Mills took his billiards seriously. It was, Bruce could see, a pastime much to his host’s taste; it exercised his faculties of quick calculation and deft execution. Mills explained that he had employed a professional to teach him. He handled the cue with remarkable dexterity; it was a pleasure to watch the ease and grace of his playing. Several times, after a long run, he made a wild shot, unnecessarily it seemed, and out of keeping with his habitual even play. Bud Henderson had spoken of this peculiarity. Bruce wondered whether it was due to fatigue or to the intrusion upon Mills’s thoughts of some business matter that had caused a temporary break in the unity of eye and hand. Or it might have been due to some decision that had been crystallizing in his subconsciousness and manifested itself in this odd way. Mills was too good a player to make a fluke intentionally, merely to favor a less skillful opponent. He accepted his ill fortune philosophically. He was not a man to grow fretful or attempt to explain his errors.
“We’re not so badly matched,” he remarked when they finished and he had won by a narrow margin. “You play a good game.”
“You got the best there was in me!” said Bruce. “I rarely do as well as that.”
“Let’s rest and have a drink.” Mills pressed a button. “I’m just tired enough to want to sit awhile.”
Bruce had expected to leave when the game was ended, but Mills gave him no opportunity. He reestablished himself on the davenport and began talking more desultorily than before. For a time, indeed, Bruce carried the burden of the conversation. Some remark he let fall about the South caused Mills to ask him whether he had traveled much in America.
“I’ve walked over a lot of it,” Bruce replied. “That was after I came back from the little splurge overseas. Gave myself a personally conducted tour, so to speak. Met lots of real tramps. I stopped to work occasionally—learned something that way.”
Mills was at once interested. He began asking questions as to the living conditions of the people encountered in this adventure and the frame of mind of the laborers Bruce had encountered.
“You found the experience broadening, of course. It’s a pity more of us can’t learn of life by direct contact with the people.”
Under Mills’s questioning the whole thing seemed to Bruce more interesting than he had previously thought it. The real reason for his long tramp—the fact that he had taken to the road to adjust himself to his mother’s confession that he was the son of a man of whom he had never heard—would probably have given Mills a distinct shock.
“I wish I could have done that myself!” Mills kept saying.