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Title: The Fortune Hunter

Author: Louis Joseph Vance

Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9747]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on October 15, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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[Illustration: "You can be worth a million ... within a year"]


THE FORTUNE HUNTER

By

Louis Joseph Vance

Author Of "The Brass Bowl,"
"The Bronze Bell," Etc.

_With illustrations by_
Arthur William Brown

1910


To
George Spellvin, Esq.,

_This book is cheerfully dedicated_


CONTENTS

CHAPTER


I.       FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT

II.      TO HIM THAT HATH

III.     INSPIRATION

IV.      TRIUMPH OF MR. HOMER LITTLE JOHN

V.       MARGARET'S DAUGHTER

VI.      INTRODUCTION TO MISS CARPENTER

VII.     A WINDOW IN RADVILLE

VIII.    THE MAN OF BUSINESS IN EMBRYO

IX.      SMALL BEGINNINGS

X.       ROLAND BARNETTE'S FRIEND

XI.      BLINKY LOCKWOOD

XII.     DUNCAN'S GRUBSTAKE

XIII.    THE BUSINESS MAN AND MR. BURNHAM
 XIV.     MOSTLY ABOUT BETTY

XV.      MANOEUVRES OF JOSIE

XVI.     WHERE RADVILLE FEARED TO TREAD

XVII.    TRACEY'S TROUBLES

XVIII.   A BARGAIN IS A BARGAIN

XIX.     PROVING THE PERSIPICUITY OF MR. KELLOGG

XX.      ROLAND SHOWS HIS HAND

XXI.     AS OTHERS SAW HIM

XXII.    ROLAND'S TRIUMPH

XXIII.   THE RAINBOW'S END


ILLUSTRATIONS

"You can be worth a million ... within a year"

"You mean you're going to work here?"

"Four hundred dollars, Mr. Sheriff"

"Betty!"

"You're a thief with a reward out for you"

"Forever and ever and a day"




I


FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT

Receiver at ear, Spaulding, of Messrs. Atwater & Spaulding, importers
of motoring garments and accessories, listened to the switchboard
operator's announcement with grave attention, acknowledging it with a
toneless: "All right. Send him in." Then hooking up the desk telephone
he swung round in his chair to face the door of his private office, and
in a brief ensuing interval painstakingly ironed out of his face and
attitude every indication of the frame of mind in which he awaited his
caller. It was, as a matter of fact, anything but a pleasant one: he
had a distasteful duty to perform; but that was the last thing he
designed to become evident. Like most good business men he nursed a pet
superstition or two, and of the number of these the first was that he
must in all his dealings present an inscrutable front, like a
poker-player's: captains of industry were uniformly like that,
Spaulding understood; if they entertained emotions it was strictly in
private. Accordingly he armoured himself with a magnificent
imperturbability which at times almost deceived its wearer.

Occasionally it deceived others: notably now it bewildered Duncan as he
entered on the echo of Spaulding's "Come!" He had apprehended the
visage of a thunderstorm, with a rattle of brusque complaints: he
encountered Spaulding as he had always seemed: a little, urbane figure
with a blank face, the blanker for glasses whose lenses seemed always
to catch the light and, glaring, mask the eyes behind them; a
prosperous man of affairs, well groomed both as to body and as to mind;
a machine for the transaction of business, with all a machine's
vivacity and temperamental responsiveness. It was just that quality in
him that Duncan envied, who was vaguely impressed that, if he himself
could only imitate, however minutely, the phlegm of a machine, he might
learn to ape something of its efficiency and so, ultimately, prove
himself of some worth to the world--and, incidentally, to Nathaniel
Duncan. Thus far his spasmodic attempts to adapt to the requirements
and limitations of the world of business his own equipment of misfit
inclinations and ill-assorted abilities, had unanimously turned out
signal failures. So he envied Spaulding without particularly admiring
him.

Now the sight of his employer, professionally bland and capable, and
with no animus to be discerned in his attitude, provided Duncan with
one brief, evanescent flash of hope, one last expiring instant of
dignity (tempered by his unquenchable humour) in which to face his
fate. Something of the hang-dog vanished from his habit and for a
little time he carried himself again with all his one-time grace and
confidence.

"Good-afternoon, Mr. Spaulding," he said, replying to a nod as he
dropped into the chair that nod had indicated. A faint smile lightened
his expression and made it quite engaging.

"G'dafternoon." Spaulding surveyed him swiftly, then laced his fat
little fingers and contemplated them with detached intentness. "Just
get in, Duncan?"

"On the three-thirty from Chicago...."

There was a pause, during which Spaulding reviewed his fingernails with
impartial interest; in that pause Duncan's poor little hope died a
natural death. "I got your wire," he resumed; "I mean, it got
me--overtook me at Minneapolis.... So here I am."

"You haven't wasted time."

"I fancied the matter might be urgent, sir."

Spaulding lifted his brows ever so slightly. "Why?"

"Well, I gathered from the fact that you wired
me to come home that you wanted my advice."

A second time Spaulding gestured with his eyebrows, for once fairly
surprised out of his pose. "_Your_ advice!..."

"Yes," said Duncan evenly: "as to whether you ought to give up your
customers on my route or send them a man who could sell goods."

"Well...." Spaulding admitted.

"Oh, don't think I'm boasting of my acuteness: anybody could have
guessed as much from the great number of heavy orders I have not been
sending you."

"You've had bad luck...."

"You mean you have, Mr. Spaulding. It was good luck for me to be
drawing down my weekly cheques, bad luck to you not to have a man who
could earn them."

His desperate honesty touched Spaulding a trifle; at the risk of not
seeming a business man to himself he inclined dubiously to relent, to
give Duncan another chance. The fellow was likeable enough, his
employer considered; he had good humour and even in dejection,
distinction; whatever he was not, he was a man of birth and breeding.
His face might be rusty with a day-old stubble, as it was; his
shirt-cuffs frayed, his shoes down at the heel, his baggy clothing
weirdly ready-made, as they were: there remained his air. You'd think
he might amount to something, to somewhat more than a mere something,
given half a chance in the right direction. Then what?... Spaulding
sought from Duncan elucidation of this riddle.

"Duncan," he said, "what's the trouble?"

"I thought you knew that; I thought that was
why you called me in with my route half-covered."

"You mean--?"

"I mean I can't sell your line."

"Why?"

"God only knows. I want to, badly enough. It's just general
incompetence, I presume."

"What makes you think that?"

Duncan smiled bitterly. "Experience," he said.

"You've tried--what else?"

"A little of everything--all the jobs open to a man with a knowledge of
Latin and Greek and the higher mathematics: shipping clerk,
time-keeper, cashier--all of 'em."

"And yet Kellogg believes in you."

Duncan nodded dolefully. "Harry's a good friend. We roomed together at
college. That's why he stands for me."

"He says you only need the right opening--."

"And nobody knows where that is, except my unfortunate employers: it's
the back door going out, for mine every time.... Oh, Harry's been a
prince to me. He's found me four or five jobs with friends of his--like
yourself. But I don't seem to last. You see I was brought up to be
ornamental and irregular rather than useful; to blow about in motor
cars and keep a valet busy sixteen hours a day--and all that sort of
thing. My father's failure--you know about that?"

