"Never met him," Jimmy admitted.
"Know anything about his cars?" Carver somewhat cynically asked.
"I know that some of those who have them brag about them," said Jimmy. "And I know that the men who work for him, from the superintendent down to the yard boy, believe in them and say so, and would tear to pieces a man who says they aren't the best. That's good enough for me. Know anything about cars? Um-m-m-mh! I reckon I don't know a thing on earth about 'em. If my life depended upon starting a car that somebody had handed me on a platter, I suppose I'd be a deader. But a man doesn't have to know it all to succeed. Noah couldn't have started the Aquitania; but he did navigate the ark pretty successfully, and nobody denies that he was the first admiral that ever sailed the seas. Admiral Nelson and Commodore Paul Jones got there, somehow, but if they had seen a motor launch tearing down on them at twenty miles an hour, I can imagine both of them diving off the poop!"
Before they parted that night, the expert and the novice had become friends. Before the race meeting was over, Mr. James Gollop knew more about the merits of cars, the advantages of one over the other, and the prevailing failings and universal obstacles than he had ever dreamed before. Incidentally, he had established a friendship that lasted and was to be of mutual benefit thereafter. He jubilated when considering fortune. All things were coming his way. He would have accepted it as a part of the regular procedure had he found a twenty dollar gold piece on the pavement. His luck was in.
And so, like a happy victor, Mr. James Gollop of the Sayers Automobile Company returned to New York one evening and, knowing that it was too late to base any hope on either MacDougall Alley or the Martha Putnam hotel, repaired, in lieu thereof, to the palm-garden precincts of the place in which he had last dined with Mary Allen. He made plans for the morrow, thought of what he might say to her, determined that the mystery should end, and was anything but discontented. He ate leisurely, enjoyed his food, and perused an evening paper. He liked the black coffee, and felt civilized when he resorted to the finger bowl. He got to his feet leisurely, well content, and then stopped, bent to one side, moved a pace and through a screen of palm fronds stared as if transfixed. What he saw was Mary Allen seated at a nice little table, inspecting a bunch of violets in her hand, whilst across from her, stiff, pompous, self-conscious, but entirely self-satisfied, sat the man who might have been Mr. James Gollop but who was, indubitably one J. Woodworth-Granger, Judge of the Fourth District Court. Others might not identify him, but Mr. James Gollop did and for a moment his mind was in a turmoil of surprise and anger. Granger! That wind bag had somehow, probably by mere accident, met the only girl on earth, taken base advantage of his likeness to one Jim Gollop, and was profiting thereby! How dare he! To impersonate another man under ordinary circumstances was in itself sufficiently culpable, but in private affairs, extraordinary and personal, it became outrageous.
A great wave of indignation surged Jimmy Gollop as if he had been thrust into a turbulent sea and was being helplessly bobbed up and down thereon. He was undecided whether to create a scene by rushing forward, seizing the impertinent Judge by the short hair at the back of his neck, which country barbers had encouraged to a bristle, or to stalk deliberately forward like the long lost hero in the cinema and—after the screen had announced his words, "This girl is mine!"—scornfully indicate to the impostor the door through which the latter, crestfallen, must inevitably depart. For about a half-minute that seemed a half-century, he didn't know what to do. And then, upsetting all ethics and standards of the melodrama and the movies, he did just what anyone else would have done in like circumstances; stalked majestically toward the hat pirate in the outer hall, fumbled for his hat slip, presented it with humble fingers, got his head covering and his overcoat, and shuffled out into the street dejectedly to ponder over the exigencies of this calamity, this tragedy, that threatened to end the world. How dared the Judge to look like him! What a dirty trick to take advantage of their unfortunate resemblance and impose himself into such a situation! It was incredible, and base. He didn't know what to do about it, because she was involved. He felt himself in a peculiarly helpless position. He could but pray that the Judge's intentions were honorable.
CHAPTER XV
After a rather disturbed night in which he slept by fits and starts, mostly starts, and occupied the intervening wakeful hours in considering the Judge's unparalleled effrontery, Jim dawdled over a breakfast for which he had no appetite, reflecting meanwhile what he could do. Ordinarily his nerves were equal to any strain; but now he found himself fidgety, which but added to his general perturbation. For her sake, as much as his own, he was indignant over the deception practiced upon Mary Allen, and resolved to punish the impostor if ever opportunity offered. He decided that his first move must be to warn her. That, too, presented its difficulty, as his one certain chance of finding her was at her studio, and he doubted if she would be there before the late forenoon. He scanned the list of hotel arrivals and learned that the Judge was a guest at the Van Astor.
"That," he soliloquized, "is worth knowing; because after I have had a talk with Mary, I'll call upon that human airship or write him a note telling him what one James Gollop thinks about him!"