“How are you, old man?” said he, hardly waiting for Farrar to introduce me.  “Well, I hope.”  It was pure cordiality, nothing more.  He seemed to bubble over with it.

I said I was well, and invited him inside.

“No,” he said; “I like the look of the town.  We can talk business here.”

And talk business he did, straight and to the point, so fast and indistinctly that at times I could scarcely follow him.  I answered his rapid questions briefly, and as best I knew how.  He wanted to know what chance he had to win the suit, and I told him there might be other factors involved beside those of which he had spoken.  Plainly, also, that the character of his great-uncle was in question, an intimation which he did not appear to resent.  But that there was no denying the fact that the railroad had a strong thing of it, and a good lawyer into the bargain.

“And don’t you consider yourself a good lawyer?” he cut in.

I pointed out that the railroad lawyer was a man of twice my age, experience, and reputation.

Without more ado, and before either Farrar or myself had time to resist, he had hooked an arm into each of us, and we were all three marching down the street in the direction of his hotel.  If this was agony for me, I could see that it was keener agony for Farrar.  And although Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke had been in town but a scant twenty-four hours, it seemed as if he knew more of its inhabitants than both of us put together.  Certain it is that he was less particular with his acquaintances.  He hailed the most astonishing people with an easy air of freedom, now releasing my arm, now Farrar’s, to salute.  He always saluted.  He stopped to converse with a dozen men we had never seen, many of whom smelled strongly of the stable, and he invariably introduced Farrar as the forester of his estate, and me as his lawyer in the great quarrel with the railroad, until I began to wish I had never heard of Blackstone.  And finally he steered us into the spacious bar of the Lake House.

The next morning the three of us were off early for a look at the contested property.  It was a twenty-mile drive, and the last eight miles wound down the boiling Washita, still high with the melting snows of the pine lands.  And even here the snows yet slept in the deeper hollows. unconscious of the budding green of the slopes.  How heartily I wished Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke back in Philadelphia!  By his eternal accounts of his Germantown stables and of the blue ribbons of his hackneys he killed all sense of pleasure of the scene, and set up an irritation that was well-nigh unbearable.  At length we crossed the river, climbed the foot-hills, and paused on the ridge.  Below us lay the quaint inn and scattered cottages of Asquith, and beyond them the limitless and foam-flecked expanse of lake:  and on our right, lifting from the shore by easy slopes for a mile at stretch, Farrar pointed out the timbered lands of Copper Rise, spread before us like a map.  But the appreciation of beauty formed no part of Mr. Cooke’s composition,—­that is, beauty as Farrar and I knew it.