"My man?" queried Uncle Peter, and, sighting Billy Brue at that moment, "why, yes, here's my man, now. Mr. Brue, shake hands with Mr. Livingston. Billy, go up to the address he gives you, and get some of these se-gars. You'll relish 'em as much as I do. Now don't talk to any strangers, don't get run over, and don't lose yourself."
Livingston had surrendered a wavering and uncertain hand to the warm, reassuring clasp of Mr. Brue.
"He ain't much fur style, Billy ain't," Uncle Peter explained when that person had gone upon his errand, "he ain't a mite gaudy, but he's got friendly feelings."
The dazed scion of the Livingstons had thereupon made a conscientious tour of his clubs in a public hansom, solely for the purpose of relating this curious adventure to those best qualified to marvel at it.
The old man's arrival had been quite unexpected. Not only had he sent no word of his coming, but he seemed, indeed, not to know what his reasons had been for doing a thing so unusual.
"Thought I'd just drop in on your all and say 'howdy,'" had been his first avowal, which was lucid as far as it went. Later he involved himself in explanations that were both obscure and conflicting. Once it was that he had felt a sudden great longing for the life of a gay city. Then it was that he would have been content in Montana City, but that he had undertaken the winter in New York out of consideration for Billy Brue.
"Just think of it," he said to Percival, "that poor fellow ain't ever been east of Denver before now. It wa'n't good for him to be holed up out there in them hills all his life. He hadn't got any chance to improve his mind."
"He'd better improve his whiskers first thing he does," suggested Percival. "He'll be gold-bricked if he wears 'em scrambled that way around this place."
But in neither of these explanations did the curious old man impress Percival as being wholly ingenuous.
Then he remarked casually one day that he had lately met Higbee, who was on his way to San Francisco.
"I only had a few minutes with him while they changed engines at Green River, but he told me all about you folks--what a fine time you was havin', yachts and card-parties, and all like that. Higbee said a man had ought to come to New York every now and then, jest to keep from gettin' rusty."