“Do you know,” he said as he stirred his tea, “I’ve been thinking about Palliser, and it has occurred to me more than once that I should like to hear just how he strikes you?”
“What I got on to first was how I struck him,” answered Tembarom, with a reasonable air. “That was dead easy.”
There was no hint of any vaunt of superior shrewdness. His was merely the level-toned manner of an observer of facts in detail.
“He has given you an opportunity of seeing a good deal of him,” the duke added. “What do you gather from him—unless he has made up his mind that you shall not gather anything at all?”
“A fellow like that couldn’t fix it that way, however much he wanted to,” Tembarom answered again reasonably. “Just his trying to do it would give him away.”
“You mean you have gathered things?”
“Oh, I’ve gathered enough, though I didn’t go after it. It hung on the bushes. Anyhow, it seemed to me that way. I guess you run up against that kind everywhere. There’s stacks of them in New York—different shapes and sizes.”
“If you met a man of his particular shape and size in New York, how would you describe him?” the duke asked.
“I should never have met him when I was there. He wouldn’t have come my way. He’d have been on Wall Street, doing high-class bucket-shop business, or he’d have had a swell office selling copper-mines—any old kind of mine that’s going to make ten million a minute, the sort of deal he’s in now. But I don’t believe you asked me because you thought I wasn’t on to him.”
“Frankly speaking, no,” answered the duke. “Does he talk to you about the mammoth mines and the rubber forests?”