JACK SURRENDERS TO THE “ENEMY.”
Anybody strolling into the dining room of the Hamilton Hotel after the
dinner hour three nights later would have seen an amusing sight. The big
room was being prepared as if for another dinner, when, as everybody
knew, the regular diners had all been and departed. Nevertheless,
instead of waiters clearing the tables and porters mopping up, here were
the employees of the fashionable caterer of the town directing the
waiters in assembling the tables down the center of the room into one
long table, some putting on snowy linen and setting out silver and plate
and flowers, others placing banks of flowers along the walls.
Rangy old Jack Hannaford, looking vastly different and uncomfortable in
black coat and white collar, peered into the room and then precipitately
withdrew. In his retreat he bumped into several other old-timers,
likewise bent upon viewing the metamorphosis of the dining room, and
they chaffed him unmercifully.
“Look at him all duded up.”
“Wouldn’ta knowed ye, Jack.”
“Huh. That ain’t Jack Hannaford. That’s an undertaker. Where’s the
corpse?”
“It’s you that is mistaken. He’s the corp himself. See how white he is.”
This last witticism drew a roar of appreciative laughter.
“Think ye’re smart, don’t ye?” said Jack, beginning with dignity and
ending in companionable mirth. “Waal, fellers, I look like I feel.”
Jack was going to the “party.” So were seven spruce young men in white
ducks donned by command invitation instead of their hot uniforms, who
entered the lobby at that moment. The foremost saw Hannaford and hailed
him, and the old Texan at once deserted his tormentors to join the
newcomers.
“Le’s sit down, boys,” invited Hannaford, “nobody but ourselves ain’t
come yet.”
With comfortable sighs, all eight sank into chairs which were drawn in a
semi-circle. Jack looked around the group. None of the aviators with
whom he had shared the honor of Ramirez’s capture and the rounding-up
and scattering of the Smuggling Band was absent.
“Ain’t seen you since that night, Captain,” said Hannaford, his deep
voice booming as he sought ineffectually to modulate it, and addressing
himself to Captain Cornell. “We got a minute’s time before the party
begins. Lay ’er out for me. What happened?”
So then Hannaford was told of how three De Havilands, each with its crew
of two men, had gone cruising through the moonlight of that memorable
night, high above the silvery reaches of the Rio Grande, to a landing
near Carana; how there the members of the Border Patrol, commandeering a
battered flivver, had piled into it and departed down river in time to
round up a full dozen of Ramirez’s band before ever a boat had put out
across the river for the purpose of transferring the Orientals into the
United States, and had sent the others flying.
“You know the rest, Jack,” said Captain Cornell. “The fellows that we
rounded up were all Mexicans lured from Don Ferdinand’s mine by Ramirez
with specious promises of the much gold they would receive. They’re
still in jail, but I expect that Uncle Sam will make it easy for them,
inasmuch as they were not caught in the act and as they had not yet
brought Orientals into the country. Besides, Don Ferdinand needs them
back at his mine, and he and the Mexican Consul are making
representations which ought to carry weight. How about Ramirez?”
“With him and his two lieutenants,” Hannaford said, “it’s some
different. We got enough on ’em to hang ’em. And good riddance, too, if
it could really be done—but it cain’t.”
Captain Cornell laughed. “You bloodthirsty old villain.”
But Hannaford did not even smile. “I know him, you don’t. Listen, let me
tell you, it’s a mighty good thing them boys took a hand.”
“They’re the real stuff, Jack,” Captain Cornell agreed heartily, and his
companion nodded. “The real stuff,” he said. “But, say, Jack, what’s the
reason for their giving us this party tonight?”
Hannaford looked mysterious but confessed ignorance. “Only,” he added,
“don’t fool yourselves none. This party ain’t bein’ give for us, or I
miss my reckonin.’ We’re only the lookers-on.”
“Great guns,” cried Captain Cornell, half rising from his chair, and
gazing toward the doorway. “Look who’s here.”
All eyes followed his gaze. And, truly, the vision entering the lobby
was worth attention. It was Rafaela, leaning on her father’s arm, but a
Rafaela so gloriously beautiful and so quaintly dressed in Spanish
costume—or was it merely a touch here and there, such as the lacy black
mantilla, which made her costume appear so much more picturesque than
that of the more Americanized beauties who followed her?—that she took
away the collective breath of the entire group.
