Blacksheep! Blacksheep! | Page 2

remember, he knew train schedules by heart, and by catching the Federal Express the next night he would be able to connect with a train at Boston that would land him at Bailey Harbor at two o'clock the same day.
With any sort of luck he could escape from the Harbor, reach New York the following morning and proceed immediately westward. A few telegrams would readjust matters so that he would lose only a day in setting out for Banff, which his newest doctor had told him was an ideal spot for him. Many other doctors had posted him off to numerous other places in pursuit of the calm or stimulus or whatever it was he needed to make him a sound man capable of taking some part in the world's affairs. Archie's condition was always a grateful topic of conversation and now that his sister had told him how many bedrooms her menage required, and warned him particularly to be sure that there was a sleeping porch and a garage, and not to forget to look carefully into the drainage system of the entire Maine coast; having watched him make notes of these matters, Mrs. Featherstone, in her most sisterly tone, broached the subject of his health.
"Your troubles, Archie, are all due to the scarlet fever you had when you were a child. I've thought that if you could ever get into some active work it would cure you. These sanatoriums you live in most of the time never do you any good. They just keep you thinking about yourself. What you need is a complete upsetting,--something that would give a new turn to your life. And, you know," she went on softly, "I'd hoped, Archie, that the right girl would turn up one of these days and that that would prove the panacea. But the girls I've picked out never pleased you, and here you are, the finest brother in the world, and the most conscientious man alive, always doing generous things for people--you know you do, Archie--with nothing ahead of you but just one sanatorium after another. I haven't much faith in this idea of your going to the Rockies; you know you tried the Alps five years ago and the altitude nearly killed you."
"I seem doomed to sit on the sidelines and watch the game," Archie agreed gloomily.
"But sometimes, I think you yield too easily to discouragement. Please don't think I mean to be unkind or unjust, but if at some turn of the road you were obliged to put your back to the wall and fight for your life! Really, dear, I think you would win the battle and be a very different man afterward."
Archie smiled wanly. He had the lively imagination of the neurasthenic and very often he had dreamed of vanquishing single-handed a dozen enemies, or plunging into a burning house and staggering out half dead bearing a helpless child in his arms. To look at him no one would believe that he had a nerve in his tall frame. Once a friend carried him off to a farm where an autocratic athletic trainer rejuvenated tired business men; and Archie survived the heroic treatment and reappeared bronzed and hardened and feeling better than he had ever felt in his life. But a winter spent in an office and leisure to think of himself as an invalid brought back the old apprehensions, and there being no one at hand to drag him again to the trainer's, he renewed his acquaintance with the waiting-rooms of specialists.
"There will be a few people in for dinner tonight," remarked Mrs. Featherstone as he rose to go; "very simple, you know; and Howard just telephoned that he can't possibly come, so if you can arrange it, Archie--"
"All right, May. Weld and Coburn are in town and I was going to have dinner with them at the Army and Navy, but if you really want me--"
"Oh, that's perfectly fine of you, Archie! You are splendid to break your engagement with them when you three don't meet very often; but it will be a real help to me to have you. It's so late now that I can't ask any one else in Howard's place. And Isabel Perry will be here; you know she's the dearest girl, and I always thought you really did like Isabel. Her father lost all his money before he died and she's had a position as gymnasium teacher in Miss Gordon's school. This summer she's to run a girls' camp up in Michigan and she can't help making a splendid success of it."
Archie did not at once detach Miss Perry from the innumerable host of young women his sister had introduced him to; they were a hazy composite in his memory, but when Mrs. Featherstone insisted that