"'Well, but my dear sir, you were lyin' in the middle of the road and might have been run over.'
"'It's none of your business where I lie,' he hollered back. 'I go to sleep where I damn please, sir. I consider it a very great liberty.'
"'I, beg your pardon, sir,' I said. 'I did not intend any trespass—' I was walkin' toward him now. I did not want him to shoot again.
"'That's sufficient, sir,' he said. 'No gentleman can do more. There's my hand, sir. Allow me, sir, to offer you a drink. If you will roll me over, you will find my flask in my coat-tail pocket.'
"Well, I rolled him over, took a drink, and then I brought the mare alongside, helped him in and drove him home to my house. He was a most delightful gentleman. Didn't leave my place until four o'clock in the mornin'. He lives about fifteen miles below me. He told me his name was Toffington. Do you happen to know him, Talbot?" said Gunning, turning to Billy.
"Toffington, Toffington," said Billy, dropping his eye-glasses with a movement of his eyebrows. He had listened to the story without the slightest comment. "No, Tom, unless he is one of those upper county men. There was a fellow I met in London last year—" (Billy pronounced it "larst yarh," to Oliver's infinite amusement) "with some such name as that. He and I went over to Kew Gardens with the Duke of—."
Gunning instantly turned around with an impatient gesture—nobody ever listened to one of Billy's London stories, they being the never-ending jokes around Kennedy Square—faced the General again, much to Oliver's regret, who would have loved above all things to hear Billy descant on his English experiences.
"Do you, General, know anybody named Toffington?" asked Tom.
"No, Gunning—but here comes Clayton, he knows everybody in the State that is worth knowing. What you have told me is most extraordinary—most extraordinary, Gunning. It only goes to show how necessary it is for every man to be prepared for emergencies of this kind. You should never go unarmed, sir. You had a very narrow escape—a very narrow escape, Gunning. Here, Clayton—come over here."
Oliver pulled his face into long lines. The picture of Gunning taking a drink with a man who a moment before had tried to blow the top of his head off, and the serious way in which the coterie about the table regarded the incident, so excited the boy's risibles that he would have laughed outright had not his eye rested on the Colonel walking toward him.