"Oh, you wouldn't have found me there. I have not been at Miss Hines' for nearly ten months."
"Ah, I see: graduated in all the arts and sciences and music and etceteras," remarks Kruger, his eyes, piercing, though gray, looking over the exquisite girl before him, and growing red and inflamed with some potent emotion, as he concludes rather huskily: "I might have seen you have left school. You have developed as be-uti-fu-l-ly as one of the lambs of Zion," though, even as he says this, Lot Kruger seems to repress himself and from this time on to keep a tight rein upon some peculiarity that is strong within him.
"But papa, papa; you haven't told me of him," exclaims the young lady, who seems little interested in Mr. Kruger's remarks, and only intent upon information as to her absent loved one, for as she speaks of her father, the girl's voice grows soft, and tender tears come into her eyes.
"Oh, your dad's all right, Sissy," goes on Kruger, in his easy Western way. "You needn't water his grave yit. Reckon your pap has had too much railroad and mine on his hands to be able to even eat for the last month. I know, for I am interested in the mine a leetle." Then he tells her quite shortly that her father has so many big enterprises beyond the Rockies that he is an "uncommon busy man."
As he does so, Erma is gazing at him and thinking what an extraordinary individual her father has found for a partner, beyond the Rocky Mountains; for Lot Kruger, as he stands before her, would be a striking figure, even in Western America, which produces curious types and more curious individuals.
He stands six feet two in his stockings, and has proportionate shoulders and limbs, which are covered with ample black broadcloth, after the Sunday-best-clothes Southern and Western fashion of the year 1871; the coat of Prince Albert style, open and unbuttoned and falling below the knees of his trousers, that are cut in what was then called the "peg-top" pattern; his shirt front as ample as his coat is large, crumpled and protruding from out a low-cut vest and adorned by a splash or two of tobacco juice; his hat a stove-pipe, its plush rumpled and brushed against the grain,—all make him a man of mark. From off his broad shoulders rises a neck strong as that of a buffalo, and supporting a massive head covered with long red hair, and a face from the nose up that of a good-natured Newfoundland, but below the jaws and teeth of a bull-dog; the eyes gray as a grizzly's, and steely when in anger; while, thrown over all this is a kind of indescribable, semi-Puritanical, semi-theological air that makes one wonder, "Is this man a backwoods preacher turned mining speculator, or a reformed cowboy made into a missionary?"
At present, as he gazes at Miss Travenion, Lot Kruger's face is nearly all that of the Newfoundland dog; and Erma, though she thinks him a curious associate for her father, with his Eastern breeding and education and New York manners, still considers Mr. Kruger, though crude, very good-natured and rather meek.
Oh, these judgments of women, whose instinct never mistakes character,—where one out of ten women guesses the villain at sight and brags of it forever, the other nine mistaken sisters are swindled and perchance undone, and say nothing about woman's unfailing intuition, but still keep on guessing wrong until the crack of doom.
As Erma gazes on Kruger he continues: "Bound for a summer jaunt, I guess,—some watering place where the boys and gals will have a high time—Nar-regani-set or Newport or Sarietogy, Miss Ermie. Your dad is very liberal to you, I understand,—puts up the greenbacks in wads."
"My father is generosity itself to me," returns Miss Travenion rather haughtily, for she is by no means pleased with the freedom of Mr. Kruger's remarks. "But the Newport season is finished, and I have accepted Mrs. Ogden Livingston's invitation to be one of her party. Under her charge I am going to take a run across the continent, and en route for California I shall drop in upon papa, and astonish and enrapture him."