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Did I ever tell ye the story of Mrs. Orcutt's coat?" "No." "It goes back quite a ways the left-handed love me an' Fred Orcutt has for one another. We speak neighborly on the street, an' for years we've played on opposite sides of a ball-a-hole foursome at the Country Club, but either of us would sooner lose a hundred dollars than pay the other a golf ball.
When the door closed behind the girl old John readjusted his nose glasses and leaned back in his chair. "A clever engineer he is, beyond a doubt," he mused. "For I kept my eye on him while he was layin' out Orcutt's Nettle River project. If he'd made a botch of the job 'twould have saved me offerin' my plant to the city.
Orcutt most certainly would, for McNabb had once publicly compared it with her coat, much to the New York coat's detriment and Mrs. Orcutt's humiliation. It was not altogether loyalty for his employer that led him to plot the woman an uncomfortable evening, for he owed her a grudge on his own account.
"McNabb's money, or Orcutt's," he muttered under his breath, "it's all the same to me. Three hundred and fifty thousand is more money than I ever expected to handle. And now for the get-away." Closing the door behind him he struck across the clearing toward the northeast. At the end of the bush he paused. "Hell!" he growled. "I can't hit for the railway.
Orcutt's glance rested meaningly, for an instant, on the Easterner at the table. Overland grinned. Orcutt spoke to the young Easterner, who immediately rose to his feet and bowed. "You was lookin' for somebody that's the real thing, you said. This here's my friend Jack Summers. He used to be sheriff of Abilene once. He ain't workin' for a movin'-picture outfit and he won't borrow your watch.
I don't believe you had to go home at all. You just wanted an excuse to get away from me." "I didn't need an excuse," she told him. He moved toward her, but she took a paper from the desk and carried it to a file across the room. "I thought we were going to be friends," he said. "Being friends doesn't mean being foolish," she retorted. "And Mr. Orcutt's waiting to see you." "Let him wait."
I suppose, though, that that would have been the logical procedure." Old John chuckled. "You're right, it would, with Fred Orcutt mixed up in it. But they didn't catch me nappin', an' I slipped the word to the city dads that I'd sell out to 'em, lock, stock, an' barrel, at a figure that would have meant a loss to Orcutt's crowd to meet.
It was not a rifle-shot from the court-house and the busiest centers of the city, yet it was as retired and as reposeful as if it had been forgotten ever since the previous century, when its houses were built. And in the middle of the first block, a sober, little brick house with an old white painted door and window lights, was Judge Orcutt's number.
But after they had struggled into birth, they became eternal possessions of her consciousness, never to be forgotten, or debated, or denied. She had thus slowly and painfully achieved whatever personality she had since she came for the first time a pale child into Judge Orcutt's court.
Judge Orcutt's house was of no particular "period" or "style," but it was remarkably harmonious the garment carefully chosen by a person with traditions.... Presently the servant came back and invited Adelle to go upstairs to the judge's library, as Judge Orcutt was not feeling well to-day, she explained. The study was like the room below, only larger, lighter, and well filled with books.
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