And mebbe she wasn’t desperate with fear that some of the Red Gap society buds and matrons would want to stick in with nursing and attentions for the interesting invalid!  Nothing like that with Genevieve May!  She kept closer guard on that man than he would of got in the worst German prison camp.  About the only other person in town she’d trust him to was Cousin Egbert Floud.

Cousin Egbert liked the Frenchman a lot at first, and rode him round town to see the canning factory and the new waterworks and the Chamber of Commerce, and Price’s Addition to Red Gap, and so on.  Also, he’d drag him all over the fair grounds to look at prize bulls and windmills and patent silos.

Cousin Egbert had refused from the first to taste any of Genevieve May’s deviltry with the vegetable kingdom.  He swore he was on a diet and the doctor wouldn’t answer for his life if he even tasted anything outside.  He was telling me that last day of the fair that the woman ought to be arrested for carrying on so, Genevieve May being now busy with some highly artificial ketchup made of carrots, and something else unimportant, with pure vegetable dyes.

“Yes; and she just tried to hand me that same old stuff about what her Japanese maid calls her,” he says to me at this time.  “She says I could never guess what that funny little mite calls her.  And I says no, I never could of guessed it if she hadn’t already told me; but I says I know it is Madam Peach Blossom, and that Jap maid sure is one funny little mite, thinking up a thing like that, the Japanese being a serious race and not given to saying laughable things.”

That’s Cousin Egbert all over.  He ain’t a bit like one of them courters of the old French courts that you read about in the Famous Crimes of History.

“Madam Peach Blossom!” he says, snickering bitterly.  “Say, ain’t them Japs got a great sense of humour!  I bet what she meant was Madam Lemon Blossom!”

Anyway, Genevieve May trusted her flying man to this here brutal cynic when she wouldn’t of trusted him to any of the younger, dancing set.  And Cousin Egbert pretty near made him late for his great engagement to auction off the strange preserves.  It was on this third day of the fair, and Genevieve May was highly excited about it.

She had her stock set up in tiers against the wall and looking right imposing in the polished glass; and she had a box in front where the Frenchman would stand when he did the auctioning.

That hall was hot, let me tell you, with the high sun beating down on the thin boards.  I looked in a minute before the crowd come, and it looked like them preserves had sure had a second cooking, standing there day after day.

And this Cousin Egbert, when he should of been leading the Frenchman back to Horticultural Hall to the auction block, was dragging him elsewhere to see a highly exciting sight.  So he said.  He was innocent enough.  He wanted to give that Frenchman a good time, he told me afterward.  So he tells him something is going to take place over at the race track that will thrill him to the bone, and come on quick and hurry over!