The gardener barely looked up from his occupation, and drew aside to let the newcomer pass with no sign of a gesture toward his cap. Thorpe halted, and tried to look at the pots on the staging as if he knew about such things.
“What are you doing?” he asked, in the tentative tone of one who is in no need of information, but desires to be affable.
“Drying off the first lot of gloxinias,” answered the other. “Some people put 'em on their sides, but I like 'em upright, close to the glass. It stands to reason, if you think about it.”
“Why, certainly,” said Thorpe, with conviction. In his mind he contrasted the independence of Gafferson's manner with the practised servility of the stable-yard--and thought that he liked it--and then was not so sure. He perceived that there was no recognition of him. The gardener, as further desultory conversation about his work progressed, looked his interlocutor full in the face, but with a placid, sheep-like gaze which seemed to be entirely insensible to variations in the human species.
“How did you ever get back here to England?” Thorpe was emboldened to ask at last. In comment upon the other's stare of puzzled enquiry, he went on: “You're Gafferson, aren't you? I thought so. When I last saw you, you were running a sort of half-way house, t'other side of Belize. That was in '90.”
Gafferson--a thick-set, squat man of middle age, with a straggling reddish beard--turned upon him a tranquil but uninformed eye. “I suppose you would have been stopping at Government House,” he remarked. “That was in Sir Roger Goldsworthy's time. They used to come out often to see my flowers. And so you remembered my name. I suppose it was because of the Gaffersoniana hybrids. There was a good bit in the papers about them last spring.” Thorpe nodded an assent which it seemed better not to put into words. “Well, it beats all,” he mused aloud. “Why, man, there's gold in those mountains! You had an inside track on prospecting, placed as you were. And there's cocoa--and some day they'll coin money in rubber, too. All that country's waiting for is better communications. And you were on the spot, and knew all the lay of the land--and yet here you are back in England, getting so much a month for messing about in the mud.”