Somewhere in Red Gap | Page 6

next morning, and he was beginning to look right puzzled indeed. He
said the wayward child of Nature had got up after about half an hour
and shut all the windows and the door. Lon thought first he was
intending to commit suicide, but he didn't like to interfere. He was
telling Jeff Tuttle and me about it when we happened to pass his office.
"'And there's another funny thing,'" he says. 'This chap was telling us
all the way up home last night that he never ate meat--simply fruits and
nuts with a mug of spring water. He said eating the carcasses of
murdered beasts was abhorrent to him. But when we got down to the
table he consented to partake of the roast beef and he did so repeatedly.
We usually have cold meat for lunch the day after a rib roast, but there
will be something else to-day; and along with the meat he drank two
bottles of beer, though with mutterings of disgust. He said spring water
in the hills was pure, but that water out of pipes was full of typhoid
germs. He admitted that there were times when the grosser appetites
assailed him. And they assailed him this morning, too. He said he
might bring himself to eat some chops, and he did it without scarcely a
struggle. He ate six. He said living the nauseous artificial life even for
one night brought back the hateful meat craving. I don't know. He is
undeniably peculiar. And of course you've heard about Pettikin's affair
for this evening?'
"We had. Just before leaving the house I had received Henrietta's card
inviting me to the country club that evening 'to meet Mr. Wilfred
Lennox, Poet and Nature Lover, who will recite his original verses and
give a brief talk on "The World's Debt to Poetry."' And there you have

the whole trouble. Henrietta should have known better. But I've let out
what women really are. I told Alonzo I would sure be among those
present, I said it sounded good. And then Alonzo pipes up about Ben
Sutton coming to town on the eleven forty-two from the West. Ben
makes a trip out of Alaska every summer and never fails to stop off a
day or two with Lon, they having been partners up North in '98.
"'Good old Ben will enjoy it, too,' says Alonzo; 'and, furthermore, Ben
will straighten out one or two little things that have puzzled me about
this poet. He will understand his complex nature in a way that I confess
I have been unequal to. What I mean is,' he says, 'there was talk when I
left this morning of the poet consenting to take a class in poetry for
several weeks in our thriving little city, and Henrietta was urging him
to make our house his home. I have a sort of feeling that Ben will be
able to make several suggestions of prime value. I have never known
him to fail at making suggestions.'
"Funny, the way the little man tried to put it over on us, letting on he
was just puzzled--not really bothered, as he plainly was. You knew
Henrietta was still seeing the big red splash of Romance, behind which
the figure of her husband was totally obscured. Jeff Tuttle saw the facts,
and he up and spoke in a very common way about what would quickly
happen to any tramp that tried to camp in his house, poet or no poet,
but that's neither here nor there. We left Alonzo looking cheerily
forward to Ben Sutton on the eleven forty-two, and I went on to do
some errands.
"In the course of these I discovered that others besides Henrietta had
fell hard for the poet of Nature. I met Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale
and she just bubbles about him, she having been at the Prices' the night
before.
"'Isn't he a glorious thing!' she says; 'and how grateful we should be for
the dazzling bit of colour he brings into our drab existence!' She is a
good deal like that herself at times. And I met Beryl Mae Macomber, a
well known young society girl of seventeen, and Beryl Mae says: 'He's
awfully good looking, but do you think he's sincere?' And even Mrs.
Judge Ballard comes along and says: 'What a stimulus he should be to

us in our dull lives! How he shows us the big, vital bits!' and her at that
very minute going into Bullitt & Fleishacker's to buy shoes for her nine
year old twin grandsons! And the Reverend Mrs. Wiley Knapp in at the
Racquet Store wanting to know if the poet didn't make me think of
some wild, free creature of the woods--a deer or an antelope poised for