Spaulding nodded. Duncan went on gloomily, talking a great deal more
freely than he would at any other time--suffering, in fact, from that
species of auto hypnosis induced by the sound of his own voice
recounting his misfortunes, which seems especially to affect a man down
on his luck.

"That smash came when I was five years out of college--I'd never
thought of turning my hand to anything in all that time. I'd always had
more coin than I could spend--never had to consider the worth of money
or how hard it is to earn: my father saw to all that. He seemed not to
want me to work: not that I hold that against him; he'd an idea I'd
turn out a genius of some sort or other, I believe.... Well, he failed
and died all in a week, and I found myself left with an extensive
wardrobe, expensive tastes, an impractical education--and not so much
of that that you'd notice it--and not a cent.... I was too proud to
look to my friends for help in those days--and perhaps that was as
well; I sought jobs on my own.... Did you ever keep books in a
fish-market?"

"No." Spaulding's eyes twinkled behind his large, shiny glasses.

"But what's the use of my boring you?" Duncan made as if to rise,
suddenly remembering himself.

"You're not. Go on."

"I didn't mean to; mostly, I presume, I've been blundering round an
explanation of Kellogg's kindness to me, in my usual ineffectual
way--felt somehow an explanation was due you, as the latest to suffer
through his misplaced interest in me."

"Perhaps," said Spaulding, "I am beginning to understand. Go on: I'm
interested. About the fish-market?"

"Oh, I just happened to think of it as a sample experience--and the
last of that particular brand. I got nine dollars a week and earned
every cent of it inhaling the atmosphere. My board cost me six and the
other three afforded me a chance to demonstrate myself a captain of
finance--paying laundry bills and clothing myself, besides buying
lunches and such-like small matters. I did the whole thing, you
know--one schooner of beer a day and made my own cigarettes: never
could make up my mind which was the worst. The hours were easy, too:
didn't have to get to work until five in the morning.... I lasted five
weeks at that job, before I was taken sick: shows what a great
constitution I've got."

He laughed uncertainly and paused, thoughtful, his eyes vacant, fixed
upon the retrospect that was a grim prospect of the imminent future.

"And then--?"

"Oh--?" Duncan roused. "Why, then I fell in with Kellogg again; he
found me trying the open-air cure on a bench in Washington Square.
Since then he's been finding me one berth after another. He's a
sure-enough optimist."

Spaulding shifted uneasily in his chair, stirred by an impulse whose
unwisdom he could not doubt. Duncan had assuredly done his case no good
by painting his shortcomings in colours so vivid; yet, somehow
strangely, Spaulding liked him the better for his open-hearted
confession.

"Well...." Spaulding stumbled awkwardly.

"Yes; of course," said Duncan promptly, rising. "Sorry if I tired you."

"What do you mean by: 'Yes, of course'?"

"That you called me in to fire me--and so that's over with. Only I'd be
sorry to have you sore on Kellogg for saddling me on you. You see, he
believed I'd make good, and so did I in a way: at least, I hoped to."

"Oh, that's all right," said Spaulding uncomfortably. "The trouble is,
you see, we've nothing else open just now. But if you'd really like
another chance on the road, I--I'll be glad to speak to Mr. Atwater
about it."

"Don't you do it!" Duncan counselled him sharply, aghast. "He might say
yes. And I simply couldn't accept; it wouldn't be fair to you, Kellogg,
or myself. It'd be charity--for I've proved I can't earn my wages; and
I haven't come to that yet. No!" he concluded with determination, and
picked up his hat.

"Just a minute." Spaulding held him with a gesture. "You're forgetting
something: at least I am. There's a month's pay coming to you; the
cashier will hand you the cheque as you go out."

"A month's pay?" Duncan said blankly. "How's that? I've drawn up to the
end of this week already, if you didn't know it."

"Of course I knew it. But we never let our men go without a month's
notice or its equivalent, and--"

"No," Duncan interrupted firmly. "No; but thank you just the same. I
couldn't. I really couldn't. It's good of you, but ... Now," he broke
off abruptly, "I've left my accounts--what there is of them--with the
book-keeping department, and the checks for my sample trunks. There'll
be a few dollars coming to me on my expense account, and I'll send you
my address as soon as I get one."

"But look here--" Spaulding got to his feet, frowning.

"No," reiterated Duncan positively. "There's no use. I'm grateful to
you for your toleration of me--and all that. But we can't do anything
better now than call it all off. Good-bye, Mr. Spaulding."

Spaulding nodded, accepting defeat with the better grace because of an
innate conviction that it was just as well, after all. And,
furthermore, he admired Duncan's stand. So he offered his hand: an
unusual condescension. "You'll make good somewhere yet," he asserted.

"I wish I could believe it." Duncan's grasp was firm since he felt more
assured of some humanity latent in his late employer. "However ...
Good-bye."

"Good luck to you," rang in his ears as the door put a period to the
interview. He stopped and took up the battered suitcase and rusty
overcoat which he had left outside the junior partner's office, then
went on, shaking his head. "Much obliged," he said huskily to himself.
"But what's the good of that. There's no room anywhere for a
professional failure. And that's what I am; just a ne'er-do-well. I
never realised what that meant, really, before, and it's certainly
taken me a damn' long time to find out. But I know now, all right...."

Outside, on the steps of the building, he paused a moment, fascinated
by the brisk spectacle afforded by lower Broadway at the hour when the
cave-like offices in its cliff-like walls begin to empty themselves,
when the overlords and their lieutenants close their desks and turn
their faces homewards, leaving the details of the day's routine to be
wound up by underlings. In the clear light of the late spring afternoon
a stream of humanity was high and fluent upon the sidewalks. Duncan had
glimpses of keen-faced men, bright-faced women, eager boys, quickened
all by that manner of efficiency and intelligence which seems so
integrally American. A well-dressed throng, well-fed, amiable and
animated, looking ever forward, the resistless tide of affairs that
gave it being bore it onward; it passed the onlooker as a strong
current passes flotsam in a back-eddy, with no pause, no turning aside.
Acutely he felt his aloofness from it, who had no part in its interests
and scarcely any comprehension of them. The sunken look, the leanness
of his young face, seemed suddenly accentuated; the gloom in his
discontented eyes deepened; his slight habitual stoop became more
noticeable. And a second time he nodded acquiescence to his unspoken
thought.

"There," said he, singling out a passer-by upon whose complacent
features prosperity had set its smug hall-mark--"there, but for the
grace of God, goes Nat Duncan!" He rolled the paraphrase upon his
tongue and found it bitter--not, however, with a tonic bitterness.
"Lord, what a worthless critter I am! No good to myself--nor to anybody
else. Even on Harry I'm a drag--a regular old man of the mountains!"

Despondently he went down to the sidewalk and merged himself with the
crowd, moving with it though a thousand miles apart from it, and
presently diverging, struck across-town toward the Worth Street subway
station.

