“Oh, as to that I only helped him. He’d have been all right anyhow,” replied Greenoak. “And,” he added, “you won’t mind my reminding you of one agreement—that of that subject we have heard more than enough!”
“I agreed to nothing of the sort. It’s a subject of which we could not hear enough! Well, Greenoak, when your wanderings with the boy are over, come back home with him and make a good long stay at our place, though we have nothing more ferocious to shoot than pheasants and hares. Is that a promise?”
“Delighted, Sir Anson.”
The above conversation took place in the otherwise empty smoking-room of the Port Elizabeth Club. The old gentleman was returning to England that afternoon, incidentally by the same liner that had brought them out. It would be more comfortable, he reckoned, than returning by a strange boat, and the sooner Dick set off on his travels the better; a theory, by the way, which was held by Dick even more firmly than by his father. The said Dick now put in his appearance.
“Time, dad,” he said, comparing his watch with the mantelpiece clock. “The last launch, you know, and she won’t wait. So come along.”
“Good-bye again, Greenoak,” said Sir Anson, as the two men heartily gripped hands. “And don’t forget your promise.”
“Good-bye to you, Sir Anson. And I won’t.”
So Dick and his father betook themselves to the landing-place, and Harley Greenoak betook himself to lunch. With characteristic judgment he had divined that father and son would prefer to be alone together at the last, and so had refrained from seeing the old gentleman off to the ship. Now as he sat in the club dining-room he was thinking, and his thoughts, needless to say, ran upon the charge he had just undertaken. To that end he was rather glad there was nobody he knew in the room.
Needless to say, too, that after the episode off Danger Point, which might so nearly have ended in tragedy, the tendency now among his fellow-passengers was to make very much of a hero of Dick Selmes, and more especially did this hold good of the “fair” section thereof. It was as well, perhaps, decided Harley Greenoak, that only a day or two remained for the absorption of all this adulation. Towards himself the tendency was not so marked, for which he was unaffectedly glad. He had borne part in too many strange and perilous episodes in his time for one, more or less, to afflict him with “swelled head.” It was all in the day’s work.
Dick Selmes, of course, had plenty of invitations, and could have got through six months easily before he had run through them all. But not to this end had he been placed in charge of Harley Greenoak. The latter meant him to see something of the hard and adventurous life of the country, even of its perils, and this Dick could scarcely effect by pleasant stays at this or that comfortable stock farm, with sport made easy; perchance, too, flirting like the mischief with this or that pretty daughter of his host pro tem. All of which Greenoak had put to him square and straight, and Dick Selmes had whole-heartedly agreed.