I dare not break in upon his awful silence."
The Moonshee's significant gesture of drawing a hand across his
own brown throat had silenced the pushing American professor.
"By hokey!" he groaned, "it is hard to have to play second fiddle
to this purblind old Scotchman." Alaric Hobbs had been a reporter
upon that dainty sheet, The New York Whorl, in one of his "emergent"
periods, and so he writhed in agony at being left at the post. "I
must be content to tap old Fraser when he comes back from London
with that embarrassing lump of beauty, his millionaire niece. She
would make a fitting spouse for this Prince Djiddin, for she never
speaks a word--at least to me. And this swell Prince, who comes 'only
one in a box,' gets the same 'frozen hand.' Funny girl, that. But
I must yield to old Fraser's moods." Alaric Hobbs then descended to
the tap-room and instructed the pretty barmaid in the manufacture
of his own favorite "cocktail," an American drink of surpassing
fierceness and "innate power," which had once caused "Bald-headed
Wolf," a Kiowa chieftain, to slay his favorite squaw, scalp a
peace commissioner, and chase a fat army paymaster till he died of
fright in his ambulance, after Alaric Hobbes had incautiously left
a bottle of this "red-eye" mixture with his aboriginal host on one
of the "exploring tours." A powerful disturbing agent, the American
cocktail!
But for all Miss Nadine Johnstone's seeming aversion to men, and in
spite of Prince Djiddin's inability to utter a word of any jargon
save ninety-five degree Thibetan, "far above proof," on this very
morning while the "Moonshee" was transcribing under the watchful
eyes of the excited Andrew Fraser the disclosures of the evening
before, the young millionairess was "getting on" very well in
exhibiting the glories of the tropical garden to the august tourist
from the lacustrine Himalayas.
Pages:
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415