“I saw everything that was goin’ through him, same as if you’d rolled it out on the picture reel.
“The ‘old friend, no manners, darn the difference’ stuff had hooked him. And there were two other hooks: this girl had some property that he didn’t know of, and the friends of the family, like me, was a-coming to him about it.
“Because what?
“Because it was settled stuff on our side that she was goin’ to take his arm up the church aisle. It was the first straight dope he’d had, an’ it bucked him, same as it bucked me to know that she was dangling him with no word passed.
“He set up now pleasant as you please.
“‘Ah—er, yes,’ he says; he hadn’t got the name I was playing under.
“I bellowed at him, an’ he mighty near jumped.
“‘Johnson!’ I said. ‘Alonzo Johnson, Kansas City!’
“‘Quite so, Mr. Johnson,’ he says, quick, same as you’d apologize, ‘there’s some business affair to discuss, I fauncy?’
“He fell right in with the line of dope mighty easy and comfortable. You see it was something like the way they do things up in his country. The old uncle or the family lawyer calls on you, when ma thinks that things are pretty well understood with the young people, and gits down to figgerin’. It was near enough to my line to go across with him. He knew that the girl hadn’t got any men folk, so an old friend of the family would fit the form as a sort of next-of-kin, as the law-books say.”