T was Mrs. Vane of the fixed, benevolent smile, a fellow-guest of good intent. With a hasty nod to the veranda she hurried by to intercept an unwary person at the gate: Mr. Uncle Jimmy Collins, a somewhat reconstructed Confederate. At her greeting he swept off his hat with an air.
Casting an apprehensive glance at the unconscious Jimmy Junior, working across the way, Mrs. Vane lowered her voice to an agitated whisper, with tragic and rhythmic underscoring of words: "Oh, Mr. Collins! I hate to mention it—but do you know your Jimmy gambles?"
The veranda listened shamelessly; even the pinochle was suspended. The query visibly staggered the old soldier. He mopped his forehead and disconsolately studied the lining of his hat. "Gambles? Dear me, dear me! Jimmy! I've tried to teach him better'n that, ma'am. Are you sure?"
"Oh, yes! Why, I saw him myself! He was playing with a Mexican boy on the freight depot platform in broad daylight! They had the money in front of them!"
"Dear me, dear me!" said the old gentleman again, in great distress. A puzzled look came to his eyes. "I am surprised. Whose—whose money was it?" he faltered.
"Whose money?" echoed the beaming lady. "Why—his, I suppose."
The veteran gave a sigh of relief. "Oh-h! I thought maybe it was yours! Good-mawnin', madam!" He clapped on his hat with bow and flourish and went stumping on his wooden-legged way with a new and jaunty erectness of bearing, leaving good Mrs. Vane to retreat, red with mortification, and the veranda redder still with smothered merriment.
"Splendid, splendid!" gasped Lena. "I wouldn't have missed that!" She turned to the Professor. "Now don't disapprove and spoil it, you rigid moralist. It's too good."
"Do you expect me to approve?" The Professor was struggling, with indifferent results, to repress a refractory grin to austere, steel-trap lines.
"You do!" she defied him. "Else, why do you laugh? Gossip makes more trouble than gambling."
"There'll be more to this!" prophesied Hiram, dolefully wagging his head. "The old man'll lead Jimmy behind the barn, pullin' a strap between his fingers. 'Jimmy,' he'll say, 'this hurts you worse than it does me'!"
"Oh, I like it here!" declared Lena. "The men are so direct and straightforward. Even in their open wrong-doing there is a childlike simplicity, a lack of all intent to conceal, that goes far to condone their offenses. Yesterday I went over to the store. They were playing that extraordinary game—I can't remember the name of it—where they all throw up coins and the one that falls nearest a crack in the floor takes all the rest"
"Crack-Loo," said Don reminiscently. "Crack-Loo can be made singularly unremunerative at times."
"There! You see!" said Lena with the triumphant feminine faculty of conveying a meaning entirely foreign to the words. "They were just like that. They moved back, but kept quietly on at their game, evidently unconscious of any impropriety. I'll tell you what it's like," she cried, with that eagerness we all use to hunt down a luckless simile. "It's like the tents they live in, with the doors wide open, revealing their domestic economy with unshrinking candor to the passer-by. No skeleton in the closet there."
"Would it not be more accurate to say there is no closet for the skeleton?" asked Kennedy. "I will cheerfully admit, however, that any of them possessing a skeleton are quite capable of providing a cozy bunk and an easy chair for it."
"I must not have understood you correctly, Miss Mallory," said the Professor. "Not to be ashamed of what you do is surely not quite the same thing as not to do that of which you should be ashamed."
"That's not a fair statement at all," said Don. "I appeal to Miss Mallory if she meant any such thing. If a man scorns to conceal his acts he may do naughty-naughty things—yes, indeedy. But when he comes to something"
"'Here we go round the mulberry bush'!" said Miss Mallory rudely, describing swift circles with a shapely hand. "Miss Mallory is quite capable of knowing what she means without having two great clumsy men explain it to her. As a matter of fact, I mean exactly what the old lady in the story did: 'My son, never do anything you need be ashamed of and then you need never be ashamed of anything you do!'"
"Oh, well," said Hiram, "we've got one big advantage over your closed-and-double-locked-door system. We're not afraid of being exposed and so we never commit one crime to conceal another."
"In other words, our sins and crimes are chosen, not forced upon us," supplemented Kennedy.