It was the year of the Chilean Arbitration, in which I held a junior brief for the British Government, and that and the late sitting of Parliament kept me in London after the end of the term. I had had a bad reaction from the excitements of the summer, and in these days I was feeling pretty well hipped and overdone. On a hot August afternoon I met Tommy again.
The sun was shining through my Temple chambers, much as it had done when he started. So far as I remember the West Ham brief which had aroused his contempt was still adorning my table. I was very hot and cross and fagged, for I had been engaged in the beastly job of comparing half a dozen maps of a despicable little bit of South American frontier.
Suddenly the door opened, and Tommy, lean and sunburnt, stalked in.
“Still at the old grind,” he cried, after we had shaken hands. “Fellows like you give me a notion of the meaning of Eternity.”
“The same uneventful sedentary life,” I replied. “Nothing happens except that my scale of fees grows. I suppose nothing will happen till the conductor comes to take the tickets. I shall soon grow fat.”
“I notice it already, my lad. You want a bit of waking up or you’ll get a liver. A little sensation would do you a lot of good.”
“And you?” I asked. “I congratulate you on your success. I hear you have retrieved Pitt-Heron for his mourning family.”
Tommy’s laughing eyes grew solemn.
“I have had the time of my life,” he said. “It was like a chapter out of the Arabian Nights with a dash of Fenimore Cooper. I feel as if I had lived years since I left England in May. While you have been sitting among your musty papers we have been riding like moss-troopers and seeing men die. Come and dine tonight and hear about our adventures. I can’t tell you the full story, for I don’t know it, but there is enough to curl your hair.”
Then I achieved my first and last score at the expense of Tommy Deloraine.
“No,” I said, “you will dine with me instead and I will tell you the full story. All the papers on the subject are over there in my safe.”
Colophon
The Powerhouse
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