck off into the forest beside the cheerful little brook that came down singing from the hills. Ardmore had rarely before in his life been abroad so early, and he kicked the dew from the grass in the cheerfullest spirit imaginable. Within a few days he had reared a pyramid of noble resolutions. Life at last entertained him. The way of men of action had been as fabulous to him as the dew that now twinkled before him. Griswold knew books, but here at his side strode a man who knew far more amazing things than were written in any book. Cooke had not been in this region for seven years, and yet he never hesitated, but walked steadily on, following the little brook. Presently he bent over the bank and gathered up a brownish substance that floated on the water, lifted a little of it in his palm and sniffed it.
"That," said Cooke, holding it to Ardmore's nose, "is corn mash. That's what they make their liquor out of. The still is probably away up yonder on that hillside. It seems to me that we smashed one there once when I was in the service; and over there, about a mile beyond that pine tree, where you see the hawk circling, three of us got into a mix-up, and one of our boys was killed."
He crossed the stream on a log, climbed the bank on the opposite shore, and scanned the near landscape for a few minutes. Then he pointed to an old stump over which vines had grown in wild profusion.
"If you will walk to that stump, Mr. Ardmore, and feel under the vines on the right-hand side, your fingers will very likely touch something smooth and cool."
Ardmore obeyed instructions. He thrust his hand into the stump as Cooke directed, thrust again a little deeper, and laughed aloud as he drew out a little brown jug.
Cooke nodded approvingly.
"We're all right. The revenue men come in here occasionally and smash the stills and arrest a few men, but the little brown jug continues to do business at the same old stand. They don't even change the hiding-places. And while we stand here, you may be pretty sure that a freckled-faced, tow-headed boy or girl is watching us off yonder, and that the word will pass all through the hills before noon that there are strangers abroad in old Dilwell. If you have a dollar handy, slip it under the stump, so they'll know we're not stingy."
Ardmore was scrutinizing the jug critically.
"They're all alike," said Cooke, "but that piece of calico is a new one—just a fancy touch for an extra fine article of liquor."
"I'll be shot if I haven't seen that calico before," said Ardmore; and he sat down on a boulder and drew out the stopper, while Cooke watched him with interest.
The bit of twine was indubitably the same that he had unwound before in his room at the Guilford House, and the cob parted in his fingers exactly as before. On a piece of brown paper that had been part of a tobacco wrapper was scrawled:
This ain't yore fight, Mr. Ardmore. Wher's the guvner of North Carolina?
"That's a new one on me," laughed Cooke. "You see, they know everything. Mind-reading isn't in it with them. They know who we are and what we have come for. What's the point about the governor?"
"Oh, the governor's all right," replied Ardmore carelessly. "He wouldn't bother his head about a little matter like this. The powers reserved to the states by the constitution give a governor plenty of work without acting as policeman of the jungle. That's the reason I said to Governor Dangerfield, 'Governor,' I said, 'don't worry about this Appleweight business. Time is heavy on my hands,' I said. 'You stay in Raleigh and uphold the dignity of your office, and I will take care of the trouble in Dilwell.' And you can't understand, Cooke, how his face brightened at my words. Being the brave man he is, you would naturally expect him to come down here in person and seize these scoundrels with his own hands. I had the hardest time of my life to get him to stay at home. It almost broke his heart not to come."
And as they retraced their steps to the caboose, it was Ardmore who led, stepping briskly along, and blithely swinging the jug.
Barbara and Griswold stopped at the telegraph office on their way back to the executive mansion, and were met with news that the sheriff of Mingo had refused to receive Griswold's message.
"His private lines of communication with the capital are doubtless well established," said Griswold, "and Bosworth probably warned him, but it isn't of great importance. It's just as well for Appleweight and his friends, high and low, to show their hands."
When they were again on the veranda, Griswold lingered for a moment with no valid excuse for delay beyond the loveliness of the night and his keen delight in Barbara's voice and her occasional low laughter, which was so pleasant to hear that he held their talk to a light key, that he might evoke it the more. Professor Griswold's last flirtation was now so remote that he would have been hard put to say whether the long-departed goddess' name had been Evelyn or Laura. He had so thoroughly surrendered himself to the exactions of the law that love and marriage held small place in his speculations of the future. He had heard himself called a bachelor professor with the humorous tolerance of one who is pretty sure of himself, and who is not yet reduced to the cynical experiment of peering beneath the top layer of his box of strawberries to find the false bottom. He recalled the slender manuscript volume of verses in his desk at home, and he felt that it would be the easiest thing in the world to write a thousand songs to-night, beside which the soundest brief ever filed in any court would be the silliest of literary twaddle.
