Gwynne, on the following day, was making a late toilet, and in anything but a good-humor, for he had grown accustomed to early rising, when he received a note from Isabel.
It ran:
Dear Partner,—Anabel has just told me over the telephone that Tom and Mr. Leslie and two other representative citizens are going out to see you this afternoon. I have the ghost of an idea that a friendly call is not their only object. Do be plastic—it is better in the beginning—until you know your ground. Above all, don't be too English. You are vastly improved, but you have lapses.
I send you your share of the ducks. Mariana's roasting will explain our pride in one of the two most native of our products—the next time we go to San Francisco I'll take you to the market and we will sit in a grimy little balcony restaurant and you will be introduced to fried California oysters.
Please consider the marsh your own; and whenever you come, remember that you are to have breakfast or supper with me. Are you quite comfortable? If anything is wrong I will go over and interview Mariana and the Jap. Of course the latter will appropriate your cigarettes and books; he is probably a prince, and far from condescending to steal, he will take them as his right; and his hauteur may match your own at times. Moreover, he may decamp any morning without giving notice—Lafcadio Hearn dwells upon the impermanency of the Japanese, and we can all bear him out. But on the other hand the Jap will keep your house cleaner than any other sort of servant, and he can be both amiable and alert when he chooses. I merely warn you, for I know nothing of your present homme de chambre beyond the recommendation of my Chuma, who is amiable to the verge of imbecility. If he disappears, let me know at once, for I really want to make you comfortable and contented in what I know must seem to you little more than a beautiful wilderness peopled by ambitious barbarians. But wait till you know San Francisco!
Isabel.
Gwynne smiled at the form of address and the expressions of concern in his welfare; but he scowled twice over the admonition to be plastic and American.
"I'll be what I damn please," he announced, aloud, much to the surprise of Imura Kisaburo Hinomoto who entered at the moment with his shaving water.
Nevertheless, when his visitors arrived, late in the afternoon, his natural courtesy, and the reflection that he had not come to America to fail, induced him to receive the four with something like warmth, and to place his cigars and whiskey—he already knew better than to offer them tea—at their immediate disposal. They sat on the porch facing the mountain, and for a few moments the conversation was confined to the weather and the scenery, giving Gwynne an opportunity to observe his guests with some minuteness. Judge Leslie and young Colton he had already met, and he liked the former, a pleasant shrewd tactful man, who was one of the chief ornaments of the northern bar, and universally admitted to be "dead straight." So "straight," indeed, was he that his term of judgeship had been brief. He had been carried to the bench on an independent ticket, but the reform movement subsiding, he could obtain re-election only by bargaining with political bosses, and this he refused to do; but after the fashion of the country he retained his title. He had a loose hairy benignant face with a humorous but penetrating eye and the usual domelike brow. His body had grown unwieldy from years and lack of exercise, and his clothes were old-fashioned and, generally, dusty. He voted the Republican ticket and was not too well pleased with his son-in-law who was a red Democrat and rising daily in the good graces of the party bosses.
This young man who was sipping his plain soda and commenting on neither the scenery nor the weather, had inspired Gwynne with a certain interest and curiosity. He was thirty but looked little over twenty, and his large limpid blue eyes were as guileless as a child's. He had a long pale face with an indifferent complexion and the common American lantern jaw. His hair and brows and lashes were paler than straw, and his long lank figure was without either distinction or muscularity. Nevertheless, there was a curious suggestion of cynical power in his impassive face and lolling inches, and Gwynne had made up his mind that he would be useful as a study in politics.
Mr. Wheaton, one of the present "City Fathers," a position he had occupied with brief intermittences for many years, had hard china-blue eyes and a straight mouth, in a large square smoothly-shaven face. He had crossed the plains in the Fifties from the inhospitable State of Maine, sought fortune in the gold diggings with moderate success, avoided San Francisco with a farmer's dread of "sharpers," and drifting to the hamlet at the head of Rosewater Creek had opened a small store for general merchandise. Frugality and a shrewd knowledge of what men wanted and women thought they wanted had increased his capital so rapidly that in five years he had converted a wing of the store into a bank. To-day he was a power. His wife was the leader of Rosewater society and attended first nights in San Francisco.
Mr. Larkin T. Boutts was new to Gwynne, although his status was easily to be inferred from the constant references in the local press. He was a fat little man who sat habitually with a hand on either knee, which he clawed absently both in conversation and thought. Otherwise his attitude was one of extreme repose, even watchfulness. He was excessively neat, almost fashionable in his dress, which—Gwynne was to observe in the course of time—was invariably brown. He had a small pointed beard and a sharp direct dishonest eye. He was the leading hardware merchant of Rosewater and owned the hotel and the opera-house. His business methods had never been above criticism, and his politics drove the San Francisco correspondent, during legislative sittings, into a display of caustic virtue which gave the newspaper he represented just the necessary smack of reform and did not hurt its inspiration in the least. For Mr. Boutts was too sharp for the law, and all his sins were forgiven him on account of his genuine devotion to Rosewater. Far from battening on her, after the fashion of the San Francisco cormorant, he had never taken a dollar out of her that he had not returned a hundred-fold, and he was the author of much of her wealth.
This gentleman was the first to indicate that they had not driven out to Lumalitas to discuss the weather and the scenery.