"With boisterous companions!" I supplied the words
in my cheerfullest tone. "No; my conduct shall be exemplary,
Mr. Pickering," I added, with affable irony.
He picked up a single sheet of thin type-written
paper and passed it across the table. It was a formal
acquiescence in the provisions of the will. Pickering
had prepared it in advance of my coming, and this assumption
that I would accept the terms irritated me.
Assumptions as to what I should do under given conditions
had always irritated me, and accounted, in a
large measure, for my proneness to surprise and disappoint
people. Pickering summoned a clerk to witness
my signature.
"How soon shall you take possession?" he asked. "I
have to make a record of that."
"I shall start for Indiana to-morrow," I answered.
"You are prompt," he replied, deliberately folding in
quarters the paper I had just signed. "I hoped you
might dine with me before going out; but I fancy New
York is pretty tame after the cafés and bazaars of the
East."
His reference to my wanderings angered me again;
for here was the point at which I was most sensitive.
I was twenty-seven and had spent my patrimony; I had
tasted the bread of many lands, and I was doomed to
spend a year qualifying myself for my grandfather's
legacy by settling down on an abandoned and lonely
Indiana farm that I had never seen and had no interest
in whatever.
As I rose to go Pickering said: "It will be sufficient if you drop me a line, say once
a month, to let me know you are there. The post-office
is Annandale."
"I suppose I might file a supply of postal cards in the
village and arrange for the mailing of one every
month."
"It might be done that way," be answered evenly.
"We may perhaps meet again, if I don't die of starvation
or ennui. Good-by."
We shook hands stiffly and I left him, going down in
an elevator filled with eager-eyed, anxious men. I, at
least, had no cares of business. It made no difference
to me whether the market rose or fell. Something of
the spirit of adventure that had been my curse quickened
in my heart as I walked through crowded Broadway
past Trinity Church to a bank and drew the balance
remaining on my letter of credit. I received in
currency slightly less than one thousand dollars.
As I turned from the teller's window I ran into the
arms of the last man in the world I expected to see.