“Next (and this is of more importance to me, and perhaps less to you), I am going into a scheme here which promises to leave me stony broke before I shall have pulled half-way through the experimental stage, and will possibly bankrupt even the Carfax strong box when it fairly gets its second wind. I may have to sell you some stock, later on, and to that end I’ll be glad if you’ll keep in touch—so that you may be ‘touched’—or at least keep yourself within reach of a wire.
“This is all I’m going to write, for the time being, except to say that I’ve thought of you about five times a minute during the past week, and have tried to picture you in Coalville, hesitating between suicide and a lingering death from disgust. Come down and try it. I’ll go bail it will give you an entirely new set of sensations. What do you say?”
The second letter was to Miss Elizabeth Wardwell, and it was a masterpiece in its way—the way of a man who writes as he would talk, and who talks when he would much better hold his tongue.
“The adventures began to-day,” so ran the words of unwisdom. “While I was clambering around on the mountain above the Ocoee opening, zip! came a bullet—yes, an indubitable leaden bullet fired from a gun—near enough to make me dodge. What will you think of me when I write it down in muddy black ink on white paper that I hid behind a tree! I did, you know, and immediately had plenty of reasons for being thankful that the tree was big enough to cover me, and thick enough through to stop a rifle-bullet.
“For fifteen minutes, or such a matter—though it seemed a moderately long lifetime—my assassin kept busy with the sharpshooting, and I could feel myself growing smaller with every fresh spat of a bullet into my tree. What did I think? I thought of you, my dear Elizabeth, and wondered if you’d keep your promise to marry me in accordance with the terms of Uncle Byrd’s will if I should be obliged to kill a man. Would you?
“When it was all over, my assassins—it turned out that there was a bunch of them—proved to be a party of school-teachers from Highmount College shooting at a mark, which the same—though I hadn’t seen it, and didn’t remotely suspect its existence—was affixed to the farther side of my tree. There were five people in the party; three attractive young women, a French lady of uncertain age, and a middle-aged professor in spectacles doing escort duty. Of course, there were explanations and apologies all around: I had slipped out, cocked revolver in hand, with a sort of ‘Now I’ll get you!’ expression on my face, I suppose.
“They were all very kind to me, especially the young woman who had been doing the actual shooting. I wish you could hear her laugh. It is the sweetest thing in Tennessee. She has the soft Southern voice, and a face that can be perfectly wooden one minute and a whole insurrectionary passion-stirring volume in the next. No, Miss Wardwell, I didn’t make love to her. How could I, with all the others standing about and looking on and listening in?
“I’m to make myself free of the college, they say, and perhaps I shall—later on. Please don’t lift those matchless eyebrows of yours and ask if I’m not going to wait at least until I have met these people properly. If you could see my present surroundings, and realize for one little instant what an elemental ruffian these same surroundings are likely to make of me, you’d urge me to go.
“Please write often. You can’t imagine how I hang upon the arrival of your letters—how much they mean to me.”