“Hit air cyarried,” said Tolliver, “an’ the meetin’ air dismissed, sigh er die. Ye kin all go on erbout yer business.”
The pedestrians filed out into the open air feeling greatly relieved. Crane lingered to have a few more passages with his sociable and hospitable grand-uncle. Indeed he remained until the rest of the party had passed out of sight up the ravine and he did not reach the hotel until far in the night, when he sang some songs under Miss Moyne’s window.
Taken altogether, the pedestrians felt that they had been quite successful in their excursion.
Dufour was happiness itself. On the way back he had chosen for himself and Miss Moyne a path which separated them from the others, giving him an opportunity to say a great deal to her.
Now it is a part of our common stock of understanding that when a man has an excellent and uninterrupted opportunity to say a great deal to a beautiful young woman, he usually does not find himself able to say much; still he rarely fails to make himself understood.
They both looked so self-consciously happy (when they arrived a little later than the rest at Hotel Helicon) that suspicion would have been aroused but for two startling and all-absorbing disclosures which drove away every other thought.
One was the disclosure of the fact that Dufour was not Dufour, but George Dunkirk, and the other was the disclosure of the fact that the high sheriff of Mt. Boab County was in Hotel Helicon on important official business.
Little Mrs. Philpot was the first to discover that the great publisher really had not practiced any deception as to his name. Indeed her album showed that the signature therein was, after all, George Dunkirk and not Gaspard Dufour. The autograph was not very plain, it is true, but it was decipherable and the mistake was due to her own bad reading.
If the sheriff had been out of the question the humiliation felt by the authors, for whom Dunkirk was publisher and who had talked so outrageously about him, would have crushed them into the dust; but the sheriff was there in his most terrible form, and he forced himself upon their consideration with his quiet but effective methods of legal procedure.