Chapter TWO: I (2)

Her assumption flattered Archie. As his immediate concern was to escape the consequences of his folly in shooting a fellow mortal, he assured her that he was always glad of an opportunity to fling business cares aside. She explained that the inn was much affected by cottagers in neighboring summer settlements and that many of the diners had motored in for the dance. Seebrook and Walters were undoubtedly enjoying the Governor, proof of which was immediately forthcoming when Seebrook suggested that they should all dine together.

"You do us much honor," said the Governor. "Mr. Comly and I shall be pleased, I'm sure."

Archie had often eaten alone in just such pleasant little inns from sheer lack of courage to make acquaintances, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world for the Governor to establish himself on terms of intimacy with perfect strangers. Their party was the merriest in the room, and Archie was aware of envious glances from other tables that were not enlivened by a raconteur so affable and amusing as the Governor.

"It's so nice to stumble into a place like this where every one may speak to every one else and be _sure_, you know!" said Miss Seebrook.

"It does rather strengthen one's faith in the human race," Archie agreed, reflecting that if she had known that upstairs in the amiable Mr. Saulsbury's room reposed fifty thousand dollars of stolen money her confidence in the exclusiveness of the Cornford Inn would have been somewhat shaken. But the ironic humor of the whole thing overmastered his sense of guilt and he managed to hold the table for a little while without the Governor's assistance as he talked of the French chateaux with honest knowledge. The Seebrooks had motored through the chateau country the year before the war and as Archie had once made the excursion with an architect he was on firm ground.

"There's a thorough man for you!" exclaimed the Governor proudly when Archie supplied some dates in French history for which Miss Seebrook fumbled.

They continued their talk over coffee served in the garden. When the music began Seebrook and Walters recalled a bridge engagement and the Governor announced that he must look up an old friend who lived in Cornford. He produced a piece of paper on which he had scratched one of the diagrams he was eternally sketching as though consulting a memorandum of an address.

"I shall be back shortly," he said as they separated in the office.

Seebrook and Walters found their bridge partners and Archie and Miss Seebrook joined the considerable company that were already dancing. Only a few days earlier nothing could have persuaded Archie to dance, but now that he was plunged into a life of adventure the fear of dropping dead from excessive exercise no longer restrained him. Miss Seebrook undoubtedly enjoyed dancing and after a one-step and a fox-trot she declared that she would just love to dance all night. It had been a long time since Archie had heard a girl make this highly unoriginal remark, and in his own joy of the occasion he found it tinkling pleasantly in remote recesses of his memory. As Miss Seebrook pouted when he suggested that she might like him to introduce some of the other men and said that she was perfectly satisfied, he hastened to assure her that the rôle of monopolist was wholly agreeable to him. In this mad new life a flirtation was only an incident of the day's work, and Miss Seebrook was not at all averse to flirting with him.

She thought it would be fine to take a breath of air, and gathering up her cloak they went into the garden for an ice. This refreshment ordered he was conscious of new and pleasant thrills as he faced her across the table. His youth stirred in him again. It was reassuring to have this proof that one might be a lost sheep dyed to deepest black and yet indulge in philandering under the June stars with a pretty girl--a handsome stately girl she was!--unrestrained by the thought that she would run away screaming for the police if she knew that he was a man who shot people and consorted with thieves and very likely would die on the gallows or be strapped in an electric chair before he got his deserts. His mind had passed through innumerable phases since he left his sister's house in Washington, and now as he shamelessly flirted with Miss Seebrook he knew himself for an unmoral creature, a degenerate who was all the more dangerous for being able to pass muster among decent folk. He had always imagined that citizens of the underworld were limited in their social indulgences to cautious meetings in the back rooms of low saloons, but this he had found to be a serious mistake. It was clear that the élite among the lawless might ride the high crest of social success.

His only nervousness was due to the fear that he might betray himself. It was wholly possible that Miss Seebrook knew some of his friends; in fact she mentioned a family in Lenox that he knew very well. She was expert in all the niceties of flirtation and he responded joyously, as surprised and delighted as a child with a new toy at the ease with which he conveyed to her the idea that his life had been an immeasurable dark waste till she had dawned upon his enraptured vision. Her back was toward the inn and across her shoulders he could see the swaying figures in the ball room. The light from a garden lamp played upon her head and brightened in her fair hair.

