By Churchill Williams
And, if you don’t mind, old fellow, will you bring over the guns yourself?”
That had been Tony Rennert’s parting charge as he bolted from the breakfast table at the Agawan Club for the dogcart which was scheduled to make connections with the eight-forty-five for the city. Two days before, after eighteen months of leisurely travel abroad, I had been met on landing with Tony’s urgent message to join him in bachelor quarters at the Agawan, and with an alacrity born of the wish to get close again to one of the “old crowd,” I had straightway come down to the club in the twenty-horse-power car which had carried me faithfully for six weeks over the French roads. Come down to find myself among a lot of men I did not know and for whom, to be entirely frank, I did not care.
Agawan had changed since last I was there. Then it was a big, comfortable shooting box, with a good cook, an old-fashioned barn, and, behind it, kennels for half a dozen clever dogs. Now it was triple its former size, rebuilt and modernized, with many bedrooms, a double-deck piazza and a dancing floor. The barn was gone, a fine stable had taken its place, and tennis courts and golf links occupied a large part of its one-time brush-grown pasturage and sloping meadows. In short, it was a country club, glaring in its fresh paint and with all the abominations which the name of that institution suggests to a man to whom knickerbockers and loose coats, a gun, a dog, a pipe and never the flutter of a petticoat the whole day long give selfish but complete satisfaction.
Tony had fallen into evil ways. I suspected as much as soon as I saw the manner of his living; I was sure of it when he informed me, with detestable glee, that there was to be a big house-warming dance the following evening, at which—well, Morleton, three miles away, had undergone a boom in my absence, and from the houses there and from the city, too, were to come—girls. Privately I made up my mind that the dance was a thing I would miss, and Tony must have read disapproval on my face, for he said no more about the festivities, and a little later proposed the shooting. There were woodcock left in the marshes; he had seen them—by accident, I guessed. He would send to the city for the guns, and we would put in a good day together. That sounded better, and I acquiesced promptly.
But before we had arisen from the table a waiter brought a telegram, and Tony’s face fell into glum lines. It was an important business message and called him to the city over the next night. There was no help for it, he explained; but, as I had my car, he hoped I would worry it out alone till he got back. He would send down the guns by express against a further delay, and—there a lingering spark of his former affection for the twelve-bores glowed into life—would I personally see that they came over from the railroad station safely?
So it was that, a little after nine o’clock the following evening, in accordance with a wire from Tony, I drew up at the station platform just as the last train pulled in. A vibrator spring on the car was badly out of tune; I was bent over, testing it, when a voice exclaimed, joyfully, almost at my elbow: “Oh, there you are! What a scare I have had!”
I started and looked up. The impression I got was of a modish and very much up-tilted hat and of a veil which hid everything beneath its brim and the collar of a long, loose coat. These and nothing much besides; for the single post-lamp left the platform in semi-darkness. But I realized that this was a lady who addressed me, and that there was a mistake which I could not too speedily correct.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, “but you see——”