From that time Rutli and I became firm friends, and, long after I had no further need of his services in the recaptured house, I often found myself in the little tea-arbor of his prosperous nursery.  He was frugal, sober, and industrious; small wonder that in that growing town he waxed rich, and presently opened a restaurant in the main street, connected with his market-garden, which became famous.  His relations to me never changed with his changed fortunes; he was always the simple market-gardener and florist who had aided my first housekeeping, and stood by me in an hour of need.  Of all things regarding himself he was singularly reticent; I do not think he had any confidants or intimates, even among his own countrymen, whom I believed to be German.  But one day he quite accidentally admitted he was a Swiss.  As a youthful admirer of the race I was delighted, and told him so, with the enthusiastic addition that I could now quite understand his independence, with his devoted adherence to another’s cause.  He smiled sadly, and astonished me by saying that he had not heard from Switzerland since he left six years ago.  He did not want to hear anything; he even avoided his countrymen lest he should.  I was confounded.

“But,” I said, “surely you have a longing to return to your country; all Swiss have!  You will go back some day just to breathe the air of your native mountains.”

“I shall go back some days,” said Rutli, “after I have made mooch, mooch money, but not for dot air.”

“What for, then?”

“For revenge—­to get efen.”

Surprised, and for a moment dismayed as I was, I could not help laughing.  “Rutli and revenge!” Impossible!  And to make it the more absurd, he was still smoking gently and regarding me with soft, complacent eyes.  So unchanged was his face and manner that he might have told me he was going back to be married.

“You do not oonderstand,” he said forgivingly.  “Some days I shall dell to you id.  Id is a story.  You shall make it yourselluff for dose babers dot you write.  It is not bretty, berhaps, ain’t it, but it is droo.  And de endt is not yet.”

Only that Rutli never joked, except in a ponderous fashion with many involved sentences, I should have thought he was taking a good-humored rise out of me.  But it was not funny.  I am afraid I dismissed it from my mind as a revelation of something weak and puerile, quite inconsistent with his practical common sense and strong simplicity, and wished he had not alluded to it.  I never asked him to tell me the story.  It was a year later, and only when he had invited me to come to the opening of a new hotel, erected by him at a mountain spa of great resort, that he himself alluded to it.

The hotel was a wonderful affair, even for those days, and Rutli’s outlay of capital convinced me that by this time he must have made the “mooch money” he coveted.  Something of this was in my mind when we sat by the window of his handsomely furnished private office, overlooking the pines of a Californian canyon.  I asked him if the scenery was like Switzerland.