CHAPTER III.
Mr. Pagebrook Eats his Breakfast.
Robert Pagebrook had never seen his cousin, and yet they were not altogether strangers to each other. Robert's father and William Barksdale's mother were brother and sister, and Shirley, the old Virginian homestead, which had been in the family for nearly two centuries, had passed to young Barksdale's mother by the voluntary act of Robert's father when, upon coming of age, he had gone west to try his fortune in a busier world than that of the Old Dominion. The two boys, William and Robert, had corresponded quite regularly in boyhood and quite irregularly after they grew up, and so they knew each other pretty well, though, as I have said, they had never met.
"I am glad, very glad to see you, William," said Robert as he grasped his cousin's hand.
"Now don't, I beg of you. Call me Billy, or Will, or anything else you choose, old fellow, but don't call me William, whatever you do. Nobody ever did but father, and he never did except of mornings when I wouldn't get up. Then he'd sing out 'Will-yum' with a sort of a horsewhip snap at the end of it. 'William' always reminds me of disturbed slumbers. Call me Billy, and I'll call you Bob. I'll do that anyhow, so you might as well fall into familiar ways. But come, tell me how you are and all about yourself. You haven't written to me since the flood; forgot to receive my last letter I suppose."
"Probably I did. I have been forgetting a good many things. But I hope I have not kept you too long from your breakfast, and especially that I have not made you 'as cross as a twenty dollar bank-note.' Pray tell me what you meant by that figure of speech, will you not? I am curious to know where you got it and why."
"Ha! ha!" laughed Billy. "You'll have a lively time of it if you mean to unravel all my metaphors. Let me see. I must have referred to the big X's they print on the bank bills, or something of that sort. But let's go to breakfast at once. I'm as hungry as a village editor. We can talk over a beefsteak, or you can at least. I mean to be as still as a mill-pond of a cloudy night while you tell me all about yourself."
And over their breakfast they talked. But in telling his story, while he remembered to mention all the details of his situation losing and his situation getting, Mr. Robert somehow forgot to say anything about his other disappointment. He soon learned to know and to like his cousin, and, which was more to the purpose, he began to enjoy him right heartily, in his own way, bantering him on his queer uses of English, half in sport, half in earnest, until the Virginian declared that they had grown as familiar with each other "as a pair of Irishmen at a wake."
"I suppose you're off at once for your new place, a'n't you? This is September," said Billy after his cousin had finished so much of his story as he cared to reveal.