Having nothing else to do, Blount went to bed, but sleep came reluctantly. Life is said to be full of paper walls thinly dividing the commonplace from the amazing; and he decided that he had surely burst through one of them when he had given place to the vagrant impulse prompting him to go horseback-riding when he should have gone comfortably to bed in his sleeper to wait for the track-clearing.
Whither had a curiously bizarre fate led him? Where was "Wartrace Hall," and who was "Mahsteh Majah"? Who was the winsome little lady who looked as if she might be twenty, and had all the wit and wisdom of the ages at her tongue's end—who had held him so nearly spellbound over the teacups that he had entirely lost sight of everything but his hospitable welcome?
These and kindred speculations kept him awake for a long time after the door had closed behind the ancient negro; and he was just dropping off into his first loss of consciousness when the familiar purring of a motor-car aroused him. There was a window at his bed's head, and he reached over and drew the curtain. The view gave upon the avenue of cottonwoods and the circular carriage approach. A touring-car, with its powerful head-lights paling the white radiance of the moon, was drawn up at the steps, and he had a glimpse of a big man, swathed from head to heel in a dust-coat, descending from the tonneau.
"I suppose that will be 'Mahsteh Majah,'" he mused sleepily. "That's why the little lady was sitting up so late—she was waiting for him." Then to the thronging queries threatening to return and keep him awake: "Scat!—go away! call it a pipe-dream and let me go to sleep!"
V
AT WARTRACE HALL
In his most imaginative moments, Evan Blount had never prefigured a home-coming to coincide in any detail of it with the reality.
When he opened his eyes on the morning following the night of singular adventures, the sun was shining brightly in at the bed's-head window, a cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and his father, a little heavier, a little grayer, but with the same ruggedly strong face and kindly eyes, was standing at his bedside.