"And the worst of it is, he's too sharp not to find it out--if he
hasn't by this time--and too damn' decent by far to let me know if he
has! ... It can't go on this way with us: I can't let him ... Got to
break with him somehow--now--to-day. I won't let him think me ... what
I've been all along to him.... Bless his foolish heart!..."

This resolution coloured his reverie throughout the uptown journey. And
he strengthened himself with it, deriving a sort of acrid comfort from
the knowledge that henceforth none should know the burden of his
misfortunes save himself. There was no deprecation of Kellogg's
goodness in his mood, simply determination no longer to be a charge
upon it. To contemplate the sum total of the benefits he had received
at Kellogg's hands, since the day when the latter had found him ill and
half-starved, friendless as a stray pup, on the bench in Washington
Square, staggered his imagination. He could never repay it, he told
himself, save inadequately, little by little--mostly by gratitude and
such consideration as he purposed now to exhibit by removing himself
and his distresses from the other's ken. Here was an end to comfort for
him, an end to living in Kellogg's rooms, eating his food, busying his
servants, spending his money--not so much borrowed as pressed upon him.
He stood at the cross-roads, but in no doubt as to which way he should
most honourably take, though it took him straight back to that from
which Kellogg had rescued him.

There crawled in his mind a clammy memory of the sort of housing he had
known in those evil days, and he shuddered inwardly, smelling again the
effluvia of dank oilcloth and musty carpets, of fish-balls and fried
ham, of old-style plumbing and of nine-dollar-a-week humanity in the
unwashen raw--the odour of misery that permeated the lodgings to which
his lack of means had introduced him. He could see again, and with a
painful vividness of mental vision, the degenerate "brownstone fronts"
that mask those haunts of wretchedness, with their flights of crumbling
brownstone steps leading up to oaken portals haggard with flaking
paint, flanked by squares of soiled note-paper upon which inexpert
hands had traced the warning, not: "Abandon hope all ye who enter
here," but: "Furnished rooms to let with board." And pursuing this grim
trail of memory, whether he would or no--again he climbed, wearily at
the end of a wearing day, a darksome well of a staircase up and up to
an eyrie under the eaves, denominated in the terminology of landladies
a "top hall back"--a cramped refuge haunted by pitiful ghosts of the
hopes and despairs of its former tenants. And he remembered with
reminiscently aching muscles the comfort of such a "single bed" as is
peculiar (one hopes) to top hall backs, and with a qualm what it was to
cook a surreptitious meal on a metal heater clamped to the gas-bracket
(with ears keen to catch the scuffle of the landlady's feet as she
skulked in the hall, jealous of her gas bill).

And to this he must return, to that treadmill round of blighted days
and joyless nights must set his face....

Alighting at the Grand Central Station he packed the double weight of
his luggage and his cares a few blocks northward on Madison Avenue ere
turning west toward the bachelor rooms which Kellogg had established in
the roaring Forties, just the other side of _the_ Avenue--Fifth
Avenue, on a corner of which Duncan presently was held up for a time by
a press of traffic. He lingered indifferently, waiting for the mounted
policeman to clear a way across, watching the while with lack-lustre
eyes the interminable procession of cabs and landaus, taxis and
town-cars that romped by hazardously, crowding the street from curb to
curb.

The day was of young June, though grey and a little chill with the
discouraged spirit of a retarded season. Though the hegira of the
well-to-do to their summer homes had long since set in, still there
remained in the city sufficient of their class to keep the Avenue
populous from Twenty-third Street north to the Plaza in the evening
hours. The suggestion of wealth, or luxury, of money's illimitable
power, pervaded the atmosphere intensely, an ineluctable influence, to
an independent man heady, to Duncan maddening. He surveyed the parade
with mutiny in his heart. All this he had known, a part of it had
been--upon a time. Now ... the shafts of his roving eyes here and there
detected faces recognisable, of men and women whose acquaintance he had
once owned. None recognised him who stood there worn, shabby and tired.
He even caught the direct glance of a girl who once had thought him
worth winning, who had set herself to stir his heart and--had been
successful. To-day she looked him straight in the eyes, apparently,
with undisturbed serenity, then as calmly looked over and through and
beyond him. Her limousine hurried her on, enthroned impregnably above
the envious herd.

He sped her transit with a mirthless chuckle. "You're right," he said,
"dead right. You simply don't know me any more, my dear--you musn't;
you can't afford to any more than I could afford to know you."

None the less the fugitive incident seemed to brim his disconsolate
cup. In complete dejection of mind and spirit he pushed on to Kellogg's
quarters, buoyed by a single hope--that Kellogg might be out of town or
delayed at his office.

In that event Duncan might have a chance to gather up his belongings
and escape unhandicapped by the immediate necessity of justifying his
course. At another time, surely, the explanation was inevitable; say
to-morrow; he was not cur enough to leave his friend without a word.
But to-night he would willingly be spared. He apprehended unhappily the
interview with Kellogg; he was in no temper for argumentation, felt
scarcely strong enough to hold his own against the fire of objections
with which Kellogg would undoubtedly seek to shake his stand. Kellogg
could talk, Heaven alone knew how winningly he could talk! with all the
sound logic of a close reasoner, all the enthusiasm of youth and
self-confidence, all the persuasiveness of profound conviction singular
to successful men. Duncan had been wont to say of him that Kellogg
could talk the hind-leg off of a mule. He recalled this now with a sour
grin: "That means me..."

The elevator boy, knowing him of old, neglected to announce his
arrival, and Duncan had his own key to the door of Kellogg's apartment.
He let himself in with futile stealth: as was quite right and proper,
Kellogg's man Robbins was in attendance--a stupefied Robbins,
thunderstruck by the unexpected return of his master's friend and
guest. "Good Lord!" he cried at sight of Duncan. "Beg your pardon, sir,
but--but it can't be you!"

"Your mistake, Robbins. Unfortunately it is." Duncan surrendered his
luggage. "Mr. Kellogg in?"

"No, sir. But I'm expecting him any minute. He'll be surprised to see
you back."

"Think so?" said Duncan dully. "He doesn't know me, if he is."

"You see, sir, we thought you was out West."

"So you did." Duncan moved toward the door of his own bedroom, Robbins
following.

"It was only yesterday I posted a letter to you for Mr. Kellogg, sir,
and the address was Omaha."

"I didn't get that far. Fetch along that suitcase, will you please? I
want to put some clean things in it."

"Then you're not staying in town over night, Mr. Duncan?"

"I don't know. I'm not staying here, anyway." Duncan switched on the
lights in his room. "Put it on the bed, Robbins. I'll pack as quickly
as I can. I'm in a hurry."

"Yes, sir, but--I hope there's nothing wrong?"

"Then you lose," returned Duncan grimly: "everything's wrong." He
jerked viciously at an obstinate bureau drawer, and when it yielded
unexpectedly with the well-known impishness of the inanimate, dumped
upon the floor a tangled miscellany of shirts, socks, gloves, collars
and ties.

"Didn't you like the business, sir?"

