After the train was under way, the Major got himself surrounded with some apollinaris and Scotch, and then settled back to enjoy himself.  “Did you see the ‘drunken kid’ at the ferry?” he asked. “(That’s what our abstemious district attorney terms my precious young heir-apparent.) You’ll meet him at the Castle—­the Havens are good to him.  They know how it feels, I guess; when John was a youngster his piratical uncle had to camp in Jersey for six months or so, to escape the strong arm of the law.”

“Don’t you know about it?” continued the Major, sipping at his beverage.  “Sic transit gloria mundi!  That was when the great Captain Kidd Havens was piling up the millions which his survivors are spending with such charming insouciance.  He was plundering a railroad, and the original progenitor of the Wallings tried to buy the control away from him, and Havens issued ten or twenty millions of new stock overnight, in the face of a court injunction, and got away with most of his money.  It reads like opera bouffe, you know—­they had a regular armed camp across the river for about six months—­until Captain Kidd went up to Albany with half a million dollars’ worth of greenbacks in a satchel, and induced the legislature to legalize the proceedings.  That was just after the war, you know, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.  It seems strange to think that anyone shouldn’t know about it.”

“I know about Havens in a general way,” said Montague.

“Yes,” said the Major.  “But I know in a particular way, because I’ve carried some of that railroad’s paper all these years, and it’s never paid any dividends since.  It has a tendency to interfere with my appreciation of John’s lavish hospitality.”

Montague was reminded of the story of the Roman emperor who pointed out that money had no smell.

“Maybe not,” said the Major.  “But all the same, if you were superstitious, you might make out an argument from the Havens fortune.  Take that poor girl who married the Count.”

And the Major went on to picture the denouement of that famous international alliance, which, many years ago, had been the sensation of two continents.  All Society had attended the gorgeous wedding, an archbishop had performed the ceremony, and the newspapers had devoted pages to describing the gowns and the jewels and the presents and all the rest of the magnificence.  And the Count was a wretched little degenerate, who beat and kicked his wife, and flaunted his mistresses in her face, and wasted fourteen million dollars of her money in a couple of years.  The mind could scarcely follow the orgies of this half-insane creature—­he had spent two hundred thousand dollars on a banquet, and half as much again for a tortoise-shell wardrobe in which Louis the Sixteenth had kept his clothes!  He had charged a diamond necklace to his wife, and taken two of the four rows of diamonds out of it before he presented it to her!  He had paid a hundred