The Turtles of Tasman | Page 5

disastrous
affairs of the steamer line father had established to San Francisco, and I
was keeping up the interest on mortgages to the tune of one hundred
and eighty thousand dollars."
A soft stertorous breathing interrupted him. Tom, chin on chest, was
asleep. Polly, with a significant look, caught her uncle's eye. Then her
father, after an uneasy restless movement, lifted drowsy lids.
"Deuced warm day," he said with a bright apologetic laugh. "I've been
actually asleep. Aren't we near home?"
Frederick nodded to the chauffeur, and the car rolled on.
III
The house that Frederick Travers had built when his prosperity came,

was large and costly, sober and comfortable, and with no more pretence
than was naturally attendant on the finest country home in the county.
Its atmosphere was just the sort that he and his daughter would create.
But in the days that followed his brother's home-coming, all this was
changed. Gone was the subdued and ordered repose. Frederick was
neither comfortable nor happy. There was an unwonted flurry of life
and violation of sanctions and traditions. Meals were irregular and
protracted, and there were midnight chafing-dish suppers and bursts of
laughter at the most inappropriate hours.
Frederick was abstemious. A glass of wine at dinner was his wildest
excess. Three cigars a day he permitted himself, and these he smoked
either on the broad veranda or in the smoking room. What else was a
smoking room for? Cigarettes he detested. Yet his brother was ever
rolling thin, brown-paper cigarettes and smoking them wherever he
might happen to be. A litter of tobacco crumbs was always to be found
in the big easy chair he frequented and among the cushions of the
window-seats. Then there were the cocktails. Brought up under the
stern tutelage of Isaac and Eliza Travers, Frederick looked upon liquor
in the house as an abomination. Ancient cities had been smitten by
God's wrath for just such practices. Before lunch and dinner, Tom,
aided and abetted by Polly, mixed an endless variety of drinks, she
being particularly adept with strange swivel-stick concoctions learned
at the ends of the earth. To Frederick, at such times, it seemed that his
butler's pantry and dining room had been turned into bar-rooms. When
he suggested this, under a facetious show, Tom proclaimed that when
he made his pile he would build a liquor cabinet in every living room of
his house.
And there were more young men at the house than formerly, and they
helped in disposing of the cocktails. Frederick would have liked to
account in that manner for their presence, but he knew better. His
brother and his brother's daughter did what he and Mary had failed to
do. They were the magnets. Youth and joy and laughter drew to them.
The house was lively with young life. Ever, day and night, the motor
cars honked up and down the gravelled drives. There were picnics and
expeditions in the summer weather, moonlight sails on the bay, starts

before dawn or home-comings at midnight, and often, of nights, the
many bedrooms were filled as they had never been before. Tom must
cover all his boyhood ramblings, catch trout again on Bull Creek, shoot
quail over Walcott's Prairie, get a deer on Round Mountain. That deer
was a cause of pain and shame to Frederick. What if it was closed
season? Tom had triumphantly brought home the buck and gleefully
called it sidehill-salmon when it was served and eaten at Frederick's
own table.
They had clambakes at the head of the bay and musselbakes down by
the roaring surf; and Tom told shamelessly of the Halcyon, and of the
run of contraband, and asked Frederick before them all how he had
managed to smuggle the horse back to the fishermen without discovery.
All the young men were in the conspiracy with Polly to pamper Tom to
his heart's desire. And Frederick heard the true inwardness of the
killing of the deer; of its purchase from the overstocked Golden Gate
Park; of its crated carriage by train, horse-team and mule-back to the
fastnesses of Round Mountain; of Tom falling asleep beside the
deer-run the first time it was driven by; of the pursuit by the young men,
the jaded saddle horses, the scrambles and the falls, and the roping of it
at Burnt Ranch Clearing; and, finally, of the triumphant culmination,
when it was driven past a second time and Tom had dropped it at fifty
yards. To Frederick there was a vague hurt in it all. When had such
consideration been shown him?
There were days when Tom could not go out, postponements of
outdoor frolics, when, still the centre, he sat and drowsed in the big
chair, waking, at times, in that unexpected queer, bright way of his, to
roll