He was larger, softer, more slovenly than ever, but he was so undeniably the perfect and inimitable Baxter, that Ordway felt his heart go out to him in a rush of sentiment. "Oh, Baxter, how is it possible that I've lived without you?" he asked.
"I don't know, Smith, but it's a plain fact that after my wife—and that's nature—there ain't anybody goin' that I set so much store by. Why, when I was in Botetourt last spring, I went so far as to put my right foot on your bottom step, but, somehow, the left never picked up the courage to follow it."
"Do you dare to tell me that you've been to Botetourt?" demanded Ordway with indignation.
"Well, I could have stood the house you live it, though it kind of took my breath away," replied Baxter, with an embarrassed and guilty air, "but when it came to facing that fellow at the door, then my courage gave out and I bolted. I studied him a long while, thinking I might get my eyes used to the sight of him, but it did no good. I declar', Smith, I could no more have put a word to him than I could to the undertaker at my own funeral. Bless my soul, suh, poor Mr. Beverly, when he was alive, didn't hold a tallow candle to that man."
"You might have laid in wait for me in the street, then, that would have been only fair."
"But how did I know, Smith, that you wan't livin' up to the man at your door?"
"It wouldn't have taken you long to find out that I wasn't. So poor Mr. Beverly is dead and buried, then, is he?"
Baxter's face adopted instantly a funereal gloom, and his voice, when he spoke, held a quaver of regret.
"There wasn't a finer gentleman on earth than Mr. Beverly," he said, "and he would have given me his last blessed cent if he'd ever had one to give. I've lost a friend, Smith, there's no doubt of that, I've lost a friend. And poor Mrs. Brooke, too," he added sadly. "Many and many is the time I've heard Mr. Beverly grieven' over the way she worked. 'If things had only come out as I planned them, Baxter,' he'd say to me, 'my wife should never have raised her finger except to lift food to her lips.'"
"And yet I've seen him send her downstairs a dozen times a day to make him a lemonade," observed Ordway cynically.