But there was no "company" invited to the Harrisons' on the following Sunday.
On the preceding Thursday, which was just two days after the evening she was married, Daisy had an impulse to go and see Jean. By arrangement with the Heathcotes, no notice of the wedding had been allowed to get to the papers; and when Daisy, in a white dress, popped in through the kitchen door of the Harrison house on Thursday afternoon, all Jean knew was that she had mysteriously slipped out on Tuesday evening and had not been seen since.
Daisy bounced over to hug her; but the honest Scot drew herself up sternly, and put out a hand.
"It's no like ye," she said, "to traipze oot like yon, an' gie the good leddy no notice—and her on the broad of her back now, at death's door, too. I ha' made the beds mysel' and sweepit up, forbye my ain work, for twa fu' days now, to save her the worry of havin' a stranger aboot, in her last hours."
"Last hours!" exclaimed Daisy, her breath catching, in the impulsive wave of self-reproachthat swept over her, "Is she—dying, then, Jeanie? Why, I—"
"Ay," Jean set her great knuckles against her hip as she stirred the broth she was making for the sickroom; "ye reck of naebody so long as ye can please yersel', an gang oot an' in, and come an' go, withoot a 'by your leave' tae ony person.... An' how come ye tae be here, all fettled up, in the middle of the afternoon? Are ye no workin'? An' if no, what are ye daein'? Say!" Jean turned, gripped Daisy by the shoulders suddenly and hard, and studied her with brows knit and eyes ablaze, "ye'll answer methatthis minute—what are ye daein' for your bed an' board? If all's no richt, man! I'll tur-rn ye across my knee an' skelp ye, like a bairn! I'll save ye from the street, or I'll no leave a whole inch o' hide on your back!"
"Is the Missis dying?" Daisy repeated, tears now in her eyes.
"Ay," said Jean, shaking her, "an' all the greetin' in the warld'll no save her the now. But come! Aboot yersel'! Oot wi't, I say!"
"Oh, I'm all right, Jean," said Daisy, still thinking about Lady Harrison, "I'm married.... Say, can I go upstairs with you, when you take up her broth, and see her?"
"Married!" Jean sat, almost stumbled, into a chair behind her. In this position, she stared atDaisy for a moment; then murmured, half, as it were, to herself, "Lassie, lassie! ye're a mystery to me. I absolutely gie ye up, as I wad a conundrum book wi' no key. Wha's the lad? Yon jitney man?"
"No." Daisy dimpled a little.
"No?" Jean, her elbow on the side-table, leaned forward with renewed interest; "I thocht, now, it could be nane other than Curly Head Jamie. Well, then, ye've no done the impossible, I take it, and hookit Nicky Cluett, have ye? Man! if ye ha' got him, yon's a laddie will soon gie ye your fine hoose an' motor-car. He's drawin' in the siller with a hand-rake, like, these days."
"It's not Nicky," said Daisy, smoothing out her sash and putting her head a little on one side.
"Weel, ye micht have set your cap for him, onyway," Jean commented, as she reached over and gave the broth a little stir to keep it from burning; "Baby Jock tells me it's common talk ye made a hit wi' Nick, you nicht at the dance. Wha did ye tak', then, if it wasna Nick? Oot wi't. Ye've fair got me on pins an' needles. Do I ken him?"
"Well, I don't know," said Daisy, protracting her mystery with a teasing delight; "may be you do. Yes, I think you know him. It's— it's—" Daisy leaned over, and said the name dramatically, right in Jean's ear.
The Scotswoman looked at her hard: sternness returning to every feature.
"I doubt ye been misconductin' yersel' after all," she said, levelly and coldly, "I kenned it when ye cm' in through yon door. Tellin' me a pack o' lies'll no improve matters—"
"I'm telling you the truth," Daisy asseverated, warmly, "I didn't think you'd go and insult me, Jean!"
The other eyed her doubtfully. "I'd fair loe tae believe ye, lassie," she breathed, "but the thing's impossible. It sounds like a story out of a book. Why, besides his money an' his social position, he's sixty years old, if he's a day—an' forbye, he's an ingrown bachelor. He'd ha' wedded long or now, if it had been in him to marry. He—he hasna offered to keep ye—that's not what ye mean, is it? But, no—I ken fine he wouldna dae that. He's an honorable man, Sir William Ware."
Daisy regarded Jean a second or two; then went over, sat plumply down on the elder woman's knee, and put an arm about her neck.
"Listen", she said, "and I'll tell you all about it, right from the start-off, when I left here Tuesday evening." And therewith Daisy did so. By the time she had finished, Jean's arms were about her waist, and penitence blended with the amazed, generous, unenvying delight that radiated fromthe Scotswoman's harsh-lined but kindly-expressioned face.
"Forgie me, bairnie," she said, as she laid her great palm around the girl's cheek; "but I—I—why, I juist canna find the words tae say what I think. I'm fair—fair tongue-tied. Fast married—and to a laird o' lairds! Ey, ye bonnie wee thing, ye, bide till I buss ye," and the great arms, tightening about Daisy's waist, hugged her ecstatically. Then Jean set her free, rose up with vigor, and reached down a bowl, spoon and plate of crackers.
"Come!" she exclaimed, as she turned out the gas-jet under the broth, poured the liquid into the bowl, and went to the cupboard for a dessert-spoon; "if the good leddy's conscious an' no in ane of her bad spells, we'll tell her the news. A bittie o' gossip like yon's better than physic or food to a sick wuman.... By the bye, here's a letter cam' for ye yesterday. Open it an' read it, if ye like, while the broth's coolin'."
The letter was from Mrs. Lovina Nixon, in answer to Daisy's first letter home, written under a daughterly impulse during one of Jean's "nights out", when Daisy was alone in the big Harrison kitchen. In her letter, the girl had asked for forgiveness and had hoped that "You and Pa are getting along all right, and that crops are looking good."
Mrs. Lovina's answer was somewhat grim and ominous. "I suppose," she wrote, "you think yourself mighty smart, taking off like that. I suppose you think it was kind of respectable, eh, to go away like you done, alone with a feller. I suppose you reckon your going to have high jinks in town there while me and your Pa milks all them cows, well you ain't. Your not of age yet understand, and your pa and me is coming right into the city to get you, one of these days and fetch you strait home, and if you don't get one tanning from your pa that youl remember all your days, my name aint lovina janet nixon, so mind."
