"Brady, you are a sentimentalist! You sigh for brooks and willows and, for all I know, people."
"Flint, you are a misanthrope! You have searched out this God-forsaken stretch of sand just for the purpose of getting away from your kind. Now I have hunted you to your lair, and I propose to stay with you for a fortnight; but I am not to be dragooned into saying that I think your resort is a scene of beauty, for I don't; but that is a jolly, old, gray, tumbled-down building over there—a barn, I suppose."
"No, sir; that is the Nepaug Inn. As it has neither porters, waiters, nor electric bells, you are expected to shoulder your own luggage and march upstairs—second room to the right. Whoa, there!" he called out to the old horse a full minute after the animal had come to a dead halt in front of the inn door. The noise, how [Pg 55] ever, served its purpose in bringing Marsden to the door, and loading the old inn-keeper with imprecations for their unlucky experience with the molasses, Flint left him to struggle with the contents of the wagon, while he himself escorted Brady up the narrow, sagging stairs, and ensconced him in a room next his own,—a room whose windows looked out like his over the purple stretch of ocean, now opalescent with reflection of the clouds.
"Where do you take your bath?" Brady asked, looking round somewhat helplessly.
"In there, you land-lubber!" answered Flint, pointing out to sea; "isn't the tub big enough?"
Brady laughed, a hearty, boyish, infectious laugh. "All right," he said, "only it seems rather odd to come East for pioneering. Did you know, by the way, that I am to be in New York this winter?"
"No!"
"Yes. Our house is just establishing a branch office there, and I am to be at the head of it."
Flint chuckled.
"Bison establishing a branch office in New York! The humor of the thing delights me."