“I speak to you as I do because it is your right to know who and what I am, for I am not on the King Edward by accident but by intention, and I am going to Washington because your sister lives there.”
Claiborne smiled in spite of himself.
“But, my dear sir, this is most extraordinary! I don’t know that I care to hear any more; by listening I seem to be encouraging you to follow us—it’s altogether too unusual. It’s almost preposterous!”
And Dick Claiborne frowned severely; but Armitage still met his eyes gravely.
“It’s only decent for a man to give his references when it’s natural for them to be required. I was educated at Trinity College, Toronto. I spent a year at the Harvard Law School. And I am not a beggar utterly. I own a ranch in Montana that actually pays and a thousand acres of the best wheat land in Nebraska. At the Bronx Loan and Trust Company in New York I have securities to a considerable amount,—I am perfectly willing that any one who is at all interested should inquire of the Trust Company officers as to my standing with them. If I were asked to state my occupation I should have to say that I am a cattle herder—what you call a cowboy. I can make my living in the practice of the business almost anywhere from New Mexico north to the Canadian line. I flatter myself that I am pretty good at it,” and John Armitage smiled and took a cigarette from a box on the table and lighted it.
Dick Claiborne was greatly interested in what Armitage had said, and he struggled between an inclination to encourage further confidence and a feeling that he should, for Shirley’s sake, make it clear to this young-stranger that it was of no consequence to any member of the Claiborne family who he was or what might be the extent of his lands or the unimpeachable character of his investments. But it was not so easy to turn aside a fellow who was so big of frame and apparently so sane and so steady of purpose as this Armitage. And there was, too, the further consideration that while Armitage was volunteering gratuitous information, and assuming an interest in his affairs by the Claibornes that was wholly unjustified, there was also the other side of the matter: that his explanations proceeded from motives of delicacy that were praiseworthy. Dick was puzzled, and piqued besides, to find that his resources as a big protecting brother were so soon exhausted. What Armitage was asking was the right to seek his sister Shirley’s hand in marriage, and the thing was absurd. Moreover, who was John Armitage?
The question startled Claiborne into a realization of the fact that Armitage had volunteered considerable information without at all answering this question. Dick Claiborne was a human being, and curious.
“Pardon me,” he asked, “but are you an Englishman?”
“I am not,” answered Armitage. “I have been so long in America that I feel as much at home there as anywhere—but I am neither English nor American by birth; I am, on the other hand—”
He hesitated for the barest second, and Claiborne was sensible of an intensification of interest; now at last there was to be a revelation that amounted to something.