THE AMATEUR INN

ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE

By
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE

LOCHINVAR LUCK
FURTHER ADVENTURES OF LAD
BUFF: A COLLIE
THE AMATEUR INN
BLACK CÆSAR’S CLAN
BLACK GOLD

NEW YORK:
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

THE
AMATEUR INN

BY
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE

NEW

YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

THE AMATEUR INN. II
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

THE AMATEUR INN

THE AMATEUR INN

Chapter I
A NON-SKIPPABLE PROLOGUE

OSMUN VAIL doesn’t come into this story at all. Yet he was responsible for everything that happened in it.

He was responsible for the whistling cry in the night, and for the Thing that huddled among the fragrant boxtrees, and for the love of a man and a maid—or rather the loves of several men and a maid—and for the amazing and amusing and jewel-tangled dilemma wherein Thaxton was shoved.

He was responsible for much; though he was actively to blame for nothing. Moreover he and his career were interesting.

So he merits a word or two, if only to explain what happened before the rise of our story’s curtain.

At this point, the boreful word, Prologue, should be writ large, with a space above and below it, by way of warning. But that would be the sign to skip. And one cannot skip this short prologue without losing completely the tangled thread of the yarn which follows—a thread worth gripping and a yarn more or less worth telling.

So let us dispose of the prologue, without calling it by its baleful name; and in a mere mouthful or two of words. Something like this:

When Osmun Vail left his father’s Berkshire farm, at twenty-one, to seek his fortune in New York, he wore his $12 “freedom suit” and had a cash capital of $18, besides his railway ticket.

Followed forty years of brow-sweat and brain-wrack and one of those careers whose semi-occasional real-life recurrence keeps the Success magazines out of the pure-fiction class.

When Osmun Vail came back, at sixty-one, to the Berkshire farm that had been his father’s until the mortgage was foreclosed, he was worth something more than five million dollars. His life-battle had been fought and won. His tired soul yearned unspeakably for the peace and loveliness of the pleasant hill country where he had been born—the homeland he had half-forgotten and which had wholly forgotten him and his.

Osmun recalled the prim village of Stockbridge, the primmer town of Pittsfield, drowsing beneath South Mountain, the provincial scatter of old houses known as Lenox; the tumbled miles of mountain wilderness and the waste of lush farmland between and around them.

At sixty-one he found Pittsfield a new city; and saw a Lenox and Stockbridge that had been discovered and renovated by beauty-lovers from the distant outside world. All that region was still in the youth of its golden development. But the wave had set in, and had set in strong.

A bit dazzled and more than a little troubled by the transformation, Osmun Vail sought the farm of his birth and the nearby village of Aura. Here at least nothing had changed; except that his father’s house—built by his grandfather’s own gnarled hands—had burned down; taking the rattle-trap red barns with it. The whole hilltop farm lay weedgrown, rank, desolate. In the abomination of desolation, a deserted New England farm can make Pompeii look like a hustling metropolis. There is something awesome in its new deadness.

Cold fingers seemed to catch Osmun by the throat and by the heartstrings; as he stared wistfully from the house’s site, to the neglected acres his grandsire had cleared and his sire had loved. From the half-memory of a schoolday poem, the returned wanderer quoted chokingly:

“Here will I pitch my tent. Here will I end my days.”

Then on the same principle of efficient promptitude which had lifted him from store-porter to a bank presidency, Osmun Vail proceeded to realize a dream he had fostered through the bleakly busy decades of his exile.

For a ridiculously low price he bought back and demortgaged the farm and the five hundred acres that bordered it. He turned loose a horde of landscape artists upon the domain. He sent overseas for two renowned British architects, and bade them build him a house on the hilltop that should be a glorious monument to his own success and to his father’s memory. To Boston and to New York he sent, for a legion of skilled laborers. And the estate of Vailholme was under way.

Fashion, wealth, modernity, had skirted this stretch of rolling valley to northeast of Stockbridge and to south of Lenox. The straggly one-street village of Aura drowsed beneath its giant elms; as it had drowsed since a quarter-century after the Pequot wars. The splashing invasion of this moneyed New Yorker created more neighborhood excitement than would the visit of a Martian to Brooklyn.

Excitement and native hostility to outsiders narrowed down to a very keen and very personal hatred of Osmun Vail; when it was learned that all his skilled labor and all his building material had been imported from points beyond the soft green mountain walls which hedge Aura Valley.

Now there was not a soul in the Valley capable of building any edifice more imposing or imaginative than a two-story frame house. There was no finished material in the Valley worth working into the structure of such a mansion as Osmun proposed. But this made no difference. An outlander had come back to crow over his poor stay-at-home neighbors, and he was spending his money on outside help and goods, to the detriment of the natives. That was quite enough. The tide of icy New England hate swelled from end to end of the Valley; and it refused to ebb.

These Aura folk were Americans of Puritan stock—a race to whom sabotage and arson are foreign. Thus they did not seek to destroy or even to hamper the work at Vailholme. But their aloofness was made as bitter and blighting as a Bible prophet’s curse. For example:

When his great house was but half built, Osmun ran up from New York, one gray January Saturday afternoon, to inspect the job. This he did every few weeks. And, on his tours, he made headquarters at Plum’s, in Stockbridge, six miles away. This was an ancient and honorable hostelry which some newfangled folk were even then beginning to call “The Red Lion Inn,” and whose food was one of Life’s Compensations. Thence, on a livery nag, Vail was wont to ride out to his estate.

On this January trip Osmun found that Plum’s had closed, at Christmas, for the season. He drove on to Aura, only to find the village’s one inn was shut for repairs. Planning to continue his quest of lodgings as far as Lenox or, if necessary, to Pittsfield, Osmun went up, through a snowstorm, to his uncompleted hilltop mansion of Vailholme.

He had brought along a lunch, annexed from the Stockbridge bakery. So interested did he become in wandering from one unceilinged room to another, and furnishing and refurnishing them in his mind, that he did not notice the steady increase of the snowfall and of the wind which whipped it into fury.

By the time he went around to the shed, at the rear of the house, where he had stabled the livery horse, he could scarce see his hand before his face. The gale was hurling the tons of snow from end to end of the Valley, in solid masses. There was no question of holding the road or even of finding it. The horse knew that—and he snorted, and jerked back on the bit when Osmun essayed to lead him from shelter.

Every minute, the blizzard increased.

The corps of indoor laborers and their bosses had gone to their Pittsfield quarters, for Sunday. Osmun had the deserted place to himself. Swathed in his greatcoat and in a mountain of burlap, and burrowing into a bed of torn papers and paint-blotched wall-cloths, he made shift to pass a right miserable night.

By dawn the snowfall had ceased. But so had the Valley’s means of entrance and of exit. The two roads leading from it to the outer world were choked breast high with solid drifts. For at least three days there could be no ingress or egress. Aura bore this isolation, philosophically. To be snowbound and cut off from the rest of the universe was no novelty to the Valley hamlet. Osmun bore it less calmly.

By dint of much skill and more persuasion, he piloted his floundering horse down the hill and into the village. There, at the first house, he demanded food and shelter. He received neither. Neither the offer of much money nor an appeal to common humanity availed. It took him less than an hour to discover that Aura was unanimous in its mode of paying him back for his slight to its laborers. Not a house would take him in. Not a villager would sell him a meal or so much as feed his horse.

Raging impotently, Osmun rode back to his frigid and draughty hilltop mansion-shell. By the time he had been shivering there for an hour a thin little man stumped up the steps.

The newcomer introduced himself as Malcolm Creede. He had stopped for a few minutes in Aura, that morning, for provisions, and had heard the gleeful accounts of the villagers as to their treatment of the stuck-up millionaire. Wherefore, Creede had climbed the hill, in order to offer the scanty hospitality of his own farmhouse to Osmun, until such time as the roads from the Valley should be open.

Osmun greeted the offer with a delight born of chill and starvation. Leading his horse, he followed Creede across a trackless half-mile or so to a farm that nestled barrenly in a cup of the hills. During the plungingly arduous walk he learned something of his host.

