“Bon jour, Bardek,” returned Miss Levering. “Whoa, Sorry, you fool. It’s only Bardek. Bardek won’t eat you; whoa, boy!”
“Mais, oui!” laughed Bardek. “Il sait bien qu’ j’en ai souvent mangé du ch’val! The horse-flesh is vairy good.”
Blynn leaned forward to talk to him. Here was a fine chance to get acquainted.
“Good afternoon,” he greeted. “My French isn’t good enough to expose to the open air. I’ll have to talk English. Do you understand—”
But “Sorry” had evidently comprehended Bardek’s cannibalistic reference to the joy of eating horse-flesh, for he jolted Blynn down hard on the seat. At the syllable “—stand” Allen Blynn had abruptly sat. As they shot briskly up the drive, Blynn looked back to see the round face of Bardek extended in malevolent laughter.
When they had settled down into a normal pace, Blynn inquired,
“Who is this Bardek? Seems to me I have seen him often hanging about this region.”
“He’s a Frenchman—at least, I think he is French. Sort of a vagabond mender of kettles. I don’t know how he gets his living. He seems always well-fed and contented. He has a wife off there somewhere, and a couple of babes-in-the-woods. He comes and goes. Sometimes he is away for weeks on his rounds. We often stop to chat with him, Gorgas and I. Drat that animal. He ought to know Bardek. I’m ashamed of him. It was that big vase-like thing that scared him. He’d jump at a new tin-cup.”
They talked of the horses, then, as they emerged from a side-road, of the beauty of the Wissahickon Valley, a lovely unchronicled spot in American scenery, Miss Levering steering the conversation by gentle steps back to “Twelfth Night.”
“I’m almost converted to the Elizabethan view,” she admitted. “I’ve been going over in my mind a number of girls I know who have confessed how the man came, saw, and conquered. Girls do gabble, if it is dark enough, especially just after the marriage. They all talk like your Elizabethans, claim to have been destined for each other from the beginning, and so on; yet they all fought the man off at first; all except one girl—the man tried to get away from her, but something—your ‘shady destiny’—what was it?—got him at last.... It’s a horrid thought.”