Shouts of laughter added to the youth's confusion. Sherman leaned far across the table and advised him in a hoarse whisper:
"Buy a dollar Ingersoll, Willy. It floats!"
"Well, you might give him one of yours, father," Kitty put in, in quick defense. "Anybody who'd carry two watches around——"
"Two watches?" Lady Crandall was interested.
Henry J. beamed expansively, pulled away his napkin, and proudly lifted from each waistcoat pocket a ponderous watch, linked by the thick chain passing through a buttonhole.
"This one"—he raised the right-hand time-piece—"tells the time of the place I happen to be in—changed it so often I guess the works'll never be the same again. But this one is my pet. Here's Kewanee time—not touched since we pulled out of the C., B. & Q. station on the twentieth of last May." He turned the face around for the others to read. "Just three in the afternoon there now. Old Ed Porter's got the Daily Enterprise out on the street, and he's tilted back in his office chair, readin' the Chicago Tribune that's just got in on the two-five train. The boys at the bank are goin' out to the country club for golf—young Pete Andrews wearin' the knickerbockers his wife cut down from his old overcoat; sort of a horse-blanket pattern, you might say. The town's just dozin' in the afternoon sun and—and not givin' a hang whether Henry J. Sherman and family gets back or not."
"You're an old dear!" Lady Crandall bubbled. "Some day Kewanee will erect a statue to you."
The talk turned to art, and the man from Kewanee even had the stolid general wiping the tears from his eyes by his description and criticism of some of the masters his wife had trotted him around to admire.
"Willy, you'll be interested to know we got a painter in Kewanee now," Henry J. cried. "'Member young Frank Coales—old Henry Coales' son? Well, he turned out to be an artist. Too bad, too; his folks was fine people. But Frank was awfully headstrong about art. Painted a war picture about as big as that wall there. Couldn't find a buyer right away, so he turned it over to Tim Burns, who keeps the saloon on Main Street. Been busy ever since, sorta taking it out in trade, you might say."
Table talk was running at a gay rate when Mrs. Sherman, who had sent frequent searching glances at Captain Woodhouse over the nodding buds of the flower piece in the center of the board, suddenly broke out: