e marching
down the street in the direction of his hotel. If this was agony for
me, I could see that it was keener agony for Farrar. And although Mr.
Farquhar Fenelon Cooke had been in town but a scant twenty-four hours,
it seemed as if he knew more of its inhabitants than both of us
put together. Certain it is that he was less particular with his
acquaintances. He hailed the most astonishing people with an easy air
of freedom, now releasing my arm, now Farrar's, to salute. He always
saluted. He stopped to converse with a dozen men we had never seen, many
of whom smelled strongly of the stable, and he invariably introduced
Farrar as the forester of his estate, and me as his lawyer in the great
quarrel with the railroad, until I began to wish I had never heard of
Blackstone. And finally he steered us into the spacious bar of the Lake
House.

The next morning the three of us were off early for a look at the
contested property. It was a twenty-mile drive, and the last eight miles
wound down the boiling Washita, still high with the melting snows of
the pine lands. And even here the snows yet slept in the deeper hollows.
unconscious of the budding green of the slopes. How heartily I wished
Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke back in Philadelphia! By his eternal accounts
of his Germantown stables and of the blue ribbons of his hackneys he
killed all sense of pleasure of the scene, and set up an irritation that
was well-nigh unbearable. At length we crossed the river, climbed the
foot-hills, and paused on the ridge. Below us lay the quaint inn
and scattered cottages of Asquith, and beyond them the limitless and
foam-flecked expanse of lake: and on our right, lifting from the shore
by easy slopes for a mile at stretch, Farrar pointed out the timbered
lands of Copper Rise, spread before us like a map. But the appreciation
of beauty formed no part of Mr. Cooke's composition,--that is, beauty as
Farrar and I knew it.

"If you win that case, old man," he cried, striking me a great whack
between the shoulder-blades, "charge any fee you like; I'll pay it! And
I'll make such a country-place out of this as was never seen west of New
York state, and call it Mohair, after my old trotter. I'll put a palace
on that clearing, with the stables just over the knoll. They'll beat the
Germantown stables a whole lap. And that strip of level," he continued,
pointing to a thinly timbered bit, "will hold a mile track nicely."

Farrar and I gasped: it was