"Bad news, bairnie?" Jean enquired; as Daisy, sobered not so much by the letter as by momentary recollection of her past, stared down at the floor in a grave, pondering way.
"Oh—no," Daisy folded up the letter and slipped it into the bosom of her dress, "not exactly. Is the broth cool now, Jean?"
"Ay," said Jean, picking up the bowl and the plate of crackers; "Come on. The Mistress is lyin' in Sir Thomas' room. I had him move his ugly carcass out of it, because it's the best-ventilated room in the hoose—the best o' the worst, like. He didna object, at least naething to speak of. He kenned fine I'd have taken the besom tae him without much encouragin'.... Ey, what d'yethink, now, I caught him sayin' tae her, one time when I came in to red up the room. He was standin' by the bedside, with his hands in his pockets and his feet spraddled out, in yon way he has.
"'We-ell, Marth',' he oppens up, in his big healthy blat, 'har yuh feelin'? Uh?'.
"'Poorly, Tom, very poorly,' says the good leddy—puir soul!—in a faint-like voice.
"'Thaat's ba-ad,' he says, suckin' his teeth like somebody chirpin' tae a pair o' horses, 'but anyway, I guess, Marth', it's time you was restin' under the sod. You've done your share o' this world's toughin' it. You've aimed the right to rest, if anybody hezz. Ever'thin' wurks furr th' best. Y'see that, don't yuh, Marth'-girl? Uh?'
"Juist then I cam up and gied him a push from behind. Ey, a bonny push! 'Get oot!' I says, chokin'-like. I was sae blind mad, I could ha' stranglit yon man, then and there, so I could. Weel, he went!"
The great muscles on Jean's arms were knotted into ribs and ridges like a man's; her chin was thrust out; her eyes were narrowed into shining slits. Her whole strong frame seemed to become a banked fire of indignation, as memory recalled that scene in the sickroom.
The door of Lady Harrison's room was slightly open as the two reached it. They were barely inside the chamber, when Jean, with an exclamationthrust the broth and crackers down on a side-table and rushed over to the bed.
Daisy, following quickly, saw the Scotswoman, after glancing closely at the half-open eyes and laying her ear to the gaunt sunken chest, hastily remove the pillows from under Lady Martha Harrison's head, lay the scalp levelly on the mattress, and press down the eyelids with her fingers.
"Ey, puir, puir leddy," Jean, keeping finger and thumb on the dead eyelids, turned toward Daisy with two tear-balls bowling down the rugged field of her face; "she's gone, she's gone. Ey, gone off all her lone—died as she lived, bairnie—while we're crackin' awa careless-like down in yon kitchen. Stane deid, an' nigh stark against the layin'-oot."
"When a chap has a bit of a brain," said a voice, speaking from behind a crinkled newspaper that was doing temporary service as a fan, "and a habit of seeing rather far into things, if you know what I mean—it'ssucha jolly nuisance that he can't get it before the public without writing it down. Isn't it, rather, don't you think, Lady Ware?"
"I suppose it rather must be, kind of," said Daisy, who, in a smart white skirt and blouse, and canvas shoes, occupied the other end of the tennis-court bench on the Wares' lawn, "but you should worry about that, Arthur. The public has enough books to read anyway."
"Not of the kind I should write, they haven't," declared Lord Arthur Milcourt, raising toward a green bough above them the ingenuous face of twenty-one; "I say, can you type a bit?"
"What?" Daisy demanded, wrinkling her brows at the speaker in a comical way; "oh, you mean, run a typewriter. No."
"Weren't you employed in an office or something, when old Will discovered—er—met you?And didn't you run—that is, operate—a typing machine there?"
"I was a housemaid before I was married," replied Daisy, dimpling, "and I didn't know a typewriter from a bale of hay."
"Ah!" commented Lord Arthur, regarding her. "I say, old Will's a queer sort, don't you think?" he added, with apparent irrelevance, after a moment.
Daisy rose to her feet and tossed her tennis racquet down on the bench.
"Not half so queer as some people I could name," she observed, pinning on her hat. "I'm going down town. Do you want to come, or will you stay here? There's a book up in the library about writers or painters or something. I came across it the other day when I was looking for something else. Full of pictures of homely-looking men, it is—some of them bald-headed, and others with hair down to the coat-collars."
"I'll stay and glance over the book," said Lord Arthur, stretching out luxuriously on the bench; "I say, get it and bring it out, will you, there's a good soul. I shouldn't wonder if it's jolly interesting. Baldheaded men! Youarea rum one."
"Get it yourself, you lazy, long-legged lump," said Daisy, promptly; "who was your servant this time last year?"
"Ah—sorry," murmured Lord Arthur (thewords were apologetic, but the tone was supercilious); "I'll go and fetch it myself." He marched off to the house; and as he marched, he muttered: "'Long-legged lump!' Jowve, but it'swickid—poor old Will!"
Daisy went up to her pretty suite of rooms with their ivied balcony. She did not notice the details of their furnishings now with quite so fresh and keen a pleasure as on that first morning, now two months past, when she had opened new-waked eyes in the dainty, pink bedroom. She stepped about now with a casual and proprietary air—turning the shower on in the bathroom for a cooling splash after her recent game of tennis with young Lord Arthur, (Ware's second cousin, "just out")—laying out a simple, girlish dress from her well-stocked wardrobe—shaking out a folded towel or two and laying them handily on the glass rack at the end of the bathtub. Ada the maid was at her service if she cared to ring. But Daisy had been her own maid for seventeen years and intended to keep on in the same way.
Only a few moments elapsed till, smart and parasolled, she stepped out through the side door and into the cinder-path that led, with many a leisurely looping, to the picket-gate that gave to the street. Life at the Wares' had wrought some changes in her appearance. The color in her face was more delicate, and her skin clearer. Hermodiste had corseted her in long willowy lines, so that, although her height had not increased a particle, she looked taller. Her ankles, in their silk stockings, showed a more shapely fulness where they met the hem of her short neat walking-skirt.
She passed from the residential street to a corner where a trolley-line crossed, and caught a car. It was the Wares' chauffeur's afternoon "off", and Daisy's own little runabout was being repaired at the garage downtown.
Her destination was the postoffice. She had answered that grim letter from her mother with a brief note in which she had asked that any further letters from the home farm should be addressed to her, in her maiden name, at the city "general delivery". Her object in this note, which mentioned nothing of her marriage, was to pique the curiosity of John Nixon and his wife, so that they would, in all probability, actually fulfil their expressed intention of coming to town and taking her back to the farm.