Creede was a Scotchman, who had begun life as a schoolmaster; and who had come to America, with his invalid wife, to better his fortunes. A final twist of fate had stranded the couple on this Berkshire farm. Here, six months earlier, the wife had died, leaving her heart-crushed husband with twin sons a few months old. Here, ever since, the widower had eked out a pitifully bare living; and had cared, as best he might, for his helpless baby boys. His meager homestead, by the way, had gleefully been named by luckier and more witty neighbors, “Rackrent Farm.” The name had stuck.

Before the end of Osmun Vail’s enforced stay at Rackrent Farm, gratitude to his host had merged into genuine friendship. The two lonely men took to each other, as only solitaries with similar tastes can hope to. Osmun guessed, though Creede denied it, that the Good Samaritan deed of shelter must rouse neighborhood animosity against the Scotchman.

Osmun guessed, and with equal correctness, that this silent and broken Scot would be bitterly offended at any offer of money payment for his hospitality. And Vail set his own ingenuity to work for means of rewarding the kindness.

As a result, within six months Malcolm Creede was installed as manager (“factor,” Creede called it) of the huge new Berkshire estate of Vailholme and was supervising work on a big new house built for him by Osmun in a corner of the estate.

Creede was woefully ignorant of business matters. Coming into a small inheritance from a Scotch uncle, he turned the pittance over to Vail for investment. And he was merely delighted—in no way suspicious—when the investments brought him in an income of preposterous size. Osmun Vail never did things by halves.

Deeply grateful, Creede threw his energy and boundless enthusiasm into his new duties. He went further. One of his twin sons he christened “Clive” for the inheritance-leaving uncle in Scotland. But the other he named “Osmun,” in honor of his benefactor. Vail, much gratified at the compliment, insisted on taking over the education of both lads. The childless bachelor reveled in his rôle of fairy godfather to them.

But there was another result of Osmun Vail’s chilly vigil in the half-finished hilltop mansion. During the hour before Creede had come to his rescue the cold and hungry multimillionaire had taken a vow as solemn as it was fantastic.

He swore he would set aside not less than ten of his house’s forty-three rooms for the use of any possible wayfarers who might be stranded, as he had been, in that inhospitable wilderness, and who could afford to pay for decent accommodations. Not tramps or beggars, but folk who, like himself, might come that way with means for buying food and shelter, and to whom such food and shelter might elsewhere be denied.

This oath he talked over with Creede. The visionary Scot could see nothing ridiculous about it. Accordingly, ten good rooms were allotted mentally to paying guests, and a clause in Vail’s will demanded that his heirs maintain such rooms, if necessary, for the same purpose. The fact was not advertised. And during Osmun’s quarter-century occupancy of Vailholme nobody took advantage of the chance.

During that quarter-century the wilderness’s beauty attracted more and more people of means and of taste. Once-bleak hills blossomed into estates. The village of Aura became something of a resort. The face of the whole countryside changed.

When Osmun Vail died (see, we are through with him already, though not so much as launched on the queer effects of his queerer actions!) he bequeathed to his beloved crony, Malcolm Creede, the sum of $500,000, and a free gift of the house he had built for him, and one hundred acres of land around it.

Creede had named this big new home “Canobie,” in memory of his mother’s borderland birthplace. He still owned Rackrent Farm, two miles distant. He had taken pride, in off moments, in improving the sorry old farmhouse and bare acres into something of the quaint well-being which he and his dead wife had once planned for their wilderness home. Within a year after Vail’s death Creede also died, leaving his fortune and his two homes, jointly, to his twin sons, Clive and Osmun.

The bulk of Vail’s fortune—a matter of $4,000,000 and the estate of Vailholme—went to the testator’s sole living relative; his grand-nephew, young Thaxton Vail, a popular and easy-going chap who, for years, had made his home with his great-uncle.

Along with Vailholme, naturally, went the proviso that ten of its forty-three rooms should be set aside, if necessary, for hotel accommodations.

Thaxton Vail nodded reminiscently, as he read this clause in the will. Long since, Osmun had explained its origin to him. The young fellow had promised, in tolerant affection for the oldster, to respect the whim. As nobody ever yet had taken advantage of the hotel proposition and as not six people, then alive, had heard of it, he felt safe enough in accepting the odd condition along with the gift.

Chapter II
AT LAST THE STORY BEGINS

AMONG the two million Americans shoved bodily into the maelstrom of the World War were Thaxton Vail and the Creede twins.

This story opens in the spring of 1919, when all three had returned from overseas service.

Aura and the summer-colony were heartily glad to have Thaxton Vail back again. He was the sort of youth who is liked very much by nine acquaintances in ten and disliked by fewer than one in ninety. But there was no such majority opinion as to the return of the two young Creedes.

The twins, from babyhood, had been so alike in looks and in outward mannerisms that not five per cent of their neighbors could tell them apart. But there all resemblance ceased.

Clive Creed was of the same general type as young Vail, who was his lifelong chum. They were much alike in traits and in tastes. They even shared—that last year before the war cut a hole in the routine of their pleasant lives—a mutual ardor for Doris Lane, who, with her old aunt, Miss Gregg, spent her summers at Stormcrest, across the valley from Vailholme. It was the first shadow of rivalry in their chumship.

Clive and Thaxton had the same pleasantly easy-going ways, the same unforced likableness. They were as popular as any men in the hill-country’s big summer-colony. Their wartime absence had been a theme for genuine regret to Aura Valley.

Except in looks, Osmun Creede was as unlike his twin brother as any one could well have been. The man had every Scotch flaw and crotchet, without a single Scotch virtue. Old Osmun Vail had sized up the lad’s character years earlier, when he had said in confidence to Thaxton:

“There’s a white man and a cur in all of us, Thax. And some psychologist sharps say twins are really one person with two bodies. Clive got all the White Man part of that ‘one person,’ and my lamentable namesake got all the Cur. At times I find myself wishing he were ‘the lamented Osmun Creede,’ instead of only ‘the lamentable Osmun Creede.’ Hester Gregg says he behaves as if Edgar Allan Poe had written him and Berlioz had set him to music.”

From childhood, Thaxton and this Creede twin had clashed. In the honest days of boyhood they had taken no pains to mask their dislike. In the more civil years of adolescence they had been at much pains to be courteous to each other when they met, but they tried not to meet. This avoidance was not easy; in such a close corporation as the Aura set, especially after both of them began calling over-often on Doris Lane.

Back to the Berkshires, from overseas, came the two Creedes. The community prepared to welcome Clive with open arms; and to tolerate Osmun, as of old, for the sake of his brother and for the loved memory of his father. At once Aura was relieved of one of its former perplexities. For no longer were the twins impossible to tell apart.

They still bore the most amazing likeness to each other, of course. But a long siege of trench fever had left Osmun slightly bald on the forehead and had put lines and hollows in his good-looking face and had given his wide shoulders a marked stoop. Also, a fragment of shell in the leg had left him with a slight limp. The fever, too, had weakened his eyes; and had forced him to adopt spectacles with a faintly smoked tinge to their lenses. Altogether, he was plainly discernible, now, from his erect brother, and looked nine years older.

There was another change, too, in the brethren. Hitherto they had lived together at Canobie. On their return from the war they astonished Aura by separating. Osmun lived on at the big house. But Clive took his belongings to Rackrent Farm; and set up housekeeping there; attended by an old negro and his wife, who had worked for his father. He even transported thither the amateur laboratory wherewith he and Osmun had always delighted to putter; and he set it up in a vacant back room of the farmhouse.

Aura was thrilled at these signs of discord in the hitherto inseparable brethren. Clive had been the only mortal to find good in Osmun and to care for his society. Now, apparently, there had been a break.

But almost at once Aura found there had been no break. The twins were as devoted as ever, despite their decision to live two miles apart. They were back and forth, daily, at each other’s homes; and they wrought, side by side, with all their old zeal, in the laboratory.

