Part 21 (2/2)

XXII

ON THE SPUR-TRACK

At the precise moment when Gertrude and Brockway, pausing in their breath-cutting scramble up the bowlder-strewn mountain-side, were casting about for a suitable place in which to eat their luncheon, President Vennor and his guests were rising from the table after a rather early midday meal in car Naught-fifty. When the ladies had gone to their staterooms, the President sent Quatremain upon a wholly unnecessary errand to the post-office, and drew up a chair to smoke a cigar with Fleetwell.

It was not for nothing that he banished the secretary. The forenoon train from Clear Creek Canyon had arrived without bringing Gertrude; and the wires, which he had waited upon with increasing disquietude, still remained churlishly silent. A crisis in Gertrude's affair seemed imminent, and, as a last resort, Mr. Vennor had resolved to admonish Fleetwell, to the end that the collegian's wooing might be judiciously accelerated.

”I am afraid you have been lukewarm with Gertrude once too often, Chester, my boy,” he began, with studied bluntness. ”You ought by all means to have gone up in the mountains with her to-day.”

Fleetwell tried to look properly aggrieved, and succeeded fairly well.

”That's rather hard on me, isn't it? when I didn't so much as know she was going?”

”That is precisely the point I wished to arrive at,” the President a.s.serted, blandly. ”You should have known. You can scarcely expect her to thrust her confidence upon you.”

In his way, Fleetwell could be quite as plain-spoken as his hard-eyed cousin, and he answered the President's implication without pretending to misunderstand it.

”You mean that I've been s.h.i.+rking; that I haven't been properly reading my lines in the little comedy planned by my grandfather; is that it?”

”Well, not exactly s.h.i.+rking, perhaps, but the most observant person would never suspect that you and Gertrude were anything more than civilly tolerant cousins. I know her better than you do, my boy, and I can a.s.sure you that she's not to be so lightly won. Ours is a fairly practical family. I think I may say, but there is a streak of romance in it which comes to the surface now and then in the women, and Gertrude has her full share of it. Moreover, she doesn't care a pin for the provisions of the will.”

”Confound the will!” said the collegian. ”I don't see why the old gentleman had to fall back on a medieval dodge that always defeats itself.”

”Nor I; the matter would have been very much simplified if he had not.

But, unfortunately, we have to do with the fact.”

”It strikes me that we've had to do with it all along. I used to think Gertrude was rather fond of me, but since this money affair has come up, I'm not so sure of it.”

”Have you ever asked her?” inquired the President, with an apparent lack of interest which was no index to his anxiety.

”Why--no; not in so many words, I believe. But how the deuce is a fellow to make love to a girl when his grandfather has done it for him?”

”That, my dear Chester, is a question you ought to be able to answer for yourself. You can hardly expect Gertrude to beg you to save her little patrimony for her.”

It was an unfortunate way of putting it, and Mr. Vennor regretted his unwisdom when Fleetwell carried the thought to its legitimate conclusion.

”There it is again, you see. That cursed legacy tangles the thing every time you make a rush at it. I can understand just how she feels about it. If she refuses me it will cost her something; if she doesn't there will be plenty of the clan who will say that she had an eye to the money.”

”What difference will that make, so long as you know better?”

The question was so deliberate and matter-of-fact that Fleetwell forgot himself and let frankness run away with him.

”That's just it; how the deuce is a fellow going to know----” but at this point the cold eyes checked him, and he suddenly remembered that he was speaking to Gertrude's father. Whereupon he stultified himself and made a promise.

”Perhaps you are right, after all,” he added. ”Anyway, I'll have it out with her to-night, after she comes back.”

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