“Oh,” exclaimed Gertrude, with a little half-suppressed shudder, “I do hope those terrible explosions are at last over!”

“If I had my way,” asserted Garretson, savagely, “I’d put this town under martial law until they were over.”

“It may come to that,” put in Jackson, quietly.

“Quite in keeping with the present tendency of the age,” agreed Snedden, in a tone of philosophical disagreement.

“I don’t think it makes much difference how you accomplish the result, Garfield,” chimed in his wife, “as long as you accomplish it, and it is one that should be accomplished.”

Snedden retreated into the refuge of silence.  Though this was only a bit of the conversation, we soon found out that he was an avowed pacifist.  Garretson, on the other hand, was an ardent militarist, a good deal of a fire-eater.  I wondered whether there might not be a good deal of the poseur about him, too.

It needed no second sight to discover that both he and Gertrude were deeply interested in each other.  Garretson was what Broadway would call “a live one,” and, though there is nothing essentially wrong in that, I fancied that I detected, now and then, an almost maternal solicitude on the part of her stepmother, who seemed to be watching both the young man and her husband alternately.  Once Jackson and Mrs. Snedden exchanged glances.  There seemed to be some understanding between them.

The time to return to the works was approaching, and we all rose.  Somehow, Gertrude and Garretson seemed naturally to gravitate toward the door together.

Some distance from the house there was a large barn.  Part of it had been turned into a garage, where Garretson kept a fast car.  Jackson, also, had a roadster.  In fact, in this new community, with its superabundant new wealth, everybody had a car.

Kennedy and I sauntered out after the rest.  As we turned an angle of the house we came suddenly upon Garretson in his racer, talking to Gertrude.  The crunch of the gravel under our feet warned them before we saw them, but not before we could catch a glimpse of a warning finger on the rosy lips of Gertrude.  As she saw us she blushed ever so slightly.

“You’ll be late!” she cried, hastily.  “Mr. Jackson has been gone five minutes.”

“On foot,” returned Garretson, nonchalantly.  “I’ll overtake him in thirty seconds.”  Nevertheless, he did not wait longer, but swung up the road at a pace which was the admiration of all speed-loving Nitropolitans.

Craig had ordered our taxicab driver to stop for us after lunch, and, without exciting suspicion, managed to stow away the larger part of the contents of our grips in his car.