At the club I found that Mr. Norcross had an invited guest—Major Kendrick. For a week or two Mrs. Sheila had been visiting at the State capital, and the major's wife and Maisie Ann were with her. So the good old major was sort of unattached, and glad enough, I took it, to be a guest at anybody's table.
For a while the table talk—in which, of course, Jimmie Dodds hadn't any part whatever—circled around the late landslide election, and what Governor Burrell's party would do, now that it had the say-so. But by and by it got around to the railroad situation.
"You're putting up a mighty good fight, Graham, my son, but it isn't over yet—not by a jugful, suh"—this isn't just the way the major said it, but it's as near as I can come to his soft Southern drawl with the smothered "r's." "I've known Misteh Rufus Hatch for a good many yeahs, and he has the perseve'ance of the ve'y devil. With all that has been done, you must neveh forget, for a single hou'uh, that youh admirable reform structchuh stands, as yet, upon the life of a single man. Don't lose sight of that, Graham."
The boss looked up kind of curiously.
"You and Sheila seem to think that that point needs emphasizing more than any other," he commented.
The major's fine old eyes twinkled gravely.
"You are mighty safe in payin' strict attention to whatever the little gyerl tells you, Graham, my boy," he asserted. "She has a way of gettin' at the heart of things that puts us meah men to shame—she has, for a fact, suh."
"She has been very helpful to me," the boss put in, with his eyes in his plate. "In fact, I may say that she has herself suggested a good many of the moves in the railroad game. It's marvelous, and I can't understand how she can do it."
They went on for a while, singing Mrs. Sheila's praises over in a good many different ways, and I thought, wherever she might happen to be just then, her pretty little ears ought to be burning good and hard. To hear them talk you would have thought she was another Portia-person, and then some.
The dinner wore itself out after a while, and when the waiter brought the cigars, the boss was looking at his watch.