"You have done all that could be asked of you, Mr. Griswold, and I can not permit you to remain longer. Father will certainly be here to-morrow. I assure you that it is not like him to avoid his public obligations. His absence is the most unaccountable thing that ever happened. I have my difficulties here at home, for since my mother's death I have had the care of my young sisters, and it is not pleasant to have to deceive them."
"Oh, but your father isn't absent! He is officially present and in the saddle," laughed Griswold. "You must not admit, even to me, that he is not here in full charge of his office. And as for my leaving the field, I have not the slightest intention of going back to Virginia until the Appleweight ghost is laid, the governor of North Carolina brought to confusion, and the governor of South Carolina visibly present and thundering his edicts again, so to speak, ex cathedra. My own affairs can wait, Miss Osborne. My university may go hang; my clients may be mulcted in direst damages, but just now I am your humble servant, and I shall not leave your service until my tasks are finished. I am consulting not my duty, but my pleasure. The joy of having a hand in a little affair like this, and of being able to tell my friend Tommy Ardmore about it afterward, would be sufficient. Ardmore will never speak to me again for not inviting him to a share in the game."
He was more buoyant than she had seen him, and she liked the note of affection that crept into his tone as he spoke of his friend.
"Ardmore is the most remarkable person alive," Griswold continued. "You remember—I spoke of him this morning. He likes to play the inscrutable idiot, and he carries it off pretty well; but underneath he's really clever. The most amazing ideas take hold of him. You never could imagine what he's doing now! I met him accidentally in Atlanta the other day, and he was in pursuit of a face—a girl's face that he had seen from a car window for only an instant on a siding somewhere."
"He must have a romantic temperament," suggested Barbara.
"Quite that. His family have been trying to marry him off to some one in their own set ever since I have known him, but he's extremely difficult. One of the most remarkable things about him is his amazing democracy. He owns a palace on Fifth Avenue, but rarely occupies it, for he says it bores him. He has a camp in the Adirondacks, but I have never known him to visit it. His place in North Carolina pleases him because there he commands space, and no one can crowd him or introduce him to people he doesn't want to meet. He declares that the most interesting people don't have more than a dollar a day to spend; that the most intelligent and the best-looking girls in America clerk in shops and work in factories. A philanthropic lady in New York supplies him every Christmas with a list of names of laundry girls, who seem to appeal particularly to Ardy's compassion, though he never knew one in his life, but he admires them for the zeal with which they destroy buttonholes and develop the deckle-edge cuff; and he has twenty-dollar bills mailed to them quite mysteriously, and without any hint of who Santa Claus really is."
"But the girl he saw from the car window—did she also appeal to him altruistically?"
"No; it was with her eye. He declared to me most solemnly that the girl winked at him!"
Griswold was aware that Miss Osborne's interest in Ardmore cooled perceptibly.
"Oh!" she said, with that delightful intonation with which a woman utterly extinguishes a sister.
"I shouldn't have told you that," said Griswold, guiltily aware of falling temperature. "He is capable of following a winking eye at a perfectly respectful distance for a hundred years, and of being entertained all the time by the joy of pursuit."
"It seems very unusual," said Barbara, with cold finality.
Griswold remembered this talk as, the next day, aboard the train bound for Turner Court House, the seat of Mingo County, South Carolina, he pondered a telegram he had received from Ardmore. He read and re-read this message, chewing cigars and scowling at the landscape, and the cause of his perturbation of spirit may be roughly summarized in these words:
On leaving the executive mansion the night before, he had studied maps in his room at the Saluda House, and carefully planned his campaign. He had talked by telephone with the prosecuting attorney of Mingo County, and found that official politely responsive. So much had gone well. Then the juxtaposition of Ardmore's estate to the border, and the possible use of the house as headquarters, struck in upon him. He would, after all, generously take Ardmore into the game, and they would uphold the honor and dignity of the great commonwealth of South Carolina together. The keys of all Ardmore's houses were, so to speak, in Griswold's pocket, and invitations were unnecessary between them; yet, at Atlanta Ardmore had made a point of asking Griswold down to help while away the tedium of Mrs. Atchison's house party, and as a matter of form Griswold had wired from Columbia, advising Ardmore of his unexpected descent.
Even in case Ardmore should still be abroad in pursuit of the winking eye, the doors of the huge house would be open to Griswold, who had entered there so often as the owner's familiar friend. These things he pondered deeply as he read and re-read Ardmore's reply to his message, a reply which was plainly enough dated at Ardsley, but which, he could not know, had really been written in caboose 0186 as it lay on a siding in the southeastern yards at Raleigh, and thence despatched to the manager at Ardsley, with instructions to forward it as a new message to Griswold at Columbia. The chilling words thus flung at him were:
Professor Henry Maine Griswold,
Saluda House, Columbia, S. C.:I am very sorry, old man, but I can not take you in just now. Scarlet fever is epidemic among my tenants, and I could not think of exposing you to danger. As soon as the accursed plague passes I want to have you down.
