CHAPTER II

THE GOLDEN DAY OF COLONEL POTTS

I awoke the next morning under most vivid portents of calamity.  I believe I am neither notional, nor given to small, vulgar superstitions, but I have learned that this peculiar sensation is never without significance.  I remember that I felt it the night our wagon bridge went out by high water.  I tried to read the presentiment as I dressed.  But not until I was shaving did it relate itself to the going out of Potts.  Then the illumination came with a speed so electric that I gashed my chin under the shock of it.  Instantly I seemed to know, as well as I know to-day, that the Potts affair had, in some manner, been botched.

So apprehensive was I that I lingered an hour on my little riverside porch, dreading the events that I felt the day must unfold.  Inevitably, however, I was drawn to the centre of things.  Turning down Main Street at the City Hotel corner, on the way to my office, I had to pass the barber-shop of Harpin Cust, in front of which I found myself impelled to stop.  Looking over the row of potted geraniums in the window, I beheld Colonel Potts in the chair, swathed to the chin in the barber’s white cloth, a gaze of dignified admiration riveted upon his counterpart in the mirror.  Seen thus, he was not without a similarity to pictures of the Matterhorn, his bare, rugged peak rising fearsomely above his snow-draped bulk.  Harpin appeared to be putting the last snipping touches to the Colonel’s too-long neglected side-whiskers.  On the table lay his hat and gold-headed cane, and close at hand stood his bulging valise.

I walked hastily on.  The thing was ominous.  Yet, might it not merely denote that Potts wished to enter upon his new life well barbered?  The bulging bag supported this possibility, and yet I was ill at ease.

Reaching my office, I sought to engage myself with the papers of an approaching suit, but it was impossible to ignore the darkling cloud of disaster which impended.  I returned to the street anxiously.

On my way to the City Hotel, where I had resolved to await like a man what calamity there might be, I again passed the barber-shop.

Harpin Cust now leaned, gracefully attentive, on the back of the empty chair, absently swishing his little whisk broom.  Before him was planted Potts, his left foot advanced, his head thrown back, reading to Harpin from a spread page of the Argus.  I divined that he was reading Solon’s comment upon himself, and I shuddered.

As I paused at the door of the hotel Potts emerged from the barber-shop.  In one hand he carried his bag, in the other his cane and the Little Arcady Argus.  His hat was a bit to one side, and it seemed to me that he was leaning back farther than usual.  He had started briskly down the street in the opposite direction from me, but halted on meeting Eustace Eubanks.  The Colonel put down his bag