With a face utterly devoid of expression she watched him now while he held back the gate with one hand while trying to stuff the bulkily folded targets into his pocket.
"Maybe you'd rather carry them, Marian," he said, "and we can look at them again on the way downtown!"
"I always take them down to your father, you know," he said again.
"I should think daddy would be immensely flattered," she observed, passing out to the street.
Scarcely had the gate closed after them when Miss Sallie and Miss Veemie, guilt written in every line of their radiant faces, tiptoed from the house, stepped into the garden and ran to the fence. As they had formerly done while watching Colonel Hampton stalk angrily townward, they now, also, leaned farther and farther over the pickets, keeping the young people who comprised their hope in view to the very last.
Colonel Hampton, after leaving the Tumpson sisters in a fog of astonishment, did not pause at the hotel and sink into the porch chair that had become his by right of daily occupation. This morning his mind was set upon greater things. Affectionate greetings from passing friends hardly checked him, and he strode deliberately onward to the office of the Hills County _Eagle_, the daily, owned and edited by Amos Strong--a long ago friend, although for twice a score of years his most unrelenting political foe. There had been a time when the town prophesied a "meeting" between these two, but their enmity had finally congealed into nothing more deadly than complete estrangement.
Now, indifferent to a look of consternation on a reporter's face, the Colonel stamped across the "city room," glared around until he saw a glass door marked "editor," pushed it violently open without knocking and closed it after him. This had not happened in the reporter's memory; it had, on the other hand, been just the thing everybody feared might come to pass.
The grizzled editor did not immediately look up; yet, when he did, his astonishment was complete, and his ever alert mind reviewed the _Eagle's_ recent utterances to discover if therein lay a reason for this visit. Recalling nothing of particular belligerency--at any rate, nothing against the Colonel--he said crisply: