“Bright in Harrington,” put in Witherlee, with a sneer; “as if they wouldn’t be at him again before we’d gone twenty yards!”
“Yes, by Jupiter, but before we had gone twenty yards, Fernando, you and I went into the shop, you know, where you bought the cigars, and it was there that Harrington said he had to go back to the house for something, and made off with himself. It never occurred to me till now—but I’ll bet a franc he went back to those boys!”
He burst into a peal of laughter at the idea.
“I’d give something to know what Harrington did with the old cur,” he said in a moment.
“Took him off to the butcher’s perhaps, and sold him for sausages,” suggested Witherlee.
“Ah, Missr Wentwort’,” said the old man, grotesquely serious, “you friend, Missr Harrin’ton, is vair fine, vair mush humane, vair fine zhentilman. I feel vair mush warm to him.”
“Rather too much of the Don Quixote order, though,” drawled Witherlee, affectedly, giving the Spanish pronunciation to the ‘Don Quixote’ and calling it Don Kehoty.
“O you be hanged, Fernando,” burst in Wentworth. “He’s no more like Don Kehoty, as you call it, than you’re like Sancho Panza. He’s the grandest fellow that ever lived, and makes me ashamed of myself every day of my life. Hallo, I guess he’s coming.”
Witherlee, biliously pale with spite at the double injury of his pronunciation of “Don Quixote” having been mimicked, and Harrington having been so warmly praised, busied himself with adjusting the loosened skin of his cigar, while Monsieur Bagasse and Wentworth turned to the door, which voices and trampling feet were nearing. Presently the door opened and a group of seven or eight poured in with a confusion of salutations. Four or five of them were young mercantiloes, and instantly swarmed around Fisk and Palmer, who were still fussing over the plastron. One was a heavy, taciturn man—a Pennsylvania Dutchman—with blue, fishy eyes, a sodden face and a yellow beard. His name was Whilt, and he kept a wine-cellar, and boarded with Monsieur Bagasse. With him was another of the fencing-master’s boarders—a tall, slender, handsome, swaggering young man, half-soldier, half-coxcomb in his bearing, with bright dark eyes, brilliant color, long black hair, well oiled and curled, and a long, slim, black moustache, shaved into two sections, and clinging to his upper lip, and curving around his moist, scarlet mouth, like two flaccid leeches. He was fancifully clad in bright blue, tight-fitting trowsers, a short, rakish coat, gay vest and neckerchief, wore his falling collar open at the throat, and had a Kossuth hat, with a black plume, set smartly on his head. This was Captain Vukovich, a young Hungarian officer, who had come over in the train of Kossuth. Though it was only eight o’clock, he and Whilt had a strong smell of Rhine wine about them, which they diffused through the room upon entering.