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Page 5
A soft stertorous breathing interrupted him. Tom, chin on chest, was
asleep. Polly, with a significant look, caught her uncle's eye. Then
her father, after an uneasy restless movement, lifted drowsy lids.
"Deuced warm day," he said with a bright apologetic laugh. "I've been
actually asleep. Aren't we near home?"
Frederick nodded to the chauffeur, and the car rolled on.
III
The house that Frederick Travers had built when his prosperity came, was
large and costly, sober and comfortable, and with no more pretence than
was naturally attendant on the finest country home in the county. Its
atmosphere was just the sort that he and his daughter would create. But
in the days that followed his brother's home-coming, all this was
changed. Gone was the subdued and ordered repose. Frederick was neither
comfortable nor happy. There was an unwonted flurry of life and
violation of sanctions and traditions. Meals were irregular and
protracted, and there were midnight chafing-dish suppers and bursts of
laughter at the most inappropriate hours.
Frederick was abstemious. A glass of wine at dinner was his wildest
excess. Three cigars a day he permitted himself, and these he smoked
either on the broad veranda or in the smoking room. What else was a
smoking room for? Cigarettes he detested. Yet his brother was ever
rolling thin, brown-paper cigarettes and smoking them wherever he might
happen to be. A litter of tobacco crumbs was always to be found in the
big easy chair he frequented and among the cushions of the window-seats.
Then there were the cocktails. Brought up under the stern tutelage of
Isaac and Eliza Travers, Frederick looked upon liquor in the house as an
abomination. Ancient cities had been smitten by God's wrath for just
such practices. Before lunch and dinner, Tom, aided and abetted by
Polly, mixed an endless variety of drinks, she being particularly adept
with strange swivel-stick concoctions learned at the ends of the earth.
To Frederick, at such times, it seemed that his butler's pantry and
dining room had been turned into bar-rooms. When he suggested this,
under a facetious show, Tom proclaimed that when he made his pile he
would build a liquor cabinet in every living room of his house.
And there were more young men at the house than formerly, and they
helped in disposing of the cocktails. Frederick would have liked to
account in that manner for their presence, but he knew better. His
brother and his brother's daughter did what he and Mary had failed to
do. They were the magnets. Youth and joy and laughter drew to them. The
house was lively with young life. Ever, day and night, the motor cars
honked up and down the gravelled drives. There were picnics and
expeditions in the summer weather, moonlight sails on the bay, starts
before dawn or home-comings at midnight, and often, of nights, the many
bedrooms were filled as they had never been before. Tom must cover all
his boyhood ramblings, catch trout again on Bull Creek, shoot quail over
Walcott's Prairie, get a deer on Round Mountain. That deer was a cause
of pain and shame to Frederick. What if it was closed season? Tom had
triumphantly brought home the buck and gleefully called it
sidehill-salmon when it was served and eaten at Frederick's own table.
They had clambakes at the head of the bay and musselbakes down by the
roaring surf; and Tom told shamelessly of the _Halcyon_, and of the run
of contraband, and asked Frederick before them all how he had managed to
smuggle the horse back to the fishermen without discovery. All the young
men were in the conspiracy with Polly to pamper Tom to his heart's
desire. And Frederick heard the true inwardness of the killing of the
deer; of its purchase from the overstocked Golden Gate Park; of its
crated carriage by train, horse-team and mule-back to the fastnesses of
Round Mountain; of Tom falling asleep beside the deer-run the first time
it was driven by; of the pursuit by the young men, the jaded saddle
horses, the scrambles and the falls, and the roping of it at Burnt Ranch
Clearing; and, finally, of the triumphant culmination, when it was
driven past a second time and Tom had dropped it at fifty yards. To
Frederick there was a vague hurt in it all. When had such consideration
been shown him?
There were days when Tom could not go out, postponements of outdoor
frolics, when, still the centre, he sat and drowsed in the big chair,
waking, at times, in that unexpected queer, bright way of his, to roll
a cigarette and call for his _ukulele_--a sort of miniature guitar of
Portuguese invention. Then, with strumming and tumtuming, the live
cigarette laid aside to the imminent peril of polished wood, his full
baritone would roll out in South Sea _hulas_ and sprightly French and
Spanish songs.
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