Osmun’s cantankerous soul did not seem to have undergone any purifying process from war experience and long illness. Within a month after he came back to Aura he proceeded to celebrate his return by raising the rents of the seven cottages he and Clive owned; and by a twenty per cent cut in the pay of the Canobie laborers.

Aura is not feudal Europe. Nor had Osmun Creede any of the hereditary popularity or masterliness of a feudal baron. Wherefore the seven tenants prepared to walk out of their rent-raised homes. The Canobie laborers, to a man, went on strike. Aura applauded. Osmun sulked.

Clive came to the rescue, as ever he had done when his brother’s actions had aroused ill-feeling. He rode over to Canobie and was closeted for three hours with Osmun. Servants, passing the library, heard and reported the hum of arguing voices. Then Clive came out and rode home. Next morning Osmun lowered the rents and restored wages to their old scale. As usual, the resultant popularity descended on Clive and not upon himself.

It was a week afterward that Thaxton Vail chanced to meet Osmun at the Aura Country Club. Osmun stumped up to him, as Vail sat on the veranda rail waiting for Doris Lane to come to the tennis courts.

“I was blackballed, yesterday, by the Stockbridge Hunt Club,” announced Creede, with no other salutation.

“I’m sorry,” said Thaxton, politely.

“I hear, on good authority, that it was you who blackballed me,” continued Osmun, his spectacled eyes glaring wrathfully on his neighbor. “And I’ve come to ask why you did it. In fact, I demand to know why.”

“I’m disobedient, by nature,” said Thaxton, idly. “So if I had blackballed you, I’d probably refuse to obey your ‘demand.’ But as it happened, I didn’t blackball you. I wasn’t even at the Membership Committee’s meeting.”

“I hear, on good authority, that you blackballed me,” insisted Osmun, his glare abating not at all.

“And I tell you, on better authority, that I didn’t,” returned Thaxton with a lazy calm that irked the angry man all the more.

“Then who did?” mouthed Osmun. “I’ve a right to know. I mean to get to the bottom of this. If a club, like the Stockbridge Hunt, blackballs a man of my standing, I’ll know why. I—”

“I believe the proceedings of Membership Committee meetings are supposed to be confidential,” Thaxton suggested. “Why not take your medicine?”

“I still believe it was you who blackballed me!” flamed Osmun. “I had it from—”

“You have just had it from me that I didn’t,” interposed Thaxton, a thread of ice running through his pleasant voice. “Please let it go at that.”

“You’re the only man around here who would have done such a thing,” urged Creede, his face reddening and his voice rising. “And I am going to find out why. We’ll settle this, here and now. I—”

Thaxton rose lazily from his perch on the rail.

“If you’ve got to have it, then take it,” he said, facing Osmun. “I wasn’t at the meeting. But Willis Chase was. And I’ll tell you what he told me about it, if it will ease your mind. He said, when your name was voted on, the ballot-box looked as if it were full of Concord grapes. There wasn’t a single white ball dropped into the box. I’m sorry to—”

“That’s a lie!” flamed Osmun.

Thaxton Vail’s face lost all its habitual easy-going aspect. He took a forward step, his muscles tensing. But before he could set in whizzing action the fist he had clenched, a slender little figure stepped, as though by chance, between the two men.

The interloper was a girl; wondrous graceful and dainty in her white sport suit. Her face was bronzed, beneath its crown of gold-red hair. Her brown eyes were as level and honest as a boy’s.

“Aren’t you almost ready, Thax?” she asked. “I’ve been waiting, down at the courts, ever so long while you sat up here and gossiped. Good morning, Oz. Won’t you scurry around and find some one to make it ‘doubles’? Thax and I always quarrel when we play ‘singles.’ Avert strife, won’t you, by finding Greta Swalm, or some one, and joining us? Please do, Oz. We—”

Osmun Creede made a sound such as might well be expected to emanate from a turkey whose tail feathers are pulled just as it starts to gobble. Glowering afresh at Vail, but without further effort at articulate speech, he turned and stumped away.

Doris Lane watched him until his lean form was lost to view around the corner of the veranda. Then, wheeling on Thaxton, with a striking change from her light manner, she asked:

“What was the matter? Just as I came out of the door I heard him tell you something or other was a lie. And I saw you start for him. I thought it was time to interrupt. It would be a matter for the Board of Governors, you know, here on the veranda, with every one looking on. What was the matter?”

“Oh, he thought I blackballed him, for the Hunt Club,” explained Thaxton. “When, as a matter of fact, I seem to be about the only member who didn’t. I told him so, and he said I lied. I’m—I’m mighty glad you horned in when you did. It’s always a dread of mine that some day I’ll have to thrash that chap. And you’ve saved me from doing it—this time. It’d be a hideous bore. And then there’d be good old Clive to be made blue by it, you know. And besides, Uncle Oz and his dad were—”

“I know,” she soothed. “I know. You won’t carry it any further, will you? Please don’t.”

“I suppose not,” he answered. “But, really, after a man calls another a liar and—”

“Oh, I suppose that means there’ll be one more neighborhood squabble,” she sighed, puckering her low forehead in annoyance. “And two more people who won’t see each other when they meet. Isn’t it queer? We come out to the country for a good time. And we spend half that time starting feuds or stopping them. People can live next door to each other in a big city for a lifetime, and never squabble. Then the moment they get to the country—”

“‘All Nature is strife,’” quoted Thaxton. “So I suppose when we get back to Nature we get back to strife. And speaking of strife, there was a girl who was going to let me beat her at tennis, this morning; instead of spending the day scolding me for being called a liar. Come along; before all the courts are taken. I want to forget that Oz Creede and I have got to cut each other, henceforth. Come along.”

On the following morning, appeared a little “human interest” story, in the Pittsfield Advocate. One of those anecdotal newspaper yarns that are foredoomed to be “picked up” and copied, from one end of the continent to the other. Osmun Creede had written the story with some skill. And the editor had sent a reporter to the courthouse to verify it, before daring to print it.

The article told, in jocose fashion, of the clause in old Osmun Vail’s will, requiring his great-nephew and heir to maintain Vailholme, at request, as a hotel. An editorial note added the information that a copy of the will had been read, at the courthouse, by an Advocate reporter, as well as Thaxton Vail’s signed acceptance of its conditions.

It was Clive Creede who first called Thaxton’s notice to the newspaper yarn. While young Vail was still loitering over his morning mail, Clive rode across from Rackrent Farm, bringing a copy of the Advocate.

“I’m awfully sorry, old man,” he lamented, as Thaxton frowningly read and reread the brief article. “Awfully sorry and ashamed. I guessed who had done this, the minute I saw it. I phoned to Oz, and charged him with doing it. He didn’t deny it. Thought it was a grand joke. I explained to him that the story was dead and forgotten; and that now he had let you in for no end of ridicule and perhaps for a lot of bother, too. But he just chuckled. While I was still explaining, he hung up the receiver.”

“He would,” said Thaxton, curtly. “He would.”

“Say, Thax,” pleaded Clive, “don’t be too sore on him. He means all right. He just has an unlucky genius for doing or saying the wrong thing. It isn’t his fault. He’s built that way. And, honest, he’s a tremendously decent chap, at heart. Please don’t be riled by this newspaper squib. It can’t really hurt you.”

The man was very evidently stirred by the affair; and was wistfully eager, as ever, to smooth over his brother’s delinquencies. Yet, annoyed by what he had just read, Thaxton did not hasten, as usual, to reassure his chum.

“You’re right when you say he has ‘an unlucky genius for saying the wrong thing,’” he admitted. “The last ‘wrong thing’ was what he said to me yesterday. He called me a liar.”

“No! Oh, Lord, man, no!”

“Before I could slug him or remember he was your brother, Doris Lane strolled in between us, and the war was off. You might warn him not to say that particular ‘wrong thing’ to me again, if you like. Because, next time, Doris might not be nearby enough to stave off the results. And I’d hate, like blazes, to punch a brother of yours. Especially when he’s just getting on his feet after a sickness. But—”

“I wish you’d punch me, instead!” declared Clive. “Gods, but I’m ashamed! I’ll give him the deuce for this. Won’t you—is there any use asking you to overlook it—to accept my own apology for it—and not to let it break off your acquaintance with Oz? It’d make a mighty hit with me, Thax,” he ended, unhappily. “I think a lot of him. He—”

Thaxton laughed, ruefully.

