It was thus, and apparently by the merest chance, that Gantry found him;
a chance because the Winnebasset club-house is spacious and the dinner
dance minimized the hazards of a meeting between two unattached men who
were merely transient guests. But the railroad man at least was
unfeignedly glad.

"Doesn't it beat the dickens what a little world this is?" he exclaimed,
with a true bromidian disregard for the outworn and the axiomatic. "Of
course, I knew you were in or around Boston somewhere, but to run slap
up against you here, when there seemed to be nothing in it for me but to
be bored stiff--" He stopped short, finding it difficult to be shiftily
insincere with as old a friend as Evan Blount. But in the nature of
things it was baldly impossible to tell Blount that the meeting was not
accidental.

"Pull up a chair and sit down," said Blount, not too ungraciously,
considering his just cause to be more ungracious. "I was thinking of you
a little while ago, Dick. I saw your name in the list of
Transcontinental representatives to the traffic meeting in Boston,
and--well, at the present moment I'm not sure but you are the one man in
the world I wanted most to meet."

"Say! that sounds pretty good to me," laughed Gantry, settling himself
comfortably in a lazy-chair and feeling in his pockets for a cigar.
"I've been in Boston the full week, skating around over the chilly crust
of things and never able to get so much as one tenuous little social
claw-hold. Say, Evan, how many ice-plants does that impenetrable old
town keep going ever count 'em?"