She had not called at the "general delivery" wicket since despatching this note home; and this was her self-appointed mission to-day.
Evidently she had succeeded in waking the interest of her mother and stepfather; for the clerk, with a smile, passed out a letter addressed in the sloping irregular handwriting of Mrs. LovinaNixon; the postmark showing it had been in the office some days. Daisy took the missive to one of the side-tables and opened it.
"Your pa and me," wrote Mrs. Lovina, "will be in town to get you, like I said, right after thrashen. You neento think your goen to get away the like of that. Yon can be looken fur us about the end of Oktobr. Mebbe we wont be so hard on you when we get you back, if youl come down to the train and meet us and save us trouble but if we have to put the police onto you or go to any expens to get aholt of you, wel take it out of your hide when we get you home here and you can bet on that, so mind, itl be just like Im tellen you, so you can do wichever you like for to do."
Daisy twinkled and dimpled from brow to chin-point as she folded the letter and slipped it into her hand-bag. She knew Mrs. Lovina Nixon!
When Daisy had commenced to read her letter, broad daylight had filled the postoffice rotunda, and a little sunbeam had slanted like a slung javelin from the window-sash down across the desk against which she leaned. As she looked up now, however, after depositing the missive in her reticule, she saw that, across the big room, the electric lights had been turned on; and, glancing toward the window-pane, she saw that heavy clouds had come up and that, already, thereshowed here and there on the glass, the splash of a raindrop.
As the trolley line did not approach within three blocks of the Ware gate, and as there was quite a walk across the lawn as well, Daisy decided the best way to avoid a wetting was to take one of the taxis which were parked in a long line by the curb, just outside the postoffice. Hastily hooking her parasol over her arm, she hurried out of the revolving door and across the sidewalk. Just as she was about to step into one of the dingy vehicles labelled "Auto for Hire", a jitney drew up by the curb to let out a passenger; and Daisy, out of the corner of her eye, saw a dry-smiling face, a profusion of riotously "kinky" hair that made it necessary to set the peaked chauffeur's cap a little to one side, and a pair of narrowed humorous eyes that, however, looked soberly away as she said, "Hello, Jimmy Knight. Want a dead-head passenger?"
"Step in, ma'am," said Jimmy, formally, holding his eyes steadily forward as he reached back, deftly felt for the latch, and opened the tonneau door.
"Haven't you any room in front?" Daisy raised her lashes very slowly, then dropped them and put her head on one side.
"You ken sit in front if you so prefer, lady," Jimmy answered, with emphasis of politeness, ashe closed the tonneau again, and opened the fore-door. Daisy had no sooner hopped in and seated herself than the rain came on heavily. Jimmy, reaching up, let down the storm-curtains on both sides and buttoned them fast before he started the car.
"Thanks so much, chauffeur," acknowledged Daisy, smiling up sidewise as she mimicked his manner.
"Don't mention it, madam," deprecated Jimmy Knight, throwing in his clutch. The car skidded slightly on the arch of the pavement, but ran smooth and straight, as the engine, in the street-centre, picked up speed. Jimmy's gloved finger mechanically "gave her gas" or advanced the spark, as occasion required. Outside, the rain poured steadily, misting the mica peep-holes in the storm-curtains and half-blinding the windshield. The car stopped frequently for additional passengers; and soon the tonneau was filled with dour figures in wet raincoats that rustled shrilly as the owners moved, watching in a fidget for home streets.
Said one of the passengers, a girl, as, leaning back in her seat after glancing around the edge of the storm-curtain, her eyes fell on Daisy's fashionably-clad figure:
"Some swell jane in the front seat with the driver, Lil."
The remark was made with unmannerly distinctness; and the speaker's companion, another girl of the same commonplace city type, made answer, also in a tone purposely raised to reach Daisy's ear:
"Oh, well, we all know what them dolled-up kind is."
"Hey!" Jimmy Knight's head jerked around, and a glinting iris swam into that corner of his eye-socket next the last speaker, "do you skirts want to get out o' this car head-first? If not, shut up!"
The second girl looked at the first one.
"Well, theveryidea!" she said audibly, after a second or two.
"The idosity of him!" commented Girl Number One, also in a loud tone; "some friend, I guess. They all have their friends."
Jimmy turned toward the curb, and threw on the brake. As the car skidded to a standstill, he banged open the tonneau door.
"Get out!" he said. "Go on—the both of you! Get to hell out of here! Keep your darned fares."
There was that in Jimmy's tone and look which caused the two to act promptly.
"Some gentleman!" remarked Girl Number Two, as she descended on the wet street.
"Oh, it doesn't matter," fired back NumberOne, as they walked away, heads up, "we live on the next street, anyway."
"That's ten cents I owe you," said Daisy to Jimmy Knight, dimpling.
Jimmy did not answer—at least, not in words. He put his lips together, slammed home the clutch and the car leaped forward.
By the end of another ten minutes the last two of the passengers in the back portion of the jitney had reached their home corner, and the car was empty except for Daisy and Jimmy.
"I'll take y' home, lady," he said, brusquely; "no coat—get wet to the skin—this here rain."
"Thank you," aped Daisy, formally. Then she put her chin in the air, and silence reigned.
"Whatyoumad at?" came Jimmy's voice, presently. "Who said they didn't 'feel like' marryin', and then went straight off and married money? Not me. You ain't got a thing in the world to be sore at: I have, an' I'm darned good and sore. I didn't think it was in you, Kid—honest, I didn't.... Here we are at your door. Get out! don't set there, with the servants maybe lookin' out of the windows."
Daisy's face was red as she dismounted. She made a step away, then came back.
"I'm—I'm—", she began, the color on her cheeks deepening.
"Yes, you are," said Jimmy Knight, dryly,"good an' plenty. No use o' standin' there and chewin' the fat now. Get into the house, and get them wet duds off. You give me a pain, you do!"
The car, with a scornful roar, shot off along the driveway of the Ware grounds, and Daisy was alone. Presently something rolled down her cheek and ran into the corner of her mouth. It had a salt taste. It was a tear.
"Some folk wad still be findin' something tae greet about, even if they had the warld with a wire dike aboot it," remarked Jean, who was now chief (under Lady Frances, of course) in the Ware kitchen; regarding Daisy in her keen and kind scrutinizing way, as the latter, entering the room, sat down moodily in a chair, dropped her hands into her lap, and stared before her with pensive wet lashes lowered; "Man! lassie, but ye're ill tae suit!"
