All this was rolling through my memory as I breakfasted at the Universe and considered the telegram from Eastridge.

“Do you remember promise?” Of course I remembered.  Was it likely that either of us would forget a thing like that?  We were in the dingy little room that he called his “den”; it was just after the birth of his third child.  I had told my plan of letting the staff of The Banner fall into other hands and going out into the world to study the nations when they were not excited by war, and write about people who were not disguised in soldier-clothes.  “That’s a big plan,” he said, “and you’ll go far, and be long away at times.”  I admitted that it was likely.  “Well,” he continued, laying down his pipe, “if you ever are in trouble and can’t get back here, send word, and I’ll come.”  I told him that there was little I could do for him or his (except to give superfluous advice), but if they ever needed me a word would bring me to them.  Then I laid down my pipe, and we stood up in front of the fire and shook hands.  That was all the promise there was; but it brought him down to Panama to get me, five years later, when I was knocked out with the fever; and it would take me back to Eastridge now by the first train.

But what wasteful brevity in that phrase, “much needed”!  What did that mean? (Why will a man try to put a forty-word meaning into a ten-word telegram?) Sickness?  Business troubles?  One of those independent, interfering children in a scrape?  One thing I was blessedly sure of:  it did not mean any difficulty between Cyrus and his wife; they were of the tribe who marry for love and love for life.  But the need must be something serious and urgent, else he never would have sent for me.  With a family like his almost anything might happen.  Perhaps Aunt Elizabeth—­I never could feel any confidence in a red-haired female who habitually dressed in pink.  Or perhaps Charles Edward—­if that young man’s artistic ability had been equal to his sense of it there would have been less danger in taking him into the factory.  Or probably Maria, with her great head for business—­oh, Maria, I grant you, is like what the French critic said of the prophet Habakkuk, “capable de tout.”

But why puzzle any longer over that preposterous telegram?  If my friend Talbert was in any kind of trouble under the sun, there was just one thing that I wanted—­to get to him as quickly as possible.  Find when the first train started and arrived—­send a lucid despatch—­no expensive parsimony in telegraphing: 

’"To Cyrus Talbert, Eastridge, Massachusetts: 

“I arrived this morning on the Dilatoria and found your telegram here.  Expect me on the noon train due at Eastridge five forty-three this afternoon.  I hope all will go well.  Count on me always.  Gerrit Wendell.”

It was a relief to find him on the railway platform when the train rolled in, his broad shoulders as square as ever, his big head showing only a shade more of gray, a shade less of red, in its strawberry roan, his face shining with the welcome which he expressed, as usual, in humorous disguise.