Mr. Curtis knocked the ash from his extinct cigar and relit it at the top of the lamp chimney.
"I should just like to have seen him," remarked Ralph enthusiastically. "And to think that he really lived in this room. How did that happen? And which bedroom did he have?"
"The one on the left, nearest the door," replied Mr. Curtis.
Over in Stoughton some fool was strumming a banjo, singing "I'm a soldier now, Lizette"--rottenly. And some one else, of the same mind as myself apparently, leaned out of the window in the room above us and holloed:
"Oh, quit that! Try being a freshman a while! Lizette won't care."
Evidently the singer decided to follow the advice thus gratuitously given, for the banjo ceased. Then came one of those long silences when you felt instinctively that in a moment something might happen to spoil the excellent opportunity of it, throw us off the key as it were, or break its placid surface like an inconsequent pebble. But Ralph, in a singularly moderate tone, as if leading the theme gently that it might not become startled and break away, continued:
"You said something about dueling pistols, you know."
Mr. Curtis looked at him with that same quizzical smile which my roommate had called forth before.
"That's it. All you want is gunpowder, treason, and plot. My feeble attempt at character sketching has been a failure. Well, now to your dessert."
"You are entirely wrong," said Ralph, rather mortified. "Randolph must have been a perfect corker. I wish we had some chaps like that in 19--. But the Southerners nowadays all seem to go to Chapel Hill, or William and Mary, or Tulane, or some of those God-forsaken places where I don't believe they even have a ball nine. Only, naturally, I wanted to make sure of the bullet hole. You see," he added cunningly, "that bullet hole is the thing that links us together. That's how we'll know when you've gone that it wasn't all a dream."
"You're a funny boy," said he. "Well, two or three days later I asked Randolph to room with me. The matter was easily adjusted, and Moses spent nearly a week in fixing up this den here with what he called 'Marse Dick's contraptions.' Save the old picture there, there's not a thing in the place that suggests the room as it looked then. From extreme meagerness, if not poverty, of furniture it sprang into opulence--almost ornately magnificent it seemed to me with my conservative New England tastes and still more conservative New England pocketbook. I remember a silver-mounted revolver was always lying on one end of the mantelpiece, while in the center was a rosewood case of pistols, curious affairs, with long octagonal barrels, and stocks inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver.