“Which one?”
He passed over my slur. “Women.”
“Kitty?”
“That’s what I meant. He’s sorry now; wishes he’d married her.”
“Humph! If you don’t make your place pay, what are you doing?”
His face took on an expression of intense earnestness.
“Breeding the Spreckles. Remember them, don’t you? I had terrible work at first; couldn’t make the strain permanent; in the third and fourth generations it was always going back to the original crossings. Well, now I’ve done it. Come and look at ’em.”
The old bond was established. His enthusiasm and my response to it swept aside the misunderstandings of years. I seemed a little boy, following him into a retreat of impossible glamour. He showed me a pen of magnificent slate-blue fowls; they had the extra toe of the Dorking, the drooping comb of the Leghorn, yellow legs of the Game, and full plump body of the Plymouth Rock. He enumerated their merits, insisted that I should guess what mixings of blood had gone to their making, and was delighted when he found I had not forgotten the old knowledge he had taught me. He was going to enter them at the shows this year, but he was worried over one point—what name should he call them?
“But you’ve given them their name.”
“I know, I know, old chap; but my conscience troubles me. Yer see, I shouldn’t have been able to do it if it hadn’t been for Rapson. I think I ought to call ’em the Rapsons.”