The November draught swept frostily down from the tracks to the station subway where Daisy, in her smart furs, stood, some three months later, waiting for the passengers from the train which had just roared into the great iron-ceiled shed overhead. She could not help thinking of the day when, gazing wonderingly about her, she had trotted alongside the self-assured and patronising Fred Beatty through this very way—forgetting, on that occasion, her travel-soiled blouse, in her wonder and rapture as the city rose about her like a warm sun-glowing tide. Only six months ago!
As the passengers from the newly-arrived train commenced to file along the corridor, Daisy, watching from her place in line, found her interest centred almost as much in looking for some forlorn and eager little person like that self of her present memory, as in "keeping her eye peeled" (in accordance with the request contained in a recently-received letter) for John and Lovina Nixon. But the travellers on this train were nearly all either blase souls of the "drummer" type, who have no wonder left for anythingbeneath the sun, or badger-gray country people who looked as though they were on a business trip and were doing mental arithmetic relating to hotel-bills as they stumped along. All bored, dull, worried or indifferent. No gay, no dancing, no holiday souls in the whole drab-faced file—at almost the end of which came stony-faced John Nixon with his square beard, dingy skin, harshly-drawn brows and mouth, and small suspicious eyes; and thin, stooped, fault-finding Lovina, with her sharp nose, her glance of ill-surmise, and bonnet pinned teeteringly on her top-knot.
Recollection blew on Daisy like a cold wave with her first view of them; but the feeling passed, and she found herself waiting mischievously to see if they would recognize her.
John Nixon passed dourly on; but Lovina's hawklike eyes, as she drew opposite to where Daisy stood, found her daughter instantly.
"Well, mother," Daisy drew her cape of sables about her shoulders and, moulding her features into a welcoming smile—which, when facing Lovina Nixon, required an effort—stepped forward.
The mother's chin came out. Her eyes drew to button-like points. There was nothing maternal about the look. It was merely a glance which bespoke ill-expectation gratified.
"John!" she chirped, to the stepfather, who had meandered on, "here!"
John Nixon turned and came back. His brows knitted as he glanced from his wife to the girl in her splendid furs; then, as his eyes travelled to Daisy's face, he gave vent to an expression which sounded like, "Ur-rh!"
"Look at this!" said Lovina Nixon; catching an end of the sable cape, holding it up for her husband's scrutiny, and then tossing it from her and making a motion of dusting off her hands; "You know what that means, I s'pose, John?"
"Ay," said John Nixon, "ay-hay."
"Disgraced!" said Lovina Nixon; "Disgraced! Oh, you—you thing! Just wait till I get you home! Just you wait!"
Daisy's cheeks warmed at this. But, a moment after, her indignation changed to an impulse of roguery: she would let these two, for the present, believe the things they thought!
"I s'pose you can show us a respectable hotel," said her mother. "But remember—you don't get out of my sight again. You stay right with me in the hotel, till we leave town. Carry this valise for me."
Daisy dimpled with devilment as she obeyed this refreshingly familiar instruction; and, accentuating her figure-lines as she walked, for the especial benefit of the furtively-watching couple,she led the way to where Tim Davitt, the Wares' chauffeur, waited outside the depot with the limousine.
"What's this?" demanded Lovina Nixon, surveying the vehicle, "a livery rig?"
"Yes, mother," said Daisy, smiling aside at the chauffeur, as Davitt, touching his hat, held the door open. The mother, knocking her bonnet askew against the top of the car, blundered to the farther end of a seat. John Nixon lumbered in after her. Then Daisy, after a low-toned "Home, Timmy," hopped in and snuggled mischievously against her stepfather, who was in the centre of the seat.
"Don't ye be 'fraid," he leaned over and whispered, not unkindly, in her ear, "I'll not let yur Moh whup ye."
Turning street-corners smoothly and swiftly, the limousine soon reached the home grounds and was brought by Tim Davitt, deftest of chauffeurs, to a soft gliding halt before the long front veranda of the Ware house.
"Is this an expensive boardin'-place?" Lovina Nixon enquired, as she and her husband followed Daisy up the steps.
"Oh—not very," Daisy answered, as she swung open the door and ushered her parents into the quietly furnished hall, with its deep, soft rugs, polished floor, and walnut hat-rack. A door onthe right led into the library; and through this Daisy, after depositing the mother's valise in the hall, led the fumbling man and woman. The room was empty, as Lady Frances was in the kitchen, overseeing, after her thrifty fashion, the supper preparations, and Sir William was not yet home from the office.
"Queer kind of a hotel." Lovina Nixon's eyes followed her daughter suspiciously, as Daisy went to the centre-table and opened a massive volume with brass binding and buckle.
"Come on, mother, and register!" said the girl then, with a queer expression; pointing down to the opened page, and regarding the sharp-nosed ill-expectant woman with eyes that were bright and flashing as live fire.
Lovina Nixon advanced; felt for her glasses; put them on; bent over; and, in the big family Bible that Daisy had laid open, read the record of the marriage of her daughter to Sir William Ware, Baronet.
Sir William sat in the drawing-room, playing the host to John Nixon.
As Nixon had his feet propped up on the back of a chair in front of him, Sir William, in order to put his guest thoroughly at his ease, secured a chair and cockedhisfeet up in the air, too. And, in order that Nixon might not he embarrassed by suddenly finding out that he was the only one who was spitting copiously on the tiles in front of the fireplace, Sir William also occasionally contributed a light expectoration in that locality. Spitting had been a yet unlearned accomplishment with Ware; but, by watching John Nixon, who was a pastmaster, the baronet learned, in the course of half an hour or so, to hit the centre of the tiling with a fair degree of accuracy, and without leaning forward in his chair.
As far, however, as putting Nixon at his ease was concerned, Sir William need not have troubled. It was an oft-enunciated maxim of John Nixon's that whatever he did was right, if he did it. "Do's you wanter," was the way Nixon put it; "dun't ast nobuddy fur nawthun."
Presently, noting that the moistened area in front of the fireplace threatened to overflow and inundate the flooring about the tiles, Sir William jumped up, as though with a sudden inspiration and said, smiting Nixon playfully on his tree-stump shoulder:
"Take you on at billiards upstairs, old chap!"
"Ur-rh?" Another salivation dampened the tiling as Nixon twisted his stocky torso about.
"I was about to say," Sir William pursued—having gathered from his guest's tone and attitude that John Nixon did not know anything about playing billiards—"that I would take you on at a game of billiards, only it's so jolly uninteresting. Shall we stroll out and see the deer?"
