“I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting you in the West when I was out there with Blair. I knew Dan’s father rather well.”
Ruggles responded: “I knew him rather well too, for thirty years. If,” he went on, “Blair hadn’t known you pretty well he wouldn’t have sent the boy out to you as he has done. He was keen on every trail. I might say that he had been over every one of ’em like a hound before he set the boy loose.”
Galorey answered, “Quite so,” gravely. “I know it. I knew it when Dan turned up at Osdene—” Holding his pipe bowl in the palm of his slender hand, he smoked meditatively. He hadn’t thought about things, as he had been doing lately, for many years. His sense of honor was the strongest thing in Gordon Galorey, the only thing in him, perhaps, that had been left unsmirched by the touch of the world. He was unquestionably a gentleman.
“Blair, however,” he said, “wasn’t as keen on this scent as you’d expect. His intuition was wrong.”
Ruggles raised his eyebrows slightly.
“I mean to say,” Lord Galorey went on, “that he knew me in the West when I had cut loose for a few blessed months from just these things into which he has sent his boy—from what, if I had a son, God knows I’d throw him as far as I could.”
“Blair wanted Dan to see the world.”
“Of course, that is right enough. We all have to see it, I fancy, but this boy isn’t ready to look at it.”
“He is twenty-two,” Ruggles returned. “When I was his age I was supporting four people.”
Galorey went on: “Osdene Park at present isn’t the window for Blair’s boy to see life through, and that is what I have come up to London to talk to you about, Mr. Ruggles. I should like to have you take him away.”