“It's the proper thing—eh?” said Jerningham, with a sort of head-waiter deference that made the reporter stare in surprise. “I am glad you told me that.”
“Oh yes. It is no longer good form to get load—er—intoxicated. It's one of the few good things we've got from England—tea-drinking,” the reporter said. “And, Mr. Jerningham, to get back to our subject, just how did you happen to go to the Klondike?”
“It began in New York,” said Jerningham, and drew his lips together. It was clearly not a pleasant memory.
“It did?” You could tell that J. Willoughby was grateful. “Well, well! And—” He frowned as though a date had escaped him. He really suggested time to the miner, for Jerningham volunteered: “When I was twelve years old.”
“That's about twenty years ago,” ventured the reporter in the affirmative tone of voice that inevitably elicits contradiction and the exact figures from the victim.
“Thirty-two years ago, sir.”
“Well, well! And—How did you say it began?” The reporter put his hand to his ear to show that his hardness of hearing had prevented him from getting Jerningham's previous answer to the same question.
“My father!” Mr. Jemingham nodded twice, to show that those two words told the whole story.
“Ah, yes! And then?” The reporter looked as if instant death Would follow the non-receipt of information; and Jerningham, as though against a lifelong determination to be silent, spoke—and frowned as he spoke:
“My father! He was a coachman in the employ of old David Soulett, who was the son of Walter and the father of Richard and David the third, and of Madge, who married the Duke of Peterborough. Old David Soulett—the second, he was—was my father's employer. My father was English. He came to New York when he was eighteen. He went straight into the Souletts' stable, became head coachman, and lived with the family for fifty years. They pensioned him off. I grew up with the boys—called one another by our first names. Do you get that?—by our first names!”