"Ain't interested in deers," said Nixon, "'n I wun't budge a step to see nawthun I dun't want for to see. Neverwould."
"You're jolly well right," agreed Sir William; "I can thoroughly sympathize with you, Nixon, old man.... Silly things, deer, after all—aren't they?"
"I tell you, though," Nixon arose, grunted, stretched, scratched, shook his legs, and, with a certain awesome gapping sound and a gust of fetid breath, yawned in his host's face, "what Iwilldo, English. Take me somewhurs whurr I ken git a schooner o' beer—thuh drinks on you, mind, fur I ain't got a cent to spare—an' I'll goalong, every steppuh the way. How des that ketch you?"
"Happy thought!" Sir William clapped his guest heartily on the back. "Bright idea! Nixon, you're a man after my own heart. Half a jiff, till I bring our hats and coats."
The two left the house by the side door; but, as they reached the gate of the grounds, Sir William on the excuse that he had forgotten his pocket-book, requested Nixon to walk on slowly, and himself hurried back to the house.
"Was you tannin' thuh leather furr a new bill-book, er whutt?" demanded John Nixon, testily, as his host, after quite a lapse of time, rejoined him.
"I really must apologise, old chap—I really must. Shan't let it occur again," Sir William said, good-humoredly. He could not very well tell Nixon that he had spent the interval in personally cleaning up with pieces of newspaper the mess by the fireplace, for fear Lady Frances should happen in and see it while they were away.
Upstairs, in Lady Frances' own sitting-room—a big, airy apartment, in which, on quiet afternoons, she read or sewed or knitted, or napped in the old arm-chair she had brought with her from overseas—the venerable lady of the house had set herself the task of entertaining the mother of her son's wife.
"Ineffably, innately common and nasty-natured," had been her inward pronouncement when first she faced Lovina Nixon; but there had been no outward sign, although one who knew the old gentlewoman's ways might have discerned a more careful and precise politeness in her attitude. Now, on this afternoon of the last day of the Nixons' stay, which had endured, for what Lady Frances had termed, in a matin soliloquy, "three dreadful days", she had steeled herself to the duty of making the time pass agreeably until evening and train-time should bring deliverance.
Ada, the maid, had brought the tea-urn and "curate"; and now the three women—Lady Frances in her big chair; Mrs. John Nixon dangling one of the fine china tea-cups, which she had drained at a draught, from her forefinger, and eating cake with her elbow on the table and the cake scattering crumbs as she gesticulated with the hand that held it; and Daisy holding a skein of yarn, from which Lady Frances was winding a ball—sat ill-assorted in the large room.
"Do have some more tea, Mrs. Nixon, won't you?" invited Lady Frances, eyeing the suspended teacup nervously. "Daisy, dear, give your mother some more tea."
But, as Mrs. Nixon had already had three cups, the urn was empty. Daisy hopped up and carriedthe shapely silver receptacle to the kitchen, to get some more hot water from Jean's kettle. As the door closed after her daughter, Mrs. Lovina Nixon leaned over toward Lady Frances with a greenish light in her eyes.
"I s'pose it ain't no use o' tellin' you, Mam, now," she said; "I mean, now that your son's tight married to her and can't get loose, that yen girl run away from us. Yes, sir—run away with a feller. Never seen nawthun like it in all m' born days. Never did." And Mrs. Lovina nid-nodded and sowed caraway seed on the carpet in showers as she vibrated the cake.
"Just like'r, though," she supplemented, after a moment, "so it was. 'Xpected somethin' like it, all along. Warn't s'prised one iota."
"Your daughter," Lady Frances said—very slowly, and governing her voice with difficulty—"has quite voluntarily told us all the circumstances you mention. I—I really do not think," the old gentlewoman could barely keep the frost out of her tone, "that we should discuss her in her absence. I really don't think we should."
"Oh, well," Mrs. John Nixon's radial arm described a flying circle of cake-crumbs about her chair as she indicated, with a sweeping gesture, that she washed her hands of the matter, "if you're satisfied, we are."
"Daisy," Lady Frances said, levelly, "hasproved a very fine and frank and sweet young woman. Her adaptability, too, has been most satisfactory. I have become very much attached to her—and I really cannot listen, nor will I listen, to anything against my son's wife."
"Oh, all right, all—right," Lovina Nixon smacked her cup down. "I wish't you'd had a siege of her like I've had, so I do. You'd talk different."
"I think," Lady Frances Ware rose out of her chair with remarkable vigor for eighty-two, "that you have probably taken a wrong course with her—in fact, I feel quite sure you must have taken a wrong course with her. Now, as I proposed before, we will change the subject. Would you care to go for a motor ride? I shall tell Davitt, the chauffeur, to have you back here in time for a leisurely and comfortable meal before your train."
Mrs. Lovina Nixon shrugged. "Might's well do that as anything else, I s'pose."
Lady Frances rang the bell. "Telephone Davitt," she said, to Ada the maid, "to bring around the larger car. Then tell Lady Ware her mother would like to do a little shopping, and wishes her to go as well. Take my hand-bag with you, and tell Lady Ware she may use what money she likes from my purse, if she is short."
A quarter of an hour later, Lady Frances,having seen the motor car off down the drive, returned to her sanctum, sat down quietly in her big chair, and took up her sewing. Presently, however, her needle paused, and she found herself, after a habit she had, drifting off into half-audible soliloquy.
"William said," she murmured musingly, "that he thought the man a fair masculine type, who might have developed well, with proper opportunity. But that woman! Thoroughly nasty, ingrate, underhand. An improvement in manners would only be a hopelessly inadequate veneer. A nature such as she has would not be mended by the opportunities of three generations and more. I do hope William doesnotintend to take those people in tow, for I am really not equal to it."
A telephone interrupted the reverie of Lady Frances. Five minutes later, pale and anxious, but not forgetting the practicality that had been her lifetime's habit, Lady Frances Ware was in her son's rooms across the hall, turning down the bed for the reception of Sir William who, knocked down by a motor dray as he was piloting the half-drunken Nixon across a crowded street downtown was being brought home in the ambulance.
Nixon, reaching the hotel bar that afternoon, had discovered an unforeseen weakness for what he termed "beer"—a word that with him, meant everything drinkable in the alcoholic line—andhad, in spite of Ware's remonstrances, continued to imbibe beyond all reasonable limits: dragging Sir William, who felt responsible and could not well abandon him, to a big bar in the central portion of the city, and even paying for his own drinks after Ware had flatly refused to take the risk of buying any more for him.
