“I didn’t need this to prove that--that--a base lie----” his stiff lips enunciated with difficulty.
This paragraph treated of the current cotton interests, giving extracts from an address made by Randal Ducie in New Orleans at a banquet of an association interested in levee protection, on the evening and also at the hour when he was represented in Floyd-Rosney’s bill as fleeing with his neighbor’s wife in a city five hundred miles distant. He had made himself conspicuous as an advocate of certain methods of levee protection, and his views were both ardently upheld and rancorously contested even at the festive board. The occasion was thus less harmonious than such meetings should be, and the local papers had much “write-up” besides the menu and the toasts, in the views of various planters and several engineer officers, guests of the occasion, lending themselves to a spirited discussion of Randal Ducie’s recommendations.
Colonel Kenwynton, now at his home on his plantation on the bayou, also gazed with starting eyes and dumfounded amazement at the excerpt from the legal proceedings, within his own knowledge so palpably false. He read it aloud under the kerosene lamp to Hugh Treherne on the other side of the old-fashioned marble-topped center table.
“What do you think of that, sir?” and the Colonel gave the newspaper a resounding blow.
“I am impressed all the time, Colonel, with the insanity of the people outside the asylum in comparison with the patients under treatment.”
“Good God, sir,” cried the Colonel in great excitement, “this is a shotgun business, and Floyd-Rosney is the man of all others to brazen it out on a plea of the ‘unwritten law.’ He will shoot one or the other of the Ducies on sight, and they are as much alike as two black-eyed peas,--they really ought to wear wigs,--he is as likely to pot one as the other. And the poor lady! My heart bleeds for her. I must clear this matter up,” concluded the all-powerful. “I will send a communication to the newspapers.”
Now Colonel Kenwynton had, in his own opinion, the pen of a ready writer. It was not his habit to mince phrases or to revise. He wrote a swift, legible hand, for he was a relic of an age when gentlemen prided themselves on an elegant penmanship, in the days when the typewriter was not. He had no sort of fear of offending Floyd-Rosney, nor care for wounding his feelings. He recited in great detail the facts of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s entrance into the Adelantado Hotel, her disclosure of her husband’s desire that she should tour the Orient with the Hardingtons, who had already acquainted the writer that she was to be of their party, and her grief because of her separation from her child, who had been secretly removed from her home as a preparation for her departure. Now and then the Colonel cast his eyes upward for inspiration and waved his pen at arm’s length.