The Brass Bowl | Page 7

"Well, consider that for once you've scared me. I'm off--just time to catch the ten-twenty for Greenfields. Waiter!"
He scrawled his initials at the bottom of the bill presented him, and rose. "Sorry, Bannerman," he said, chuckling, "to cut short a pleasant evening. But you shouldn't startle me so, you know. Pardon me if I run; I might miss that train."
"But there was something else--"
"It can wait."
"Take a later train, then."
"What! With this grave peril hanging over me? _Im_possible! 'Night."
Bannerman, discomfited, saw Maitland's shoulders disappear through the dining-room doorway, meditated pursuit, thought better of it, and reseated himself, frowning.
"Mad Maitland, indeed!" he commented.
As for the gentleman so characterized, he emerged, a moment later, from the portals of the club, still chuckling mildly to himself as he struggled into a light evening overcoat. His temper, having run the gamut of boredom, interest, perturbation, mystification, and plain amusement, was now altogether inconsequential: a dangerous mood for Maitland. Standing on the corner of Twenty-sixth Street he thought it over, tapping the sidewalk gently with his cane. Should he or should he not carry out his intention as declared to Bannerman, and go to Greenfields that same night? Or should he keep his belated engagement with Cressy's party?
An errant cabby, cruising aimlessly but hopefully, sighted Maitland's tall figure and white shirt from a distance, and bore down upon him with a gallant clatter of hoofs.
"Kebsir?" he demanded breathlessly, pulling in at the corner.
Maitland came out of his reverie and looked up slowly. "Why yes, thank you," he assented amiably.
"Where to, sir?"
Maitland paused on the forward deck of the craft and faced about, looking the cabby trustfully in the eye. "I leave it to you," he replied politely. "Just as you please."
The driver gasped.
"You see," Maitland continued with a courteous smile, "I have two engagements: one at Sherry's, the other with the ten-twenty train from Long Island City. What would you, as man to man, advise me to do, cabby?"
"Well, sir, seein' as you puts it to me straight," returned the cabby with engaging candor, "I'd go home, sir, if I was you, afore I got any worse."
"Thank you," gravely. "Long Island City dep?t, then, cabby."
Maitland extended himself languidly upon the cushions. "Surely," he told the night, "the driver knows best--he and Bannerman."
The cab started off jogging so sedately up Madison Avenue that Maitland glanced at his watch and elevated his brows dubiously; then with his stick poked open the trap in the roof.
"If you really think it best for me to go home, cabby, you'll have to drive like hell," he suggested mildly.
"Yessir!"
A whip-lash cracked loudly over the horse's back, and the hansom, lurching into Thirty-fourth Street on one wheel, was presently jouncing eastward over rough cobbles, at a regardless pace which roused the gongs of the surface cars to a clangor of hysterical expostulation. In a trice the "L" extension was roaring overhead; and a little later the ferry gates were yawning before them. Again Maitland consulted his watch, commenting briefly: "In time."
Yet he reckoned without the ferry, one of whose employees deliberately and implacably swung to the gates in the very face of the astonished cab-horse, which promptly rose upon its hind legs and pawed the air with gestures of pardonable exasperation. To no avail, however; the gates remained closed, the cabby (with language) reined his steed back a yard or two, and Maitland, lighting a cigarette, composed himself to simulate patience.
Followed a wait of ten minutes or so, in which a number of vehicles joined company with the cab; the passenger was vaguely aware of the jarring purr of a motor-car, like that of some huge cat, in the immediate rear. A circumstance which he had occasion to recall ere long.
In the course of time the gates were again opened. The bridge cleared of incoming traffic. As the cabby drove aboard the boat, with nice consideration selecting the choicest stand of all, well out upon the forward deck, a motor-car slid in, humming, on the right of the hansom.
Maitland sat forward, resting his forearms on the apron, and jerked his cigarette out over the gates; the glowing stub described a fiery arc and took the water with a hiss. Warm whiffs of the river's sweet and salty breath fanned his face gratefully, and he became aware that there was a moon. His gaze roving at will, he nodded an even-tempered approbation of the night's splendor: in the city a thing unsuspected.
Never, he thought, had he known moonlight so pure, so silvery and strong. Shadows of gates and posts lay upon the forward deck like stencils of lamp-black upon white marble. Beyond the boat's bluntly rounded nose the East River stretched its restless, dark reaches, glossy black, woven with gorgeous ribbons of reflected light streaming from pier-head lamps on the further shore. Overhead,