“That’s the way it’s always been,” he grumbled. “Whenever Oz does or says some unspeakably rotten thing, and just as he’s about to get in trouble for it, you always hop in and deflect the lightning. You’ve been doing it ever since you were a kid. There, stop looking as if some one was going to cut off your breathing supply! It’s all right. I’ll forget the whole thing—so far as my actions towards Oz are concerned. Only, warn him not to do anything to make me remember it again. As for this mess he’s stirred up, in the Advocate, I can’t see what special effect it’ll have. Uncle Oz was too well loved, hereabouts, for it to make his memory ridiculous.”

But, within the day, Thaxton learned of at least one “special effect” the news item was to have. At four o’clock that afternoon, he received a state visit from a little old lady whom he loved much for herself and more for her niece. The visitor was Miss Hester Gregg, Doris’s aunt and adoptive mother.

“Please say you’re glad to see me, Thax,” she greeted Vail. “And please say it, now. Because when you hear what I’ve come for, you’ll hate me. Not that I mind being hated, you know,” she added. “But you lack the brain to hate, intelligently. You’d make a botch of it. And I like you too well to see you bungle. Now shall I tell you what I’ve come for?”

“If you don’t,” he replied, solemnly, “I shall begin hating you for getting my curiosity all worked up, like this. Blaze away.”

“In the first place,” she began, “you know all about our agonies, with the decorators, at Stormcrest. You’ve barked your shins over their miserable pails and paper-rolls, every time you’ve tried to lure Doris into a dark corner of our veranda. Well, I figured we could stay on, while they were plying their accursèd trade. I thought we could retreat before them, from room to room; and at last slip around them and take up our abode in the rooms they had finished, while they were working on the final ones. It was a pretty thought. But we can’t. We found that out, to-day. We’re like old Baldy Tod, up at Montgomery. He set out to paint his kitchen floor, and he painted himself into a corner. We’re decorated into a corner. We’ve got to get out, Doris and I, for at least a week; while they finish the house. We’ve nowhere to live. Be it never so jumbled there’s no place at home—”

“But—”

“We drove over to Stockbridge, to-day, to see if we could get rooms in either of the hotels. (We’ll have to be near here; so I can oversee the miserable activities of the decorators, every day.) No use. Both hotels disgustingly full of tourists. The return of all you A. E. F. men and the post-war rush of cash-to-the-pocket-book have jammed every summer resort on earth. We tried at Lenox and Lee and we even went over to Pittsfield. The same everywhere. Not an inn or a hotel with a room vacant. Then—”

“Hooray!” exulted Vail. “Stop right there! I have the solution. You and Doris come over here! I’ve loads of room. And it’ll be ever so jolly to have you—both. Please come!”

“My dear boy,” said the old lady, “that’s just what I’ve been leading up to for five minutes.”

“Gorgeous! But when are you going to get to the part of your visit that’s due to make me hate you? Thus far, you’ve been as welcome as double dividends on a non-taxable stock. When does the ‘hate’ part begin?”

“It’s begun,” she said. “Now let me finish it. I saw the Advocate story, this morning. I’d almost forgotten that funny part of the will. But it gave me my idea. I spoke of it to Doris. She was horrified. And that confirmed my resolve. Whenever modern young people are horrified at a thing, one may know that is the only wise and right thing to do.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, crestfallen. “Doesn’t she want to come here? I hoped—”

“Not the way I’m coming,” supplemented Miss Gregg. “I’m not coming to visit Vailholme as a guest. I’m coming here to board!”

She paused to let him get the full effect of her words. He got them. And he registered his understanding by a snort of disdain.

“Your great-uncle,” she resumed, defiantly, “put that clause in his will for the benefit of wayfarers up here who could pay and who couldn’t get any other accommodations. That fits my case precisely. So it’ll be great fun. Besides, I loathe visiting. And I really enjoy boarding. So I am coming here, for a week, with Doris. To board. Not as a guest. To board. So that’s settled. We will be here about eleven o’clock, to-morrow morning.”

She gazed in placid triumph at the bewildered young man.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort!” he sputtered. “You’re the oldest friends I’ve got—both of you are. And it’ll be great to have you stay here from now till the Tuesday after Eternity. But you’re not going to board. That’s plain idiocy.”

“Thax,” she rebuked. “You are talking loudly and foolishly. We are coming to board with you. It’s all settled. I settled it, myself. So I know. We’re coming for a week. And our time will be our own, and we won’t feel under any civil obligations or have to be a bit nicer than we want to. It’s an ideal arrangement. And if the coffee is no better than it was, the last night we dined here, I warn you I shall speak very vehemently to you about it. Coffee making is as much an art as violin playing or administering a snub. It is not just a kitchen chore. We shall stay here,” she forestalled his gurgling protest, “under an act of Legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The law demands that a landlord give us hotel accommodations, until such time as we prove to be pests or forget to pay our bills. We—”

“Bills!” stammered Thaxton. “Oh, murder!”

“That brings me to the question of terms,” she resumed. “There will be Doris and myself and Clarice, my personal maid. (Clarice has the manners of a bolshevist and the morals of a medical student. But she has become a habit with me.) We shall want a suite of two bedrooms and a sitting room and bath for Doris and myself. And we shall need some sort of room for Clarice. A cage will do, for her, at a pinch. I’ve been figuring what you ought to charge me; and I’ve decided that a fair price would be—”

“So have I,” interrupted Thaxton, a glint of hope brightening his embarrassment. “I’ve been figuring on it, too. On the price, I mean. Man and boy, I’ve been thinking it over, for the best part of ten seconds. I am the landlord. And as such I have all sorts of rights, by law; including the right to fix prices. Likewise, I’m going to fix it. If you don’t like my rates, you can’t come here. That’s legal. Well, my dear Miss Gregg, on mature thought, I have decided to make special rates for you and your niece and Clarice. I shall let you have the suite you speak of, per week, with meals (and coffee, such as it is) for the sum of fifteen cents per day—five cents for each of you—or at the cut rate of one dollar weekly. Payable in advance. Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.”

He beamed maliciously upon the old lady. To his surprise, she made instant and meek answer:

“The terms are satisfactory. We’ll take the rooms for one week, with privilege of renewal. I don’t happen to have a dollar, in change, with me, at the moment. Will you accept a written order for one dollar; in payment of a week’s board in advance?”

“As I know you so well,” he responded, deliberating, “I think I may go so far as to do that. Of course, you realize, though, that if the order is not honored at the bank, I must request either cash payment or the return of your keys. That is our invariable rule. And now, may I trouble you for that order?”

From her case Miss Gregg drew a visiting card and a chewed gold pencil. She scribbled, for a minute, on the card-back; then signed what she had written; and handed the card to Thaxton. He glanced amusedly at it; then his face went idiotically blank. Once more, his lips working, he read the lines scribbled on the back of the card:

“Curator of Numismatic Dept., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City:—Please deliver to bearer (Mr. Thaxton Vail) upon proper identification, the silver dollar, dated 1804, which I placed on exhibition at the Museum.—Hester Gregg.”

“The 1804 dollar!” he gasped. “That’s a low-down trick to play on me!”

“Why?” she asked, innocently. “It is worth at least its face value. In fact—as you may recall—my father paid $2,700 for it. When I placed it on view at the Museum, the curator told me its present value is nearer $3,600. You see, there are only three of them, extant. So, since you really insist on $1 a week for our board, it may as well be paid with a dollar that is worth the—”

“I surrender!” groaned Thaxton.

