A man who has been forty miles over a mountain road on an empty lumber wagon knows what thrills are. I could see that Jim was aboard and that the team had cut loose down hill, for his bones were fairly rattling with the vibrations from the bog hollows, "thank yer, mums," old stumps and disagreeable boulders. He needed help. He couldn't hang on much longer.

"Say, Ben, there was a little matter I wanted to speak to you about,"

said Jim, with the same uneasy manner in which he had rubbed all our household arrangements the wrong way and aroused the resentment of the frying-pan and its "pards" of the domestic range.

I at once began to talk about something I was reading, to let him down easy and to open him up wider, for I was anxious to burrow into the mystery and dig exploration shafts in all directions. As he seemed to close again, I allowed my comment to drool off into a hum, and then looked up short in a way to send his ideas from mark-time to a continuance of the procession.

"You know that young lady, Miss Tescheron--Miss Gabrielle Tescheron?"

asked Jim, tossing his hair into windrows and looking straight away from me.

"Why, I know that lovely girl I've seen you with; is her name--"

"Yes, that's her name, and we're to be married."

"Jim, old boy, let me congratulate you." And we shook hands over this creature who was to wreck our happy home--still, I felt there wouldn't be enough crockery to continue on unless the thing was settled in church or at Sing Sing pretty soon.

"When is it to come off?" I continued, that question usually being No. 2 to the hand-shake and congratulations.

"Ben, I mention this matter because I feel that I need your friendship now more than ever," said he, disregarding my inquiry in a way which clearly showed that Cupid had stubbed a toe. "I am up against it. Tell me, what should be done? You must know a lot about such matters, and I don't seem to understand. It's the old man, her pa; a little whipper-snapper of a dude. I could swat him with my little finger and settle him in a minute. George! I've a mind to, at that."

"That, of course, is out of the question," I advised, tackling the matter as if time and again the fat of my theories had been tried out into the dripping of wedded affinities. "Soft dealing with parents is essential." This wisdom came also as if I were quoting from a book by a Mormon, who had handled every variety of father-in-law. "On what does pa base his opposition?"

"Well, I'll tell you," said Jim, preparing to confess all and let me do the penance. "But it's such blamed nonsense, I'm almost afraid to. It shows what an infernal old fool he is."

"How old is pa?" I inquired.

"Oh, he's an old 'un."

"Says you're old enough to be her father, doesn't he?"

"That's it, but he's off; and how would you get around it, anyway--by postponing it?"

Jim's notion of ages, and Tescheron's, I feared were both wide of the mark, but I let that pa.s.s. One was vain and mad, and the other did not observe closely.

"Is that all he said?" I asked.

"Well, no. I'll tell you just what he said as near as I can remember, and see if you can figure out the answer. I came away to-day from his office, squeezed out and dried up, but I gave him no back talk. I simply said, 'Mr. Tescheron, I love your daughter, Gabrielle, and I am here, sir, to ask you to set the day for the wedding,' just like that, as pleasant as if I was chatting to him after church. Say, I thought he would hurrah, or take me around to lunch (it was then after noon) and introduce me to his friends. But he proceeded to breathe an early frost on my green and tender leaves. As I was about to say, Ben, as near as I can remember after rehearsing all this afternoon is this--and I tell you, because if I don't the chances are I'll go right on rehearsing it forever in some asylum, and then everybody will hear it till they are sick and tired of it, and the curtain won't rise on the real show. Said he: 'Well, so you say, so you say, so you say!' This beat me. I had never heard a man talk that way."

"I've heard that kind," said I, knowingly. "He took st.i.tches in his conversation."

"'So you say, so you say. What say I? So? No.' That has been running through my head in a way to set me crazy," continued Jim. "'Do I want a son-in-law nearly as old as I am?' the little jackanapes asked me. 'Not I. So you see, you are too old for Gabrielle.' Now, what do you think of that? Doesn't that beat you? Why, the old chap is over fifty, and he says I am older than he is. I actually believe he's crazy. Hair dye and cologne and young men's clothes seem to give him the notion that he is about thirty and became Gabrielle's father when he was about five years old. He's got an idea from somewhere that I'm twice as old as I am because I'm twice as big as he is--that's the most reasonable way I can look at it. Well, I got so dry in the roof of my mouth I couldn't stub my tongue on it to turn a word; my eyes burned and a cold sweat started.

No man his size had ever floored me before. I tried hard to remember he was Gabrielle's father, and out of respect for her I should not injure him. He then piled in on me again. 'That is not all,' he said.

'Gabrielle is ambitious. You are lazy. You have wasted your youth. Look at you! A man of your age who has done nothing yet!'"

From this I gathered that Tescheron's objections were at first personal.

He did not find Jim to his liking and was probably urging his daughter to regard the suitor in the same light. Later in the day the better excuse learned from the great detective bureau came to his support.

"What do you think of that, Ben?" continued Jim. "What has he done to brag about? Should I bring a birth certificate?"