"No, I didn't like the business--and it didn't like me. It's the same
old story, Robbins. I've lost my job again--that's all."

"I'm very sorry, sir."

"Thank you--but that's all right. I'm used to it."

"And you're going to leave, sir?"

"I am, Robbins."

"I--may I take the liberty of hoping it's to take another position?"

"You may, but you lose a second time. I've just made up my mind I'm not
going to hang round here any longer. That's all."

"But," Robbins ventured, hovering about with exasperating
solicitude--"but Mr. Kellogg'd never permit you to leave in this way,
sir."

"Wrong again, Robbins," said Duncan curtly, annoyed.

"Yes, sir. Very good, sir." With the instinct of the well-trained
servant, Robbins started to leave, but hesitated. He was really very
much disturbed by Duncan's manner, which showed a phase of his
character new in Robbins' experience of him. Ordinarily reverses such
as this had seemed merely to serve to put Duncan on his mettle, to
infuse him with a determination to try again and win out, whatever the
odds; and at such times he was accustomed to exhibit a mad
irresponsibility of wit and a gaiety of spirit (whether it were a mask
or no) that only outrivalled his high good humour when things
ostensibly were going well with him.

Intermittently, between his spasms of employment, he had been Kellogg's
guest for several years, not infrequently for months at a time; and so
Robbins had come to feel a sort of proprietary interest in the young
man, second only to the regard which he had for his employer. Like most
people with whom Duncan came in contact, Robbins admired him from a
respectful distance, and liked him very well withal. He would have been
much distressed to have harm happen to him, and he was very much
concerned and alarmed to see him so candidly discouraged and sick at
heart. Perhaps too quick to draw an inference, Robbins mistrusted his
intentions; his dour habit boded ill in the servant's understanding:
men in such moods were apt to act unwisely. But if only he might
contrive to delay Duncan until Kellogg's return, he thought the former
might yet be saved from the consequences of folly of some insensate
sort. And casting about for an excuse, he grasped at the most sovereign
solace he knew of.

"Beg pardon, sir," he advanced, hesitant, "but perhaps you're just
feeling a bit blue. Won't you let me bring you a drop of something?"

"Of course I will," said Duncan emphatically over his shoulder. "And
get it now, will you, while I'm packing.... And, Robbins!"

"Sir?"

"Only put a little in it."

"A little what, sir?"

"Seltzer, of course."




II


TO HIM THAT HATH

It had been a forlorn hope at best, this attempt of his to escape
Kellogg: Duncan acknowledged it when, his packing rudely finished, he
started for the door, Robbins reluctantly surrendering the suit-case
after exhausting his repertoire of devices to delay the young man. But
at that instant the elevator gate clashed in the outer corridor and
Kellogg's key rattled in the lock, to an accompanying confusion of
voices, all masculine and all very cheerful.

Duncan sighed and motioned Robbins away with his luggage. "No hope
now," he told himself. "But--O Lord!"

Incontinently there burst into the room four men: Jim Long, Larry
Miller, another whom Duncan did not immediately recognise, and Kellogg
himself, bringing with them an atmosphere breezy with jubilation.
Before he knew it Duncan was boisterously overwhelmed. He got his
breath to find Kellogg pumping his hand.

"Nat," he was saying, "you're the only other man on earth I was wishing
could be with me tonight! Now my happiness is complete. Gad, this is
lucky!"

"You think so?" countered Duncan, forcing a smile. "Hello, you boys!"
He gave a hand to Long and Miller. "How're you all?" He warmed to their
friendly faces and unfeigned welcome. "My, but it's good to see you!"
There was relief in the fact that Kellogg, after a single glance,
forbore to question his return; he was to be counted upon for tact, was
Kellogg. Now he strangled surprise by turning to the fourth member of
the party.

"Nat," he said, "I want you to meet Mr. Bartlett. Mr. Bartlett, Mr.
Duncan."

A wholesome smile dawned on Duncan's face as he encountered the blank
blue stare of a young man whose very smooth and very bright red face
was admirably set off by semi-evening dress. "Great Scott!" he cried,
warmly pressing the lackadaisical hand that drifted into his. "Willy
Bartlett--after all these years!"

A sudden animation replaced the vacuous stare of the blue eyes.
"Duncan!" he stammered. "I say, this is rippin'!"

"As bad as that?" Duncan essayed an accent almost English and nodded
his appreciation of it: something which Bartlett missed completely.

He was very young--a very great deal younger, Duncan thought, than when
they had been classmates, what time Duncan shared his rooms with
Kellogg: very much younger and suffering exquisitely from
over-sophistication. His drawl barely escaped being inimitable; his air
did not escape it. "Smitten with my old trouble," Duncan appraised him:
"too much money... Heaven knows I hope he never recovers!"

As for Willy, he was momentarily more nearly human than he had seemed
from the moment of his first appearance. "You know," he blurted, "this
is simply extraordinary. I say, you chaps, Duncan and I haven't met for
years--not since he graduated. We belonged to the same frat, y'know,
and had a jolly time of it, if he was an upper-class man. No side about
him at all, y'know--absolutely none whatever. Whenever I had to go out
on a spree, I'd always get Nat to show me round."

"I was pretty good at that," Duncan admitted a trifle ruefully.

But Willy rattled on, heedless. "He knew more pretty gels, y'know... I
say, old chap, d'you know as many now?"

Duncan shook his head. "The list has shrunk. I'm a changed man, Willy."

"Ow, I say, you're chawfin'," Willy argued incredulously. "I don't
believe that, y'know--hardly. I say, you remember the night you showed
me how to play faro bank?"

"I'll never forget it," Duncan told him gravely. "And I remember what a
plug we thought my room-mate was because he wouldn't come with us." He
nodded significantly toward the amused Kellogg.

"Not him!" cried Willy, expostulant. "Not really? Why it cawn't be!"

"Fact," Duncan assured him. "He was working his way through college,
you see, whereas I was working my way through my allowance--and then
some. That's why you never met him, Willy: he worked--and got the
habit. We loafed--with the same result. That's why he's useful and
you're ornamental, and I'm--" He broke off in surprise. "Hello!" he
said as Robbins offered a tray to the three on which were slim-stemmed
glasses filled with a pale yellow, effervescent liquid. "Why the blond
waters of excitement, please?" he inquired, accepting a glass.

From across the room Larry Miller's voice sounded. "Are you ready,
gentlemen? We'll drink to him first and then he can drink to his royal
little self. To the boy who's getting on in the world! To the junior
member of L.J. Bartlett and Company!"

Long applauded loudly: "Hear! Hear!" And even Willy Bartlett chimed in
with an unemotional: "Good work!" Mechanically Duncan downed the toast;
Kellogg was the only man not drinking it, and from that the meaning was
easily to be inferred. With a stride Duncan caught his hand and crushed
it in his own.

"Harry," he said a little huskily, "I can't tell you how glad I am!
It's the best news I've had in years!"

Kellogg's responsive pressure was answer enough. "It makes it doubly
worth while, to win out and have you all so glad!" he said.