"Youarerather a thirsty chap, you know," Ware, who had himself taken only the original proposed glass of refreshment, had remarked, as at last he had managed to get Nixon's wobbling head faced toward home. It was while the two were in the act of crossing a street to a taxi Ware had hailed, that the motor dray had run the baronet down. With a last half-spasmodic push, he had thrust Nixon out of harm's way, and the latter had not received so much as a scratch.
"Well," said Sir William, a little feebly to Daisy, who sat on a stool beside his chair, with her head resting on the cushioned arm in such a position that Ware could stroke her hair with his "good" hand, "this has jolly well taught me to look about, on street-crossings. I suppose I am what the tram people would call a 'jay walker'. I say, Puss—aren't you sorry you married such a silly ass. Be frank, now! Say I'm a blundering idiot."
"No, you're not," said Daisy; "how's your arm feeling?"
"Tip-top," Ware, as he replied offhand about the broken limb, regarded the girl with a bright and tender approval.
"And your head?" continued Daisy, "does it ache much, there where the bruise is? Let me get some fresh ice."
"For the third and last time—no!" Sir William responded, flipping her ear; "this ice is cold enough: it has clotted every vein in my bally forehead. I say, kitten, isn't that somebody knocking?"
The knock which sounded on the door—that ofthe small sitting-room of Sir William's bedroom suite—was clumsily-knuckled and hesitating. It sounded once, audibly—then a second time, feebly—and, after the second knock, the scuffle of a heavy foot receding indicated that the knocker was going away without entering. Daisy went quickly and opened the door.
"Come on, Dad," she said.
Nixon stopped in the hall, his back half-turned, and spoke to his foster-daughter over-shoulder.
"You go on about your business a while," he said, gruffly, "I want to talk to the boss."
Ware, hearing this dialogue from his chair, smiled queerly to himself.
"Right-O," he called, "run along, my dear, for a jiffy; see if Mother has any messages for us. Come on, Nixon, old chap!"
Reddening in an odd way at the cordial tone, John Nixon, his hands hanging awkwardly and his beard canted aside in a sheepish attitude, came in, pushing the door shut behind him. He lowered himself into the nearest chair.
"How areyou?" said Sir William, humorously and companionably, "I say—thatwasa jolly cataclysm! Lucky to get off with our lives, what?" Nixon, sheepish but still characteristically blunt, came straight to his point.
"I wouldn't have got off with no life," he said,"if you hadn't slung me out o' the way and got stepped on yourself."
"Rubbish!" said Ware, briefly; "all the same, it's good of you to put it that way, old chap. Makes me feel less mortified at my stupidity in standing there like a post and getting knocked down. Let's jolly well talk of something else."
John Nixon's head came up and back. He put his right hand down on his knee-cap with a slap that could be heard across the room.
"Don't you go tryin' for to head me off, English," he said, "I done wrong and I'm a-goin' to own up to it. Here, I been walkin' around your nice house here, a-spittin' all over the floor as if it was a hotel—it kind of seems like that to me, because we don't sling on no style out west here—and all because I never did like an Englishman. They always make me contrairy. When I'm with an Englishman, I talk rough and go bullin' around, just to be the opposite to what I think he is—"
Sir William leaned out over the arm of his chair and extended his uninjured hand toward Nixon.
"Put her there, as you say in Canada," he said, beamingly, "Nixon, you're a brick. And if we English make you Canadians feel contrary, I'll admit we bring it on ourselves. We, too, are a contrary people; and the more you try to put on this roughness of manner, which is not your own,the more we try to put on this finicky niceness, which so rubs you the wrong way. Just because we desire to rub you the wrong way. And so we see-saw, back and forth, until eventually we come to fisticuffs, or worse. Nixon, I believe you've hit the peg on which hangs the whole difficulty between England and Canada. Now that we two understand each other, let's set an example to our peoples: let's be natural. Put her there, I say."
John Nixon put her there, and the two shook hands—an inter-imperial handshake.
"How would you like for to come out to my place a while, English?" he said, after a moment. "As I said, we don't sling on no style nor nothin', but we never know what it is to go hungry. The roof don't let in no rain, neither; and you can't sleep on nothin' more comfortable than a bedtick stuffed with prairie hay."
"Ripping!" Sir William, "knocked about" as he was, all but hoisted himself to his feet in his enthusiasm; "I say, Nixon, when shall we start?"
"Next train, if you say so. Anyway," John Nixon rubbed an eyebrow with his gray-bristled forefinger, "I'm worryin' about the stock, and I want to get back home. Got any drinkin-water around, English?"
Sir William was about to touch the bell, when Nixon, glancing toward the bathroom, saw basin, tap and tumbler.
"Don't ring, for me," he said, getting up, "I can work the fasset myself, without no help botherin' around."
As his guest returned from the bathroom, sweeping the water-drops from his beard by drawing his hand down over it, Sir William said:
"Will you be offended if I ask you a question—a straight question—Nixon, old chap?"
"You couldn't offend me now, English," said John Nixon, "anyhow straight questions goes, between us, after this. That's our agreement, ain't it?"
"That's it, exactly," said Ware, "so my question is this: Why do you persist in calling me 'English'? It sounds a bit like some sort of an imputation. Do you see my point?"
"I don't foller you," said John Nixon, as he laid his hand on the door-knob; "the only reason I call you 'English' is because your reel name keeps slippin' my mind."
"It shouldn't be hard to remember," said Ware.
"What is it?" queried Nixon.
"To you, henceforth," said the baronet, "it is—Bill."
"Yes, that's you, all over again," said Lovina Nixon, late that evening, as she thrust into her iron-gray hair two or three matutinal hairpins, in places where they would not jab her, and clambered into bed, "astin' these tony English peopleout to the farm, to turn up their noses at everything. Well, Daise'll have to look after them, for I got enough to do with the housework and the milkin'. Is the old woman coming along, too?"
John Nixon yawned, turned his back to her, and wrapped around himself two-thirds of the bed-clothes.
"You go on to sleep," he said, "you'll feel better in the mornin'."
Lovina, however, continued on rebelliously, although the rest of her grumbling was sunk to a smothered monotone by her nightly habit of sleeping with the blankets over her head; but her last thought before she dropped off to sleep was that now at last she would have a chance to bring from the back of the farmhouse cupboard the "weddin' set" of neat china that had been waiting there during nearly a quarter of a century for an appropriate guest.
