THE AMERICAN
"I shall be happy to make their acquaintance. I want to cultivate society."
Tristram seemed restless and suspicious; he eyed his friend askance, and then, "What are you up to, anyway?" he demanded. "Are you going to write a heavy book?"
Christopher Newman twisted one end of his moustache in silence and finally made answer. "One day, a couple of months ago, something very curious happened to me. I had come on to New York on some important business; it's too long and too low a story to tell you now—a question of getting in ahead of another party on a big transaction and on information that was all my own. This other party had once played off on me one of the clever meannesses the feeling of which works in a man like strong poison. I owed him a good one, the best one he was ever to have got in his life, and as his chance here—for he was after it, but on the wrong tip—would have been a remarkably sweet thing, a matter of half a million, I saw my way to show him the weight of my hand. The good it was going to do me, you see, to feel it come down on him! I jumped into a hack and went about my business, and it was in this hack—this immortal historical hack—that the curious thing I speak of occurred. It was a hack like any other, only a trifle dirtier, with a greasy line along the top of the drab cushions, as if it had been used for a great many Irish funerals. It's possible I took a nap; I had been travelling all night and, though I was excited with my errand, I felt the want of sleep. At all events I woke up suddenly, from a sleep or from a kind of reverie,
30
