"Oh, very well. But you gentlemen will share the joint with me, eh? Welcome to Branscomb Arms! And let's gather around, sirs, let's gather around!"
You should have seen the way he did it, though. Reg'lar John Drew manners, the old duffer had. Lord knows where he thought he was, though; somewhere on Highgate Road, I suppose. But wherever it was, he was right to home—called Rufus Rastus Jenkins, and told Danvers he could go for the day. Gave me the goose-flesh back until I got used to it; but Mr. Gordon seemed to take it all as part of the game.
It beat all the dinners I ever had, that one. There we were poundin' over the rails through Pennsylvania at a mile-a-minute clip, the tomato soup doin' a merry-go-round in the plates, the engine tootin' for grade crossin's; and Sir Peter, wearin' his pail as dignified as a cardinal does a red hat, talkin' just as if he was back on the farm, up north of London. I don't blame Rufus Rastus for wearin' his eyes on the outside. They stuck out like the waist-buttons on a Broadway cop, and he hardly knew whether he was waitin' on table, or makin' up a berth.
With his second glass of fizz Sir Peter began to thaw a little. He hadn't paid much attention to me for a while, passin' most of his remarks over to Mr. Gordon; but all of a sudden he comes at me with:
"You're a Home Ruler, I expect?"
"Sure," says I. "Now, spring the gag."
But if there was a stinger to it, he must have lost it in the shuffle; for he opens up a line of talk that I didn't have the key to at all. Mr. Gordon tells me afterwards it was English politics and that Sir Peter was tryin' to register me as a Conservative. Anyway, I've promised to vote for Balfour, or somebody like that next election; so I'm goin' to send word to Little Tim that he needn't come around. Had to do it, just to please the old gent. By the time we'd got to the little cups of black he'd switched to something else.
"I don't suppose you know anything about railroads?" says he to Mr. Gordon.
Then it was my grin. Railroads is what Pyramid plays with, you know. He's a director on three or four lines himself, and is always lookin' for more. It's about as safe to leave a branch road out after nightfall when Gordon's around as it would be to try to raise watermelons in Minetta Lane. He grinned, too, and said something about not knowing as much about 'em as he did once.
With that Sir Peter lights up one of Mr. Gordon's Key West night-sticks and cuts adrift on the railroad business. That made the boss kind of sick at first. Railroads was something he was tryin' to forget for the evenin'. But there wasn't any shuttin' the old jay off. And say! he knew the case-cards all right. There was too much high finance about it for me to follow close; but anyways I seen that it made Mr. Gordon sit up and take notice. He'd peg in a question now and then, and got the old one so stirred up that after a while he shed the bucket, lugged out one of his bags, and flashed a lot of papers done up in neat little piles. He said it was a report he was goin' to make to some board or other, if ever the decimals would quit bothering him long enough.