Late that afternoon, just as John was leaving the office, a letter was brought to him in Bill’s handwriting. It ran as follows:
‘Ta-ta, John, I’m off, you quaint, cocked-hat old Puritan Precisian; but I couldn’t leave without having tried a fall with you first, and, on totting it up, I think Bill Coody’s just had a trifle the best of the mêlée. If I’d got on to the stores, I’d have stayed in this derned little one-hoss place, but those all-fired articles[21] upset that cart.
I’ll allow you that, John; but I have you, my boy, over that little cargo of mine. Why, the whole show was a got-up job, the cargo saw-dust, salvage stocks worth £20 at an outside figure. The skipper, being a pal of mine, lent me his duds, this morning, for I knew you’d be down there sniffing and spectacling about with the morning’s sunrise, and I had the show ready for you, John, to walk into, and in you walked like blue blazes. The £400 will about pay for my trouble, and for the premiums on the store shares. Your principals will have to buy the shares back from the banks—they mustn’t buy below par, though, John—you remind them of that.
‘I’ve sold my biz., and am off with my pal, the skipper, this moment. No time to handshake. Ta-ta, John, and bear no malice. Stick to piety and 5 per cent., and don’t buy up bankrupt cargoes, and you’ll be Lord Mayor of Old Quay before you’re finished. So long, your pardner,
‘Bill Coody.’
THE PROTÉGÉ
The Vale of the Frolic in the far west of Northumberland had always been a favourite retreat of mine. As I trudged the London pavements in the dog-days before the Law Courts rose, my heart panted for the green hills and the sweet silences of remotest Frolicdale.
The chiefest charm of the vale perhaps for me lay in the fact that it was a track untrodden by the tourist, resembling the maid of the waters of Dove in this—that it was one which, as yet, there were ‘few to know, and very few to love.’
It was a pastoral, sheep-raising countryside, inhabited by shepherds almost entirely, who were at the same time farmers also, for their tenure was something after the métayer order.