"Be'n a-lookin' fer you, Mr. Harkless," he said in a shaking spindle of a
voice, as plaintive as his pale little eyes. "Mother Wimby, she sent some
roses to ye. Cynthy's fixin' 'em on yer table. I'm well as ever I am; but
her, she's too complaining to come in fer show-day. This morning, early,
we see some the Cross-Roads folks pass the place towards town, an' she
sent me in to tell ye. Oh, I knowed ye'd laugh. Says she, 'He's too much
of a man to be skeered,' says she, 'these here tall, big men always 'low
nothin' on earth kin hurt 'em,' says she, 'but you tell him to be
keerful,' says she; an' I see Bill Skillett an' his brother on the Square
lessun a half-an-hour ago, 'th my own eyes. I won't keep ye from yer
breakfast.--Eph Watts is in there, eatin'. He's come back; but I guess I
don't need to warn ye agin' him. He seems peaceable enough. It's the other
folks you got to look out fer."
He limped away. The editor waved his hand to him from the door, but the
old fellow shook his head, and made a warning, friendly gesture with his
arm.
Harkless usually ate his breakfast alone, as he was the latest riser in
Plattville. (There were days in the winter when he did not reach the hotel
until eight o'clock.) This morning he found a bunch of white roses, still
wet with dew and so fragrant that the whole room was fresh and sweet with
their odor, prettily arranged in a bowl on the table, and, at his plate,
the largest of all with a pin through the stem. He looked up, smilingly,
and nodded at the red-haired girl. "Thank you, Charmion," he said. "That's
very pretty."
She turned even redder than she always was, and answered nothing,
vigorously darting her brush at an imaginary fly on the cloth. After
several minutes she said abruptly, "You're welcome."
There was a silence, finally broken by a long, gasping sigh. Astonished,
he looked at the girl. Her eyes were set unfathomably upon his pink tie;
the wand had dropped from her nerveless hand, and she stood rapt and
immovable. She started violently from her trance. "Ain't you goin' to
finish your coffee?" she asked, plying her instrument again, and, bending
over him slightly, whispered: "Say, Eph Watts is over there behind you."
At a table in a far corner of the room a large gentleman in a brown frock
coat was quietly eating his breakfast and reading the "Herald." He was of
an ornate presence, though entirely neat. A sumptuous expanse of linen
exhibited itself between the lapels of his low-cut waistcoat, and an inch
of bediamonded breastpin glittered there, like an ice-ledge on a snowy
mountain side. He had a steady, blue eye and a dissipated, iron-gray
mustache. This personage was Mr. Ephraim Watts, who, following a calling
more fashionable in the eighteenth century than in the latter decades of
the nineteenth, had shaken the dust of Carlow from his feet some three
years previously, at the strong request of the authorities. The "Herald"
had been particularly insistent upon his deportation, and, in the local
phrase, Harkless had "run him out of town." Perhaps it was because the
"Herald's" opposition (as the editor explained at the time) had been
merely moral and impersonal, and the editor had always confessed to a
liking for the unprofessional qualities of Mr. Watts, that there was but
slight embarrassment when the two gentlemen met to-day. His breakfast
finished, Harkless went over to the other and extended his hand. Cynthia
held her breath and clutched the back of a chair. However, Mr. Watts made
no motion toward his well-known hip pocket. Instead, he rose, flushed
slightly, and accepted the hand offered him.