The unwelcome intruder was Mr. John Van Blarcom, my late fellow-voyager, and he accepted the encounter with a better grace than I.
“Why, hello!” he greeted me cheerfully. “Going through to France? Glad to see you—but you’re about the last man that I was looking for. I got the idea somehow you were planning to stop a while in Rome.”
I returned his nod with a curtness I was at no pains to dissemble. Then I reproached myself, for it was undeniable that on the Re d’Italia he had more than once stood my friend. He had offered me a timely warning, which I had flouted; he had obligingly confirmed my statement in my grueling third degree. Yet despite this, or because of it, I didn’t like him; nor did I like his patronizing, complacent manner, which seemed fairly to shriek at me, “I told you so!”
“Changed my plans,” I acknowledged with a lack of cordiality that failed to ruffle him. He had hung up his overcoat and installed himself facing me, and was now making preparations for lighting a fat cigar.
“Well,” he commented, with a chuckle of raillery, after this operation, “the last time I saw you you were in a pretty tight corner, eh? You can’t say it was my fault, either; I’d have put you wise if you’d listened. But you weren’t taking any—you knew better than I did—and you strafed me, as the Dutchies say, to the kaiser’s taste.”
“Good advice seldom gets much thanks, I believe,” was my grumpy comment, which he unexpectedly chose to accept as an apology and with a large, fine, generous gesture to blow away.
“That’s all right,” he declared. “I’m not holding it against you. We’ve all got to learn. Next time you won’t be so easy caught, I guess. It makes a man do some thinking when he gets a dose like you did; and those chaps at Gibraltar certainly gave you a rough deal!”
“On the contrary,” I differed shortly,—I wasn’t hunting sympathy,—“considering all the circumstances, I think they were extremely fair.”
“Not to shoot you on sight? Well, maybe.” He was grinning. “But I guess you weren’t hunting for a chance to spend two days cooped up in a cabin that measured six feet by five.”
“It had advantages. One of them was solitude,” I responded dryly. “And it was less unpleasant than being relegated to a six-by-three grave. See here, I don’t enjoy this subject! Suppose we drop it. The fact is, I’ve never understood why you came to my rescue on that occasion, you didn’t owe me any civility, you know, and you had to—well—we’ll say draw on your imagination when you claimed you saw what I threw overboard that night.”