CHAPTER IX

A FLASHING KNIFE

“THERE!” exclaimed Mr. Damon with a grunt of satisfaction, as he straightened up. “Bless my golf clubs, but I think I’ve taught that insolent fellow a lesson!”

“What’s it all about?” asked Tom, greatly surprised by this scene.

“Oh, he’s a crank about flowers, that’s all,” Mr. Damon said. “But I have never known him to go to such lengths before.”

“Did he hurt you?” asked Mary anxiously, for she was very fond of Mr. Damon, as was Tom, in spite of his odd ways.

“Not at all, my dear,” answered the eccentric man. “I hit him first.”

“And, speaking of golf,” said Tom, “you seem to have made a hole in one, Mr. Damon.”

“What do you mean, Tom?”

The young inventor smiled and pointed to the gardener who was getting up out of a hole beneath the bushes into which Mr. Damon had knocked him. There was a strange, strained look on the man’s face, but he said nothing nor did he attempt to renew the quarrel. He dusted himself off, looked at some scratches on his hands, glanced once at Mr. Damon, and went away.

“You had better look out for him, Mr. Damon,” Tom warned. “He had an ugly look.”

“I know him of old,” was the answer. “He is very jealous of his flowers, but Mr. Thorndyke has said that we guests may pick a few when we please. I shall speak to the manager about this fellow. But, Tom, I am delighted to see you and Mary here. How did it happen?”

“The folks needed a rest and change, particularly dad,” Tom explained. “So I brought them up in the House on Wheels.”

“And we came nearly not getting here,” added Mary.

“How was that, my dear?”

“We were caught in a landslide.”

“Bless my toothbrush!” cried Mr. Damon. “You don’t tell me!”

Then Tom related some of the events leading up to the visit to Mt. Camon. In turn, Mr. Damon stated that his wife had gone to visit some of her relatives, and he not fancying a trip to the little town where they lived, had come by himself to the mountain resort.

“We will have a good time while you are here, Tom,” said the odd character. “Bless my first base, but we must get up a ball game! They have a very good diamond here. We married men will play the single men, and you’ll have to be in the former class now, Tom.”

“That’s right, Mr. Damon, and I’m not sorry!” laughed Tom, with a fond look at his wife.

“She can play tennis,” went on Mr. Damon. “They have some fine courts here.”

“Indeed they have,” said Mary. “I’ve played here before. Is there a good crowd up this season, Mr. Damon?”

“Well, really, my dear, I don’t know. I arrived only a little while ago, like yourselves. But from what I have seen I should say it was going to be a good season. Are you up for long, Tom?”

“No, I must go back in a few days. We have a big, new dirigible in process of construction, and it’s taking a good bit of my time. But I hope to have it finished in another month and then Mary and I will enjoy our vacation together. How long are you going to stay?”

“As long as my wife will let me and while she is contented to stay with her relatives,” chuckled the odd man, for it was no secret that Mrs. Damon was rather censorious and she and her odd husband led a more or less troubled life.

A little later Mr. Damon went up to speak to Mr. Swift and the Nestors, leaving Tom and Mary to wander about the hotel grounds. Tom saw the tennis courts and the well-laid-out ball field. The hotel and its grounds occupied the level plateau of the highest of the mountain peaks in that neighborhood. All about it on every side, only pierced by a few roads, was a dense forest.

“It is dry,” Tom observed, when he and his wife had gone a little way into the outlying woods. “If this ever got on fire it would be a hard job to put it out.”

“Let us hope then,” said Mary, with a smile, “that it will never get on fire.”

“Oh, sure!” exclaimed Tom.

On the way back to the hotel veranda, where Mary said she wanted to rest awhile before dressing for dinner, they met the strange gardener who had tried to stop Mr. Damon from picking a rose.

“You want to be careful!” said the man to Tom.

“What do you mean?” asked the young inventor with not a little indignation in his voice.

“Keep away from that man who picks my roses,” went on the gardener. “He is in danger. And don’t you pick any flowers, either.”

“Look here!” began Tom, but Mary pulled him by the arm and whispered:

“Don’t have a fuss with him, Tom dear. He is a bit queer. A sort of crank about his flowers.”

