hall I meet you?" asked the man at the window.

"At the Gun-Club grounds on the hill," replied Latimer; "we've sent a
barrel of oil up there for the lanterns. So long, Halford. Is Dirck at
home?"

"Yes," said Halford; and without another word Latimer galloped into the
darkness, and in a minute the sound of his tattoo was heard on the
hollow pillars of the veranda of the house next door.

This was the summons--a bare announcement of an event without appeal,
request, suggestion, or advice. None of these things was needed. Enough
had been said between the two men, though they knew each other only as
distant neighbors. Each knew well what that summons meant, and what duty
it involved.

The rat-tat of Latimer's crop had hardly sounded before a cheery young
voice rang out on the air.

"All right, old man! I heard you at Halford's. Go ahead."

It was Dirck's voice. Dirck had another name, a good long, Holland-Dutch
one, but everybody, even the children, called him by his Christian name,
and as he had lived to thirty without getting one day older than
eighteen, we will consider the other Dutch name unnecessary. Dirck
and Halford were close friends and close neighbors. They were two
men who had reached a point of perfect community of tastes and
inclinations, though they came together in two widely different
starting-places--though they were so little alike to outward seeming
that they were known among their friends as "the mismates." Though one
was forty and the other but thirty, each had closed a career, and was
somewhat idly seeking a new one. As Dirck expressed it, "We two fellows
had played our games out, and were waiting till we strike another that
was high enough for our style. We ain't playing limit games."

Two very different games they had been, but neither had been a small
one. Dirck had started in with a fortune to "do" the world--the whole
world, nothing else would suit him. He had been all over the globe. He
had lived among all manner of peoples. He had ridden everything ridable,
shot everything shootable, climbed everything climbable, and satisfied
himself, as he said, that the world was too small for any particular
use. At the end of his travels he had a little of his fortune left, a
vast amount of experience, the constitution of a red Indian, and a
vocabulary so vast and so peculiar that it stunned and fascinated the
stranger. Halford was a New York lawyer, gray, clean-shaven, and sharp
of feature. His "g