The members of the clubhouse party were amusing themselves that afternoon in the various ways peculiar to their kind.
At one end of the wide veranda overlooking the river a group sat at a card table. At the other end of the roomy lounging place, men and women, lying at careless ease in steamer-chairs and hammocks, were smoking and chatting about such things as are of interest only to that strange class who are educated to make idleness the chief aim and end of their existence. On the broad steps leading down to the tree-shaded lawn, which sloped gently to the boat landing at the river's edge, still other members of the company were scattered in characteristic attitudes. Across the river, in the shade of the cottonwoods that overhang the bank, a man and a woman in a boat were ostensibly fishing. In a hammock strung between two trees, a little way from the veranda, lay a woman, reading.
Now and then a burst of shrill laughter broke the quiet of the surrounding forest. A man on the steps called a loud suggestive jest to the pair in the boat, and the woman waved her handkerchief in answer. The card-players argued and laughed over a point in their game. Some one shouted into the house for Jim, and a negro man in white jacket appeared. When the people on the veranda had expressed their individual tastes, the one who had summoned the servant called to the woman in the hammock under the tree, “What is yours, Martha?”
Without looking up from her book, the woman waved her hand, and answered, “I am not drinking this time. Thanks.”
A chorus of derisive shouts and laughter came from the veranda. But the woman went on reading. “Oh, let her alone!” protested some one, good-naturedly. “She was going a little strong, last night. She'll be all right by and by, when she gets started again.”
The negro, Jim, had returned with his loaded tray, and was passing among the members of the company with his assortment of glasses, when some one called attention to Harry Green, who was just pulling his boat up to the landing after his visit to the little log house down the river.
A boisterous chorus greeted the boatman: “Hello, Harry! Did you find anything? You're just in time. What'll you have?”
With a wave of greeting, the man fastened his boat to the landing, and started up the slope.
“He'll have a Scotch, of course!” said some one. “Did anybody ever know him to take anything else? Go and get it, Jim. He'll be nearly dead for a drink after rowing all that distance.”
The woman in the hammock lowered her book, and lay watching the man as he came up the path toward the steps.