“He gave me a hint of the major’s powers in that direction, in his account of Greef King’s trial.”
“Humph!” retorted the doctor gloomily, “that was in his palmy days. He’s fallen off since then. Plenty of others been here to bore you, I reckon, though of course you don’t remember all the names yet.”
Valiant summoned Uncle Jefferson.
“Yas, suh,” grinned the old darky pridefully, “de folkses mos’ lam de face off’n dat-ar ol’ knockah. Day ’fo’ yistiddy dah wuz Mars’ Quarles en Jedge en Mis’ Chalmahs. De jedge done sen’ er streng o’ silvah perch.”
“His place is Gladden Hall,” the major said, “one of the finest mansions round here. A sportsman, sah, and one of the best pokah hands in the county.”
“—En yistiddy dah’s Mars’ Chilly Lusk en de Pen’letons en de Byloes en Mars’ Livy Stowe f’om Seven Oaks, en de Woodrows en—”
“That’ll do,” said the major. “I’ll just run over the tax-list; it’ll be quicker. There are kindly people here, sah,” he went on, “but after all, it’s a narrow circle. We have our little pleasures and courtships and scandals and we are satisfied with them. We’re not gadabouts. Our girls haven’t all flirted around Europe and they don’t talk of the Pincio and the Champs Elysées as if they were Capitol Hill and Madison Street in Richmond. But if I may say so, sah, I think in Virginia we get a little closer to life as God Almighty intended it than people in some of your big cities.”
“Come, Bristow,” interrupted the doctor, “tell the truth. This dog-gone borough is as dull as a mud fence sticking with tadpoles. There isn’t a man in it with a soul above horse-flesh.”
The doctor’s shafts to-day, however, glanced off the major’s buckler of geniality like the Lilliputian arrows from Gulliver’s eye-glass. “I hope you ride, Mr. Valiant?” the latter asked genially.
“I’m fond of it,” said Valiant, “but I have no horse as yet.”