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After this reception, the embassy marched back to the consul's office, surrounded by an immense number of the natives, some of whom ran ahead and looked back at them, and crowded so close that the two Bradleys had to poke at those nearest with their guns. The crowd remained outside the office even after the procession of four had disappeared, and cheered.
One last fond embrace, one lingering kiss, and Checkers turned and walked resolutely away. The next morning early he bid the Bradleys a sorrowful farewell, and boarded the train for Little Rock. Mr. Bradley gave him letters to a number of merchants there, but he was unable to find employment. In fact, he only sought it in a half-hearted way; Little Rock was too small, too near Clarksville.
She dressed severely in black, in memory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago a young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day. She had the unmoved countenance of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like her father's, astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously ironic curl.
There was a veranda around the consul's office, and inside the walls were hung with skins, and pictures from illustrated papers, and there was a good deal of bamboo furniture, and four broad, cool-looking beds. The place was as clean as a kitchen. "I made the furniture," said Stedman, "and the Bradleys keep the place in order." "Who are the Bradleys?" asked Albert.
But domestic peace is a habit, after all, and the Bradleys had lost the habit. Nancy was restless, beside her own hearth, even while she spangled a gown for the Hallowe'en ball, and discussed with Bert the details of the paper chase at the club, and the hunt breakfast to follow.
"Oh, sure!" Bert agreed easily. "Unless, of course," he added after a pause, "all the other fellows do something else." "Oh of course!" agreed Nancy, little dreaming that she and her husband were in these words voicing the new creed that was to be theirs. Up to this time it might have been said that the Bradleys had grasped their destiny, and controlled it with a high hand.
The consul rubbed his rheumatic leg and sighed, but said nothing. The Bradleys returned about ten o'clock, and came in very sheepishly. The consul had gone off to pay the boatmen who had brought them, and Albert in his absence assured the sailors that there was not the least danger of their being sent away.
"The Bradleys are those two men you saw with me," said Stedman; "they deserted from a British man-of-war that stopped here for coal, and they act as my servants. One is Bradley, Sr., and the other Bradley, Jr." "Then vessels do stop here occasionally?" the consul said, with a pleased smile. "Well, not often," said Stedman. "Not so very often; about once a year.
Ruby had already begun the period of over-bloom. The Bradleys, he gathered, lived a kind of a tramp existence, moving from boarding-house to hotel as Bradley went up or down. And Ruby, with all her assurance and her affluent person, had not lost the Ellwell ailments. Yet to her child had been given the strong stock he envied.
And so back to the front hall again, and to a rather blank moment when the agent obviously expected a definite decision, and the Bradleys felt unable to make it. "What don't you like about the place?" the agent would ask. "Well " Bert would flounder. "I don't know. I'll talk it over with my wife!" "Better decide to take it, Mr.
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