Horace almost smiled, as he felt how much older he was than this red-faced, white-haired boy, who could fight and drink and tell funny stories, world without end, but was powerless to understand business even to the extent of protecting his interest in a hardware store. But the tendency to smile was painfully short-lived; the subject was too serious.
“Well, tell me, then, what you are going to do!”
“Good God!” broke forth the General, raising his head again. “What can I do! Crawl into a hole and die somewhere, I should think. I don’t see anything else. But before I do, mark me, I’ll have a few minutes alone with that scoundrel, in his office, in the street, wherever I can find him; and if I don’t fix him up so that his own mother won’t know him, then my name isn’t ‘Vane’ Boyce!”
“Tut-tut,” said the prudent lawyer of the family. “Men don’t die because they fail in the hardware business, and this isn’t Kentucky. We don’t thrash our enemies up here in the North. Do you want me to see Tenney?”
“I suppose so—if you can stomach a talk with the whelp. He said something, too, about talking it over with you, but I was too raving mad to listen. Have you had any dealings with him?”
“Nothing definite. We’ve discussed one or two little things—in the air—that is all.”
The General rose and helped himself to some neat brandy from his son’s liqueur-stand. “Well, if you do—you hear me—he’ll singe you clean as a whistle. By God, he won’t leave so much as a pin-feather on you!”
Horace smiled incredulously. “I rather think I can take care of Mr. Schuyler Tenney,” said he, with a confident front. “I’ll go down and see him now, if you like, and don’t you worry yourself about it. I daresay I can straighten it out all right. The best thing you can do is to say nothing at all about your affairs to anybody. It might complicate matters if he heard that you had been publicly proclaiming your intention of beating him into a jelly. I don’t know, but I can fancy that he might not altogether like that. And, above all things, don’t get down on your luck. I guess we can keep our heads above water, Tenney or no Tenney.”
The young man felt that it was distinctly decent of him to thus assume responsibility for the family, and did not look to see the General take it so much as a matter of course. But that distinguished soldier had quite regained his spirits, and smacked his lips over a second glass of brandy with smiling satisfaction, as if Tenney had already been turned out of the hardware store, neck and crop.
“All right! You go ahead, and let him have it from the shoulder. Give him one for me, while you’re about it,” he said, with his old robust voice and hearty manner all come back again. The elasticity of this stout man’s temperament was a source of perpetual wonderment to his slender son.