Who could sleep after a night like that?
XX
Draper Lund and Barber Trane came walking together from the direction of the town. Reaching Egholm’s beach path, Lund broke off in the middle of a sentence, and said:
“Well, I think I’ll go down this way. Enjoy the view, you know. Good-bye!”
“Why, I was going down that way myself. It’s to-day that thing was to start, you know—the miracle man’s steamboat thing.”
“H’m. If it goes at all.” Lund straightened his glasses and shot an unexpected glance of considerable meaning at the other.
“No, no, of course. But it’s as well to know how it went off, you know, when customers come in and talk about it.”
“I don’t want to deliver any definite judgment,” said Lund delicately, as a very Professor of Drapery, “but there is something about the man that leads me to doubt. He talks so much.”
“Yes, and so mysterious about things. And conceited, too.”