Miss Seebrook was speaking of music, and reciting the list of operas she loved best when Archie's gaze was caught and held by a shadow that flitted along an iron fire escape that zigzagged down from the fourth to the first story of the long rambling inn.

"You seem very dreamy," remarked Miss Seebrook. "I know how that is for I can dream for hours and hours."

"Yes; reverie; just floating on clouds, on and on," Archie replied, though the shadow moving on and on along the side of the inn was troubling him not a little.

"The stars were never so near as they are tonight," she said. "Was it Shakspere or Longfellow who said, 'bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art!'"

It was neither, Archie knew, but he said he thought the line occurred in Hamlet.

"Do you think Hamlet was insane?" she asked.

"I sometimes think I am," replied Archie, watching the shadow on the inn wall.

"Why, Mr. Comly, how absurd!"

It was really not so absurd at the moment, but he again had recourse to the poets, devoutly praying that she would not look toward the inn. He had surmised that the Governor's declared purpose to call on an old friend in Cornford was merely to cover his withdrawal from the party; but that he could have meditated a predatory excursion through the inn had not entered into Archie's speculations as to his friend's absence. There was no mistaking the figure that had moved swiftly down the ladder. The Governor for a man of his compact build was amazingly agile and quick of foot and hand. He was now creeping along the little balcony at the third floor. He paused a moment and then vanished into an open window. The Governor had said that the Seebrook party had rooms just under their own; but--

"I have chosen a star for you," Miss Seebrook was murmuring.

Archie, in his preoccupation with the Governor's strange performance, was so slow to respond that Miss Seebrook, thinking that he was deliberating as to which star he should bestow upon her in return, generously broadened the scope of her offer.

"You shall have Orion or Arcturus with his sons."

"I never could find Orion even with a sky map and a telescope," Archie roused himself to protest.

Something very unlike a star but more like the glimmer of a match in a room on the third floor held his fascinated gaze, and it was difficult to be interested in the conversation of even so pretty a girl as Miss Seebrook when an audacious thief was at work only a little way beyond her. For all Archie knew it was her own room that the venturesome Governor was ransacking and at that very moment he might be stuffing his pockets with her belongings.

Venus, Archie gravely announced, had always been his favorite star; and he set her to searching for it in the bright expanse while he watched the Governor reappear, bending low as he crept out of the window and ascended rapidly to the fourth floor. He had risked detection by a dozen people who were idling about the garden. The intermission was over and music floating through the open windows again invited to the dance.

"We must go back, I suppose," said Miss Seebrook with a sigh.

"I shall never forget this," declared Archie, hoping with all his heart that there would be no occasion for regretting the hour spent in the garden.

They danced again, and in the handclapping that followed the first number he turned to find the Governor, calm and with no marks of his escapade upon him, bowing before Miss Seebrook.

"Really, I must break in! Just a little fragment of this waltz! More capricious and jazzy measures have their day but the waltz endures forever! Don't frown at me that way, Comly! My old friend kept me longer than I expected and the night grows old."

The Governor danced with smoothness and ease. Archie, his back to the wall, saw the rogue laughing into his partner's face as lightheartedly as though he had not, within a few minutes, imperiled his freedom in an act of sheerest folly.

He brought the girl back to Archie, and then ingratiated himself with a shy elderly woman who was having a difficult time finding partners for her granddaughters. The Governor introduced himself with a charming deference, a winning courtesy, that gained her heart at once. He not only danced with her young charges but found other partners for them. Archie marveled; a man of the Governor's intelligence and address could hardly have failed to gain a high place in the world, yet his performance on the fire escape proved all the man had said of himself as an outlaw. The Governor was not one man but a dozen different men and in despair Archie gave up trying to account for him.

V

At midnight Seebrook and Walters came in from their card game.

"We've certainly had the best of you, papa! It has been a wonderful evening!" exclaimed Miss Seebrook.

"I knew it was going to be a good party," said the Governor warmly. "I regretted every moment I had to spend with my friends in Putnam Street. And yet should auld acquaintance be forgot, you know!"

"You were perfectly lovely to that nice old lady and her frightened little granddaughters. They will never forget you as long as they live! And I'm afraid Mr. Comly will always remember me as the girl who kept him all to herself for a whole evening."

"I didn't make it a hard job for you," Archie protested. "I shall mark the evening with a white stone on the long journey of life."

"I hope, papa, you will add a word to my invitation to these gentlemen to come and see us at home."

