Just now, however, she treated his remarks in very cavalier fashion. The burden of such conversation as there was rested on Halloway. It consisted for the most part in genially ironical remarks on the charms of an outdoor life. Katherine was aloofly viewing the scenery with occasional side-shot glances at the offending youth; I watched events in a moody silence, and Corduroy still discussed his dinner some fifty yards from us. As for Simon Gray, he sat in a brown study, his eyes fixed intently on a syphon he did not see. I wondered what plan was filtering into that alert, fertile brain of his.
I was soon to learn. Halloway carried over to Corduroy a bottle of ale, and in his absence the Copper King found chance to enlist his daughter in the scheme. Presently Miss Katherine strolled leisurely toward the cluster of great brown rocks which cropped out near the edge of the bluff. She carried a magazine with her.
“You’re not going to run away again, Kate,” Halloway called after her.
She shook her head.
“Word of honor?”
“Word of honor,” she called gaily back to him. “But if you doubt——”
“Word of honor,” she called gaily back to him.
Her smile was an invitation. Halloway did not accept it at once, but, plainly eager to be off, stuck to the magnate for a long ten minutes. Then, “Hang duty!” he said, and with a word of caution to his accomplice, he disappeared after her behind the rocks. His long shadow had scarcely trailed out of view before old Gray and a flask of old Scotch were laying siege to Corduroy. The task of sapping his loyalty was no easy one. It took thirty minutes of argument—of threats, cajolery, promises, interspersed with frequent internal applications of the contents of the flask—to win him over. There were times when I despaired of hooking our shy fish, and even after he had swallowed the bait he fought against being landed. Every moment I expected to see Halloway’s impudent curly head rising over the brow of the hill. I was as nervous as a youngster awaiting a caning, but they don’t make them more cool and game than old Gray was. Our joint pocket books happened to carry five hundred twenty-five dollars, and it took all we had except some silver change to buy a release. But in the end I had the satisfaction of seeing the rotund millionaire and Corduroy legging it down the hill toward Manitou. I am not going to pretend that I have often spent as bad a quarter of an hour as the one which followed, during which I saw their figures lessen in the distance. It was not until they had reached the red thread of the valley road that I breathed freely. I was ready now for the villain to reenter, and, as if pat to his cue, the alluring vagabond I had cast for the part sauntered into view. He was very much engrossed with his companion, and—I noticed it with a pang of envy—she with him. Both of them seemed always to radiate health and vitality, but my jaundiced eyes found about them now a scarce decently subdued sparkle of exhilaration. They were in a world primeval and everybody else forgotten. There have been times when I have trod air and breathed champagne myself, but that did not make me any less sulky now. I resented to the bottom of my soul their Eden from which I was excluded.
