“We will have the dinner, then,” said He of Tupelo, “on next Saturday. You can tell Chamberlin; and I’ll see to the guests.”
“How many?” said Chamberlin’s steward, when he received the orders of Jim Britt.
The coming railway magnate looked at the Statesman from Tupelo.
“Say fifty,” remarked the Statesman from Tupelo.
Jim Britt was delighted. He would have liked sixty guests better, or if one might, one hundred; but fifty was a fair start. There could come other dinners, for the future holds a deal of room. In time Jim Britt might dine a full moiety of Congress. The dinner was fixed; the menu left to the steward’s ingenuity and taste; and now when the situation was thus relaid, and Saturday distant but two days, Jim Britt himself called for an apartment at Chamberlin’s, sent for his one trunk, and established himself on the scene of coming dinner action to have instant advantage of whatever offered that might be twisted to affect his lead-mine road.
The long tables for Jim Britt’s dinner were spread in a dining room upstairs. There were fifty covers, and room for twenty more should twenty come. The apartment itself was a jungle of tropical plants, and the ground plan of the feast laid on a scale of bill-threatening magnificence.
This was but right. For when the steward would have consulted the exultant Jim Britt whose florid imaginings had quite carried him off his feet, that gentleman said simply:
“Make the play with the bridle off! Don’t pinch down for a chip.”
Thereupon the steward cast aside restraint and wandered forth upon that dinner with a heart care-free and unrestrained. He would make of it a moment of terrapin and canvas-back and burgundy which time should date from and folk remember for long to the Chamberlin praise.
Saturday arrived, and throughout the afternoon Jim Britt, by grace of the good steward, who had a pride of his work and loved applause, teetered in and out of the dining room and with dancing eye and mouth ajar gave rein to admiration. It would be a mighty dinner; it would land his bill in his successful hands, and make, besides, a story to amaze the folk of Last Chance to a standstill. These be not our words; rather they flowed as the advance jubilations of Jim Britt.