"Certainly," Seebrook assented cordially, drawing out his card-case.

"We shall be ready for a little sociability," remarked the Governor, "when we return from the West. We are motoring from Portland to Portland, with a few little side trips like this, and we ought to have some good yarns to tell when we get back."

"You are not running off immediately?" asked Walters. "Mr. Seebrook and I are really here on business, but we've been delayed and may have another day's time to kill. We'd be glad to play around with you."

"It's most lamentable," replied the Governor, "that we've got to run away tomorrow. It's now the hour when ghosts walk but we shall see you in the morning."

In Archie's room the Governor hummed one of his favorite ballads as he slipped out of his coat and picked a speck from his snowy waistcoat. Then he produced a tiny phial from his pocket and touched his upper lip with a drop of the contents.

"It's a very curious thing about perfumes," he said meditatively. "I carry an assortment of these little bottles. The psychology of the thing is most interesting. Fragrances differ astonishingly as to their reactions upon the nerves. Only two hours ago I fortified myself for a little foolishness that required nevertheless a steady hand by sniffing the bouquet of a rare perfume known only to a few connoisseurs,--a compound based upon attar of roses. But this that I have just had recourse to is soothing and sedative. It is made from a rare flower found only in the most inaccessible fastnesses of the Andes, and is believed by the natives to be a charm against death. At some time I shall be glad to show you a treatise on the plant written by an eminent Spanish botanist. Its effect upon me is instantaneous and yet it might serve you quite differently, as our sensitiveness to these reactions of the olfactory nerve are largely idiosyncratic. Let me tap your upper lip with the cork--ah!"

There was nothing more repulsive to Archie than perfumes and he impatiently jerked his head away. The odor proved, however, to be exceedingly delicate and not the miserable chemical concoction he dreaded. But he was not to be thwarted in his purpose to learn just what the Governor meant by endangering their security so recklessly. He slammed the transom tight and drew down the shades.

"Well?" he demanded sharply.

"It is evident," remarked the Governor good-humoredly, "that you do not react to the soothing influences of the _rosa alta_. You seem perturbed, anxious, with slight symptoms of _paralysis agitans_. Pray be seated and I will do my best to restore your peace of mind."

"You needlessly exposed yourself to observation by sneaking down the fire escape of this hotel--I know that!"

"My dear boy, I was merely gathering a few blossoms of the crimson rambler from the ancient walls of the inn. You may have noted that I wore a spray of buds in my lapel when I joined you in the ball room."

"You had no right to plunder the house without warning me! I don't relish the idea of being jailed for your foolishness. And those people were mighty decent to us! If they knew we were two crooks--!"

"They merely yielded to our charms! They feel themselves honored by our acquaintance! Now seat yourself on the bed and I'll tell you the whole story. When I left you I hastened into the village, bought a stick of shaving soap in a drug store and a few cigars in a tobacconist's. In each place I conversed with the clerk, thus laying ample ground for an alibi. Hurrying back to the inn I avoided observation by entering by the side door, skipped up to our rooms--and there you are! I did run a chance, of course, in climbing down the ladder, but all's well that ends well. I exchanged our new bank notes for sixty well-worn one-thousand-dollar gold certificates negotiable in all parts of the republic. That means a net gain in the Red Leary trust fund of ten thousand dollars. Seebrook had the stuff in the collar tray of his trunk. As the trunk was otherwise empty and the lock a special one that gave me a bit of trouble he's not likely to bother with it until old man Congdon turns up to close the stock transaction. When he opens it he will find fifty thousand dollars of good bills neatly piled there and if he has the imagination of a canary he will think the fairies have played a trick on him!"

"My God!" moaned Archie. "You don't think you can get away with this!"

"I think," returned the Governor imperturbably, "that _we_ must and will get away with it." His emphasis on the plural pronoun caused Archie to cringe. "It strikes me as highly amusing that we have unloaded those bills of Leary's on a good sport like Seebrook. As I locked that stuff in his trunk I got to laughing--really, I did--and a chambermaid roaming the hall must have heard me, for the key rattled in the lock just as I slipped out of the window. There's Leary's suitcase and I've packed it with our soiled linen and stuck in a pair of shoes for weight. Seebrook's legal tender is neatly rolled up in my best silken hose in my kit bag. Hark! There's Seebrook tumbling into his bed, which is just beneath mine!"

