The old stone buildings along the winding river gradually emerged from the gray mist of the dawn and hung as if suspended, floating before his eyes. The thin branches of a tall poplar waved lightly above his head, dropping to him a yellow leaf. A gendarme who was patrolling the quay looked interrogatively into the face of the young American, as if he were suspicious of his proximity to the river at that hour of the morning.
“Beau temps,” he observed amicably to the loiterer.
“What do you say?” Brainard asked, coming a long way down to earth.
The officer repeated his innocent remark about the weather.
“Yes, the temps is all right,” the young man agreed. “Fine!”
Evidently another of those foolish Americans, star-gazing in the early dawn! The officer lingered near, cocking his eye on the stranger; but Brainard had started for his hotel, talking to himself as he walked.
“There’s a whole lot, Melody, I can never pay you for, even with two millions and a bunch of five-per-cent bonds! Where are you, Melody, in all this wide world?”
Suddenly he stopped, and stood very still. Then, slapping his thigh, he shouted into the dawn:
“Why, Monument! Monument, Arizona! That’s it! That’s what the old boy was trying to say at the very end, when he was too far gone to make himself clearly understood. He was trying to give me the address, of course!”
The gendarme, thinking there must be something wrong with a young man who acted in this fashion, followed Brainard to his hotel, whither, now that he had solved his puzzle, he went at a brisk pace.