The colonel’s lips twitched; he was thinking that were Miss Smith working for Atkins, she couldn’t have a better chance to make a killing. “But I’ll bet my life she isn’t,” he added; “she may be trying to save his life, but she isn’t playing his game!”
He said aloud: “I will, Mr. Keatcham, if you will let me do it as part of the obligation of the situation; and there is no bally rot about compensation.”
“Very well,” said Keatcham. He did not hesitate; it was (as the colonel had already discovered) the rarest thing in the world for him to hesitate; he thought with astonishing rapidity; and he formulated his answer while his interlocutor talked; before the speech was over the answer was ready. Another trait of his had struck the soldier, namely, the laborious correctness of his speech; it was often formal and old-fashioned; Aunt Rebecca said that he talked like Daniel Webster’s speeches; but it had none of the homely and pungent savor one might expect from a man whose boyhood had scrambled through miners’ camps into a San Francisco stock office; who had never gone to school in his life by daylight; who had been mine superintendent, small speculator and small director in California until he became a big speculator and big railway controller in New York.
“You might begin on the morning mail,” Keatcham continued. “Let me sort them first.” He merely glanced at the inscriptions on the envelopes, opening and taking out one which he read rather carelessly, frowning a little before he placed it to one side.
A number of the letters concerned the endowments of the experimental chairs at the universities. Keatcham’s attention was not lightened by any ray of pleasure. Once he said: “That fellow has caught my idea,” and once: “That’s right,” but there was no animation in his voice, no interest in his pallid face. Stealing a furtive scrutiny of it, now and then, Rupert Winter was impressed with its mystical likeness to that of Cary Mercer. There was no physical similarity of color or feature; it was a likeness of the spirit rather than the flesh. The colonel’s eyes flashed.
“I have it!” he exclaimed within, “I have it; they are fanatics, both of them; Keatcham’s a fanatic of finance and Mercer is a fanatic of another sort; but fanatics they both are, ready to go any length for their principles or their ambitions or their revenge! J’ai trouvé le mot d’énigme, as Aunt Becky would say—I wonder what she’ll say to this sudden psychological splurge of mine.”
“The business hour is up,”—it was Miss Smith entering with a bowl on a white-covered tray; the sun glinted the lump of ice in the milk and the silver spoon was dazzling against the linen—“your biscuit and milk, Mr. Keatcham. Didn’t you have it when you were a boy?”
“I did, Miss Janet,”—and Keatcham actually smiled. “I used to think crackers and milk the nicest thing in the world.”
“That is because you never tasted corn pone and milk; but you are going to.”
“When you make it for me. I’m glad you’re such a good cook. It’s one of your ways I like. My mother was a very good cook. She could make better dishes out of almost nothing than these mongrel chefs can make with the whole world.”