“Stop your monkey-shines,” said Carl.
But Joe Lewis asked curiously: “What do you mean, Jack? Give us straight dope.”
And with that Jack, chuckling very much, told the tale, to the wonder and amusement and awe of the three lads. And then, with a dizzying shift from boyishness to the stress of the battle of life, the shouts of laughter and light-hearted chaffing stopped short, and the four bent, grave and responsible, over the law-books, and the work of the day went on.
And the days went on and the Harvard Law School and its events went on, varying from mere recitations to trials in the moot courts, till a Thursday came, three weeks after the luncheon at the Lawyers’ Club. There was an important meeting that day in the impressive offices of W. R. H. Bradlee. People had travelled from long distances to that meeting; there was a man there from Texas, and Hugh Arkendale had come from San Francisco on purpose, and Conway Fitzhugh had left his home in New Orleans two days before for it. Bradlee, opening the meeting, was making a short speech setting forth its purpose and importance. He had just begun when a rap came at the door. Every one looked up in astonishment; these men were as unaccustomed to being interrupted in their councils as the gods of Olympus.
“Come,” thundered Bradlee in a terrible voice, and an alarmed clerk slid hurriedly in and held out a telegram.
“Orders”—he murmured—“any message from”—and the name was a gurgle and the clerk bolted.
Billion Bradlee flopped the paper open, and, as if a bar of rollicking sunlight had broken into the dull atmosphere, his face lit up, as he read it, with a smile, a most unfitting smile. His clear, keen blue eyes flashed about the company a second, and then, like a boy, quite unlike a great financier plying his mighty trade, he tossed the yellow scrap to Fitzhugh.
“Good news,” he spoke—he was shaking a bit with inward laughter, it seemed. “Read that, Conway.”
The bald-headed general counsel of four railways put on his glasses, while the rest of the august company watched him and waited curiously. With careful, deliberate enunciation, in a businesslike tone and manner, the general counsel read aloud—a picked company of the most important men in America listening—these somewhat bewildering words: