“Key-aunty.” Shanley screwed up his face. “What the devil is key-aunty?”
“Ver’ good wine from Italia,” said the beaming padrone.
“It is, is it? Well, it’s against the rules,” asserted Shanley with conviction. “It’s against the rules. McCann’u’d skin you alive. He would. Where’d you get it? What’s up, eh? It’s against the rules. I’m in charge.”
Pietro explained. It was his birthday. It was very bad weather. For the rest of the afternoon there would be no work. They would celebrate the birthday, Meester McCann had taken the train. As for the wine—Pietro shrugged his shoulders—his people adored wine. Unless they were very poor his people would have a little wine in their packs, perhaps. He was not quite sure where they had got it, but it was very thoughtful of them to remember his birthday. Each had presented him with a little wine. This bottle was an expression of their very great good estime of Meester Shanley. Perhaps, later, Meester Shanley would come himself to the shack.
“It’s against the rules,” blinked Shanley. “McCann ‘u’d skin you alive. Maybe I’ll drop in by and by. You can leave the bottle.”
Pietro bobbed, grinned delightedly, handed over the bottle, and backed out into the storm.
Shanley, still blinking, placed the bottle on the table, and gazed at it thoughtfully for a few minutes—and his thoughts were of Carleton.
“If ‘twere whisky,” said he, “I’d have no part of it, not a drop, not even a smell. I would not. I would not touch it. But as it is——” Shanley uncorked the bottle.
Not at all. One does not get drunk on a bottle of Chianti wine. A single bottle of Chianti wine is very little. That is the trouble—it is very little. After three weeks of abstinence it is very little indeed—so little that it is positively tantalizing.
The afternoon waned rapidly—and so did the Chianti. Outside, the storm instead of abating grew worse—the thunder racketing through the mountains, the lightning cutting jagged streaks in the black sky, the rain coming down in sheets that set the culverts and sluiceways running full. It was settling down for a bad night in the mountains, which, in the Rockies, is not a thing to be ignored. “’tis no wonder McCann found it lonely,” muttered Shanley, as he squeezed the last drop from the bottle. “‘Tis very lonely, indeed”—he held the bottle upside down to make sure that it was thoroughly drained—“most uncommon lonely. It is that. Maybe those Eyetalians ‘ll be thinkin’ I’m stuck up, perhaps—which I am not. It’s a queer name the stuff has, though it’s against the rules, an’ I can’t get my tongue around it, but I’ve tasted worse. For the sake of courtesy I’ll look in on the birthday party.”