“Don’t you think it is gay enough as it is?” I answered. “Behold this festive throng.”
“Oh, it is nothing to what there might be. This could never make Viking and ‘surrounding country’ notorious as a pleasure resort. To attract tourists you must have enough people to make romances and tragedies,--without loss of life, of course,--merely catastrophes of broken hearts, and hair-breadth escapes, and mammoth fishing and shooting achievements, such as men know how to invent,”--it was delightful to hear her voice soften to an amusing suggestiveness, “and broken bridges and land-slides, with many other things which you can supply, Dr. Marmion. No, I am afraid that Viking is too humdrum to be notable.”
She laughed then very lightly and quaintly. She had a sense of humour.
“Well, but, Miss Devlin,” said I, “you cannot have all things at once. Climaxes like these take time. We have a few joyful things. We have splendid fishing achievements,--please do not forget that basket of trout I sent you the other morning,--and broken hearts and such tragedies are not impossible; as, for instance, if I do not send you as good a basket of trout to-morrow evening; or if you should remark that there was nothing in a basket of trout to--”
“Now,” she said, “you are becoming involved and--inconsiderate. Remember, I am only a mountain girl.”
“Then let us only talk of the other tragedies. But are you not a little callous to speak of such things as if you thirsted for their occurrence?”
“I am afraid you are rather silly,” she replied. “You see, some of the land up here belongs to me. I am anxious that it should ‘boom’--that is the correct term, is it not?--and a sensation is good for ‘booming.’ What an advertisement would ensue if the lovely daughter of an American millionaire should be in danger of drowning in the Long Cloud, and a rough but honest fellow--a foreman on the river, maybe a young member of the English aristocracy in disguise--perilled his life for her! The place of peril would, of course, be named Lover’s Eddy, or the Maiden’s Gate--very much prettier, I assure you, than such cold-blooded things as the Devil’s Slide, where we are going now, and much more attractive to tourists.”
“Miss Devlin,” laughed I, “you have all the eagerness of the incipient millionaire. May I hope to see you in Lombard Street some day, a very Katherine among capitalists?--for, from your remarks, I judge that you would--I say it pensively--‘wade through slaughter to a throne.’”