"No, I don't think I shall go, William," said Lady Frances, adjusting the cushion at the back of her son's head and handing him the evening newspaper, "this northwest winter is here now—don't forget that it's November, not May, outside—and the plan sounds to me rather too much like Polar exploration. You say you intend to go out for the winter. Well, if you survive the experience, perhaps I shall join you in the spring. But surely you're not going to start on this wildexpedition the way you are. I am told it is difficult to go on snowshoes with a crutch. Those people, too! William, you are insane."
"Mother, dear," Ware patted the capable old hand that rested on his chair-arm, "you said that once before, you remember. And that reminds me—we haven't discussed this with Daisy. Let's have her in now, if she's about."
"She's about," rejoined Lady Frances—a little sarcastically, but with an unconcealed accent of motherly affection—, "she's having tea with McTavish, the cook."
"Shove on all the clothes you can get on to you, Eng—Bill," counselled John Nixon, sucking his teeth shrilly as he donned a lupine-looking wombat coat and reached for his mittens, "and after that put on an extry sweater, as they say. She's a-going to blow."
The place was the Toddburn hotel, where Sir William and John Nixon, left there by the warm and friendly train at 11 a.m., had now, an hour and a half later, come out of the dining-room with a good meal "under their belts".
"You don't need to hurry, gettin' your duds on, Bill," John Nixon said, as he went out, "the Missis will be pokin' around the store down there for an hour yet, and Jim's buyin' himself a new suit, to have for when Daise gets here. I've told him she's married now, but it don't seem to sink in.... You better stay here and keep warm till we fetch the team round to the door."
Sir William stayed—not to keep warm, but to look about him, like a boy at a circus. Somehow, the effect of the cold dry tingling air that resided in the streets of this prairie hamlet seemed to percolate in from outside, in spite of stormwindow and door, striking upon the nostrils bracingly and making one "feel good" in spite of the blue fog of tobacco-smoke and the odor of wet leather and fur. The effects of Ware's accident, now a week old, had pretty well passed, and the hereditary health of the Wares glowed in his face again and sparkled in his eyes.
He stood with his back toward the window, his hands tucked into the side-pockets of his Norfolk coat, his attitude the Englishman's inimitable easy and negligent one which imparts to the stiffest suit the comfortable effect of flannels, and glanced down the short perspective of the Toddburn hotel sitting room and bar, which were in a kind of suite, with a swinging-door between.
The roof of this place was very low, and the walls were very near one, and after the spacious places in which Ware had lived his life, it was a bit like standing in a piano-box. If the situation of this hotel had been a narrow byway in a city, it would have been a slum, a locality of death, a room of hollow coughings and faces dreary with debility and gloom. But here, on the wide prairie it was in effect a sanitarium, if one might judge by the figures that breezed about, the harsh but deep-lunged voices that came out of the midst of steam-clouds made when the outside door opened, the faces glowing and tanned by gale and snow-shine.
One only needed to listen a moment to the hearty laughing and the sentences detached at random from the blend of cheery, companionable greeting and rallying, to know that the minds of these western men were as healthy as their bodies.
"No, sir—I'd never go back on him. Bob an' me was neighbors a-homesteadin'. It ain't his fault if he had to give up farmin' and get a job in Jim McMillan's livery stable. His health give out—that's all."
"Yes, sir, boy—she's a-goin' to blow up some harricane before dark. This reminds me of yon day, four years ago—yous'll all remember the time—when Elleck Hamilton an' me started out for home on the bob-sleighs, pickled up to the eyebrows. Elleck, he was worse than me when we started; but Elleck's as strong as a horse, and when she started to blow, he slung off the effects of the licker like tossin' off a hat. But the stuff had got a kind of a holt on me; I got cold and started for to go to sleep. However, Elleck he seen me home safe. My face was froze a little, that's all—but Elleck, he'd had to get out of his bob-sleigh so many times to look after my team, that he'd froze both legs, one as fur as the ankle and the other clare up to the knee. Had to have her taken off. Never was any good after that, Elleck. He was worth about ten thousand dollars when that happened; and to-day he's buyin' grainfor an elevator company, at seventy-five dollars a month. But I've done pretty well myself, an' old Elleck knows this—that whenever his pride'll let him quit work, he can come over to my place, and set down by the stove, and put his bad leg up on a chair an' keep her there, for life, even if he lives to be a hundred and fifty."
Exclamation and anecdote rattled on; fog of tobacco-smoke and stench of snow melting on fur filled the air; free grammar and the broad "a" had unchecked currency in this organ-box of a western railway-hamlet hotel: but Sir William Ware, standing by the iron-rodded window with philosophic hands in his coat-pockets, had only one distinguishable impression—that he was being educated, that this west was giving him something denied by the university.
This was Western Canada—blunt, gruff, western Canada. Not too forward in making one's acquaintance; not too stiff and "standoffish". Not caring sixpence—so long as you yourself were "all right"—who your father was, nor how much money you were worth. Western Canada, where nobody who works—or, if he can't or won't work, can tell a good yarn—is allowed to starve. Western Canada, which never "picks" a fight, but—well, just try to "run on" her!
A raucous "hey!" brought Sir William about. Glancing out through the window, in the directionof the hall, he saw John Nixon signalling to him from the seat of a bob-sleigh. Hurrying on scarf and coat, Ware hastened out, creaked across the sidewalk and smilingly awaited instructions as to boarding this western vehicle of the long trail. It had a high, green-painted double box. The front and rear seats were two boards laid across the box and draped with gunny-sacks. The front seat was occupied by John Nixon and Jim Burns, the hired man who had brought the equipage in to meet the train. On the hind seat Lovina Nixon perched, nothing of her visible except one stoical pioneer-woman eye which looked out unwinkingly at Ware through a crack between folds of gray shawl.
"Climb in alongside the Missis, Bill," directed John Nixon, who had made no special preparation for extreme weather conditions, other than to pull his corduroy cap down over his ears, "We'll need to get a-goin', if we're intendin' to strike home before we get blew off the trail. All set?"
"All set, old chap," Sir William responded, as he tucked his end of the goatskin robe around his knees and, in response to Lovina's mumbled recommendation, felt with his toes for the extra brick which Nixon had heated for him on the top of the livery stable stove; "it's a jolly good thing Daisy decided to do as Mother wanted and stay intown for a week. Perhaps we shall have a better day, to bring her out."
