Page:Hugh Pendexter--Tiberius Smith.djvu/327

 first-cabin, as we always did when we didn't walk, and the scarcity of other affluent bipeds made it more easy for him to approach her. She was an only daughter, it seems, making a flying trip to Adelaide, where her pa lay ill. Besides a wooden-faced maid, the captain of the boat was her only body-guard. But as Tib had the captain hypnotized at the go-in, he soon managed to formally address himself to Miss Mary.

"She was about as approachable as the Antarctic Circle, and was the first bit of peerage I had seen floating about alone. As to speaking to her, I would as quickly have thought of attempting to get chummy with a ton of ice. But a man or woman had to be armor-plate to withstand Tib when he threw himself, and at the end of the first day's essay he made her give away in a few molten ha-ha's. Then she got mildly interested in him, and I knew he was delving into romance.

"It soured me to be deserted, but when from my loafing-place I overheard him giving his Vermont ancestry an old-chateau environment and carefully painting the good old days at The Oaks, and bragging of his father's pack of hounds, I knew aristocracy wanted to crawl into a safe-deposit vault and slam the door, or get scalped. I reckon he could jam more poetry and pâté-de-foie-gras breeding into his round form and look more dreamy truth from