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Page 57
"Your manner says 'Drop it,'" observed Burns, with a keen glance at a
side-face clean-cut against the landscape. "I've encountered that manner
before, and I'll take warning accordingly. This is a fine day, and it's
rather an interesting case I'm going to see, up this road. If you care to
come in I'll be glad of your opinion, but I won't insist on it."
"Unless you really wish it, I'll stay out, thank you."
Burns left his companion in the car, open book in hand. It was a book Red
Pepper had strongly recommended, with the motive of stirring up his
friend to interested resentment,--a particularly unfair and prejudiced
discussion of a subject just then being torn to pieces by all manner of
disputants, with the issue still very much in doubt. He knew precisely
the place Leaver had reached in his reading, and noted, as he got out of
the car, the page at which he was about to begin. The page was one easily
recognizable, for it was one upon whose margin he himself had drawn, in a
moment of intense irritation with the argument advanced thereon, a rough
outline of a donkey's head with impossibly long and obstinate ears.
He left Leaver with eyes bent upon the page, not the semblance of a smile
touching his grave mouth at sight of the really striking and effective
cartoon which so ably expressed a former reader's sentiments. Burns went
into the house making with himself a wager as to how far Leaver's perusal
of the chapter would have progressed in the ten minutes which would
suffice for the visit, and was divided whether to stake a page against a
half-chapter, or to risk his friend's being aware of his observation and
leaping through the chapter to its end.
When he came out the book was closed and lying upon Leaver's knee. Burns
took his place and drove off, malice sparkling in his eye.
"What did you think of that chapter?" he inquired.
"Interesting argument, but weak in spots."
"Hm--m. Which spots?"
Leaver indicated them. There could be no doubt that he had read
the chapter carefully to the end. Burns put him through a severe
cross-examination, but he stood the test, much to his examiner's disgust.
In detective work it is usually irritating to have one's theories
disproved. But he still doubted the evidence of his ears. Either John
Leaver was a colder blooded deceiver than he thought him, or his powers
of concentration were more than ordinarily great, that he could turn from
the contemplation of a subject like the one left at the cross-roads
corner, a subject which Burns was pretty sure vitally concerned him, to
a mere abstract discussion of a modern sociological problem, bare of
practical illustration, and dealing purely with one man's notions not yet
worked out to any constructive conclusion.
"Well," said Leaver, turning suddenly to look at Burns with a smile, "are
you satisfied that I have read the chapter?"
Burns also turned, met his companion's eye, and broke into a laugh. "I
shall have to admit you have," said he.
"Why should you have doubted it?"
"I haven't been gone long enough for you to have read and digested it."
Leaver looked at his watch. "You were gone seventeen minutes. That's
long enough to take in the argument pretty thoroughly. As to digesting
it--it's indigestible. Why try?"
"No use at all. But having given my mental machinery a lot of friction I
enjoyed trying to stir yours up also to irritation and discontent. But
I haven't done it. You've remained calm where I grew hot. Also you've
proved your ability to change the subject of your thinking as you would
switch off one electric current and switch on another. It shows you're a
well man."
"I must warn you, as I have done at various times in our association:
'Don't jump to conclusions.' Your first one, that I hadn't read the
chapter, was wrong. I had read it. Your second one, that, after all, I
had read the chapter while you were in the house, was also wrong. I had
read it by the side of the brook, an hour ago."
Burns's laughter spoke his enjoyment as heartily as if he were not the
one cornered. But his amusement ended in triumph, after all, though to
this he discreetly did not give voice. Since he had met Miss Charlotte
Ruston in the woods Dr. John Leaver had not given himself to the study of
any other man's ideas.
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