"Why, man, there's gold in those mountains! You had an inside track on prospecting, placed as you were. And there's cocoa--and some day they'll coin money in rubber, too.
All that country's waiting for is better communications.
And you were on the spot, and knew all the lay of the land--and yet here you are back in England, getting so much a month for messing about in the mud."He saw swiftly that his reflections had carried him beyond his earlier limit, and with rapidity decided upon frankness.
"No, I wasn't in the Governor's outfit at all. I was looking for gold then--with occasionally an eye on rubber.
I stopped at your place. Don't you remember me? My name's Thorpe. I had a beard then. Why, man, you and one of your niggers were with me three or four days once, up on the ridge beyond the Burnt Hills--why, you remember, the nigger was from San Domingo, and he was forever bragging about the San Domingo peppers, and saying those on the mainland hadn't enough strength to make a baby wrinkle his nose, and you found a pepper coming through the swamp, and you tipped me the wink, and you handed that pepper to the nigger, and it damned near killed him.
Hell! You must remember that!"
"That would have been the Chavica pertusum," said Gafferson, thoughtfully. He seemed to rouse himself to an interest in the story itself with some difficulty. "Yes--I remember it,"he admitted, finally. "I shouldn't have known you though.
I'm the worst in the world about remembering people.
It seems to be growing on me. I notice that when I go up to London to the shows, I don't remember the men that I had the longest talks with the time before.
Once you get wrapped up in your flowers, you've got no room in your head for anything else--that's the way of it."Thorpe considered him with a ruminating eye. "So this is the sort of thing you really like, eh? You'd rather be doing this, eh? than making your pile in logwood and mahogany out there, or floating a gold mine?" Gafferson answered quite simply: "I wasn't the kind to ever make a pile.
I got led into going out there when I was a youngster, and there didn't seem to be any good in trying to get back, but I wasn't making more than a bare living when you were there, and after that I didn't even do that much.
It took me a good many years to find out what my real fancy was. I hated my hotel and my store, but I was crazy about my garden. Finally an American gentleman came along one day, and he put up at my place, and he saw that I was as near ruined as they make 'em, and he says to me, 'You're no good to run a hotel, nor yet a store, and this aint your country for a cent.
What you're born for is to grow flowers. You can't afford to do it here, because nobody'll pay you for it, but you gather up your seeds and roots and so on, and come along with me to Atlanta, Georgia, and I'll put fat on your bones.'
"That's what he said to me, and I took him at his word, and I was with him two years, and then I thought I'd like to come to England, and since then I've worked my way up here, till now I take a Royal Horticultural medal regular, and there's a clematis with salmon-coloured bars that'll be in the market next spring that's named after my master.
And what could I ask more 'n that?"
"Quite right," said Thorpe. "What time do they have breakfast here?"The gardener's round, phlegmatic, florid countenance had taken on a mild glow of animation during his narrative.
It relapsed into lethargy at the advent of this new topic.
"It seems to me they eat at all hours," he said.
