“Don't go,” I said. “I'll attend to the letter.”
“I don't know, but in some way,” I said, with the strong confidence of youth in its own capacity. “I only ask that you give me permission to consult my friend Dan'l Webster Smead in strict confidence. It won't do to let the Colonel drive us out of town. He is the one to be driven out.”
Florence agreed with me, and I walked home with the girls, and left them in a better frame of mind.
I asked Smead to come to my room with me, and laid the facts before him. He sat smoking thoughtfully, and said not a word until I had finished. Then he said in that slow drawl of his:
“I take it that you are willing to suffer, if need be, for the sake of decency and fair women.”
“Then again I ask you to follow me,” he said, rising; and together we left his house as the old town dock was striking nine; Mr. Smead wore his great overcoat with its fur collar and cuds.
“The Colonel has often admired it,” said he. “He's a great swapper when he's drinking, and perhaps--”
“I shall fight the Colonel, if necessary,” I suggested.
“Hush, boy! Let us first try eloquence,” said he. “It is only the vulgar mind that resorts to muscle when the tongue may do as well. Eloquence, my dear boy, is the jimmy of Griggsby; it is also the gold brick, the giant powder, the nitroglycerin of Griggsby. Let us see what it can accomplish.” We went on in silence, and soon heard sounds of revelry in a bar-room. We stopped and listened a moment, after which he led me farther up the street.
“The Colonel began to slide from his eminence to-day,” my companion whispered. “I doubt not he is still sliding, and what I hope to hear are sundry deep-voiced remarks about the 'witchin' hour of night.”'
We came soon to the lighted windows of the Palace Hotel, through which a loud and mirthful joy floated into the still night. We listened again. I could hear the rumbling words, “When churchyards yawn and graves give up their dead.”
“Those graves and churchyards are counterfeit,” Smead whispered. “They have not the Buckstonian ring to them. Let's go in for a minute.”
We entered. About the stove in the office was the usual crowd of horsemen with meerschaum pipes. I took the only vacant chair by the side of a maudlin old soldier who did chores for his keep, and who addressed me with incoherent mumbles. The air was heavy with tobacco smoke and the odor of rum and molasses. “Rat” Emerson, a driver, was telling how he had worn out a faster horse than his in the scoring and won a race. Through the open door of the bar-room I could see a man with his glass raised, and hear him saying in a stentorian tone: