Various

By Susan Sayre Titsworth

The Goat was from the West, a graduate of a prairie college of Moravian foundation, an athletic, good-looking young fellow in badly-fitting clothes, who appeared in no way ashamed to admit that he had never before been east of the Mississippi, and was frankly impressed by New York. His gaucherie was not ungraceful; there was an attractive impertinence in his cheerful assertions that his Moravian grandparents had desired him not to smoke or drink until he had completed his education and was earning his own living, and that, consequently, he knew tobacco only by sight and smell, and had contented himself with looking on the wine when it was red. There was one vacant seat at the table, which the Lambs occupied at the Commons; with an eye to future entertainment they had invited the Goat to join them, and in the two months since the term began, the arrangement had given general satisfaction.

They had undertaken the education of the Goat; they set him up to the theater, with supper at the Black Cat or Pabst’s afterward, and lay awake nights howling at the recollection of his naÏve and shrewd comments; they took him walking to show him the historical landmarks of New York, extemporizing the landmarks and the history as they went along, to the delighted gratitude of the Goat, who lamented that Arizona had no associations. They egged him on to tell stories of his prowess with lasso and lariat, of which he was boyishly proud, and listened with flattering attention to his relations of grizzly hunts and Greaser raids. He usually told these experiences as happening to a friend of his, and blushed and looked sheepish when they accused him of modesty. In return for the pleasure he afforded them, they coached him in first-year law, and gave him pointers about the professors’ idiosyncrasies, feeling well repaid by his enthusiastic reports of his good progress, and of the encouraging impression he was making on his instructors.

And, finally, they were teaching him to smoke. After much urging, he had consented to try it, and had accomplished part of a cigar. Then he had suddenly become silent, looked at it intently for a few moments, and then, murmuring an indistinct excuse, had retired with precipitation. He appeared at breakfast the next morning, good-naturedly accepted all the chaffing he got, and bravely essayed another that evening.

That had been a week or more before. On this particular night he had successfully smoked a whole Chancellor without growing pale or letting it go out, treating them meanwhile to a vivacious narrative of a drunken gambler who had been run out of a little mining camp one stormy winter night, and had taken refuge with a friend of the Goat, also caught out in the blizzard, in a cave which proved to be the domicile of a big hibernating grizzly not thoroughly hibernated; at the close, he had, as usual, protested but not denied when they politely insisted on identifying his friend with himself. Then he had torn himself away to study common-law pleading in the suspicious manner previously described.

There was, however, no sign of resentment or of injured feelings in his face as he lit the gas in his own room. On the contrary, he grinned cheerfully at his reflection in the glass, and, pulling open his top drawer, took from the remote corner an unmistakably sophisticated brier and a package of Yale Mixture, and proceeded to light up. He grinned again as his teeth clamped on the stem, and jerked it into the corner of his mouth with a practiced twist of his tongue. Then he picked up a small and well-thumbed book lying half hidden among his law books and papers, and glanced over a few pages.

“I did that pretty well,” he said, approvingly. “Pity those babes don’t know their Bret Harte any better. Guess I’ll ring in some of Teddy’s ’97 trip on ’em to-morrow night.” And then he sat down to study.

The next day the Lamb from Boston announced that his cousin and her mother, who were passing through town on their way home from three years of wandering abroad, were coming to call on him at four. Therefore, at two, he and his brother Lambs began to prepare his room, and the only other one that was visible from the front door of their apartment, for the fitting reception of his relatives. This preparation consisted largely in moving all presentable articles in all the rooms into these two, and banishing all unpresentable into the most remote of the other rooms, and shutting that door. The Lamb from Brookline inspected the pictures and photographs, straightening the first, retiring some of the second, and adding a few of both borrowed from the other members of the flock, and arranged to suit his own artistic fancy; the Lamb from Philadelphia polished off the cups and saucers with a clean towel; then the Lamb from Boston took the towel and dusted the mantel. After their labors, they attired themselves in their “glad rags,” and sat in readiness behind their half-closed doors, while the Boston Lamb laid out two or three law tomes on his couch, and assumed a studious attitude in his Morris chair. Promptly at four appeared the Cousin and the Aunt.