"You're getting me in pretty deep," mumbled Archie dejectedly.

"How about those blood stains on the sidewalk at Bailey Harbor?" asked the Governor in his blandest tones. "When you speak of getting in deep you forget that some one besides Hoky was shot back yonder. You came to me red-handed from a deed of violence, and I took you in and became your protector, asking no questions. It's the basest ingratitude for you to whimper over a small larceny when you have added assault or murder to the liabilities of our partnership! But don't forget for a moment that we're pals and pledged to see each other through."

The reference to the blood stains reported by the Bailey Harbor police threw Archie back instantly upon the Governor's mercy. Complicity in the robbery of Seebrook was as nothing compared with the haunting fear that the man he had shot in the Congdon house had died from the wound. Unable to determine this question he was floundering in a veritable sea of crimes. The Governor was undressing with provoking indifference to his companion's perturbation.

"Sleep, lad, sleep! You may be sure that nothing will harm us tonight, and I have faith that more stirring adventures are ahead of us. I forgive you your qualms and quavers, the pardonable manifestations of youth and inexperience. We walk in slippery places but we shall not stumble, at least not while the Governor keeps his head!"

Nothing appealed to Archie as of greater importance than the retention by his companion of the head that now lay chastely upon a snowy pillow. A handsome, well-formed head, a head suggestive of family and the pride of race, though filled with the most complicated mental machinery with which a human being had ever been endowed.

"Put out the lights and get you to your couch!" the Governor muttered drowsily.

The man certainly wore his crimes lightly. He was sound asleep before Archie had got into his pajamas.

VI

When they reached the dining-room at ten the next morning they found Seebrook and Walters just finishing breakfast. Miss Seebrook was having coffee in her room, her father explained in response to Archie's polite inquiries.

"We're hoping to get away this afternoon," he continued. "It will take only a few minutes to transact our business when the man I'm waiting for appears; but he's an uncertain quantity, and there's no telling when he'll show up. But we're having a good time and I shan't mind another day or two. If only you gentlemen would bear us company!"

"Ah, you are very kind!" said the Governor; "but we must resume our ramble toward the Pacific. We are more or less dated up for little entertainments on the way."

"I certainly envy you," said Walters ruefully. "Seebrook and I belong to the large class of men who work for a living."

"Well, Comly and I have our own small jobs," the Governor protested. "We're interested in some water power schemes through the West and hope to make our expenses."

Seebrook and Walters lingered in the office as Archie and the Governor paid their account. As they waited for their car to be sent round from the garage a machine drew up and discharged a short, wiry, elderly man in a motor coat that was much too large for him. He was accompanied by an enormous amount of luggage and from the steps of the inn gave orders in a high piping voice as to the manner of its disposal. As the various pieces were hustled into the office he enumerated them in an audible tone as though inviting the cooperation of all the loungers in making an inventory of his effects. When this had been concluded Seebrook stepped up and accosted the newcomer.

"Mr. Congdon, I am very glad to see you. I hope you are not worn out by your drive."

"Worn out!" snapped the little man. "Do you imagine a run of a hundred miles would fatigue a man of my constitution? I assure you that you are greatly mistaken if you think I am feeling my age. Seventy! And I don't feel a day over fifty, not a day, sir. But I shall rest for a few hours as a precaution, a mere precautionary measure and be able to meet you for our little business at two-thirty sharp."

"That will suit me perfectly," replied Seebrook.

Archie hung about impatiently waiting for the Governor to make his farewells to the old lady and her granddaughters on whom he had expended his social talents at the dance. Mr. Congdon was quarreling with the clerk over the location of the room he had reserved; he wanted no room with a western exposure as such rooms were always so baked by the afternoon sun that they were as hot as tropical jungles at night. Having frightened the clerk into readjusting the entire registration to accommodate him, he demanded to know whether his son, Mr. Putney Congdon, was stopping in the house.

"Mind you, I have no reason to believe he _is_ here, but I've been asking for him everywhere along the road."

Assured that Mr. Putney Congdon was not in the inn and hadn't been there within the recollection of the office staff, the senior Congdon exploded violently upon Seebrook and Walters.

"Things have come to a pretty pass in this topsy turvy world when a man can't find his own son! For three days I've been wiring his clubs and all other places he could possibly be without result. And I have learned that his wife has left Bailey Harbor and the house there is closed. Closed! How dare they close that house when I was about to pay them a visit? I spent thirty-five dollars last night in telephoning trying to find out what's become of my son and his family and I got nothing for my money--nothing!"