Ardmore.
An epidemic that closed the gates of Ardsley would assume the proportions of a national disaster; for even if the great house itself were quarantined, there were lodges and bungalows scattered over the domain, where a host of guests could be entertained in comfort. Griswold reflected that the very fact that he had wired from Columbia must have intimated to Ardmore that his friend was flying toward him, pursuant to the Atlanta invitation. Griswold dismissed a thousand speculations as unworthy. Ardmore had never shown the remotest trace of snobbishness, and as far as the threatened house party was concerned, Griswold knew Mrs. Atchison very well, and had been entertained at her New York house.
The patronizing tone of the thing caused Griswold to flush at every reading. If the Ardsley date-line had not been so plainly written; if the phraseology were not so characteristic, there might be room for doubt; but Ardmore—Ardmore, of all men, had slapped him in the face!
But, scarlet fever or no scarlet fever, the pursuit of Appleweight had precedence of private grievances. By the time he reached Turner Court House Griswold had dismissed the ungraciousness of Ardmore, and his jaws were set with a determination to perform the mission intrusted to him by Barbara Osborne, and to wait until later for an accounting with his unaccountable friend.
Arrived at Turner's, Griswold strode at once toward the court house. The contemptuous rejection of his message by the sheriff of Mingo had angered Griswold, but he was destined to feel even more poignant insolence when, entering the sheriff's office, a deputy, languidly posed as a letter "V" in a swivel-chair, with his feet on the mantel, took a cob pipe from his mouth and lazily answered Griswold's importunate query with:
"The sheriff ain't hyeh, seh. He's a-visitin' his folks in Tennessy."
"When will he be back?" demanded Griswold, hot of heart, but maintaining the icy tone that had made him so formidable in cross-examination.
"I reckon I don't know, seh."
"Do you know your own name?" persisted Griswold sweetly.
"Go to hell, seh," replied the deputy. He reached for a match, relighted his pipe, and carefully crossed his feet on the mantel-shelf. The moment Griswold's steps died away in the outer corridor the deputy rose and busied himself so industriously with the telephone that within an hour all through the Mingo hills, and even beyond the state line, along lonely trails, across hills and through valleys, and beside cheery creeks and brooks, it was known that a strange man from Columbia was in Mingo County looking for the sheriff, and Appleweight, alias Poteet, and his men were everywhere on guard.
Griswold liked the prosecuting attorney on sight. His name was Habersham, and he was a youngster with a clear and steady gray eye. Instead of the Southern statesman's flowing prince albert, he wore a sack-coat of gray jeans, and was otherwise distinguished by a shirt of white and blue check. He grinned as Griswold bent a puzzled look upon him.
"I took your courses at the university two years ago, Professor, and I remember distinctly that you always wore a red cravat to your Wednesday lectures."
"You have done well," replied Griswold, "for I never expected to find an old student who remembered half as much of me as that. Now, as I understood you over the telephone, Appleweight was indicted for stealing a ham in this county by the last grand jury, but the sheriff has failed or refused to make the arrest. How did the grand jury come to indict if this outlaw dominates all the hill country?"
"The grand jury wanted to make a showing of virtue, and it was, of course, understood between the foreman, the leader of the gang, and the sheriff that no warrant could be served on Appleweight. I did my duty; the grand jury's act was exemplary; and there the wheels of justice are blocked. The same thing is practically true across the state line in Dilwell County, North Carolina. These men, led by Appleweight, use their intimate knowledge of the country to elude pursuers when at times the revenue men undertake a raid, and the county authorities have never seriously molested them. Now and then one of these sheriffs will make a feint of going out to look for Appleweight, but you may be sure that due notice is given before he starts. Three revenue officers have lately been killed while looking for these men, and the government is likely to take vigorous action before long."
"We may as well be frank," said Griswold in his most professional voice. "I don't want the federal authorities to take these men; it is important that they should not do so. This is an affair between the governors of the two Carolinas. It has been said that neither of them dares press the matter of arrest, but I am here in Governor Osborne's behalf to give the lie to that imputation."
"That has undoubtedly been the fact, as you know," and Habersham smiled at his old preceptor inquiringly. "Osborne once represented the Appleweights, and he undoubtedly saved the leader from the gallows. That was before Osborne ever thought of becoming governor, and he acted only within his proper rights as a lawyer. I don't recall that anything in professional ethics requires us to abandon a client because we know he's guilty. If such were the case we'd all starve to death."
"Governor Osborne has been viciously maligned," declared Griswold. "While he did at one time represent these people—no doubt thoroughly and efficiently—he holds the loftiest ideal of public service, and it was only when his official integrity was brought into question by unscrupulous enemies that he employed me as special counsel to carry this affair through to a conclusion. That accounts for my presence here, Habersham, and, with your assistance, I propose to force Governor Dangerfield's hand. Suppose all these people were arrested in Mingo County under these indictments, what would be the result—trial and acquittal?"