"So you've taken him into the firm, eh?" Duncan inquired of Bartlett.

The blue eyes widened stonily. "The governor has. I'm not in the
business, y'know. Never had the slightest turn for it, what?" Willy set
aside his glass. "I say, I must be moving. No, I cawn't stop, Kellogg,
really. I was dressin' at the club and Larry told me about it, so I
just dropped round to tell you how jolly glad I am."

"Your father hadn't told you, then?"

"Who, the governor?" Willy looked unutterably bored. "Why, he gave up
tryin' to talk business with me long ago. I can't get interested in it,
'pon my word. Of course I knew he thought the deuce and all of you, but
I hadn't an idea they were goin' to take you into the firm. What?"

Long and Miller interrupted, proposing adieus which Kellogg vainly
contended.

"Why, you're only just here--" he expostulated.



"Cawn't help it, old chap," Willy assured him earnestly. "I must go,
anyway. I've a dinner engagement."

"You'll be late, won't you?"

"Doesn't matter in the least; I'm always late. 'Night, Kellogg.
Congratulations again."

"We just dropped round to take off our hats to you," Long continued,
pumping Kellogg's hand.

"And tell you what a good fellow we think you are," added Miller,
following suit.

"You don't know how good you make me feel," Kellogg told them.

Under cover of this diversion Duncan was making one last effort to slip
away; but before he could gather together his impedimenta and get to
the door Willy Bartlett intercepted him.

"I say, Duncan--"

"Oh, hell!" said Duncan beneath his breath. He paused ungraciously
enough.

"We've got to see a bit of one another, now we've met again, y'know.
Wish you'd look me up--Half Moon Club'll get me 'most any time. We'll
have to arrange to make a regular old-fashioned night of it, just for
memory's sake."

Duncan nodded, edging past him. "I've memories enough," he said.

"Right-oh! Any reason at all, y'know, just so we have the night."

"Good enough," assented Duncan vaguely. He suffered his hand to be
wrung with warmth. "I'll not forget--good-night." Then he pulled up and
groaned, for Willy's insistence had frustrated his design: Kellogg had
suddenly become alive to his attitude and hailed him over the heads of
Long and Miller.

"Nat, I say! Where the devil are you going?"

"Over to the hotel," said Duncan.

"The deuce you are! What hotel?"

"The one I'm stopping at."

"Not on your life. You're not going just yet--I haven't had half a
chance to talk to you. Robbins, take Mr. Duncan's things."

Duncan, set upon by Robbins, who had been hovering round for just that
purpose, lifted his shoulders in resignation, turning back into the
room as Miller and Long said good-night to him and left at Bartlett's
heels, and smiled awry in semi-humorous deprecation of the way in which
he let Kellogg out-manoeuvre him. When it came to that, it was hard to
refuse Kellogg anything; he had that way with him. Especially if one
liked him... And how could anyone help liking him?

Kellogg had him now, holding him fast by either shoulder, at arm's
length, and shaking a reproving head at his friend. "You big duffer!"
he said. "Did you think for a minute I'd let you throw me down like
that?"

Duncan stood passive, faintly amused and touched by the other's show of
affection. "No," he said, "I didn't really think so. But it was worth
trying on, of course."

"Look here, have you dined?"

'At this suggestion Duncan stiffened and fell back. "No, but--"

Kellogg swept the ground from under his feet. "Robbins," he told the
man, "order in dinner for two from the club, and tell 'em to hurry it
up."

"Yes, sir," said Robbins, and flew to obey before Duncan could get a
chance to countermand his part in the order.

"And now," continued Kellogg, "we've got the whole evening before us in
which to chin. Sit down." He led Duncan to an arm-chair and gently but
firmly plumped him into its capacious depths. "We'll have a snug little
dinner here and--what do you say to taking in a show afterwards?"

"I say no."

"You dassent, my boy. This is the night we celebrate. I'm feeling
pretty good to-night."

"You ought to, Harry." Duncan struggled to rouse himself to share in
the spirit of gratulation with which Kellogg was bubbling. "I'm mighty
glad, old man. It's a great step up for you."

"It's all of that. You could have knocked me over with a feather when
Bartlett sprang it on me this morning. Of course, I was expecting
something--a boost in salary, or something like that. Bartlett knew
that other houses in the Street had made me offers--I've been pretty
lucky of late and pulled off one or two rather big deals--but a
partnership with L.J. Bartlett--! Think of it, Nat!"

"I'm thinking of it--and it's great."

"It'll keep me mighty busy," Kellogg blundered blindly on; "it means a
lot of extra work--but you know I like to work...."

"That's right, you do," agreed Duncan drearily. "It's queer to me--it
must be a great thing to like to work."

"You bet it's a great thing; why, I couldn't exist if I couldn't work.
You remember that time I laid off for a month in the country--for my
health's sake? I'll never forget it: hanging round all the time with my
hands empty--everyone else with something to do. I wouldn't go through
with it again for a fortune. Never felt so useless and in the way--"

"But," interrupted Duncan, knitting his brows as he grappled with this
problem, "you were independent, weren't you? You had money--could pay
your board?"

"Of course; nevertheless, I felt in the way."

"That's funny...."

"It's straight."

"I know it is; it wouldn't be you if you didn't love work. It wouldn't
be me if I did.... Look here, Harry; suppose you didn't have any money
and couldn't pay your board--and had nothing to do. How'd you feel in
that case?"

"I don't know. Anyhow, that's rot--"

"No, it isn't rot. I'm trying to make you understand how I feel
when--when it's that way with me.... As it generally is." He raised one
hand and let it fall with a gesture of despondency so eloquent that it
roused Kellogg out of his own preoccupation.

"Why, Nat!" he cried, genuinely sympathetic. "I've been so taken up
with myself that I forgot.... I hadn't looked for you till to-morrow."

"You knew, then?"

"I met Atwater at lunch to-day. He told me; said he was sorry, but--"

"Yes. Everybody is always sorry, _but_--"

Kellogg let his hand fall on Duncan's shoulder. "I'm sorry, too, old
man. But don't lose heart. I know it's pretty tough on a fellow--"

"The toughest part of it is that you got the job for me--and I
_had_ to fall down."

"Don't think of that. It's not your fault--"

"You're the only man who believes that, Harry."

"Buck up. I'll stumble across some better opening for you before long,
and--"

"Stop right there. I'm through--"

"Don't talk that way, Nat. I'll get you in right somewhere."

"You're the best-hearted man alive, Harry--but I'll see you damned
first."

"Wait." Kellogg demanded his attention. "Here's this man Burnham--you
don't know him, but he's as keen as they make 'em. He's on the track of
some wonderful scheme for making illuminating gas from crude oil; if it
goes through--if the invention's really practicable--it's bound to work
a revolution. He's down in Washington now--left this afternoon to look
up the patents. Now he needs me, to get the ear of the Standard Oil
people, and I'll get you in there."

"What right've you got to do that?" demanded Duncan. "What the dickens
do I know about illuminating gas or crude oil? Burnham'd never thank
you for the likes o' me."