“I must speak to the manager about him,” Tom decided, as he and his wife walked on, leaving the evil-faced gardener pottering about some laurel bushes.

Tom left Mary with her father and mother, Mr. Swift having gone to his room to rest. Then, while walking about the beautiful grounds, the young inventor came upon Mr. Damon talking with Mr. Thorndyke, the hotel manager.

“Well, Mr. Swift, are you enjoying yourself?” Mr. Thorndyke wanted to know.

“Very much,” was the reply. “But I have been a little annoyed by the actions of one of the gardeners on the grounds.”

“I was just telling him about that man myself,” said Mr. Damon. “Really, Mr. Thorndyke, your guests should not be annoyed by such a fellow when they want to pick a rose or two.”

“Indeed they shouldn’t!” agreed the manager angrily. “I must speak to Cosso Tobini.”

“Is that his name?” asked Tom. “Sounds Italian.”

“It is Italian, I believe.”

“Well, he got in Dutch with Mr. Damon!” chuckled Tom. “It was one fine little knock-out.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have hit him,” said the odd man. “But, bless my boxing gloves, I didn’t want him to hit me.”

“You did perfectly right, Mr. Damon,” the manager said. “Wait. Here comes Tobini now. I shall speak to him. He is a very good workman and an excellent gardener. He has achieved results here with flowers and plants that no other man has ever been able to equal. But we are in the hotel business to please our guests, not to raise roses for a cranky gardener to keep on the bushes. Tobini is very hot-headed, but I must make him listen to reason and mend his ways.”

The man with whom Mr. Damon had had such a lively little argument was coming along a path with a barrow of dirt, evidently destined for some flower bed. Mr. Thorndyke stopped him as Tom and Mr. Damon stood near.

“Look here, Tobini,” said the manager, “you must stop this nonsense of trying to prevent our guests from picking roses or I will discharge you.”

“They are my roses!” snapped the man, and one could see that he had a passionate love of flowers. “No one must pick them! Why should they not live out their lives on their own stems? To pick them is to kill them. Let them live their alloted lives.”

“That’s all nonsense,” said Mr. Thorndyke. “Our guests may pick a few flowers when they choose. If you interfere with any of them again, Cosso—with Mr. Swift or Mr. Damon—you will get your walking papers. Understand?”

“They can pick my roses?” the man growled out the question.

“Certainly! Keep your tongue and hands to yourself! Now go!”

The gardener wheeled the barrow of dirt a little distance and then deliberately upset it in the middle of a gravel path. A moment later, as Tom and Mr. Damon looked in surprise at this manifestation of anger, the man took a shovel and slowly began refilling his barrow from the pile he had made.

“Bless my thermometer!” cried Mr. Damon, “what’s the idea?”

“It’s just one of his fits of temper,” said the manager, with a shrug of his shoulders. “He has done stranger things than that. But he is such a good gardener that I hate to let him go, though I have threatened to many times.”

“Well,” chuckled Tom, “as long as he makes work for himself and cleans up after it, he’ll be kept busy.”

“It’s an outlet for his rage, I suppose,” the manager said. “I don’t really believe he is dangerous, though he has all the hotness of the Italian race and is unreasonable in the extreme.”

The incident was soon forgotten, as Tom and Mr. Damon strolled about, talking over old times and the many adventures they had shared together. If they had known it, a great adventure was just around the corner for them.

Mr. Damon was given a seat at the table where Tom Swift and his party ate, and they were making a pleasant meal, laughing and conversing, when a sound on a veranda just outside the window near which the Swift table was placed, attracted their attention.

Mr. Thorndyke, the manager, was walking along the veranda. Suddenly, out of some side passage, sprang the gardener, Cosso Tobini. As Tom Swift looked he saw something flashing in the man’s upraised hand. A moment later the young inventor knew what it was—a knife glinting in the rays of the sun.

“Look out, Mr. Thorndyke!” Tom cried.

As he spoke, the evil-faced man leaped forward, raising the knife high to strike. Mr. Thorndyke, warned by Tom Swift’s cry, looked over his shoulder just in time, and, seeing the danger, began to run. There were excited shouts from those at Tom’s table and from other guests.

“I will kill you!” screamed Tobini, as he raced after the fleeing manager. “You let people kill my roses! I will kill you!”