“Who is D. B. Orchard?” he persisted, in the puffy, thick-throated way of the pompous man. “How is one to get at the fellow? I hammered at the door for the best part of half an hour. D. B. Orchard!” He laughed ironically. “I’d teach him not to play stupid jokes on me. I’d have him understand, sir, that Geoffrey Hopkins is not a man to be played with.”
Geoffrey Hopkins! I felt my very lips grow white. I must have looked like some foolish, anæmic girl.
“How is one to get at him? I might claim damages.” He brought his broad, hairy fist down vigorously on the shining table. Pray, looking from one to the other—my quivering countenance and the inflamed features of the man Hopkins—was evidently uncomfortable.
I looked at that man. Geoffrey Hopkins! I could have taken that flabby body in my grip and shaken it for all that it had made poor Orchard suffer. And yet! Was this the man? Instinct told me, common sense told me, that it was not.
“D. B. Orchard is dead,” I said curtly at last; then, with a savage laugh and a terror-stricken glance at the coarse face, added, “You can’t get at him. He’s out of your reach, poor devil, at last.”
I didn’t know; I don’t know, now—how can one be sure! Of course he wasn’t Orchard’s Hopkins. But! What an affair!
Tell him? No. I saw him look at me with disgust and suspicion—no doubt he thought I was a little drunk. No doubt he went away and told his friends that I wasn’t quite a gentleman. That sort of man talks like that.
When we were alone I told the whole story to Pray. But he, with a pathetic droop of his mouth and a mystic flicker in eyes that were hard with success, said—glancing at the door—that such subjects didn’t interest him. He hated to dabble on the edge of the infinite—he’d had enough. He seemed to sigh as he lighted his pipe.
I haven’t seen Hopkins since. If ever I see him again I shan’t tell him—he’s too commonplace.
THE END.