“No. There are, apparently, a number of reasons. Hash, it’s a curious thing, my uncle taking it into his head to shoot me over to England like this. The other day a palmist told me that I was shortly going to take a long journey, at the end of which I should meet a fair girl.... Hash!”
“Ur?”
“I want to show you something.”
He fumbled in his pocket and produced a note-case. Having done this, he paused. Then, seeming to overcome a momentary hesitation, he opened the case and from it, with the delicacy of an Indian priest at a shrine handling a precious relic, extracted a folded piece of paper.
A casual observer, deceived by a certain cheery irresponsibility that marked his behaviour, might have set Sam Shotter down as one of those essentially material young men in whose armour romance does not easily find a chink. He would have erred in this assumption. For all that he weighed a hundred and seventy pounds of bone and sinew and had when amused—which was often—a laugh like that of the hyena in its native jungle, there was sentiment in Sam. Otherwise this paper would scarcely have been in his possession.
“But before showing it to you,” he said, eying Hash intently, “I would like to ask you a question. Do you see anything funny, anything laughable, anything at all ludicrous, in a fellow going for a fishing trip to Canada and being stuck in a hut miles from anywhere with nothing to read and nothing to listen to except the wild duck calling to its mate and the nifties of a French-Canadian guide who couldn’t speak more than three words of English——”
“No,” said Hash.
“I haven’t finished. Do you—to proceed—see anything absurd in the fact that such a fellow, in such a situation, finding the photograph of a beautiful girl tacked up on the wall of the hut by some previous visitor and having nothing else to look at for five weeks, should have fallen in love with this photograph? Think before you answer.”
“No,” said Hash, after consideration. He was not a man who readily detected the humorous aspect of anything.
“That’s good,” said Sam. “And lucky for you. Because had you let one snicker out of yourself—just one—I would have smitten you rather forcibly on the beezer. Well, I did.”