“Neighborly,” shouted Ford, fearing he was deaf.
“Yes,” said Enoch. “I recognize you perfectly—Mr.—Mr.—er——”
“Ford,” returned the other, the grin broadening, his outstretched hand seeking Enoch’s, the other fumbling in the pocket of his waistcoat for his business card. Both the card and the hand Enoch accepted in silence.
“Looks comfy and homelike enough here,” blurted out Ford, glancing around him. “I tell my wife, there’s nothin’ like——”
“Be seated,” intervened Enoch, waving his visitor to the armchair. “Well, Mr.—er—Ford, what can I do for you?” He snapped out an old gold watch attached to a chain of braided human hair, and stood regarding his visitor with an expression of haste and annoyance. “Forgive me if I am brief,” he added briskly, as Ford flung himself into the proffered chair, “but I was about to go out when you knocked—a club meeting which I must attend—an important meeting, sir.”
“Well, now, that’s too bad. Must go, eh? Thinks I, as I told my wife, you’d be in to-night, and we could have a good old talk together—seeing we was neighbors. Got to go, have you?” and Ford sank deeper into the armchair, stretching out his long legs before the fire. “Well, that’s right, never pays to be late—reminds me of that story about the feller who was runnin’ to catch the train for Chicago and met a red-headed girl and a white horse on the way—old man Degraw used to tell this up in Syracuse—I can hear him now.” Here he emitted a thin, reminiscent laugh—cut short by Enoch.
“You do not seem to comprehend, sir, that I am pressed for time,” interrupted Enoch testily, again snapping out his watch. This time he held its dial out for Ebner Ford’s inspection. “Eighteen minutes of nine now, Mr. Ford—our meeting is at nine.”
“Ain’t you a little fast?” remarked the latter, pulling out his own. “Funny how I got that watch,” Ford rattled on with an insistence that keyed Enoch’s nerves to the quick.
Enoch had been bothered with many of the inmates in his time, but Ford’s effrontery was new to him. The very ease with which he had settled himself in the proffered chair set the muscles of the bulldog jaw twitching. Forced as he had been to open his door to him, nothing but his innate sense of breeding had, he felt, allowed the man to cross his threshold. What he regretted most now was that he had asked him to be seated. Ford’s hail-fellow-well-met manner sent the hot blood in him tingling. Twice during the account of the remarkable history of the watch Enoch had tried to check him and failed; he might as well have tried to halt the street vender of a patent medicine, selling with both hands to a gullible crowd. Only when his visitor had changed the subject to a rapid-fire eulogy over the hospitality of the young men on the floor beneath, touching at length upon the party of the night before—the wisdom of Mrs. Ford—the price of rent in other towns—and the care he had always observed in giving his daughter the best education money could buy, including French and piano lessons, did Enoch manage to dam the torrent of his volubility with:
“Mr. Ford, you must consider our interview at an end, sir—I am late and must be going,” and with that he strode over to the bedroom closet for his coat and hat.