“Oh, lord,” groaned the manager, capitulating. “All right, Ling. I’ll speak to Mrs. Hardin to-morrow.”
Even that would not do. The two men made out that Mrs. Hardin was to invade his quarters that evening and teach the outraged Chinese how to cook prunes. That insult had caused the rebellion. “She come, I go.” It was a statement, not a threat. Rickard succumbed.
“All right, Ling. I’ll stop it.” With the dignity of an oriental prince, Ling pattered out of the tent. Rickard was puckering his lips at his secretary. “I’d rather take castor oil.”
“Take time!” laughed MacLean, Jr.
“I can’t do that,” Rickard’s reply was rueful. “I can’t take chances with Ling. More Hardin trouble, or my name’s not Casey. We’ll quit for to-day, Junior. If I’m to head her off, I’ll have to be moving some.”
A half-hour later, MacLean saw his chief leave his tent. He was in fresh linens; and MacLean noticed that he had a pin in his tie.
“I wouldn’t swap places with him this minute! She’ll be as mad as a wet hen!”
Heartily, Rickard, too, was disliking his errand. But there was no shirking it. Ling must be appeased. “And, already, they have enough reason to dislike me. And here comes this to make matters worse!
“It’s not their fault, it’s Hardin who’s inflaming them with his wrongs. Lord, what does the man want? Here was his precious scheme going to pot for lack of funds, and bad management, and he goes whining to Marshall for help, and now he’s sore because he got what he asked. He wants to be the high-muck-a-muck; he pretends it’s the valley salvation. If it were that, he’d be whistling, instead of kicking.”
Mrs. Hardin, from her bed by her screen window, saw him coming. She slipped into a semi-negligee of alternate rows of lace and swiss constructed for such possible emergencies. She did not make the mistake of smoothing her hair; her instinct told her that the fluffy disorder bore out the use of the negligee. She was sewing, in her ramada, when Rickard’s knock sounded on the screen door.