“You ought to be,” said Rudolph, “with that blessed baby in the house. It might save you thirty precious minutes in getting a doctor.”
“Does your line work?” asked Louise.
“Yes; it seems to get all connections but yours. So I imagine something is wrong with your phone, or near the house.”
“I’ll have them send a repair man out at once,” said Arthur, and departed for the telephone office, accompanied by his fellow rancher.
While they were gone Louise told them something of young Hahn’s history. He had eloped, at seventeen years of age, with his father’s stenographer, a charming girl of eighteen who belonged to one of the best families in Washington. Old Hahn was at first furious and threatened to disinherit the boy, but when he found the young bride’s family still more furious and preparing to annul the marriage on the grounds of the groom’s youth, the great financier’s mood changed and he whisked the pair off to California and bought for them a half-million-dollar ranch, where they had lived for six years a life of unalloyed bliss. Having no children of their own, the Hahns were devoted to little Jane and it was Rudolph who had given the baby the sobriquet of “Toodlums.” At almost any time, night or day, the Hahn automobile was liable to arrive at El Cajon for a sight of the baby.
“Rudolph—we call him ‘Dolph,’ you know—has not a particle of business instinct,” said Louise, “so he will never be able to take his father’s place in the financial world. And he runs his ranch so extravagantly that it costs the pater a small fortune every year. Yet they are agreeable neighbors, artless and unconventional as children, and surely the great Hahn fortune won’t suffer much through their inroads.”
When Arthur returned he brought with him still another neighboring ranchman, an enormous individual fully six feet tall and broad in proportion, who fairly filled the doorway as he entered. This man was about thirty years of age, stern of feature and with shaggy brows that overhung a pair of peaceful blue eyes which ought to have been set in the face of some child. This gave him a whimsical look that almost invariably evoked a smile when anyone observed him for the first time. He walked with a vigorous, aggressive stride and handled his big body with consummate grace and ease. His bow, when Arthur introduced him, was that of an old world cavalier.
“Here is another of our good friends for you to know. He’s our neighbor at the north and is considered the most enterprising orange grower in all California,” announced Weldon, with a chuckle that indicated he had said something funny.
“Lemon,” said the man, speaking in such a shrill, high-pitched tenor voice that the sound was positively startling, coming from so massive a chest.
“I meant lemon,” Arthur hastened to say. “Permit me to introduce Mr. Bulwer Runyon, formerly of New York but now the pride of the Pacific coast, where his superb oranges—”