“You’d have saved so much trouble—people always would save themselves so much trouble,” she sighed, plaintively, “by just letting me have my own way in the first place. Thaxton, I am going to pay you $200 a week, board. As summer hotel rates go, now, it is a moderate price for what we’re going to get. And I’ll see we get it. We’ll be here, luggage and all, at about eleven in the morning. And now suppose you ring for Horoson. I want to talk to her about all sorts of arrangements. You’d never understand. And you’d only be in the way, while we’re talking. So, run out to the car. I left Doris there. Run along.”

Summoning his housekeeper,—who had also kept house for Osmun Vail,—Thaxton departed bewilderedly to the car where Doris was awaiting her aunt’s return.

“Are you going to let us come here, Thax?” hailed the girl, eagerly. “I do hope so! I wanted, ever so much, to go in while Auntie was making her beautifully preposterous request. But she said I mustn’t. She said there might be a terrible scene; and that you might use language. She said she is too innocent to understand the lurid things you might say, if you lost your temper; but that I’m more sophisticated; and that it’d be bad for me. Was there a ‘terrible scene,’ Thax?”

“Don’t call me ‘Thax!’” he admonished, icily. “It isn’t good form to shower familiar nick-names on your hotelkeeper. It gives him a notion he can be familiar or else that you’re trying to be familiar. It’s bad, either way. Call me ‘Mine Host.’ And in moments of reproof, call me ‘Fellow.’ If only I can acquire a bald head and a red nose and a bay window (and a white apron to drape over it) I’ll be able to play the sorry rôle with no more discomfort than if I were having my backteeth pulled. In the meantime, I’m as sore as a mashed thumb. What on earth possessed her to do such a thing?”

“Why, she looks on it as a stroke of genius!” said Doris. “Any one can go visiting. But no one ever went boarding in this way, before. It’s just like Auntie. She’s ever so wonderful. She isn’t a bit like any one else. Aren’t you going to be at all glad to have us here?”

Chapter III
AN INVOLUNTARY LANDLORD

THAXTON VAIL was eating a solitary breakfast, next morning, when, wholly unannounced, a long and ecstatic youth burst in upon him. The intruder was Willis Chase, who had roomed with Thaxton at Williams and who still was his fairly close and most annoyingly irresponsible friend.

“Grand!” yelled Chase, bearing down upon the breakfaster. “Grand and colossal! A taxi-bandit is dumping all my luggage on the veranda, and your poor sour-visaged butler is making awful sounds at him. I didn’t bring my man. I didn’t even bring my own car. I taxied over from the club, just as I was; the moment I read it. I knew you had plenty of cars here; and the hotel valet can look after me. I’m inured to roughing it. Isn’t it a spree?”

“If you’ll stop running around the ceiling, and light somewhere, and speak the language of the country,” suggested the puzzled Thaxton, “perhaps I can make some guess what this is all about. I take it you’re inviting yourself here for a visit. But what you mean by ‘the hotel valet’ is more than I—”

“Don’t you grasp it?” demanded Chase, in amaze. “Haven’t you even read that thing? It was in one of the New York papers, at the club, this morning. A chap, there, said it was in the Advocate, yesterday. Your secret has exploded. All the cruel world knows of your shame. You run a hotel. You have to; or else you’d lose Vailholme. It’s all in the paper. In nice clear print. For everybody to read. And everybody’s reading it, ever so happily. I’m going to be your first guest. It all flashed on me, like—”

“Then switch the flash off!” ordered Thaxton, impatiently. “This crazy thing seems to hit you as a grand joke. To me, it hasn’t a single redeeming feature. Clear out!”

“My worthy fellow,” reproved Chase, “you forget yourself. You run a hotel. Your hotel is not full. I demand a room here. I can pay. By law, you cannot refuse to take me in. If you do, I shall bring an attorney here to enforce my rights. And at the same time, I shall bring along ten or eleven or nineteen of the Hunt Club crowd, as fellow-guests; to liven things for the rest of the summer. Now, Landlord, do I stay; or do I not?”

Vail glowered on his ecstatically grinning friend, in sour abhorrence. Then he growled:

“If I throw you out, it’d be just like you to bring along that howling crowd of outcasts; and all of you would camp here on me for the season. If you think it’s a joke, keep the joke to yourself. If you insist on butting in here, you can stay. Not because I want you. I don’t. But you’re equal to making things fifty times worse, if I turn you out.”

“I sure am,” assented Chase, much pleased by the compliment to his powers. “Maybe even seventy-eight times worse. And then some—et puis quelque, as we ten-lesson boulevardiers say. So here we are. Now, what can you do for me in the way of rooms, me good man? The best is none too good. I am accustomed to rare luxury in my own palatial home, and I expect magnificent accommodations here.”

Thaxton’s grim mouth relaxed.

“Very good,” he agreed. “Miss Gregg and Doris are due here, too, in an hour or so. They have picked out my best suite. But—”

“They are? Glory be! I—”

Thaxton proceeded:

“As landlord, I have the right to put my guests in any sort of room I choose to; and to charge them what price I choose. If my guests don’t like that, they can get out. I have all manner of rooms, you know; from my own to the magenta. Do you remember the magenta room, by any chance?”

“Do I?” snorted Chase, memory of acute misery making him drop momentarily his pose. “Do I? Didn’t I get that room wished on me, six years ago, when your uncle had the Christmas house party; and when I turned up at the last minute? I remember how the dear old chap apologized for sticking me in there. Every other inch of space was crowded. I swear I believe that terrible room is the only uncomfortable spot in this house of yours, Thax. I wonder you don’t have it turned into a storeroom or something. Right over the kitchen; hot as Hades and too small to swing a cat in, and no decent ventilation. Why do you ask if I ‘remember’ it? Joan of Arc would be as likely to forget the stake. If you’re leading up to telling me the room’s been walled in or—”

“I’m not,” said Vail. “I’m leading up to telling you that that’s the room I’m assigning to you. And the price, with board, will be one hundred dollars a day. Take it or leave it. As—”

A howl from Chase interrupted him.

“Take it or leave it,” placidly repeated Vail. “In reverse to the order named.”

“You miserable Shylock!” stormed Chase. “And after I worked it all out so beautifully! Say, listen! Just to spite you and to take that smug look off your ugly face, I’m going to stay! Get that? I’m going to stay! One day, anyhow. And I’ll take that hundred dollars out of your hide, somehow or other, while I’m here! Watch if I don’t. It— What you got there?” he broke off.

Thaxton had pulled out an after-breakfast cigar and had felt in vain for the cigar-cutter which usually lodged in his cash pocket. Failing to find it, he had fished forth a knife to cut the cigar-end. It was the sight of this knife which had caught the mercurial Chase’s interest. Thaxton handed it across the table for his friend’s inspection.

“It’s a German officer’s army knife,” he explained. “Clive Creede brought it home with him, from overseas, for me. There aren’t any more of them made. It weighs a quarter-pound or so, but it has every tool and appliance on earth tucked away, among its big blades. It’s the greatest sort of knife in the world for an outdoor man to carry, in the country.”

Chase, with the curiosity of a monkey, was prying open blade after blade, then tool after tool, examining each in childlike admiration.

“What’s this for?” he asked, presently, after closing a pair of folding scissors and a sailor’s needle; and laboriously picking open a long triangular-edged instrument at the back of the knife. “This blade, or whatever it is. It’s got a point like a needle. But it slopes back to a thick base. And its three edges are razor-sharp. What do you use it for?”

“I don’t use it for anything,” replied Vail. “I don’t know just what it’s for. It’s some sort of punch, I suppose. To make graduated holes in girths or in puttee-straps or belts. Vicious looking blade, isn’t it? The knife’s a treasure, though. It—”

“Say! About that magenta room, now! Blast you, can’t I—?”

“Take it or get out! I hope you’ll get out. It—”

A shadow, athwart the nearest long window, made them turn around. Clive Creede was stepping across the sill, into the room. He was pale and hollow-eyed; and seemed very sick.

“Hello, old man!” Vail greeted him. “You came in, like a ghost. And you look like one, too. Was it a large night or—?”

