A FLAG OF TRUCE.
CHAPTER XIII.
A FLAG OF TRUCE.
The younger man reached the bottom the sooner, and sitting down began to shy pebbles at a bowlder a few yards below, to see how far they would glance.
Bob came lumbering down the slope of loose stones, took a seat pretty near Len, and slowly drawing his knife from his pocket, opened it with great deliberation and began to whittle at a bit of spruce bark.
Nothing was said for some time, and neither took any notice of the other. Each was waiting for his opponent to begin. At last the eager disposition of the young Virginian, who never could bear to waste time in going about whatever he had to do, and who in consequence had often exemplified the maxim “more haste less speed,” overcame his reserve and broke the silence.
“Well, Bob,” he began in a careless manner, “I never expected to see you in as mean a scrape as this.”
If our embassador had studied over it for a week, he could not have made a remark which would better serve his purpose. Bob had long deemed himself a very wily old dog indeed. He had boasted of this to his associates more than once, and had assured them that they would see how, on this occasion, he would “argify and bamboozle that young cub of a Bushwick” until, figuratively speaking, he had tied him all up in a bundle and laid him away on a shelf in safe storage.
But Len’s cool remark, driving straight home to the very heart and spirit of all his pretensions, let the wind out of Old Bob’s behavior and arguments together. It angered him in an instant, and when a diplomat gets angry he loses his power. Instead of the soft words and sly reasoning by which he had hoped to fool his antagonist into opening his doors to the treachery which it was intended should follow; instead of the pretty speeches which Bob had carefully thought out and talked over, came furious retorts, bad language, and threats, to which Len listened with the utmost composure.
The substance of it all was, that Bob and his precious accomplices had jumped the mine, and yet they hadn’t jumped it, rightly speaking, because they had as much right there as anybody. The claim had been abandoned, and if anybody had gone to work at it why that was at their own risk, and they mustn’t complain when another man came along and took it away from the first party.