"Oh, the gal wouldn't mind this," Nixon rejoined, casually, after he had "clucked" the horses into a trot down the drifted street; "no, sir, Bill; she'd have got you off that seat, a-runnin' behind in the sleigh-track, as soon as your toes would start for to feel nippy. It would take a mighty high wind to chase Daise into the house in the winter-time, except when dinner is ready. Her and the dog is about even, when it comes to standin' the cold. Ain't that so mother?"
"Oh, yes, it's so," Lovina's voice, muffled but still recognizable in its sharpness, said through the swathes of shawl, "except when I ust to want her to fetch in an armful o' wood or a pail of water. Then you couldn't budge her from behint the stove."
"Aw, go on," Nixon, happy to be on the way home to the "stock" again, swung his whip jovially but harmlessly over the backs of the horses. "Wait till you see the happy reunion between her and Rove, Bill, when she gets here next week. It'll prove what I say about them bein' chums. Rove, he would have no use for a girl that stayed in the house: you couldn't coax him any closer to in-doors than the chip-pile, not if it was sixty below zero."
The two bay sleigh-ponies—a light team hadbeen chosen, as they could stand quick travel over difficult roads better than the heavy-fetlocked, big-haunched, working horses—trotted along sure-footed on the hard ridge of the trail. The last house on Toddburn's one short street was soon passed. Turning out at a wide angle from the railroad, at a point where Ware saw one of the country's tall red elevators, with staccato explosion of gasoline engine, pouring wheat into a freight-car, the prairie road set off alone across the white country.
The snowfall had been unseasonably heavy this autumn; and Sir William, looking over the side of the sleigh-box at a point where some passing horse had accidentally inched out into the soft snow and put down a leg, saw a hole nearly fifty inches deep. Plainly, if the bob-sleigh should slip off the packed hard ridge of the road, it meant a wholesale "spill", a floundering of horses, a chilling to the marrow of all concerned, and much delay. If it happened after dark, with the blizzard—the effect of which Ware had often watched from the study window of his city home—at its height, itwouldbe a bit awkward.
"Was you ever out in a blizzard?" said John Nixon, suddenly: as though the thought, like that of a group of castaways in an open boat under squall-clouds, had become by sympathy communal."No? Well, you're a-goin' to be out in one to-night, English—"
"Come, come, now, old chap," reminded Ware, "no national imputations, remember. I thought it was to be 'Bill'—wasn't it?"
"Well, Bill," conceded Nixon, "as I was about to say, you're goin' to be out to-night in the finest whoopin' he-blizzard since '97. I can smell her a-comin'—all through me."
From the sleigh—which now, with the village in the distance behind and a wholly roofless horizon-line before, was the sole, small centre of life and companionship in the midst of a snowy waste—Ware looked across the drifts toward the west, where the sun of the short, late-November afternoon was trending low. The trail ran almost due north, to where the white line of the horizon met the pale blue of that part of the sky distant from the transfiguring sun. Between these two cardinal points—north and west—the voice of winter megaphoned from northwestward that bitter weather was at hand.
The distant groves roared softly, like surf heard against the wind. Afar, the sound had the similitude of hoarse, enormous exhalation; near at hand, it was like the wash and hiss of water. The whole surface of the prairie that had been fixed and frozen, now took on an aspect of life, of ceaseless scintillation and quivering like ripplesin the sun. Ware, looking along the bright faces of the drifts, saw that this phenomenon was caused by multitudinous lines of hurrying snow-grains, serpentining over those white billows in the track of the wind, building with a wondrous rapidity little ribs and ridges of snow in the lee of every bump and projection in their path.
In the early afternoon, it had been warm, even to thawing-point. But now, as the wind rose, it shuttled with a sharp cold the woof of the air. Earlier, the air had been clear and speckless as the void above quiet water, and bland in its touch upon the skin. Now, it was clouded with gathering snow-atoms, hard as sand, whose impact upon face and hands was needle-sharp and whose irritation of the eyeballs blinded the vision with rheum. Earlier, the sky had been bright-blue from horizon to zenith. Now, it was half-fogged with a kind of smoke-blue mist, that was nothing other than the first draft of a trillion-atomed host of snow-motes drawn up to their unfriendly function by the cold whirlwind that should general their attack upon the prairie's winter peace.
The blizzard is like, and yet contrary to, the thunderstorm that is the crowning phenomenon of summer. It is like, in that it is preceded by a "weather-breeding" twelve hours or so of undue heat; it is like, in the effect of its attack; it is like, in its whipping of the outcast, its lashing of theearth; it is somewhat like in its roar, although there is no thunder to diapason the storm of mid-winter. But it is contrary in color, and in duration, and in direction—or rather, lack of direction. For the color of a blizzard is not a definite black, but a blinding white; its duration is not a few moments, but long hours of terrific, unabated wind-energy; its direction is everywhere—that is to say, you can turn your back to a thunderstorm, but you cannot turn your back to a blizzard. If you face to windward, you get the volley of the "spindrift" direct; if you face leeward, you get it round a corner, just as stingingly. To the wanderer, a blizzard is a succession of intersecting whirlwinds, not a direct blast from a definite point in the compass.
Sir William Ware, in this sleigh that was inching its course—at least, so it seemed—across the long ten miles that separated Toddburn village from the Nixon farm, felt an odd sense of dependence as he watched the gathering of the storm. There was in his whole fine body and brain no fibre of fear, as far as personal danger was concerned—for, besides the heritage of his family and race, he was too much the philosopher to regard the chance of death with anything but curiosity. But he felt awed by the cold, the great white vastness, the thrilling mighty wind—not yet at anything like its crescendo, either—and thefeeling that his sole link with safety, this bluff Canadian pioneer who held the destiny of that sleighful in his rough-mittened hands that held the horses' reins and his wonderful, but not infallible, pioneer's sense of direction, was plainly a bit anxious in spite of all his experience.
"Suppose we have a song, old chap," he leaned forward and shouted in Nixon's ear; "start up something you know, and we'll all join in the chorus."
But John Nixon shook a diffident head. "I got all I can do, handlin' the team, Bill," he said—in his Canadian way avoiding by the excuse the admission that he could not sing. "Try Jim, here—he's the singin' bird out on our ranch. Let's have that there about the 'Mistle-tree Bough', Jim—you ain't got nothin' on your mind just now."
Jim Burns, a man of few words and short, cleared his throat and, without preamble, started "The Mistletoe Bough":