“Explains her?” Fairchild repeated, passing glasses among them.
“It’s a long story. I'll tell it to you some day.”
“It'll take a long story to explain her,” Fairchild rejoined. “Say, she’d be a better bet for Major Ayers than the laxative business, wouldn’t she? I’d rather own plantations than a patent medicine plant, any day.”
“He’d have to remove Talliaferro, somehow,” the Semitic man remarked.
“Talliaferro’s not thinking seriously of her, is he?”
“He’d better be,” the other answered. “I wouldn’t say he’s got intentions on her, exactly,” he corrected. “He’s just there without knowing it: a natural hazard as regards any one else’s prospects.”
“Freedom and the laxative business, or plantations and Mrs. Maurier,” Fairchild mused aloud. “Well, I don’t know . . . What do you think, Gordon?”
Gordon stood against the wall, aloof, not listening to them hardly, watching within the bitter and arrogant loneliness of his heart a shape strange and new as fire swirling, headless, armless, legless, but when his name was spoken he stirred. “Let’s have a drink,” he said.
Fairchild filled the glasses: the muscles at the bases of their noses tightened.
“That’s a pretty good rejoinder to every emergency life may offer—like Squire Western’s hollo,” the Semitic man said.
“Yes, but freedom—” began Fairchild.
“Drink your whisky,” the other told him. “Take what little freedom you'll ever get while you can. Freedom from the police is the greatest freedom man can demand or expect.”
“Freedom,” said Major Ayers, “the only freedom is in wartime. Every one too busy fighting or getting ribbons or a snug berth to annoy you. Samurai or headhunters—take
