"After all—that is, after the performance," said Stainton, "I shall explain. Just now I want you to take me to your friends' box and present me all round."
Holt recalled having heard that certain of the Cæsars had been driven mad by their sudden acquisition of power. He recalled having read of stock-gamblers that went crazy when they achieved a great coup. He recalled having seen the Las Animas country, when the Las Animas country was really a prospectors' bedlam, one gold-seeker that had lost his wits in what were then the vast solitudes of the San Juan Triangle. All of these recollections rushed in detail through a brain warped by a few years of the most unnatural side of city life, and following them came the realisation, as the newspapers had brought it to him, of Stainton's unexpected success. Stainton had always, when Holt knew him in the West, been unlike his fellows, a man aloof. Stainton had once, Holt recollected, been practical, silent, slow; now, having come upon a gold mine after twenty-five years of adversity, in a country more desolate than the San Juan had ever been, this man was powerful, almost in a day, rich. He wondered if—
But Stainton was once more smiling his old self-reliant smile.
"No," he was saying, "I am not crazy, and I am not drunk. It sounds queer, I know——"
"Sounds! Sounds——"
"But I am sane and sober. Come along and, honestly, I'll explain—later."
"You can't," said Holt.
"Can't what?"
"Explain. Such things can't be explained. This would balk Teddy himself."
Nevertheless, in the end Holt did what he was accustomed to doing, which is to say that he did as he was told, and before the curtain had risen again Stainton was in the agonies of the introduction.