CHAPTER XI.
A TREACHEROUS COACHMAN.
Let us now go back to Blake, the energetic chairman of the committee of arrangements, to whose careful management the boys in the first class had intrusted their affairs in Hamilton, and see where he was and what he had been doing all this while. The last time we saw him he and two companions, Forester and White, were standing in the lower hall at the academy, listening to some very emphatic instructions from Clark, the president of the class, after which they hurried out to take the early train for the city. They were going to look at the hall which the proprietor, Mr. Colson, had been requested to decorate in his best style, for the banquet that was to be held there that night, and to speak to Mr. Taylor about the dinner, for which he had been instructed to provide two hundred covers. If the arrangements were satisfactory, they were to ease President Clark’s mind by telegraphing the fact at once; and if there were anything lacking, they were empowered to set it right without loss of time. These three boys were the only members of the class who had been to Hamilton thus far. Their companions had left everything to their judgment, and of course they felt their responsibility, and were anxious to make the dinner as grand as it was expected to be.
There was a goodly number of students on the train, members of other classes who were going to the city to spend the day with their parents, and this proved to be a very fortunate thing for Blake. Had it not been for the assistance which they willingly and eagerly rendered him, he and his committee would have gone back to Bridgeport without the courage to hold up their heads. They reached Hamilton without any mishap, and the first person Blake encountered, as he jumped off the cars, was a negro with a very shiny face, a roguish eye and a bald head, who came up holding his hat in his hand.
“Which one of you young gentlemen is Mr. Blake, if you please, sah?” was his greeting.
“I am,” replied the owner of that name.
“Well, sah, if you please, sah,” continued the negro, “I’se driving coach for Mr. Taylor at the present opporchunity, sah, and he done sont me down hyar this mawning to tol’ you as how he was tuk sick at the residence of his paternal father out in the country las’ night, and that he can’t possibly officiate with his official services on the happiness of the present occasion of this evening; therefore, he requests, as a peculiar and macadamize favor to himself, that you will come out to the house of his paternal parents so that he can talk to you about the dinner, you know, sah. He done sont me with the coach to brung you.”
The boys would have been greatly amused had it not been for the discouraging information which the coachman strove to impart by his grandiloquent verbiage. Mr. Taylor was ill, he could not “officiate” at the dinner that evening, and he had sent the negro to bring them out to his father’s house in the country, so that he could tell them what to do in his absence.
“That’s the worst piece of news I have heard in a long time,” exclaimed Blake. “Everything has gone well with us so far, and now the trouble begins. There’s nobody who can manage that dinner like Mr. Taylor.”
“That, sah, is a question beyond dispute,” assented the negro.
“I suppose we had better go with him,” said White. “If Mr. Taylor can’t give us the benefit of his services, we want to know how to get on without him. How far is it, uncle?”