"You're quite right, sir. You'd see that when lots of other men wouldn't. As a matter of tact, this job or any other job would be new to me. I had some money—but the war's got me stone-broke. I lived in France till just lately.
"If you lived in France, why ain't you fightin'?"
Not having the same dread of inventing a tale as with Boyd Averill, I said, boldly:
"I did fight, till they discharged me. Got a blow on the head, and wasn't any good after that. I was with the French army because my people lived over there. When I got out of it, there was no provision made for me, of course. My father and mother had died, my father's business had been smashed to pieces—"
"What was he?"
Luckily my imagination didn't fail me.
"An artist. He was just beginning to make a hit. I was to have been"—I sought for the most credible possibility—"an architect. I was to have studied at the Beaux Arts, that's the big school for architects in Paris; but of course all that was knocked on the head when my father died, and so I sailed for New York."
"Haven't you got no relations here?"
I remembered that Lydia Blair thought she might have seen me in Salt Lake City, but I was afraid of the Mormon connotation. "My family used to live in—in California; but they're all scattered, and we'd been in Europe for so many years—"
"Amur'cans should live in God's country—"