The solemn man retired hastily, leaving the door slightly ajar behind him. I heard him murmur something within, which was followed by a rather quick, hearty response.
“All right, Bill. Newspaper man, I guess,—tell him I’m coming!”
The tall man whose name, it seemed, and inappropriately enough, was Bill, returned with this announcement. Close behind him followed a stout, clear-eyed man of perhaps fifty. A man evidently overflowing with nerve force and energy, appreciative of humor, prompt and keen in his estimate of human nature, and willing to back his judgments with his money. Undismayed and merry in misfortune, joyous and magnanimous in prosperity, scrupulously careful of his credit, and picturesquely careless of his speech—in a word, Chauncey Gale, real estate speculator, self-made capitalist and American Citizen.
I did not, of course, realize all of these things on the instant of our meeting, yet I cannot refrain from setting them down now, lest in the reader’s mind there should exist for a moment a misconception of this man to whom I owe all the best that I can ever give.
He came forward and took my hand heartily.
“Set down,” he commanded, “and tell us all about it.”
“Mr. Gale,” I began, “I have been admiring your yacht from the outside, and I came on board to learn more about her purpose—how you came to build her, what you intend to do with her, her dimensions, and so on.”
I was sparring for an opening, you see, and then he had taken me for a reporter.
“What paper you on?”
I was unprepared for this and it came near being a knockout. I rallied, however, to the truth.