"Yes, but he is not marrying Gabrielle himself," said I. "He is trying to help her to find a good husband. You must be generous, Jim, and give a father his due."

"Shucks! He spends all his pay on his clothes. Such a dresser you never saw, and what is he? A rubber-neck, that's all."

"A what?"

"I asked one of the fellows who worked where he does, some time ago, what old man Tescheron did, and he told me he was a rubber-neck. Now, I know very well that a rubber-neck is a fellow who goes around to corner groceries to see what other kinds of crackers are sold there besides the brands furnished by his house. He starts in talking about the price of green-groceries, drifts along for five or ten minutes, and keeps squinting over the cracker boxes. To stave off suspicion he buys an apple, peels it carefully and eats it slowly, while he incidentally craves a cracker and proceeds to pump the innocent grocer on his cracker business. He writes out his notes in full afterward and that grocer is then described on a card index at the main office as handling such and such goods. I ought to know what rubber-necks are, having been around groceries enough."

"A sort of cracker detective," said I.

"That's all. A common, ordinary rubber-neck--gets about fifteen a week.

By the way he dresses you'd think he had a king's job. Think of him looking down upon me. Small as I am, I lead him."

"I wonder would he turn up his nose at me, an Inspector of Offensive Trades?" I queried, sadly. "But go ahead, Jim, and stick to your story, for I can see that there is plenty of trouble ahead for you."

This startled Jim into a more direct presentation of his problem.

"Well, I up and told him, said I: 'Mr. Tescheron, Miss Gabrielle and I would like to be married at her home some time soon,' said I; 'and if you don't wish it that way,' said I, 'I guess we can find a place that will be big enough and will answer just as well,' said I; and then I began to start up warmer and get bolder, when he shut me off with a string of cuss words that ran all over me. I didn't suppose he could talk that way, but no one in the office seemed to mind, although I'll bet you could have heard him a mile down South Street."

"South Street?" I asked, in a surprised tone not observed by the single-minded Jim. "Where's his office?"

"Fulton Market."

"The place they deal in fish at wholesale. And yet you say he is a rubber-neck for a cracker house?" I connected the faint suggestion of fish at the Fifth Avenue Hotel with the case at this point, and knew at once Tescheron's business, and from my knowledge gained by many inspections at the market inferred that the father of the girl was a millionaire.

"A queer place for the cracker business," said I.

"Well, a fellow told me; that's all I know," said Jim. "I haven't been sitting on the same sofa with the old gentleman asking him questions."

"Jim, do you know that you have this prospective father-in-law all twisted? He's something besides a cheap dude," said I. "He's no rubber-neck. I'll bet the old chap is well off, and do you want to know why he dresses so fine and keeps cologne on his handkerchief?"

"That's right, he does," said Jim with a wondering gaze. "And it's sickening to find a little, weazened, sawed-off cuss doing it--just to get people to look around to locate him, I warrant. There'd be no questions about old Tescheron if it warn't for his gasoline."

"No, no. You are away off, Jim. You don't know so much about perfumes and their antidotes as I do, and besides, you're not expected to, because it is not your profession. My nose is my bread and b.u.t.ter. I am an expert in the a.n.a.lysis of the nether atmosphere. Any composite bunch of air striking my acute a.n.a.lytic apparatus is at once split into its elements. Put me blindfolded in a woman's kitchen and I can tell you if there is pumpkin pie and rhubarb under cover there, and where they keep the b.u.t.ter and cheese. I can tell you what kind of microbes live in the cellar and all about their relatives, and even if there are moths or other evidences of winged occupancy among the fauna of the mattresses on the floors above. Wonderful, of course; but it's in my line, that's all.

Given a peculiar kind of brains and any man can do it just as easily. My great deficiencies in other respects have all tended to the enlargement of this faculty. By some accident of nature my ancestors appear to have inclined toward obtaining a higher development of this sense so important to the protection of life in these days of crowded living. Of course, they did it unconsciously; but Fate wisely predisposes, I believe--"

"Well, what has this all got to do with Gabrielle?" interrupted Jim, crossing first one leg and then the other, and tossing his hair into c.o.c.ks ready to be thrown on the rigging.

"Patience, Jim, old boy. You can't solve these great mysteries of life which confront us at every crisis of our existence, by jumping off the handle. I am ready to tell you, however, that I have hastily turned over in my mind such data as you have given me, and I find that you have blundered into a favorable position. It will not do for you to make any moves without consulting me, however. If you can patiently bear up while I handle the case for you for a few days--"

"You may handle the father all you please," interrupted Jim, "but not Gabrielle. Everything is quiet at that end of the line."

"Of course," said I. "I would be no good there. Let me adjust the old gentleman. You may be thankful that the trail leads to a wholesale fish-market. I will be right at home there. I think I can surprise you."

CHAPTER V.

Jim shuffled off to bed after receiving my a.s.surances of support. I had been extremely careful to keep from him the knowledge that I was in the game at both ends. In five minutes he was asleep.