Madge began to speak, but was interrupted by a smart hand-clapping at the door of the tent, and a male voice boomed:
“Good! Fine! Give us the other barrel! I don’t know who you are, but you’re there with the goods!”
“Why, Jack! Where did you come from?” cried Madge, as the flaps were parted and a good-looking, brown-haired young man stood revealed in a gray Norfolk suit and shiny puttees, with a leather quirt hanging by a thong from his wrist.
“Hello, Madge! Hello, Ma Mundy! How’s the old slide coming down?”
Smiling genially and confidently, the young man stepped into the room and shook hands with Mrs. Mundy and Madge. Then, with an amused twinkle in his fine brown eyes, he turned and surveyed the young astronomer, who had risen from his seat.
“Joshua,” said Madge, “this is Mr. Jack Montgomery. Jack—Mr. Joshua Cole, the hero of the day, the expert slide-stopper and adviser of world-famous engineers—Cole of Spyglass Mountain!”
CHAPTER XXIV
WATER AT RAGTOWN
JACK MONTGOMERY proved himself to be an affable young man, admittedly wise in the ways of the world, distinctly of the earth, earthy. Joshua inferred from his conversation that the contracting firm of which his father was the head was struggling along bravely without meddlesome advice from him. He spent a great deal of his time out of the mountains, and had much to say about recent plays, repeated many golf-links stories, and claimed that if he hadn’t returned to the mountains when he did he would have danced his head off. When in the mountains he rode about on horseback from camp to camp, “kidding” his friends, and visiting Shanty Madge. He was older than Joshua. He had been graduated from an Eastern college, and considered the achievement sufficient laurels on which to rest.
There were two distinct reasons why Joshua Cole did not like him: He was insincere, and he thought himself in love with Shanty Madge. Montgomery laughed at Joshua’s theory of life on Mars, and though it was plain that he recognized in the young astronomer a man with the capacity for deep thinking, he treated him with a sort of polite tolerance which Joshua found hard to bear.
Montgomery considered himself a modern gentleman. Joshua Cole was the scion of a long and illustrious line of gentlemen. With no social training whatever beyond what his mother had given him before he was sent to the House of Refuge, the instinct with which Joshua had been endowed at birth gave him an air which convinced others that he was a man of culture. Montgomery was patently puzzled at this, especially after he learned that Joshua had been a hammerman for Demarest, Spruce and Tillou until he had stopped the slide.