Ogilvie, leaning back, could inspect the face of the man beside him. Involuntarily, his expression had slightly changed at the name. Benson Flood was as well known to readers of the daily papers as Hecla or Klondike or Standard Oil, and stood for about the same thing—wealth, spectacular wealth. The name had heretofore interested John Ogilvie neither more nor less than any of the others; now, sitting beside its possessor, it carried a different and more personal significance. It seemed almost grotesquely unreal that an actual living person, a man to be met at a mountain crossroads, could calmly introduce himself as Benson Flood, and be as frankly and comfortably hungry as anyone else. These thoughts, however, took but an instant.
"Well, you've seen a bit of country, anyway," he replied, quite as if his mind were not busy on its separate line of speculation. Flood's face was not what he would have expected to find it. It had not lost its lean ruggedness, nor put on those fleshly signs of indulgence that are so apt to follow the early acquisition of great wealth. The well-cut mouth was very firm, and there was something of the idealist, the questioner, the seeker of high things, about the eyes and brow that Ogilvie found puzzling and interesting.
"Yes; and what a view there was from that crossroads up there! I wish I could transplant my Virginia farm to that mountain-top.
"A good many men have seen that view; the army retreated from Battlesburg along this old pike, you know."
"Ah, Battlesburg! I'm from the West, where history is not much more than we fellows have made it; it fairly stirs my blood to come across a place like Battlesburg, with its monuments, and its memories, and where Lincoln spoke, and all that. I'm going to run up there to-morrow, if the hotel people can set me on my way early enough."
"I'm afraid you'll have to trust me to do that," said Ogilvie. "There's my house, there where the light's in the front porch; and—I hope you won't think I've kidnapped you, but I'm going to keep you over night. The hotels aren't open at this time of year."
As the car stopped before the doctor's cottage, Flood turned to his host. "Oh, I say! That's mighty good of you! Won't I put you out? Isn't there some place I can go to?"
But Ogilvie laughed. "There is not, but I wouldn't tell you if there was! Why, Mr. Flood, I haven't talked to anyone from beyond the mountains for six months!"