Seebrook and Walters expressed their sympathy in mild tones that roused the old gentleman to greater fury.

"Can a whole family be obliterated and no trace left behind? Is it possible that they've been murdered in their beds, servants and all, and the police not yet aware of it?"

At the mention of murder Archie began stealthily feeling his way along the cigar counter to a water cooler. He drank two glasses of ice water while he listened to Eliphalet's grievances against all things visible and invisible. There seemed to be no escaping from the Congdons and here was the father of Putney boldly publishing to the whole state of New Hampshire his fear that his son had been murdered.

"I called up everybody I could think of at Bailey Harbor, that dismal rotten hole, and got nothing for my trouble. Nothing! A fool druggist, who pretended to know everything about the place, had the effrontery to tell me Putney hadn't been there for a week and declared that his family had left! Why should they leave? I ask you to tell me why my daughter-in-law should leave a comfortable house at the shore at this season and tell nobody her destination?"

As no member of his growing audience of guests, clerks and bell-hops could answer his questions, Mr. Congdon swept the whole company with a fierce, disdainful glare and began mobilizing the entire day watch of porters and bell-boys to convey his luggage to his room. One of the young gentlemen was engaged at the moment in winking at the girl attendant at the cigar counter when the agitated traveler thrust the point of an enormous umbrella into his ribs with a vigor that elicited a yell of surprise and pain.

The concentration of the hotel staff upon the transfer of Mr. Congdon's luggage to his room left the Governor and Archie to manage the removal of their own effects to the waiting car. Seebrook and Walters obligingly assisted, laughing at Congdon's eccentricities.

"The arrival of that enchanting old crank increases my grief at leaving," declared the Governor. "A delightful person. The son he mentioned with so much feeling was in Boston looking for _him_ a month ago."

Seebrook seized the Governor's kit bag containing the sixty thousand dollars and carried it out to the car. The sight of it in Seebrook's hand gave Archie sensations of nausea that were not relieved by the grin he detected on the Governor's face. Within an hour or two at most the substitution and robbery would be discovered and the country would ring with the demand for their detention. But the Governor was carrying off the departure with his usual gaiety. It was clear that he had made the most favorable impression upon Seebrook and Walters; and in the cordial handshaking and expressions of hope for future meetings Archie joined with the best spirit he could muster. A cheery good-by caused him to look up. Miss Seebrook with a red rose in her hand waved to him from her window.

As he lifted his cap she dropped the rose with a graceful sweep of the arm.

"Like the old stage coach days!" cried the Governor, applauding Archie's catch.

He jumped into the machine and Archie scrambled after him. Archie's last impression of the inn was the blur of a waving handkerchief in Miss Seebrook's window.

"We are a success, my boy! You bore yourself marvelously well," said the Governor testing the gears. "As I remember we pass town hall on right and cross railroad at bridge; then follow telephone poles. We don't need the guide book; it's all in my head. Ah, that little touch of the rose was worth all our perils; nothing in my experience was ever prettier than that! A lovely girl; you might do worse if you were not already plighted. If she had come down to say good-by it would have been much less significant. But the rose, the red, red rose! It wouldn't be a bad idea to stick it in an envelope and mail it to the girl you were telling me about--the one who sent you forth to shatter kingdoms. I guess that would jostle her a little, particularly if you were to enclose a line telling her that it had fallen to your hand from a curtained lattice."

"I don't know her address," mumbled Archie, fastening the flower in his buttonhole.

He still martyrized himself in his thoughts of Isabel. Her contumelious treatment of him at Portsmouth rankled; but he had satisfied himself that it was all his fault. In some way the curse of the Congdons lay upon her as upon him. If he had not burst upon her so idiotically she would probably have listened to his story with some interest if not with admiration. He meant to be very loyal to Isabel in spite of the disheartening contretemps at Portsmouth and he drew the rose from his coat and cast it from him.

"So soon!" exclaimed the Governor. "I rejoice in your fidelity. Hope rides a high horse and I'm confident that in due season we shall find our two adorable ones. But it will do you no harm to indulge in a little affair now and then on the way; merely practice at the approach shot, you know, to keep your hand in. You are undoubtedly thinking of your beloved with a new tenderness because you found Miss Seebrook kind. Such, lad, is the way of love, true love, the love that never dies."

