On a bench, with an air, sat the young millionaire’s chum.
He was dressed in a neat suit of dark blue serge, a neat white straw hat, neat low-cut tan shoes, linen of the well-known “immaculate” trade mark, a neat, narrow four-in-hand tie, and carried a slender, neat bamboo cane.
I laughed loudly and vulgarly.
“What you want to do,” said I to the sociologist, “is to establish a reformatory for the Logical Vicious Circle. Or else I’ve got wheels. It looks to me as if things are running round and round in circles instead of getting anywhere.”
“What do you mean?” asked the man of progress.
“Why, look what he has done to ‘Smoky’,” I replied.
“You will always be a fool,” said my friend, the sociologist, getting up and walking away.
VIII
THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF
It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama—Bill Driscoll and myself—when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, “during a moment of temporary mental apparition”; but we didn’t find that out till later.
There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.