“I don’t know where the darned place is,” he confessed. “I did start for it the first day, but I run into a Punch and Judy show in a little park, and I just couldn’t get away from it, it was so comical, with all the French kids hollering their heads off at it. Anyway, what’s the use? I’d rather set here in front of this saloon, where everything is nice.”
“It’s very extraordinary, sir,” I said, wondering if I oughtn’t to cut off to the hotel and warn Mrs. Effie so that she might do a heated foot to him, as he had once expressed it.
“Well, I guess I’ve got my rights as well as anybody,” he insisted. “I’ll be pushed just so far and no farther, not if I never get any more cultured than a jack-rabbit. And now you better go on and write or I’ll be—dashed—if I’ll ever wear another thing you tell me to.”
He had a most bitter and dangerous expression on his face, so I thought best to humour him once more. Accordingly I set about writing in his notebook from the volume of criticism he had supplied.
“Change a word now and then and skip around here and there,” he suggested as I wrote, “so’s it’ll sound more like me.”
“Quite so, sir,” I said, and continued to transcribe from the printed page. I was beginning the fifth page in the notebook, being in the midst of an enthusiastic description of the bit of statuary entitled “The Winged Victory,” when I was startled by a wild yell in my ear. Cousin Egbert had leaped to his feet and now danced in the middle of the pavement, waving his stick and hat high in the air and shouting incoherently. At once we attracted the most undesirable attention from the loungers about us, the waiters and the passers-by in the street, many of whom stopped at once to survey my charge with the liveliest interest. It was then I saw that he had merely wished to attract the attention of some one passing in a cab. Half a block down the boulevard I saw a man likewise waving excitedly, standing erect in the cab to do so. The cab thereupon turned sharply, came back on the opposite side of the street, crossed over to us, and the occupant alighted.
He was an American, as one might have fancied from his behaviour, a tall, dark-skinned person, wearing a drooping moustache after the former style of Cousin Egbert, supplemented by an imperial. He wore a loose-fitting suit of black which had evidently received no proper attention from the day he purchased it. Under a folded collar he wore a narrow cravat tied in a bowknot, and in the bosom of his white shirt there sparkled a diamond such as might have come from a collection of crown-jewels. This much I had time to notice as he neared us. Cousin Egbert had not ceased to shout, nor had he paid the least attention to my tugs at his coat. When the cab’s occupant descended to the pavement they fell upon each other and did for some moments a wild dance such as I imagine they might have seen the red Indians of western America perform. Most savagely they punched each other, calling out in the meantime: “Well, old horse!” and “Who’d ever expected to see you here, darn your old skin!” (Their actual phrases, be it remembered.)
The crowd, I was glad to note, fell rapidly away, many of them shrugging their shoulders in a way the French have, and even the waiters about us quickly lost interest in the pair, as if they were hardened to the sight of Americans greeting one another. The two were still saying: “Well! well!” rather breathlessly, but had become a bit more coherent.
“Jeff Tuttle, you—dashed—old long-horn!” exclaimed Cousin Egbert.
“Good old Sour-dough!” exploded the other. “Ain’t this just like old home week!”