“I felt sure you wouldn’t,” Fogg admitted significantly, shifting comfortably in his big chair.
“I’m too bewildered to know what to say, or what to think; I only know that it’s a great surprise, and that I’m troubled as to how it will be regarded by the Davisons.”
“Well, of course you must expect them to be a little sore over it, as it comes so close home to them. But Davison is a pretty square sort of man, as I’ve found, and he’ll look at it in the right light, unless you give him occasion to do otherwise. Ben will be bitter, I’ve no doubt; but there’s no help for that, and if I were you I shouldn’t let it trouble me. He’ll get over it after awhile. If his head is level he’ll know that he went up against a cyclone for which you were not responsible and he’ll keep still.”
Fogg’s attitude eased Clayton’s anxiety. The turbulent conflict he foresaw seemed about to be avoided.
“I’ve spoken to some of my friends,” Fogg went on, “and there will be a crowd up here to-night. I reckon you’d better rub up a little something in the way of a speech, Justin. And if you happen to hear a brass band filling the air with march music, don’t get scared and bolt like a stampeding broncho, for that will be the new band they’ve organized in town coming up to serenade you. You’re a public character now, and you’ve got to stand such things.”
Fogg left Clayton’s with growing confidence. He believed that Justin would be pliable, if properly manipulated.
“If I can only jolly him along here I can manage him when we get to Denver,” was his thought.
Though Justin was strong enough now to take short rides about the valley, he did not visit the Davison ranch that day. Lucy was temporarily absent from home, he was glad to know. So he shut himself up at Clayton’s and tried to take stock of the situation. His thoughts were chaotic. The thing he would have chosen had come to him, but in a manner so strange that he could hardly be sure it was desirable. As he did not know what he ought to say to the people who would gather there that evening, he did not try to put together the few thoughts in the way of a speech which Fogg had suggested.
For Paradise Valley that was a great gathering. At nightfall the new band came down from the town, braying its loudest. Horsemen, and men on foot and in carriages, seemed to spring out of the ground. They overflowed the little house, for Clayton’s hospitality urged them to make themselves at home anywhere, and they filled the yard, yelling lustily. Fogg set up some gasolene torches, and came out of the house, accompanying Justin.
The noise, the cries for him to appear, the music of the band, the leaping call of aroused ambition, tingled Justin’s blood. He felt his soul swell, when he heard that roar. It was a feeling wholly new and he could not define it, but it caused him to lift his head and step with sure precision as he passed through the doorway with Fogg to the little piazza in front of the house.