"Just that, in spite of any effort made to convict them."
"Well, Governor Osborne is tired of this business and wants the Appleweight scandal disposed of once and for all."
"That's strange," remarked Habersham, clearly surprised at Griswold's vigorous tone. "I called on the governor in his office at Columbia only ten days ago, and he put me off. He said he had to prepare an address to deliver before the South Carolina Political Reform Association, and he couldn't take up the Appleweight case; and I called on Bosworth, the attorney-general, and he grew furiously angry, and said I was guilty of the gravest malfeasance in not having brought those men to book long ago. When I suggested that he connive with the governor toward removing our sheriff, he declared that the governor was a coward. He seemed anxious to put the governor in a hole, though why he should take that attitude I can't make out, as it has been generally understood that Governor Osborne's personal friendliness for him secured his nomination and election to the attorney-generalship, and I have heard that he is engaged to the governor's oldest daughter."
"He is a contemptible hound," replied Griswold with feeling, "and at the proper time we shall deal with him; but it is of more importance just now to make Appleweight a prisoner in North Carolina. If he's arrested over there, that lets us out; and if the North Carolina authorities won't arrest their own criminals we'll go over into Dilwell County and show them how to be good. The man's got to be locked up, and he'd look much better in a North Carolina jail, under all the circumstances."
"That's good in theory, but how do you justify it in law?"
"Oh, that's the merest matter of formulæ! My dear Habersham, all the usual processes of law go down before emergencies!"
The airiness of Griswold's tone caused the prosecutor to laugh, for this was not the sober associate professor of admiralty whose lectures he had sat under at the University of Virginia, but a different person, whose new attitude toward the law and its enforcement shocked him immeasurably.
"You seem to be going in for pretty loose interpretations, and if that plaster bust of John Marshall up there falls from the shelf, you need not be surprised," and Habersham still laughed. "I might be impudent and cite you against yourself!"
"That would constitute contempt of court, and I can not just now spare your services long enough for you to serve a jail sentence. Go on now, and tell me what you have done and what you propose."
"Well, as I told you over the telephone, we hear a great deal about Appleweight and his crowd, but we never hear much of their enemies, who are, nevertheless, of the same general stock, and equally determined when aroused. Ten of these men I have quietly called to meet at my farm out here a few miles from town, on Thursday night. They come from different points over the country, and we'll have a small but grim posse that will be ready for business. You may not know it, but the Appleweights are most religious. Appleweight himself boasts that he never misses church on Sunday. He goes also to the mid-week service on Thursday night, so I have learned, and thereby hangs our opportunity. Mount Nebo Church lies off here toward the north. It's a lonely point in itself, though it's the spiritual center and rendezvous for a wide area. If Appleweight can be taken at all, that's the place, and I'm willing to make the trial. Whether to stampede the church and make a fight, or seize him alone as he approaches the place, is a question for discussion with the boys I have engaged to go into the game. How does it strike you?"
"First rate. Ten good men ought to be enough; but if it comes down to numbers, the state militia can be brought into use. The South Carolina National Guard is in camp, and we can have a regiment quick enough, if I ask it."
Habersham whistled.
"Osborne is certainly up and doing!" he exclaimed, chuckling. "I suppose he has tossed a quarter, and decided it's better to be good than to be senator. By the way, that was a curious story in the newspapers about Dangerfield and Osborne having a row at New Orleans. I wonder just what passed between them?"
Griswold was conscious that Habersham glanced at him a little curiously, with a look that implied something that half formed itself on the prosecuting attorney's lips.
"I know nothing beyond what I read in the newspapers at the time. Some political row, I fancy."
"I suppose Governor Osborne hasn't discussed it with you since his return to Columbia?" asked Habersham carelessly. The shadow of a smile flitted across his face but vanished quickly as though before a returning consciousness of the fact that he was facing Henry Maine Griswold, who was first of all a gentleman, and not less a scholar and a man of the world, who was not to be trifled with.
"No," replied Griswold, a little shortly. "I was appealed to in rather an unusual way in this matter of Appleweight. It is quite out of my line as a legal proposition, but there are other considerations of which I may not speak."
"Pardon me," murmured Habersham; but he asked: "What was Governor Osborne doing when you left Columbia?"
"When I left Columbia," remarked Griswold, and it was he that smiled now, "to the best of my knowledge and belief the governor of South Carolina was deeply absorbed in knitting a necktie, the color of which was, I think, the orange of a Blue Ridge autumn sunset. And now, if you will kindly give me pen and paper, I will communicate the Appleweight situation and our prospects to my honored chief."