Across the lobby Don Ferdinand, impeccably clad in dinner clothes, saw
the standing group of aviators clustered about Jack Hannaford, and with
a word to Rafaela, he made his way toward them. And then while the
aviators gallantly professed themselves captivated, and while Rafaela
and her attendant beauties blushed and bowed as prettily as ladies of
the Sixties, introductions finally were achieved. Strangely enough,
there was a beauty for each, with a handful left over. Even Jack
Hannaford, confirmed old bachelor, groaned inwardly, as he saw a
duenna—the counterpart of Donna Ana, Jack could have told him—being
gently manoeuvred his way.
And Jack, where was he? And Bob and Frank? Ah, there! Coming down the
stair; at their heels, Mr. Hampton and Bob’s father. Nor could any of
the group, watching the approach across the lobby, guess that for the
last hour tall, curly-haired Jack Hampton had been dressing with more
painstaking preparations than he had ever bestowed on this operation
before in his life. Nor could any have guessed that during that time he
had been the target of unmerciful chaffing on the part of his
chums—until at length he had attempted to expel them from his room, and
a tussle had ensued, and he had been compelled at the end to undertake
dressing all over again, for it had left him a ghastly ruin.
No, none of these things could have been surmised from his appearance.
For, fortunately, he had not yet donned dinner jacket and vest when the
tussle had begun.
A merry clatter of voices rose as the two parties met and mingled, only
to be temporarily stilled when Mr. Hampton announced that they would
move into the dining room. So in they poured, each gallant aviator doing
his best to be a ladies’ man, with a Creole beauty on his arm, and Bob
and Frank in the same case, while Jack walked beside Rafaela and neither
spoke a word, yet eyes were far more eloquent than any speech could have
been. And last of all came the three elders of the party—while the
fourth, the real elder of all, old Jack Hannaford, strode fiercely just
ahead of them, with the duenna’s fingers resting on his high-crooked
arm.
The room was a blaze of light. The decorations miraculously had all been
arranged. And down the center, under its canopy of snowy linen, with the
silver gleaming and sparkling, ran the long table. Place cards? Yes,
here they were. And amid much laughter the various couples found their
places.
Then silence, while Mr. Hampton at the head of the table, looking
impressive and yet mischievous, lifted his glass—of sparkling grape
juice.
“Friends,” he said, “under other circumstances, the announcement I am
about to make would come in an utterly different way. But the people
involved—oh, yes, there are people involved—lead such scatterbrain lives
that the customary manner of announcing engagements must be a bit
scatterbrained, too.”
Bob and Frank, standing beside their partners across the table from
Jack, looked pointedly at him and Rafaela, grinning widely the while.
And in the little pause following Mr. Hampton’s last words, the aviators
who had been unaware of what was coming and felt sadly puzzled, caught
the significance of that glance. Jack tried to grin back manfully, but
it was what his two comrades privately considered a sickly attempt. As
for Rafaela, she looked as demure and unconcerned as if not she, but
some other of the beautiful girls nodding to her with parted lips, was
about to be named.
“I ask you to drink,” cried Mr. Hampton, “to my son and his affianced
bride.”
There, the secret was a secret no longer. And in the hubbub that
followed, with girls crowding around Rafaela, and the men about Jack,
telling him what a lucky fellow he was, the dinner bade fair to be
forgotten.
But suddenly a waiter wearing an anxious frown appeared at Mr. Hampton’s
elbow, apologetically but firmly pleading for a hearing.
“It’s that crazy fella you says must be master of ceremonies,” he said.
“He says you must go on with the dinner or it will be spoiled. He’s out
there in the kitchen, tearin’ around like wild. I says no good would
come of havin’ one o’ these Spanish chefs in the kitchen, bossin’
everybody. There,” pointing toward the kitchen door—“there he is now.”
Mr. Hampton, lips quirked in a smile, let his gaze travel down the room.
In the kitchen door, outlined against the gleaming ranges beyond, stood
a figure, arms akimbo. Mr. Hampton said to the waiter, “All right, tell
him to begin.” And to the distant figure, he waved a hand, a signal
which the latter apparently understood, for he disappeared.
“Ramon says we must begin dinner,” Mr. Hampton announced, turning to Don
Ferdinand on his right. And he rapped on the table, and made a similar
announcement. “You’ll all have to sit down and be good,” he added, “or
the old fellow’s heart will be broken. He wouldn’t let anybody, not even
the caterer, oversee this dinner but himself. Says he owes it to Jack
for lifting from him a load that oppressed him for years.”