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She always returned to Washington with excitement and pleasure, and with the hope of some outstanding victory, and the suite at the Riggs House, given her by generous Jane Spofford, was a delight after months of hard travel in the West. "I shall come both ragged and dirty," she wrote Mrs. Spofford in 1887.
"What you ask is quite impossible. My niece is, ah, I may say tentatively engaged. I am sorry for you. Perhaps it would be just as well if you did not wait for her to come in. She will be " "Mrs. Spofford, I am obliged to confess to you that I have already spoken to Miss Clinton, and I may add that she is not tentatively engaged. She has promised to be my wife." She drew back as if struck.
Hence it was with misgiving that the Ad-Visor opened the door of his sanctum to Mr. Spofford, on a harsh December noon. But the misgivings were supplanted by pleased surprise when the caller laid in his hand a clipping from a small country town paper, to this effect: RANSOM Lost lad from Harwick not drowned or harmed. Retained for ransom. Safe and sound to parents for $50,000.
"We're taking these rogues to the sloop Warren. They're to be tried for arson and assault in the foreign quarter." "By the Eternal!" shouted a bystander enthusiastically. "We've got Law in San Francisco at last.... Hurrah for Bill Spofford and the Citizens' Committee." "There's Adrian," cried Inez as the rearguard of the pageant passed. "Isn't it fine? Alice, aren't you proud?"
Am I right, or am I wrong?" he asked, in conclusion. "I prefer to believe Mr. Landover's story," said Mrs. Spofford stiffly. "Will you be good enough to go now, Mr. Shay?" "Sure," said "Soapy," rising. "I'm not asking anybody to take my word against his. I'm just telling you, that's all. Good afternoon, ladies." "It was not Mr. Percival who fired the shot? You are sure of that, Soapy?"
Spofford spoke in a more guarded manner, but it was very evident his opinion agreed with theirs. In the height of his raving, the physician who was present said to others, that he could find nothing the matter with the man, and that his pulse was perfectly regular. But consider the facts which Dr. Balch testifies. He suspected the whole of this illness and delirium to be feigned.
Finding that he had ten minutes to spare before school was out, he decided to call upon Mrs. Spofford. That lady received him with icy politeness. "I have been expecting you," she said. "Your friend Mr. Shay honoured us with a visit yesterday. My niece is at the school. Will you sit down and wait for her, or " "I beg your pardon. What was that you said about Shay?" "I said he came to see us."
"But as one must see something of the world," continues Mrs. Spofford, "he used to jump from lintel to lintel of the windows of the block, if by chance his own were left open, and return when he pleased." Muff died soon after the death of Miss Booth. Vashti, who was very much admired by all her mistress's literary friends, was given to Miss Juliet Corson.
He felt it his duty to help entertain Miss Booth's guests, always; and he more than once, at the beginning of a reception, came into the drawing-room with a mouse in his mouth as his offering to the occasion. Naturally enough "he caused the stampede," as Mrs. Spofford puts it, "that Mr. Gilbert forgot to put into 'Princess Ida' when her Amazons wild demonstrate their courage."
Indeed, in the morning it was the sort of thing a man of varied experiences might have been expected to enjoy: the walk through Eagle Pass, with a glimpse of the Dolch hotel bus going to meet the early train from Spofford Junction, and a friendly greeting from an occasional merchant, and then the breezy passage across the Rio Grande bridge, spanning the meandering waters which never bore vessels of any sort to the far-off sea, and finally the negotiation of the narrow street in Piedras Negras, past the plaza and the bull-ring, and countless little wine-shops, and the market, with its attractively displayed fruits and vegetables from nobody knew where.
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