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"Mac's" friends had a trick of looking away when they spoke to him, but children gazed fascinated at the expressionless blue eyeballs and regarded their owner with awe. The "real estate agent" was considered an enterprising man by his neighbors and a "poor stick" by his wife.
"Going to be a record Dry," he assured us "all surface water gone along the line already"; and then he hurled various items of news at us: "the horse teams were managing to do a good trip; and Mac? Oh, Mac's getting along," he shouted; "struck him on a dry stage; seemed a bit light-headed; said dry stages weren't all beer and skittles queer idea. Beer and skittles!
Jacob was a man of few words. He did it, and thus it came to pass that when grey dawn began to break over Mac's Fort, it found the Reverend William Tucker and his guide scouring over the western plains at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour more or less while Reuben Dale lay sound asleep in his blood-stained wedding dress, his strong hand clasping that of pretty little Loo, who was also sound asleep, in an easy chair by his side.
The stoutest spot in his mental armor yielded to the touch of small fingers, and some of his best comradeships had been with tiny boys and girls. Now, in an instant, all his sense of injured dignity fell away from him, and the watchers under the awnings wondered at the sudden kindliness in his face, as he grasped Mac's pudgy fist. "Why, Mac, who ever dreamed of seeing you here, old man!"
"He won't," said Voorhees, with conviction, and the listener overhead smiled grimly to himself, for at that moment, twenty miles offshore, lay Mac's little tug, hove to in the track of the outgoing steamship, and in her tiny cabin sat Bill Wheaton eating breakfast. As the morning wore by with no news of the lawyer, McNamara's uneasiness grew.
Mac and Owen had followed our tracks in another motor, and arrived thirty minutes later. Mac's happy face was drawn and white. "I wouldn't go through that experience again for all the money in Mongolia," he said. "We followed your tracks and at every hill expected to find you dead on the other side and the car upside down. How on earth did you miss capsizing when you went over that bank?"
But the stormy inconstancy of Mac's behaviour had no connection with a gill or two of wine; his passions, angry and otherwise, were on a different sail-plan from his neighbours'; and there were possibilities of good and evil in that hybrid Celt beyond their prophecy.
Rose did not care, for one dance proved to her that that branch of Mac's education had been sadly neglected, and she was glad to glide smoothly about with Steve, though he was only an inch or two taller than herself. She had plenty of partners, however, and plenty of chaperons, for all the young men were her most devoted, and all the matrons beamed upon her with maternal benignity.
It was a trying ordeal for him, Mac's nerves having had a wrench. He was a temperate man, but under the circumstances we advised him to take a glass of brandy to steady his nerves. Then placing the genuine signature before him and the forged letters, he began to put in the name. The signatures were not well written, but under the trying circumstances they were wonderfully well done.
Thus it will be seen that I alone was unprejudiced in my predilections, and qualified, however inadequately, to do justice to Mrs. Carville. Mac was annoyed because she had cut down a tree. That it was her own tree made no difference. To cut down a living tree was, in Mac's view, a sacrilege. Bill had an additional grievance in the fact that Mrs.
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