"But--thunder!--you can learn. All you need--."

"Now see here, Harry!" Duncan gave him pause with a manner not to be
denied. "Once and for all time understand I'm through having you
recommend an incompetent--just because we're friends."

"But, Harry--"

"And I'm through living on you while I'm out of a job. That's final."

"But, man--listen to me!--when we were at college--"

"That was another matter."

"How many times did you pay the room-rent when I was strapped? How many
times did your money pull me through when I'd have had to quit and
forfeit my degree because I couldn't earn enough to keep on?"

"That's different. You earned enough finally to square up. You don't
owe me anything."

"I owe you the gratitude for the friendly hand that put me in the way
of earning--that kept me going when the going was rank. Besides, the
conditions are just reversed now; you'll do just as I did--make good in
the world and, when it's convenient, to me. As for living here, you're
perfectly welcome."

"I know it--and more," Duncan assented a little wearily. "Don't think I
don't appreciate all you've done for me. But I know and you must
understand that I can't keep on living on you,--and I won't."

For once baffled, Kellogg stared at him in consternation. Duncan met
his gaze steadily, strong in the sincerity of his attitude. At length
Kellogg surrendered, accepting defeat. "Well...." He shrugged
uncomfortably. "If you insist ..."

"I do."

"Then that's settled."

"Yes, that's settled."

"Dinner," said Robbins from the doorway, "is
served."




III


INSPIRATION

"Look here, Nat," demanded Kellogg, when they were half way through the
meal, "do you mind telling me what you're going to do?"

Duncan pondered this soberly. "No," he replied in the end.

Kellogg waited a moment, but his guest did not continue. "What does
that kind of a 'No' mean, Nat?"

"It means I don't mind telling you."

Again an appreciable pause elapsed.

"Well, then, what do you mean to do?"

"I'm sure I don't know."

Kellogg regarded him sombrely for a moment, then in silence returned
his attention to his plate; and in silence, for the most part, the
remainder of the dinner was served and eaten. Duncan himself had
certainly enough to occupy his mind, while Kellogg had altogether
forgotten his own cause for rejoicing in his concern for the fortunes
of his friend. He was entirely of the opinion that something would have
to be done for Nat, with or without his consent; and he sounded the
profoundest depths of romantic impossibilities in his attempts to
discover some employment suited to Duncan's interesting but
impracticable assortment of faculties and qualifications, natural and
acquired. But nothing presented itself as feasible in view of the fact
that employment which would prove immediately remunerative was
required. And by the time that Robbins, clearing the board, left them
alone with coffee and cigars and cigarettes, Kellogg was fain to
confess failure--though the confession was a very private one, confined
to himself only.

"Nat," he said suddenly, rousing that young man out of the dreariest of
meditations, "what under the sun _can_ you do?"

"Me? I don't know. Why bother your silly old head about that? I'll make
out somehow."

"But surely there's something you'd rather do than anything else."

"My dear sir," Duncan told him impressively, "the only walk of life in
which I am fitted to shine is that of the idle son of a rich and
foolish father. Since I lost that job I've not been worth my salt."

"That's piffle. There isn't a man living who hasn't some talent or
other, some sort of an ability concealed about his person."

"You can search me," Duncan volunteered gloomily.

His unresponsiveness irritated Kellogg; he thought a while, then
delivered himself of a didactic conclusion:

"The trouble with you is you were brought up all wrong."

"Well, I've been brought down all right. Besides, that's a platitude in
my case."

"Let's see: I've know you--er--nine years."

"Is it that long?" Duncan looked up from a gloomy inspection of the
interior of his demitasse, displaying his first gleam of interest in
this analysis of his character. "You are a long-suffering old duffer.
Any man who'd stand for me for nine years--"

"That'll be all of that," Kellogg cut in sharply. "I was going on to
say that you can't room with a man for four terms at college and then
know him, off and on, for five years more, pretty intimately, without
forming a pretty clear estimate of what he's worth in your own mind."

"And I don't mind telling you, Harry, I think you're the best little
business man as well as the finest sort of an all-round good-fellow on
this continent."

"Thanks awfully. I presume that's why you're determined to throw me
down just at the time you need me most.... What I was trying to get at
is the fact that I've never doubted your ultimate success for an
instant."

"You'd be a mighty lonesome minority in a congress of my employers,
Harry."

"Given the proper opportunity--"

"Hold on," Duncan interrupted. "I know just what you're going to say,
and it's all very fine, and I'm proud that you want to say it of me.
But you're dead wrong, Harry. The truth is I haven't got it in me--the
capacity to succeed. Just as much as you love work, I hate it. I ought
to know, for I've had a good, hard try at it--several tries, in fact.
And you know what they came to."

"But if you persist in this way, Nat,--don't you know what it means?"

"None better. It means going back to what you helped me out of--the
life that nearly killed me."

"And you'd rather--"

"I'd rather that a thousand years before I'd sponge on you another
day.... But, on the level, I'd as lieve try the East River or turn on
the gas.... What's the use? That's the way I feel."

"That's fool talk. Brace up and be a man. All you need is a way to earn
money."

"No," Duncan insisted firmly: "get it. I'll never be able to earn
it--that's a cinch."

Kellogg laughed a little mirthlessly, absorbed in revolving something
which had popped into his head within the last few moments. "There are
ways to get it," he admitted abstractedly, "if you're not too
particular."

"I'm not. I only wish I understood the burglar business."

This time Kellogg laughed outright. He sat up with a new spirit in his
manner. "You mean you'd steal to get money?"

"Oh, well ..." Duncan smiled a trace sheepishly. "I can't think of
anything hardly I wouldn't do to get it."

"Very well, my son. Now attend to uncle." Kellogg leaned across the
table, fixing him with an enthusiastic eye. "Here, have a smoke. I'm
going to demonstrate high finance to your debased intelligence." He
thrust the cigarette case over to Duncan, who helped himself
mechanically, his gaze held in wonder to Kellogg's face.

"Fire when ready," he assented.

"I know a way," said Kellogg slowly, "by which, if you'll discard a
scruple or two, you can be worth a million dollars--or
thereabouts--within a year."

Duncan held a lighted match until it singed his fingertips, the while
he stared agape. "Say that again," he requested mildly.

"You can be worth a million in a year."

"Ah!" Duncan nodded slowly and comprehendingly. He turned aside in his
chair and raked a second match across the sole of his shoe. "Let him
rave," he observed enigmatically, and began to smoke.
 "No, I'm not dippy; and I'm perfectly serious."

"Of course. But what'd they do to me if I were caught?"

"This is not a joke; the proposition's perfectly legal; it's being done
right along."

"And I could do it, Harry?"

"A man of your calibre couldn't fail."

"Would you mind ringing for Robbins?" Duncan asked abruptly.

"Certainly." Kellogg pressed a button at his elbow. "What d'you want?"

"A straight-jacket and a doctor to tell which one of us needs it."

Kellogg, chagrined as he always was if joked with when expounding one
of his schemes, broke into a laugh that lasted until Robbins appeared.