They were courteously impressed by the Lamb’s bachelor quarters and the appurtenances thereof, nor was the significance of the “Cases on Quasi-Contracts,” which the Lamb ostentatiously hustled away, lost upon them. The Cousin insisted on looking at it, and her comments were of so sprightly a character and so difficult to return in kind, that the Lamb, conscious of the open doors, and not desiring to subject the esprit de corps of his friends to a very severe strain, called in his brother Lambs to meet his relatives.

They attended promptly, three personable young men in irreproachable afternoon dress, overjoyed to find the Cousin as pretty as her voice was musical, and as entertaining as her skillful jolly of the Boston Lamb had led them to expect. In ten minutes the flock was hers to command. The Philadelphia Lamb took down from its new position on the Boston Lamb’s wall the cherished Whistler of the Brookline Lamb, and presented it to her; the Boston Lamb begged her acceptance of the quaint little CloisonnÉ cup which she admired as she drank from it, and which was the property of the Philadelphia member; the Albany Lamb, on the plea that everything of value had already been abstracted from him to make the Boston Lamb’s room pretty for her, offered her himself, and was in no way cast down when she declined him on the ground that he was too decorative to be truly useful. But in the middle of the recrimination that followed this turning state’s evidence on the part of the Albany Lamb, the Cousin inquired:

“You are all law students—do any of you know a man named Freeman who is studying up here?” The flock looked at each other and smiled. Freeman was the Goat’s name.

“She doesn’t mean the Goat,” explained the Boston Lamb, hastily. “We know a first-year man named Freeman,” he added, turning to her, “but he’s a wild and woolly Westerner, who’d never been off the plains of Arizona till he came here. There may be others, but we’re educating only one.”

“Oh, no,” said the Cousin. “The Mr. Freeman I mean is the son of the consul-general to Japan—he’s a San Francisco man, and he’s been everywhere. We met him first in Cairo, and then we played together in Yokohama, and came as far as Honolulu together, last spring. He decided to study law in New York, and I know he lives up here somewhere.”

“Such a nice young fellow!” contributed the Aunt.

“Don’t know him,” said the flock.

“We’ll ask the Goat about him,” suggested the Philadelphia Lamb.

“We’ve been so engrossed with our own pet Freeman that we haven’t had time for any other,” volunteered the Brookline Lamb.

“It’s rather strange,” began the Cousin, and then interrupted herself. “Anyway, I hope you’ll all look him up; I am sure he will be very grateful.” The flock acknowledged the bouquet by appropriate demonstrations.

“Our acquaintance with his namesake verges on the altruistic, also,” ventured the Albany Lamb.

“I should not like, myself, to be the victim of your altruism,” said the Cousin, with a slow glance that took them all in. In the midst of the delighted expostulations that greeted this shot, the apartment bell rang sharply. The Brookline Lamb, being nearest, went to open the door, and, having opened it, remarked in a subdued but unmistakably sincere manner:

“Well, I’ll be——” A saving recollection of the Cousin and the Aunt brought him to a full stop there, but everybody looked up, and for a moment the flock was speechless. Not so the Goat, for it was the Goat who stood there, arrayed in the afternoon panoply of advanced civilization, with a cigarette between his fingers and the neatest of sticks under his arm.

“Beg pardon!” he said. “Didn’t realize—regret exceedingly—should never have intruded—why, Miss Brewster!” And with an instant combination of high hat, stick and cigarette that showed much practice, he came in to shake hands with the Cousin, who, suddenly displaying a brilliant color, had risen and taken a step toward him.

“What luck! what bully good luck!” he went on. “Mrs. Brewster, how do you do? This is like old Cairo days. Boston, you brute, why didn’t you mention this at luncheon?”

The flock choked; this was from the Goat, who had unobtrusively consumed most of the plate of toast at noon while the Lambs were discussing the visit of the Cousin and the Aunt. The Albany Lamb rose to the occasion feebly.“There seems to have been some mistake,” he said. The Goat put his hat on the bust of the young Augustus, and sat down on the divan beside the Cousin.

“Well, now I’ve happened in, mightn’t I have some tea?” he inquired, genially. “No lemon, if you please,” and he pointed a suggestive finger at the rum. In dazed silence the Brookline Lamb hastened to serve him, while the Cousin said, with a peculiar little smile tightening the corners of her mouth:

“I thought it was strange that you didn’t know Mr. Freeman.”

