“What are they?”
She saw a quick, warning frown on Carroll’s sharply turned face. Galpy noted it, too, and was lost in confusion.
“Oh—ah—just gossip—nothing at all. I say, Miss Brewster, the railway—I’m in the Ferrocarril-del-Norte office, you know—has offered your party a special on an hour’s notice, any time you want it.”
“That’s most kind of your road, Mr. Galpy. But why should we want it?”
“Things might be getting a bit ticklish any day now. I’ve just taken the message from the manager to your father.”
The young Englishman took his leave, and Polly Brewster went to her room, to freshen up for luncheon, carrying with her the sobriquet she had just heard. Certainly, applied to its subject, it had a mucilaginous consistency. It stuck.
“‘The Unspeakable Perk,’” she repeated, with a little chuckle. “If I had a month to train him in, eh, what a speakable Perk I’d make him! I’d make him into a Perk that would sit up and speak when I lifted my little finger.” She considered this. “I’m not so sure,” she concluded, more doubtfully. “How can one tell through those horrid glasses, particularly when one doesn’t see him for days and days?”
Without moving, she might, however, have seen him forthwith, for at that precise and particular moment, the Unspeakable Perk was in plain sight of her window, on a bench in the corner of the plaza, engaged in light conversation with a legless and philosophical beggar whom he had just astonished by the presentation of a whole bolivar, of the value of twenty cents gold.
After she had finished luncheon and returned to her room, he was still there. Not until the mid-heat of the afternoon, however, did she observe, first with puzzlement, then with a start of recognition, the patiently rounded brown back of the forward-leaning figure in the corner. Greatly wroth was Miss Polly Brewster. For some hours—two, at least—the man to keep tryst and wager with whom she had tramped up miles of mountain road had been in town and hadn’t called upon her! Truly was he an Unspeakable Perk!
Wasn’t there possibly a mistake somewhere, though? A second peep at the far-away back interpreted into the curve a suggestion of resigned waiting. Maybe he had called, after all. Thought being usually with Miss Brewster the mother of the twins, Determination and Action, she slipped downstairs and inquired of the three guardians of the door, in such Spanish as she could muster, whether a Mr. Perkins, wearing large glasses—this in the universal sign manual—had been to see her that day.