"You rang, sir?"

"Yes. Put those decanters over here, and some glasses, please."

"Yes, sir."

The man obeyed and withdrew. Kellogg filled two glasses, handing one to
Duncan.

"Now be decent and listen to me, Nat. I've thought this thing over
for--oh, any amount of time. I'll bet anything it will work. What d'you
say? Would you like to try it?"

"Would I like to try it?" A conviction of Kellogg's earnestness forced
itself upon Duncan's understanding. "Would I--!" He lifted his glass
and drained it at a gulp. "Why, that's the first laugh I've had for a
month!"

"Then I'll tell you--"

Duncan placed a pleading hand on his forearm. "Don't kid me, Harry," he
entreated.

"Not a bit of it. This is straight goods. If you want to try it and
will follow the rules I lay down, I'll guarantee you'll be a rich man
inside of twelve months."

"Rules! Man, I'll follow all the rules in the world! Come on--I'm
getting palpitation of the heart, waiting. Tell it to me: what've I got
to do?"

"Marry," said Kellogg serenely.

"Marry!" Duncan echoed, aghast.

"Marry," reaffirmed the other with unbroken gravity.

"Marry--who?"

"A girl with a fortune.... You see, I can't guarantee the precise size
of her pile. That all depends on luck and the locality. But it'll run
anywhere from several hundred thousand up to a million--perhaps more."

Duncan sank back despondently. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself,
Harry," he said dully; "you had me all excited, for a minute."

"No, but honestly, I mean what I say."

"Now look here: do you really think any girl with a million would take
a chance on me?"

"She'll jump at it."

Duncan thought this over for a while. Then his lips twitched. "What's
the matter with her?" he inquired. "I'm willing to play the game as it
lies, but I bar lunatics and cripples."

"There's no particular her--yet. You can take your pick. I've no more
idea where she is than you have."

"Now I know you're stark, staring, gibbering----"

"Not a bit of it. I'm inspired--that's all. I've solved your
problem--you only can't believe it."

"How could I? What the devil are you getting at, anyhow?"

"This pet scheme of mine. Lend me your ears. Have you ever lived in a
one-horse country town--a place with one unspeakable hotel and about
twenty stores and five churches?"

"No ..."

"I have; I was born in one of 'em.... Have you any idea what becomes of
the young people of such towns?"

"Not a glimmering."

"Then I'll enlighten your egregious density. ...The boys--those who've
got the stuff in them--strike out for the cities to make their
everlasting fortunes. Generally they do it, too."

"The same as you."

"The same as me," assented Kellogg, unperturbed. "But the yaps, the
Jaspers, stay there and clerk in father's store. After office-hours
they put on their very best mail-order clothes and parade up and down
Main Street, talking loud and flirting obviously with the girls. The
girls haven't much else to do; they don't find it so easy to get away.
A few of 'em escape to boarding-schools and colleges, where they meet
and marry young men from the cities, but the majority of them have to
stay at home and help mother--that's a tradition. If there are two
children or more, the boys get the chance every time; the girls stay
home to comfort the old folks in their old age. Why, by the time
they're old enough to think of marrying--and they begin young, for
that's about the only excitement they find available--you won't find a
small country town between here and the Mississippi where there aren't
about four girls to every boy."

"It's a horrible thought ..."

"You'd think so if you knew what the boys were like. There isn't one in
ten that a girl with any sense or self-respect could force herself to
marry if she ever saw anything better. Do you begin to see my drift?"

"I do not. But go on drifting."

"No? Why, the demand for eligible males is three hundred per cent. in
excess of the supply. Don't you know--no, you don't: I got to that
first--that there are twenty times as many old maids in small country
towns as there are in the cities? It's a fact, and the reason for it is
because when they were young they couldn't lower themselves to accept
the pick of the local matrimonial market. Now, do you see--?"

"You're as interesting as a magazine serial. Please continue in your
next. I pant with anticipation."

"You're an ass.... Now take a young chap from a city, with a good
appearance, more or less a gentleman, who doesn't talk like a yap or
walk like a yap or dress like a yap or act like a yap, and throw him
into such a town long enough for the girls to get acquainted with him.
He simply can't lose, can't fail to cop out the best-looking girl with
the biggest bank-roll in town. I tell you, there's nothing to it!"

"It's wonderful to listen to you, Harry."

"I'm talking horse sense, my son. Now consider yourself: down on your
luck, don't know how to earn a decent living, refusing to accept
anything from your friends, ready (you say) to do almost anything to
get some money.... And think of the country heiresses, with plenty of
money for two, pining away in--in innocuous desuetude--hundreds of
them, fine, straight, good girls, girls you could easily fall in love
with, sighing their lives away for the lack of the likes of you....
Now, why not take one, Nat--when you come to consider it, it's your
duty--marry her and her bank-roll, make her happy, make yourself happy,
and live a contented life on the sunny side of Easy Street for the rest
of your natural born days? Can't you see it now?"

"Yes," Duncan admitted, half-persuaded of the plausibility of the
scheme. "I see--and I admire immensely the intellect that conceived the
notion, Harry. But ... I can't help thinking there must be a catch in
it somewhere."

"Not if you follow my instructions. You see, having come from just such
a hole-in-the-ground, I know just what I'm talking about. Believe me,
everything depends on the way you go about it. There are a lot of
things to contend with at first; you won't enjoy it at all, to begin
with. But I can demonstrate how it can be managed so that you'll win
out to a moral certainty."

Duncan drew a deep breath, sat back and looked Kellogg over very
critically. There was not a suspicion of a gleam of humour in his face;
to the contrary, it blazed with the ardour of the instinctive schemer,
the man who, with the ability to originate, throws himself heart and
soul into the promotion of the product of his imagination. Kellogg was
not sketching the outlines of a gigantic practical joke; he believed
implicitly in the feasibility of his project; and so strongly that he
could infuse even the less susceptible fancy of Duncan with some of his
faith.

"If I didn't know you so well, Harry," said Duncan slowly, "I'd be
certain you were mad. I'm not at all sure that I'm sane. It's raving
idiocy--and it's a pretty damned rank thing to do, to start
deliberately out to marry a woman for her money. But I've been through
a little hell of my own in my time, and--it's not alluring to
contemplate a return to it. There's nothing mad enough nor bad enough
to stop me. What've I got to do?"

Kellogg beamed his triumph. "You'll try it on, then?"

"I'll try anything on. It's a contemptible, low-lived piece of
business--but good may come of it; you can't tell. What've I got to
do?"

Slipping back, Kellogg knitted his fingers and stared at the ceiling,
smiling faintly to himself as he enumerated the conditions that first
appealed to his understanding as essentials toward success.

"First, pick out your town: one of two or three thousand
inhabitants--no larger. I'd suggest, at a hazard guess, some place in
the interior of Pennsylvania. Most of such towns have at least one rich
man with a marriageable daughter--but we'll make sure of that before we
settle on one. Of course any suburban town is barred."

"How so?"

"Oh, they don't count. The girls always know people in the city--can
get there easily. That spoils the game."