Love as a subject for discussion seemed wholly incongruous in view of the fact that they were running off with Seebrook's money and pursuers might already be hot on their trail. He suggested the dangers of their situation, thinking that here at last was something that would sober the Governor. But the Governor merely laughed as he swung the car round a sharp corner.

"Don't you believe that I hadn't a care for our safe flight! You must learn to use your eyes, son. There was one of the brotherhood of the road right there in the office when we left. I gave him instructions last night. He's a sneak thief of considerable intelligence who gave me the sign as I was pretending to leave for that call on my old friend. I smuggled him upstairs to keep watch for me and he proved himself a fellow of decided merit. He'll be hanging round Cornford today and as the absurd police will be obliged to make an arrest to save their reputations he will put himself in their way and encourage the idea by subtle means that he _might_ have been the malefactor who robbed Seebrook's trunk and left Leary's bills behind. They will be unable to make a case against him but he'll probably get thirty days for loitering. Then he'll walk out and draw a thousand dollars from one of our little private banks further along the road for so chivalrously throwing himself into the breach! There are wheels within wheels in our game, and these fellows who make sacrifice hits are highly useful. They also serve who only go to jail, as John Milton almost said. Even the police recognize the sacrificial artists; and encourage them--on the quiet, of course. It calms public complaint of their inefficiency. I can find you men who will do a year's time to save the men higher up. This satisfies the public as to the zeal of its paid protectors and makes it possible for men of genius like you and me to walk in high places unmolested. A damnable system, Archie, but we learned it from the greedy trust magnates. You take the wheel; it just occurs to me that you said you were a fair driver."

Archie had always imagined that men slip gradually from the straight and narrow path, but he felt himself plunging down a steep toboggan with all the delirious joy of a speed maniac.

Of one thing he was confident: if he ever returned to his old orderly, lawful life, he would be much more tolerant of sinners than he had been in the old tranquil times. He had always found it easy to be good but now he was finding it quite as easy to be naughty, very naughty indeed. His speculations as to just how long he could be imprisoned for his crimes and misdemeanors to date resolved themselves into a question with which he interrupted the Governor in a sonorous recitation of Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.

"If you shoot a man but don't kill him, and pile on top of that receiving stolen goods and complicity in burglary, how much can they hand you?"

The Governor answered with disconcerting promptness.

"Shooting with intent to commit murder--they always put it that way whether you meant the shot as anything more than a little pleasantry or really had murder in your heart--that would be a minimum of ten years in many of the American states and a hard-hearted judge might soak you for twenty. Then pile on that from one to five years for hiding stolen property; and then a first-class burglary, might run you pretty high, particularly if they landed you on all three charges and showed that you were viciously hostile to the forces of society. But there's no cause for worry. If you behaved yourself they'd knock off a generous allowance and a fellow of your enlightenment and tact might be put to work in the warden's office, or set to collecting potato bugs in the prison garden patch. But it's highly unprofessional to bother about such trifles. We haven't been nabbed yet, and if you and I are not smart enough to keep out of trouble we ought to be locked up; that's my philosophy of the situation. You must conquer that morbid strain in you that persists in looking for trouble. I find it highly depressing."

He sang a bar of "Ben Bolt" to test his memory of the words and then urged Archie to join him in the ballad, which he said was endeared to him by the most sacred associations. Archie hadn't indulged in song since he sang "Fair Harvard" at his last class reunion, but the Governor praised his singing and carried him through "Robin Grey" and a few other classics with growing animation.

"You respond to treatment splendidly! The sun and air are bringing a fine color to your face until you don't even remotely suggest a doleful jail bird. We'll soon be able to stroll along Fifth Avenue and pass for members of the leisure class who live on the golf links. You need hardening up and if you stick to me you'll lay up a store of health that will last you forty years."

The Governor was amazingly muscular, and his shapely hands seemed possessed of miraculous strength. When a tire went bad he changed it with remarkable ease and dexterity, scorning Archie's offer of assistance.

"No lost motion! The world spends half its time doing things twice that could as well be done once. I am blessed with an orderly mind, Archie. You will have noticed that virtue in me by the time the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock, to quote the Hoosier Theocritus."

And so, to the merry accompaniment of old tunes and mellow rhymes, they crossed the Connecticut.