Hathorn, with a secret avidity entirely New Yorkish, determined to find out all the details of Vreeland’s financial windfall.
He had a vague idea that the outlandish wilds of Montana were stuffed with copper mines, gold ledges, silver leads, cattle ranches, and “all sorts of things that might be gotten hold of,” i. e., other people’s money.
And if this placid and lamb-like blonde guest had “dropped into a good thing,” then by a judicious use of a regulated social hospitality, Hathorn now proposed to “drop into that same good thing.”
An uneasy fever seems to burn in a New York man’s blood from the moment when he knows his neighbor to have an unprotected penny.
The keen-eyed Vreeland minutely examined his old chum’s “get-up,” and quickly decided that he would closely copy this easily graceful “glass of fashion and mould of form.”
He had already resolved that he would also try to make a “run in” at Lakemere, if the cards came his way.
“I could always give Fred ten points at billiards and twenty with the women, and then do him every time,” mused Vreeland. “He only plays a sure-thing game.”
Vreeland’s own motto had always been “De l’audace! Toujours de l’audace!” and in fact, the root of his quarrel with his own cowardly father had been the sniveling, self-deprecatory caution of that “Old-man-afraid-of-his-record.”
The little dinner was “très-soigné
,” for Mr. Fred Hathorn did everything “decently and in order,” and it calmly proceeded to the gastronomic delight of a pleasure-loving man who had long nibbled at jerked elk and biscuits à