“It was,” answered Clive, hoarsely, as he turned from shaking hands with his host and with Chase. “A very large night. In fact it came close to being a size too large for me. I got to fooling with some new monoxide gas experiments in that laboratory of Oz’s and mine. No use going into details that’d bore you. But I struck a combination by accident that put me out.”

“You look it. Why—?”

“Oz happened to drop in. He found me on the lab floor; just about gone for good. He lugged me out of doors and worked over me for a couple of hours before he got me on my feet. The whole house,—the whole of Rackrent Farm, it seems to me,—smells of the rotten chemical stuff. I got out, this morning, before it could keel me over again. The smell will hang around there for days, I suppose. It—”

“Why in blazes should a grown man waste time puttering around with silly messes of chemicals?” orated Chase, to the world at large. “At best, he can only discover a new combination of smelly drugs. And at worst, he can be croaked by them. Not that research isn’t a grand thing, in its way,” he added. “I used to do a bit of it, myself. For instance, last month, I discovered one miraculously fine combination, I remember: A hooker of any of the Seven Deadly Gins, and one— No, that’s wrong! Two parts Jersey applejack to one part French—”

He broke off in his bibulous reminiscences, finding he was not listened to. Thaxton solicitously had helped Clive to a chair and was pouring him a cup of black coffee. The visitor appeared to be on the verge of serious collapse.

“Did Doc Lawton think it was all right for you to leave the house while you’re so done up?” asked Vail.

“I didn’t send for him. Oz pulled me through,” returned Clive, dully. “Then I piked over here. I couldn’t stay there, in that horribly smelly place, could I?”

He shuddered, in reminiscence, and gulped his coffee.

“It’ll be days before the place is fit to live in again,” he said. “The gases have permeated—”

“I’d swap the magenta room for it, any time,” put in Chase, unheeded.

Clive continued:

“Oz brought me as far as your door, in his runabout. He had an idea he wouldn’t be over-welcome here, so he went on. He wanted me to stay at Canobie, with him, till I can go back home. But— Well, when I’m as knocked out as this, I don’t want to. Oz is all right. He’s a dandy brother, and a white pal. But he has no way with the sick. He—”

“I know,” said Thaxton, as Clive halted, embarrassed. “I know.”

“You see,” added Clive, “I don’t want you to think I’m a baby, to go to pieces like this. But the fumes seem to have caught me where I was gassed, at Montfaucon. Started up all the old pain and gasping and faintness, and heart bother and splitting headache again. I’ve heard it comes back, like that. The surgeon told me it might. And now I know it does. It’s put me pretty well onto the discard. But a few days quiet will set me on my feet.”

“So you rolled over here, first crack out of the box?” suggested Willis Chase. “By way of keeping perfectly quiet?”

“No,” denied Clive, looking up, apologetically, from his second cup of black coffee. “I came over to sponge on Thax, if he’ll let me. Thax, will it bother you a whole lot if I stay here with you for a few days? I won’t be in the way. And I know you’ve got lots of room, and nobody else is stopping with you. I don’t want to put it on the ‘hotel’ basis. But that’s what gave me the nerve to ask—”

“Rot!” exclaimed Thaxton, in forced cordiality. “What’s the use of all that preamble? You’re knocked off your feet. You can’t stay at home. Every inn is full, for ten miles around. I can understand your not wanting to stay with Oz. If you hadn’t come here, I’d have come after you. Of course, you must stay.”

As a matter of fact, all Vail’s boyhood friendship for the invalid was called upon, to make the invitation sound spontaneous. He liked Clive. He liked him better than any other friend. Ordinarily, it would have been a joy to have him for a house-guest. The two men had always been congenial, even though they had seen less of each other since their return from France and had abated some of the oldtime boyish chumship.

Yet with Doris Lane coming to Vailholme, the host had dreamed of long uninterrupted hours with her. And now the presence of this other admirer of hers would block most of his golden plans. Yet there was no way out of it. In any event Willis Chase’s undesired arrival had wrecked his hopes for sweet seclusion. So the man made the best of the annoying situation and threw into his voice and manner the cordiality he could not put into his heart.

He was ashamed of himself for his sub-resentment that this sick comrade of his should find no warmer welcome, in appealing to him for hospitality. Yet the dream of having Doris all to himself for hours a day had been so joyous! While he could not rebuff Clive as he had sought to rebuff Willis Chase, yet he could not be glad the invalid had chosen this particular time to descend upon Vailholme.

Sending for Mrs. Horoson, his elderly housekeeper, he bade her prepare the two east rooms for Clive’s reception.

“Say!” Chase broke in on the instructions. “You told me that measly magenta room was the only one you had vacant!”

“I did not,” rasped Thaxton. “I told you it was the only one you could have. And it is. I hope you won’t take it. If I’d had any sense I’d have said the furnace room was the only one I’d give you. That or the coal cellar.”

“Never mind!” sighed Chase, with true Christian resignation. “What am I, to complain? What am I?”

“I’d hate to tell you,” snapped Thaxton.

“What are you charging Clive?” demanded Willis.

“A penny a year. Laundry three cents extra. He—”

“Miss Gregg, sir. Miss Lane,” announced the sour-visaged butler, from the dining room doorway.

Thaxton arose wearily and went to meet his guests. All night he had mused happily on the rare chance which was to make Doris and himself housemates for an entire rapturous week—a week, presumably, in which Miss Gregg should busy herself on long daily inspection visits to Stormcrest. And now—an invalid and a cheery pest were to shatter that lovely solitude.

Chapter IV
TWO OR THREE INTRUDERS

YET luncheon was a gay enough meal. All the guests were old friends, and all were more or less congenial. Thaxton’s duties as host were in no way onerous, except when Willis Chase undertook to guy him as to his anomalous position as hotelkeeper—which Chase proceeded to do at intervals varying from two minutes to fifteen.

In the afternoon, Miss Gregg was forced to drive across to Stormcrest, to superintend the first touches of the decorators to her remaining rooms. Clive made some excuse for retiring shakily to his own rooms for a rest. Willis Chase had to go back to Stockbridge on urgent business—having found, on unpacking, that in his haste he had brought along all his evening clothes except the trousers.

Thus, for an hour or so, Vail had Doris Lane to himself. They idled about the grounds, Vail showing the girl his new sunken garden and his trout hatcheries. Throughout the dawdling tour they talked idly and blissfully, and withal a whit shyly, as do lovers on whom the Great Moment is making ready to dawn. At their heels paced Vail’s dark sable collie, Macduff.

The sky was hazy, the air was hot. Weather-wise Berkshire folk would have prophesied a torrid spell, the more unbearable for the bracing cool of the region’s normal air. But the hot wave had merely sent this mildly tepid day as a herald.

To the lounging young folk in the garden it carried no message. Yet at whiles they fell silent as they drifted aimlessly about the grounds. There was a witchery that both found hard to ignore.

Rousing herself embarrassedly from one of these sweet silences, Doris nodded toward the big brown collie, who had come to a standstill in front of a puffy and warty old toad, fly-catching at the edge of a rock shelf.

The dog, strolling along in bored majesty in front of his human escorts, had caught the acrid scent of the toad and was crouching truculently in front of it, making little slapping gestures at the phlegmatic creature with his white forepaws and then bounding back, as if he feared it might turn and rend him.

It was quite evident that Macduff regarded his encounter with that somnolent toad as one of the High Dramatic Moments of his career. Defiantly, yet with elaborate caution, he proceeded to harry it from a safe distance.

“What on earth makes him so silly?” asked Doris as she and Vail paused to watch the scene—the dog’s furry and fast-moving body taking up the entire narrow width of the path. “He must have seen a million toads, in his time.”

“What on earth made you cry, the evening we saw Bernhardt die, in Camille, when we were kids?” he countered, banteringly. “You knew she wasn’t really dead. You knew she’d get into her street clothes and scrub the ghastliness off her face and go out somewhere and eat a big supper. But you wept, very happily. And I had to give you my spare handkerchief. And it had a hole in it, I remember. I was hideously mortified. Every time I went to the theater with you, after that, I carried a stock of brand-new two-dollar handkerchiefs, to impress you. But you never cried, again, at a play. So that’s all the good they did me. Of course, the one time you cried, I had to be there with the last torn handkerchief I ever carried. Remember?”