“We really don’t,” said the Boston Lamb, making a late recover. “I’m not at all sure that he is a fit person for you to associate with—all we know of him is what he has told us himself.”

“That’s all right,” said the Goat, impudently. “And, anyway, I didn’t come to see you this time, old man.”

“What has he told you?” demanded the Cousin, as the Boston Lamb gasped with impotent rage.

“A series of Munchausen adventures,” returned the Philadelphia Lamb, vindictively. “Six Apaches and three and a half Sioux with one throw of the lasso.”

“Won out in a hugging match with a ten-foot grizzly,” added the Albany Lamb.

“Nonsense!” said the Cousin, interrupting the Brookline Lamb’s sarcasm in regard to nerve cures. “Hasn’t he told you about the mob at Valladolid? Or about San Juan?” The flock gazed with unutterable reproach at the Goat, who sipped his tea with a critical frown, and observed, pleasantly:

“That happened to a friend of mine.”

The Lambs surrendered at discretion, and roared. The Cousin glanced at the Aunt, and they rose.

“We have had the most attractive time,” said the Cousin, prettily, as, suddenly sobered by this calamity, the Lambs protested in a body against her going. “It has been charming—and I am so interested in your experiment in altruism.” The Lambs collapsed under the ex cathedra nature of the smile she bestowed upon them, as she turned and held out a frank hand to the Goat. “I am glad you happened in,” she said. “I mailed a note to you this morning—you will doubtless get it to-night. Come and see us.”

“The Holland, isn’t it?” said the Goat, holding her hand, and then he made a short speech to her that sounded to the paralyzed Lambs like a Chinese laundry bill, but which evidently carried meaning to the Cousin, for she flushed and nodded. Then she turned back to the flock, who by this time, with touching unanimity, were showering devoted attentions on the Aunt. At the elevator they were all graciously dismissed except the Boston Lamb, who alone went down to put his relatives into their cab.

“Come and see us, all of you,” called the Cousin, cordially, as the car began to descend.

“How soon?” begged the Albany Lamb, anxiously.

“Any time, after to-night,” returned the Cousin, and was lowered from their sight.

Then with one accord they fell upon the Goat, and bore him into the apartment for condign punishment, regardless of his indignant assertions of his right as a citizen to a trial by a jury of his peers. When the Boston Lamb came leaping up the stairs to add his weight to the balancing of accounts, he found a riotous crowd.

“Just because my luggage was derailed and burned up out in the Kansas deserts,” the Goat was saying, “and I struck New York in a suit of hobo clothes from Topeka—oh, you fellows are easy marks!”

“Where are your Moravian grandparents?” demanded the Albany Lamb.

“Don’t know,” said the Goat, unfilially. “They died before I was born. They weren’t Moravians, anyway.”

“See here!” The Boston Lamb jerked him to his feet with one hand and assaulted him with the other. “What was that stuff you were reeling off to my cousin? As her nearest male relative, geographically speaking, I insist on an explanation.”“That was Japanese,” said the Goat, with a grin, and immediately favored the crowd with several more doubtfully emphatic remarks in the same tongue.

“I pass!” said the Boston Lamb, meekly. “But one thing more. Are you engaged to my cousin?”

“How very impertinent!” returned the Goat. “Why didn’t you ask her?”

The Boston Lamb inserted four determined fingers between the Goat’s collar and the back of his neck, and in view of the attitude of mind and body of the other Lambs, the Goat saw fit to yield.

“Not exactly, as yet,” he admitted. “But to-night—I hope——”

“After which we are invited to call—oh, you brute!” groaned the Albany Lamb, and started for him. But the Goat had pulled himself loose, and gained the door. He stopped, however, to pull an oblong package from his coat pocket.

“Here,” he said, tossing it toward the crowd. “The smokes are on me tonight. Sorry I can’t be here to assist, for they’re a distinct advance on your husky old Chancellors. Also, there’s a case of fairly good booze downstairs that the janitor is taking care of until you call for it. So long, fellows!” And with a wave of his hat the Goat departed.