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.

"If you win that case, old man," he cried, striking me a great whack
between the shoulder-blades, "charge any fee you like; I'll pay it! And
I'll make such a country-place out of this as was never seen west of New
York state, and call it Mohair, after my old trotter. I'll put a palace
on that clearing, with the stables just over the knoll. They'll beat the
Germantown stables a whole lap. And that strip of level," he continued,
pointing to a thinly timbered bit, "will hold a mile track nicely."

Farrar and I gasped: it was as if we had tumbled into the Washi