“I remember I asked you why Mac is so silly about that toad,” she reproved him, “and you mask your ignorance of natural history and of dog-psychology by changing the subject.”

“I did not!” he denied, with much fervor. “I was leading up in a persuasive yet scholarly way to my explanation. You knew Bernhardt wasn’t dying. Yet you cried. Mac knows that toad is as harmless as they make them. Yet he is fighting a spectacular duel with it. You entered into the spirit of a play. He’s entering into the spirit of a perilous jungle adventure. You cried because an elderly Frenchwoman draped herself on a sofa and played dead. He is all het up, because he’s endowing that toad with a blend of the qualities of a bear and a charging rhinoceros. That’s the collie of it. Collies are forever inventing and playing thrillingly dramatic games. Just as you and I are always eager to see thrillingly dramatic plays. It isn’t really silly. Or if it is, then what are people who pay to get thrills out of plays they know aren’t true and out of novels that they know are lies? On the level, I think Mac has a bit the best of us.”

“Why doesn’t he bring the sterling drama to a climax by annihilating the toad so we can get past?” she demanded, adding, “Not that I’d let him. That’s why I’m waiting here, while he blocks the path, instead of going around him.”

“If that’s all you’re waiting for,” he reassured her, “your long wait has been for nothing. No rescue will be needed. Mac will never touch the toad.”

“Does Mac know he won’t, though?”

“He does,” returned Vail, with finality. “Every normal outdoors dog, in early puppyhood, undertakes to bite or pick up a toad. And no dog ever tried it a second time. A zoölogy sharp told me why. He said toads’ skins are covered with some sort of chemical that would make alum taste like sugar, by contrast. It’s horrible stuff, and it’s the toad’s only weapon. No dog ever takes a second chance of torturing his tongue with it. That’s why Mac keeps his mouth shut, every time he noses at the ugly thing. The toad is quite as safe from him as Bernhardt was from dying on the elaborate Camille sofa. Mac knows it. And the toad knows it. If toads know anything. So nobody’s the worse for the drama.... One side there, Mac! You’re a pest.”

At the command, the collie gave over his harrowing assault, and wandered unconcernedly down the path ahead of them, his plumed tail gently waving, his tulip ears alert for some new adventure.

“Remember old Chubb Beasley?” asked Thaxton. “He lived down on the Lee Road.”

“I do, indeed,” she made answer. “He used to be pointed out to us by our Sunday School teacher as the one best local example of the awful effects of drink. What about him?”

“He owned Macduff’s sire,” said Vail. “A great big gold-and-white collie—a beauty. Chubb used to go down to Lee, regularly, every Saturday, to spend his pay at the speak-easy booze joint in the back of Clow’s grocery. The old chap used to say: ‘If I c’d afford it, I’d have a batting average of seven night a week. As it is, I gotta do my ’umble best of a Sat’dy night.’ And he did it. He came home late every Saturday evening, in a condition where the width of the road bothered him more than the length of it. And always, his loyal old collie was waiting at the gate to welcome him and guide his tangled footsteps up the walk to the house.”

“Good old collie!” she applauded. “But—”

“One night, Beasley got to Clow’s just as the saloon was raided by the Civic Reform Committee. He couldn’t get a drink, and he spent the evening wandering around looking for one. He had to go back home, for the first Saturday night in years, dead cold sober. The collie was waiting for him at the gate, as usual. Chubb strode up to him on steady unwavering legs and without either singing or crying. He didn’t even walk with an accent. The faithful dog sprang at the poor old cuss and bit him. Didn’t know his own master.”

Macduff’s histrionic display, and the story it had evoked, dispersed the sweet spell that had hung over the man and the maid, throughout their leisurely walk. Subconsciously, both felt and resented the glamour’s vanishing, without being able to realize their own emotions or to guess why the ramble had somehow lost its dreamy charm.

They were at the well-defined stage of heart malady when a trifle will cloud the elusive sun, and when a shattered mood cannot be reconstructed at will.

Doris became vaguely aware that the afternoon was hot and that her nose was probably shiny. Instinctively, she turned toward the house.

Vail, unable to frame an excuse for prolonging the stroll, fell into step at her side, obsessed by a dull feeling that the walk had somehow been a failure and that he was making no progress at all in his suit.

As they made their way houseward across the rolling expanse of side-lawn, they saw a huge and dusty car drawn up under the porte-cochère. On the steps was a heap of luggage. A chauffeur stood by the car, stretching his putteed legs, and smoking a furtive cigarette; the machine’s bulk between him and the porch.

In the tonneau lolled a fat and asthmatic-looking old German police dog.

On the veranda, in two wicker chairs drawn forward from their wonted places, lolled a man and a woman swathed in yellow dust-coats. The man was enormous, paunchy, pendulous, sleek. The woman was small and dark and acerb. They were chatting airily, as Vail and Doris drew near.

In front of them wavered Vogel, the butler, trying to get in a word edgewise, as they talked. Back of the doorway, in the hall, could be seen the shadowy forms of the second man and a capped maid, listening avidly.

At sight of Thaxton, the butler abandoned his vain effort to interrupt the strangers and came in ponderous haste down the stone steps and across the lawn to meet his employer.

“Excuse me, sir,” began Vogel, worriedly, “but might I speak to you a minute?”

Doris, with a word of dismissal to her escort, moved on toward the house, entering by a French window and giving the queerly occupied front veranda a wide berth.

“Well?” impatiently asked Vail, vexed at the interruption and by the presence of the unrecognized couple on the porch. “Well, Vogel? What is it? And who are those people?”

For reply, the butler proffered him two cards. He presented them, on their tray, as if afraid they might turn and rend him.

“They are persons, sir,” he said, loftily. “Just persons, sir. Not people.”

Without listening to the distinction, Thaxton Vail was scanning the cards. He read, half aloud:

“Mr. Joshua Q. Mosely.” Then, “Mrs. Joshua Q. Mosely, 222 River Front Terrace, ... Tuesdays until Lent.”

“Interesting, if true. I should say, offhand, it ought to count them about three, decimal five,” gravely commented Vail. “But it’s nothing in my young life. I don’t know them.”

“No, sir,” agreed Vogel. “You would not be likely to, sir. Nobody would. They are persons. Most peculiar persons, too. I think they are a bit jiggled, sir, if I might say so. Unbalanced. Why, sir, they actually thought this was an hotel!”

“Huh?” interjected Vail, with much the same sound as might have been expected from him had some one dug an elbow violently into his stomach. “Huh? What’s that, Vogel? Hotel?”

“Yes, sir. That’s why I took the liberty of asking to speak to you alone. I fancied you would not wish Miss Lane to hear of such a ridiculous—”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, sir, they came here, some five minutes ago, and ordered Francis to conduct them to ‘the desk.’ He could not understand, sir, so he came to me, and I went out to see what it meant. They told me they wished rooms here; for themselves and for their chauffeur. And for that stout gray dog in the car. They were most unnecessarily unpleasant, sir, when I told them this was no hotel. They insist it is. They say they know all about it. And they demand to see the proprietor. I was arguing with them when I saw you coming. Would it be well, sir, if I should telephone the police station at Aura or—?”

“No,” groaned Vail. “I’ll see them. You needn’t wait.”

Bracing himself, and cursing his loved great-uncle’s eccentricity, and cursing a thousand times more vehemently the mischief-act of Osmun Creede, the unhappy householder walked up the veranda steps and confronted the two newcomers.

On the way he planned to carry off the situation with a high hand and to get rid of the couple as quickly as might be. Whistling to heel Macduff, the collie, who showed strong and hostile signs of seeking closer acquaintance with the fat police dog, he advanced on the couple.

“Good afternoon,” he said, briskly, as he bore down on the big man and the small woman. “I am Thaxton Vail. What can I do for you?”

