“Well, there ain't much use 'whooping up the boys' when only the whooper gets wild.”
“Still, that does not affect any right he may have in the property.”
“But it affects the syndicate,” said Custer gloomily; “and when we found that he was whooping up some shopkeepers and factory hands who claimed to belong to the clan,--and you can't heave a stone at a dog around here without hitting a McHulish,--we concluded we hadn't much use for him ornamentally. So we shipped him home last steamer.”
“Oh, that's all right,” said Custer, still gloomily. “We've effected an amicable compromise, as Sir James calls it. That means we've taken a lot of land somewhere north, that you can shoot over--that is, you needn't be afraid of hitting a house, or a tree, or a man anywhere; and we've got a strip more of the same sort on the seashore somewhere off here, occupied only by some gay galoots called crofters, and you can raise a lawsuit and an imprecation on every acre. Then there's this soul-subduing, sequestered spot, and what's left of the old bone-boiling establishment, and the rights of fishing and peat-burning, and otherwise creating a nuisance off the mainland. It cost the syndicate only a hundred thousand dollars, half cash and half in Texan and Kentucky grass lands. But we've carried the thing through.”
“Thanks.” Custer puffed at his cigar for a few moments. “That Sir James MacFen is a fine man.”
“A large, broad, all-round man. Knows everything and everybody, don't he?”
“Big man in the church, I should say? No slouch at a party canvass, or ward politics, eh? As a board director, or president, just takes the cake, don't he?”
“Nothing mean about Jimmy as an advocate or an arbitrator, either, is there? Rings the bell every time, don't he? Financiers take a back seat when he's around? Owns half of Scotland by this time, I reckon.”
The consul believed that Sir James had the reputation of being exceedingly sagacious in financial and mercantile matters, and that he was a man of some wealth.
“Naturally. I wonder what he'd take to come over to America, and give the boys points,” continued Custer, in meditative admiration. “There were two or three men on Scott's River, and one Chinaman, that we used to think smart, but they were doddering ijuts to HIM. And as for me--I say, Jack, you didn't see any hayseed in my hair that day I walked inter your consulate, did you?”