The doctor sniffed audibly at this, but offered no further remark. Later on, however, when he was walking along in the crisp moonlight with John Fairchild, he unburdened his mind.
“It was positively sickening,” he growled, biting his cigar angrily, “to see the way that young cub of a Boyce foisted himself upon the concern. I’d bet any money he put up the whole thing with Jones. They nominated each other for president and treasurer—didn’t you notice that?”
“Yes, I noticed it,” replied Fairchild, with something between a sigh and a groan. After a moment he added: “Do you know, I’m afraid Rube will find himself in a hole with that young man, before he gets through with him. It may sound funny to you, but I’m deucedly nervous about it. I’d rather see a hundred Boyces broiled alive than have harm come to so much as Tracy’s little finger.”
“What could have ailed him to go in blindfold like that into the partnership? He knew absolutely nothing of the fellow.”
“I’ve told him a hundred times, he’s got no more notion of reading characters than a mulley cow. Anybody can go up to him and wheedle his coat off his back, if he knows the first rudiments of the confidence game. It seems, in this special instance, that he took a fancy to Boyce because he saw him give two turkeys to old Ben Lawton, who’d lost his money at a turkey-shoot and got no birds. He thought it was generous and noble and all that. So far as I can make out, that was his only reason.”
Dr. Lester stopped short and looked at his companion. Then he burst out in a loud, shrill laugh, which renewed itself in intermittent gurgles of merriment so many times that Fairchild finally found them monotonous, and interposed a question:
“There’s something besides fun in all this, Lester. What is it?”
“It isn’t professional to tell, my dear fellow, but there is something—you’re right—and we are Reuben’s friends against all the world; and this is what I laughed at.”
Then in a low tone, as if even the white flaring moon and the jewelled stars in the cold sky had ears, he told his secret to his friend—a secret involving one small human being of whose very existence Mr. Horace Boyce had no knowledge.
“The girl has come back here to Thessaly, you know,” concluded the doctor.