“I am Joshua Q. Mosely,” answered the enormous man, making no move to rise from the easy chair from whose ample sides his fat bulk was billowing sloppily. “What are your rates?”

“Rates?” echoed Vail, dully.

“Yes,” replied Mosely. “Your rates—American plan—for an outside room and board for Mrs. M. and myself and a shakedown, somewhere, for Pee-air.... Pee-air is our chauffeur. How much?”

“Please explain,” said Vail, bluffing weakly.

“Yep,” nodded Joshua Q. Mosely. “He said you’d try to stall. Said you were queer that way. But he said if I stuck to it, I’d get in. Said he could prove you weren’t full up. So I’m sticking to it. How much for—?”

“Who are you talking about?” queried Vail. “Who’s ‘he’? And—”

“Here’s his card,” responded Joshua Q. Mosely, groping in an inner pocket. “Met him on the steps of the Red Lion—at Stockbridge, you know—this morning. They’d told us they hadn’t a room left there. Same thing at Haddon Hall. Same thing at Pittsfield. Same thing at Lenox. Same at Lee. Full everywhere. Gee, but you Berkshire hotel men must be making a big turnover, this season! Yep, here’s his card. Thought I’d lost it.”

He fished out a slightly crumpled oblong of stiff paper and handed it to Vail. Thaxton read: “Mr. Osmun Creede, ‘Canobie,’ Aura, Massachusetts.”

“We were coming out of the Red Lion,” resumed Joshua Q. Mosely. “Figured we’d have to drive all the way to Greenfield or maybe to Springfield, before we could get rooms. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted another day in this region and then make the thirty-mile run to Williamstown and back to North Adams and over the Mohawk Trail to—”

“Quite so,” cut in Vail. “What has all this to do with—?”

“I was coming to that. We were standing there on the steps, jawing about it, the wife and me, when up comes this Mr. Creede. He’d been sitting on the porch there and he’d overheard us. He hands me his card and he says: ‘You can get into Vailholme if you’re a mind to,’ he says. ‘Most excloosive hotel in the Berkshires. Not like any other place in America. Best food. Best rooms. They never advertise. So they aren’t full up,’ he says. ‘They try to keep folks away. But give Mr. Vail this card and tell him I’ll know who to go to with information if he refuses to take in people who can’t get accommodations elsewhere; and he’ll take you in.’ I thought maybe he was jollying me.”

“I—”

“He looked kind of funny while he talked to me,” prattled Mosely, unheeding. “So I asked the day clerk at the Red Lion about it. The clerk said he knew you run a hotel, because he’d read about it in the paper. And he guessed you weren’t full up. So here I came. And your—your head waiter, I s’pose he is, he told me you didn’t have but four folks stopping here with you just now. So that means you’ve got rooms left. What rates for—”

A despairing grunt from Vail checked at last the flow of monologue. Thaxton was aware of a deep yearning to hunt up Osmun Creede and murder him. Well did he understand the inner meaning of Creede’s hint as to the lodging of information in case Vail should refuse to obey the terms of the will whereby he held tenure of Vailholme. And he knew Osmun was quite capable of keeping his word.

Vailholme was dear to Thaxton. He was not minded to lose it through any legal loophole. He was profoundly ignorant of the law. But he remembered signing an agreement to fulfill all the conditions of his great-uncle’s will before assuming ownership of the property.

“I am obliged,” he said, haltingly, “to take in any travelers who can pay my prices. Probably that is what Mr. Creede meant. But I have no adequate provision—or provisions—for guests. I don’t think you’d care for it, here; even for a single day. Why not go on to North Adams, to the—”

“No, thanks, friend,” disclaimed Joshua Q. Mosely, with a leer of infinite cunning. “This isn’t the first time the wife and I have been steered away from excloosive joints. We know the signs. And we want to stop here. So here we stop. For the night, anyhow. We know our rights. And we know the law. Now, once more, what’s your rates for us? Put a price on the—”

“Your chauffeur will have to bunk in at one of the rooms over the garage,” said Vail, morbidly aware that the butler and a maid and the second man were still listening from the hallway. “And I can’t give you and Mrs. Mosely a room with a bath. I’ll have to give you one without. And you’ll have to eat at the only table I have—the table where I and my four personal guests will dine.”

“That’s all right,” pleasantly agreed the tourist. “We’re democratic, Mrs. M. and me. We’ll put up with the best we can get. How much?”

“For all three of you,” said Thaxton, “the lump price will be—let’s see—the lump price will be two hundred dollars a day.”

Joshua Q. Mosely gobbled. His lean little wife arose and faced him.

“It’s just like all these other excloosive places, Josh!” she shrilled. “He’s trying to lose us. Don’t you let him! We’ll stay. It’ll be worth two hundred dollars just to spite the stuck-up chap. We’ll stay, young man. Get that? We’ll stay. If you knew anything about Golden City, you’d know two hundred dollars is no more to my husband than a plugged nickel would be worth to one of you Massachusetts snobs. We’re ‘doing’ the Berkshires. And we’re prepared to be done while we’re doing it. We can afford to. Have us shown up to that room.”

Lugubriously Vail stepped to the hall door.

“Vogel,” he said, as a vanishing swarm of servants greeted his advent, “show these people up to the violet room. Have Francis help their chauffeur up with the luggage. Then have Gavroche take the chauffeur to one of the garage rooms.”

He spoke with much authority; and forcibly withal. But he dared not meet the fishy eye of his butler. And he retreated to the veranda again, as soon as he had delivered the order.

“It’s all up,” he announced to Willis Chase, three minutes later, as this first of his unwelcome guests alighted from a Stockbridge taxi, bearing a bagful of the forgotten sections of his apparel. “Here’s where I decamp. If I can’t get some inn to put me up for the night, I’ll take a train for New York.”

“And leave us to our fate?” queried Chase, disgustedly.

“Precisely that. And I hope it’ll be a miserable fate. What do you suppose has happened?”

Briefly, bitterly, he told of the arrival of the Moselys. Willis Chase smiled in pure rapture. Then his face fell as he asked concernedly:

“And you say you’re getting out and deserting us?”

“Why not? It’ll be horrible. Fancy those two unspeakable vulgarians sitting down to dinner with one! Fancy having to meet Vogel’s righteous wrath! Fancy—”

“Fancy walking out on us!” retorted Chase. “Fancy leaving a girl like Doris Lane to the mercies of the Moselys’ society at dinner! Fancy what she’ll think of you for deserting her and her aunt, like a quitter, when your place is at the head of your own table! Fancy leaving a disorganized household that’ll probably go on strike! We’ve paid our board. Are you going to welsh on us? Poor old Clive Creede is sick and all shot to pieces. He came here to you for refuge. Going to leave him to—?”

“No,” groaned Thaxton. “I suppose not. You’re right. I can’t. I’ve got to stay and see it out. If I valued Vailholme any less than I value my right arm, though, I’d let Uncle Oz’s fool conditions go to blazes. Say! Let’s go for a walk. It’s hot as Tophet and I’m tired. But it’ll be better than meeting Vogel till I have to. Let me put that off as long as I can. Something tells me he is going to be nasty. And that means he’ll probably organize a strike. Come along, Macduff!” he bade the collie. “Stop nosing at that obese German dog in the car and come here!”

“Why can’t real-life butlers be like the dear old stage butlers?” sighed Chase, sympathetically, as he and Vail slunk, with guilty haste, down the veranda steps and across the lawn. “Now if only Vogel were on the stage, he’d come to you, with an antique ruffled shirt and with his knees wabbling, and he’d say: ‘Master, I’ve saved up a little out of my wages, this past ninety years that I’ve served your house. I know you’re in trouble. Here’s my savings, Master! Maybe they’ll help. And I’ll keep on working my poor hands to the bone for you, without any wages, God bless your bonny face!’ That’s what he’d say. And he’d snivel a bit as he said it. So would the audience.”

“Faster!” urged Vail, with a covert look over his shoulder. “He’s standing on the steps, looking after us. Hit the pace!”