He had jumped down on the inner side of the office, then turned anew to the window, as if with a sudden thought.
"That fellow, Captain Ollory—keen to get away—never saw a man so rattled! Here in the office last night they had it out—one of them had to stay. He wouldn't—he'd have walked to New York first—said so—perfectly wild!"
Jardine looked for a moment as if he had beheld a Gorgon's face—his own seemed petrified.
"Then that manager—that rascal Lloyd is here yet?" he asked.
The clerk seemed disconcerted.
"Hard phrase, Mr. Jardine." Then he hesitated as if he thought he had said too much. It was no part of his duty as clerk of the Avoca House of Colbury to censor the guests' criticism of each other. "Poor business, but no man could behave more fairly. Lloyd wanted to go, but gave up the preference. Ollory seemed possessed to get away—Haxon, I should say. And there was not money enough for both."
Jardine could hardly control his irritation, the revulsion was so great. He had just been liberated from all his fears and anxieties to find himself suddenly enmeshed anew. It mattered little indeed that the foolish, sordid, futile paraphernalia of the fair had been removed, if the point of danger in divers interpretations, the man himself, remained. As he stood by the window, frowning down in deep absorption at the floor, silent, forbidding of aspect, cold and formal as always, the clerk resumed, somewhat at a loss.
"Lloyd, too, seemed frantic to be off," he said. "He could hardly resign himself."
He laughed a little at the forlorn plight; it had to him its ludicrous suggestions. "'Sent for, but couldn't go,'" he quoted gaily.
Jardine made no answer; he was reflecting that both men had doubtless the best of reasons for quitting the country; he hardly questioned that they were amenable to the Federal law in some measure for conspiring with the distillers for the sale of illicit liquor, and reciprocally profiting thereby through the enterprise of the street fair. The manager was obviously the responsible individual, the principal, and his apprehension would rebound with all its conspicuous derogations upon the personnel of Jardine's own select party. Since one must needs remain, it was a thousand pities that that one could not have been the innocuous Captain Ollory.