Into this happy Arcady—this land of the heart’s desire and hope’s fruition—softly prowled the onion-skinner. Like an evil wind upon a flowery lea, he crept out of the north over the wide waters. He landed at the beach with a boat on the still morning of a day that had promised to be bright and fair. Eveless though this garden was, Satan had entered.
Horatius T. Bascom was a man of perhaps forty-five. His closely cropped moustache was slightly gray. Under it was a mouth like a slit in a letter-box. It seemed to have a certain steel-trap quality that savored of acquirement but not disbursement. His eyes had a shrewd, greedy expression, and, when he frowned, small wrinkles formed between them that somehow suggested the lines of the dollar sign—that sordid mark that disfigures great characters and destroys small ones.
He was the type of man who signs his business letters with a rubber stamp facsimile signature, to facilitate legal evasion in the future. Such letters, insulting to the recipient, are also often stamped with a small inscription to the effect that they were “dictated, but not read” by the cautious sender. Altogether his personality was such as to prompt one to protect his watch pocket with one hand and his scarf pin with the other while talking with him.
“Hello, boys!” he called out glibly, as he walked up to our group. “You seem quite cosy around here. Have some cigars.” He produced a handful and passed them around. We all happened to be smoking, and Sipes was the only one who accepted the proffered weed. He put it in his pocket, with the remark that he would “smoke it some other time”—a phrase that the giver always inwardly resents, but the wily old man may have intended it to offend.
We were not particularly enthusiastic over his descent into our little circle.
“You look pretty cosy yerself,” said Sipes; “how much did you git fer that big jool you gouged us out of?”
“I sold it at a loss. It had a small imperfection that I didn’t notice when I bought it. You certainly got the best of that bargain.”
“They wasn’t no imperfection in yer bunch o’ bunk w’en you was buyin’ it.”
We kept rather quiet and let our caller lead the conversation, hoping that the object of his visit would finally unravel from the tangle of his small talk. Coonie sniffed around him a few times, and, with unerring instinct, retreated under the house.
The atmosphere of hostility that enveloped his coming gradually dissipated during the forenoon, and he was invited to join us when Narcissus announced lunch.