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"One thing, Thayer," Dick said in an aside, after releasing himself from the girls, as they jostled in confusion where they met Thayer and Naismith at the head of the stairway leading down to the dining room. "Before you leave us, cast your eyes over those Merinos. I really have to brag about them, and American sheepmen will have to come to them.
There was a great commotion downstairs, and I distinctly heard some one say, in my own language, that they were not to get away alive. It must have been Naismith who telephoned. One of the men, I have been told, was killed not far from our gates. He was shot, I am sure, by the man called Nicholas, noted as one of the most marvellous marksmen in our little army.
This cool assumption that the sale was already consummated so perturbed Thayer, that, along with the sure knowledge that he had never seen so high a quality of rams, he was nettled into changing his order to twenty carloads. As he told Naismith, after they had regained the Big House and as they chalked their cues to finish the interrupted game: "It's my first visit to Forrest's. He's a wizard.
As a business investment, yes; for the virtues of the valley were on the eve of being discovered by the outside world, and no better location for a summer home could be found. As a happiness investment in joy of beauty and climate, it was worth a thousand times the price asked. And he knew Naismith would allow time on most of the amount.
There was little need for conversation. Thayer was distinctly disappointed in this, for he felt that the purchase of ten carloads of such expensive creatures was momentous enough to merit much conversation. "They speak for themselves," Dick had assured him, and turned aside to give data to Naismith for his impending article on Shropshires in California and the Northwest.
" More material for the Breeders' Gazette?" Naismith, a youngish man of thirty, with glasses, smiled sheepishly and cocked his head at his companion. "Wainwright challenged me," he explained. "Which means that Lute and Ernestine must still be beauty-sleeping," Forrest laughed.
Few young ladies are. But you are different from most." The Superintendent was ever a gallant. "You remember Mr. Boyle who graduated a year ago?" Her words came hurriedly and there was a slight flush on her cheek. "There was some trouble about his license at Presbytery. That horrid old Mr. Naismith was very nasty, and Dick, Mr.
Alexander Naismith was a little man with a shrill voice, which gained for him the cognomen of "Squeaky Sandy," and a most irritatingly persistent temper. Into his hands, while candidates and examiners were disporting themselves in the calm waters of Systematic Theology, fell poor Dick, to his confusion and the temporary withholding of his license.
So did I my cook, and a better never boiled water in Manatomana. For the same reason I discharged my chief clerk. And for the first time in the history of trading my schooners to the westward carried Bibles in their stock. I built a little anchorite bungalow up town on a mango-lined street squarely alongside the little house occupied by Ebenezer Naismith.
The last piece to go into this puzzle is the mishap that befell Naismith on that very afternoon. He was no doubt thwarted in his design to waylay me on the road from Spanish Falls by a singular occurrence in this tavern. He was attacked in his room here shortly after the noon hour, overpowered, bound and gagged by two men.
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