“It's a real world we are in, after all!” he sighed. “Somehow or other, I thought—I thought we'd escaped.”
CHAPTER VIII. BACK TO CIVILIZATION
Pritchard, trim and neat, a New Yorker from the careful arrangement of his tie to the tips of his patent boots, gazed with something like amazement at the man whom he had come to meet at the Grand Central Station. Tavernake looked, indeed, like some splendid bushman whose life has been spent in the kingdom of the winds and the sun and the rain. He was inches broader round the chest, and carried himself with a new freedom. His face was bronzed right down to the neck. His beard was fullgrown, his clothes travel-stained and worn. He seemed like a breath of real life in the great New York depot, surrounded by streams of black-coated, pale-cheeked men.
Pritchard laughed softly as he passed his arm through his friend's.
“Come, my Briton,” he said, “my primitive man, I have rooms for you in a hotel close here. A bath and a mint julep, then I'll take you to a tailor's. What about the big country? It's better than your salt marshes, eh? Better than your little fishing village? Better than building boats?”
“You know it,” Tavernake answered. “I feel as though I'd been drawing in life for month after month. Have I got to wear boots like yours—patent?”
“Got to be done,” Pritchard declared.
“And the hat—oh, my Heavens!” Tavernake groaned. “I'll never become civilized again.”
“We'll see,” Pritchard laughed. “Say, Tavernake, it was a great trip of ours. Everything's turning out marvelously. The oil and the copper are big, man—big, I tell you. I reckon your five thousand dollars will be well on the way to half a million. I'm pretty near there myself.”