“Yes,” replied Mr. Devlin, “you’ll know Boldrick a long time before you find his limits. He is about the most curious character I ever knew, and does the most curious things. But straight—straight as a die, Mrs. Falchion!”
“I fancy that Mr. Boldrick and I would be very good friends indeed,” said Mrs. Falchion; “and I purpose visiting him again. It is quite probable that we shall find we have had mutual acquaintances.” She looked at Roscoe meaningly as she said this, but he was occupied with Ruth.
“You were not afraid?” Roscoe said to Ruth. “Was it not a strange sensation?”
“Frankly, at first I was a little afraid, because the cage swings on the cable, and it makes you uncomfortable. But I enjoyed it before we got to the end.”
Mrs. Falchion turned to Mr. Devlin. “I find plenty here to amuse me,” she said, “and I am glad I came. To-night I want to go up that cable and call on Mr. Boldrick again, and see the mills and the electric light, and hear your whistle, from up there. Then, of course, you must show us the mill working at night, and afterwards—may I ask it?—you must all come and have supper with me at the summer hotel.”
Ruth dropped her eyes. I saw she did not wish to go. Fortunately Mr. Devlin extricated her. “I’m afraid that will be impossible, Mrs. Falchion,” he said: “much obliged to you all the same. But I am going to be at the mill pretty near all night, and shouldn’t be able to go, and I don’t want Ruth to go without me.”
“Then it must be another time,” said Mrs. Falchion.
“Oh, whenever it’s convenient for Ruth, after a day or two, I’ll be ready and glad. But I tell you what: if you want to see something fine, you must go down as soon as possible to Sunburst. We live there, you know, not here at Viking. It’s funny, too, because, you see, there’s a feud between Viking and Sunburst—we are all river-men and mill-hands at Viking, and they’re all salmon-fishers and fruit-growers at Sunburst. By rights I ought to live here, but when I started I thought I’d build my mills at Sunburst, so I pitched my tent down there. My wife and the girls got attached to the place, and though the mills were built at Viking, and I made all my money up here, I live at Sunburst and spend my shekels there. I guess if I didn’t happen to live at Sunburst, people would be trailing their coats and making Donnybrook fairs every other day between these two towns. But that’s neither here nor there. Take my advice, Mrs. Falchion, and come to Sunburst and see the salmon-fishers at work, both day and night. It is about the biggest thing in the way of natural picturesqueness that you’ll see—outside my mills. Indians, half-breeds, white men, Chinamen—they are all at it in weirs and cages, or in the nets, and spearing by torch-light!—Don’t you think I would do to run a circus, Mrs. Falchion?—Stand at the door, and shout: ‘Here’s where you get the worth of your money’?”
Mrs. Falchion laughed. “I am sure you and I will be good friends; you are amusing. And, to be perfectly frank with you, I am very weary of trying to live in the intellectual altitudes of Dr. Marmion—and The Padre.”
I had never seen her in a greater strain of gaiety. It had almost a kind of feverishness—as if she relished fully the position she held towards Roscoe and Ruth, her power over their future, and her belief (as I think was in her mind then) that she could bring back to her self Roscoe’s old allegiance. That she believed this, I was convinced; that she would never carry it out, was just as strong: for I, though only the chorus in the drama, might one day find it in my power to become, for a moment, one of the principal actors—from which position I had declined one day when humiliated before Mrs. Falchion on the ‘Fulvia’. Boyd Madras was in my mind.