"Well, I went yesterday morning and returned late last night. Do you know, it's positively marvelous!"
"Which—the six lots, the boom, or the celerity of your movements?" she asked, with a simulation of the deepest interest.
"All three, if you please; but I meant the miraculous revival of things along the Trans-Western. But that is neither here nor there—"
"I think it is very much here and there," she interrupted.
"I see you don't want me to tell the truth—the whole truth; but I am determined. The first man I met after dinner was Hunnicott, and when I had made him my broker in the real estate affair we fell to talking about the railroad steal. Speaking of MacFarlane's continued absence, Hunnicott said, jokingly, that it was a pity we couldn't go back to the methods of a few hundred years ago and hire the Hot Springs doctor to 'obliterate' him. The word stuck in my mind, and I broke away and took the train chiefly to have a chance to think out the new line. In the smoking-room of the sleeper I found—whom, do you suppose?"
"Oh, I don't know: Judge MacFarlane, perhaps, coming back to give you a chance to poison him at short range?"
"No; it was Marston."
"And he talked so long and so fast that you couldn't get here in time for dinner this evening? That would be the most picturesque of the little fictions you spoke of."
Kent laughed.
"For the first hour he wouldn't talk at all; just sat there wooden-faced, smoking vile little cigars that made me think I was getting hay-fever. But I wouldn't give up; and after I had worn out all the commonplaces I began on the Trans-Western muddle. At that he woke up all at once, and before I knew it he was giving me an expert legal opinion on the case; meaty and sound and judicial. Miss Van Brock, that man is a lawyer, and an exceedingly able one, at that."