"How about the game laws?"

"I'm coming to them. Of course there isn't an open or close season, and
the hunting's always good, but there are a few precautionary measures
to be taken if you want to be sure of bagging an heiress. You won't
like most of 'em."

"Like 'em! I'll live by them!"

"Well, here come the things you mustn't do. You mustn't swear or use
slang; you mustn't smoke and you mustn't drink--"

"Heavens! are these people as inhuman as all that?"

"Worse than that. It might be fatal if you were ever seen in the hotel
bar. And to begin with, you must refuse all invitations, of any sort,
whether to dances, parties, church sociables, or even Sunday dinners."

"Why _Sunday_ dinners?"

"Because Sunday's the only day you'll be invited. Dinner on week-days
is from twelve to twelve-thirty, and it's strictly a business
matter--no time for guests. But you needn't fret; they won't ask you
till they've sized you up pretty carefully."

"Oh!..."

"Moreover, you must be very particular about your dress; it must be
absolutely faultless, but very quiet: clothing sober--dark greys and
blacks--and plain, but the very last word as to cut and fit. And
everything must be in keeping--the very best of shirts, collars, ties,
hats, socks, shoes, underwear--." Kellogg caught Duncan's look and
laughed. "Your laundress will report on everything, you know; so you
must be impeccable."

"I'll be even that--whatever it is."

"Be very particular about having your shoes polished, shave daily and
manicure yourself religiously--but don't let 'em catch you at it."

"Would they raid me if they did?"

"And then, my son, you must work."

Kellogg paused to let his lesson sink in. After a time Duncan observed
plaintively: "I knew there was a catch in it somewhere. What kind of
work?"

"It doesn't make any difference, so long as you get and hold some job
in the town."

"Well, that lets me out. You'll have to sic some other poor devil on
this glittering proposition of yours. I couldn't hold a job in--"

"Wait! I'll tell you how to do it in just a minute."

"I don't mind listening, but--"

"You'll cinch the whole business by going to church without a break.
Don't ever fail--morning and evening every Sunday. Don't forget that."

"Why?"

"It's the most important thing of all."

"Does going to church make such a hit with the young female
Jasper--the Jasperette, as it were?"

"It'll make you more solid than anything else with her popper and
mommer, and that's very necessary when you're a candidate for their
ducats as well as their daughter. You must work and you must go to
church."

"That can't be all. Surely you can think of something else?"

"Those are the cardinal rules--church and work until you've landed your
heiress. After that you can move back to civilisation.... Now as soon
as you strike your town you want to make arrangements for board and
lodging in some old woman's house--preferably an old maid. You'll be
sure to find at least half a dozen of 'em, willing to take boarders,
but you want to be equally sure to pick out the one that talks the
most, so that she'll tell the neighbours all about you. Don't worry
about that, though, they all talk. When you've moved In, stock up your
room with about twenty of the driest-looking books in the world--law
books look most imposing; fix up a table with lots of stationery--pens
and pencils, red and black ink and all that sort of thing; make the
room look as if you were the most sincere student ever. And by no means
neglect to have a well-worn Bible prominently in evidence: you can buy
one second-hand at some book-store before you start out."

"I'd have to, of course. I thank you for the flattery. Proceed with the
programme of the gay, mad life I must lead. I'm going to have a swell
time: that's perfectly plain."

"As soon as you're shaken down in your room, make the rounds of the
stores and ask for work. Try and get into the dry-goods emporium if you
can: the girls all shop there. But anything will do, except a grocery
or a hardware store and places like that. You mustn't consider any
employment that would soil your clothes or roughen your lily-white
hands."

"You expect me to believe I'd have any chance of winning a
millionaire's daughter if I were a ribbon-clerk in a dry-goods store?"

"The best in the world. The ribbon-clerk is her social equal; he calls
her Mary and she calls him Joe."

"Done with you: me for the ribbon counter. Anything else?"

"The storekeepers aren't apt to employ you at first; they'll be
suspicious of you."

"They will be afterwards, all right. However--?"

"So you must simply call on them--walk in, locate the boss and tell
him: 'I'm looking for employment.' Don't press it; just say it and get
out."

"No trouble whatever about that; it's always that way when I ask for
work."

"They'll send for you before long, when they make up their minds that
you're a decent, moral young man; for they know you'll draw trade. And
every Sunday--"

"I know: church!"

"Absolutely.... Pick out the one the rich folks go to. Go in quietly
and do just as they do: stand up and kneel, look up the hymns and sing,
just when they do. Be careful not to sing too loud, or anything like
that: just do it all modestly, as if you were used to it. Better go to
church here two or three times and get the hang of it...."

"Here, now--"

"Nearly all the wealthy codgers in such towns are deacons, you see, and
though they may not speak to you for months on the street, it's their
business to waylay you after the service is over and shake hands with
you and tell you they hope you enjoyed the sermon and ask you to come
again. And you can bank on it, they'll all take notice from the first."

"It's no wonder Bartlett made you a partner, Harry."

"Now behave. I want you to get in right. ... If you follow the rules
I've outlined, not only will all the girls in town be falling over
themselves to get to you first, but their fond parents will be egging
them on. Then all you've got to do is to pick out the one with the
biggest bundle and--"

"Make a play for her?"

"Not on your life. That would be fatal. Your part is to put yourself in
her way. She'll do all the courting, and when she scents the
psychological moment she'll do the proposing."

"It doesn't sound natural, but you certainly seem to know what you're
drooling about."

"You can anchor to that, Nat."

"And are you finished?"

"I am. Of course I'll probably think of more things to wise you to,
before you go."

Duncan laughed shortly and tilted back in his chair, selecting another
cigarette. "And you're the chap who wanted me to go to some bromidic
old show to-night! Harry, you're immense. Why didn't you ever let me
suspect you had all this romantic imagination in your system?"

"Imagination be blowed, son. This is business." Kellogg removed the
stopper from the decanter and filled both glasses again. "Well, what do
you say?"

"I've just said my say, Harry. It's amazing; I'm proud of you."

"But will you do it?"

"Everything else aside, how can I? I've got to live, you know."

"But I propose to stake you."

Duncan came down to earth. "No, you won't; not a cent. I'm in earnest
about this thing: no more sponging on you, Harry. Besides--"

"No, seriously, Nat: I mean this, every word of it. I want you to do
it--to please me, if you like; I've a notion something will come of it.
And I believe from the bottom of my heart there's not the slightest
risk if you'll play the cards as they fall, according to Hoyle."

"Harry, I believe you do."

"I do, firmly. And I'll put the proposition on a business basis, if you
like."

"Go on; there's no holding you."

"You start out to-morrow and order your war kit. Get everything you
need, and plenty of it, and have the bills sent to me. You can be ready
inside a fortnight. The day you start I'll advance you five hundred
dollars. When you're married you can repay me the amount of the
advances with interest at ten per cent, and I'll consider it a mighty
good deal for myself. Now, will you?"

"You mean it?"

"Every word of it. Well?"

For a moment longer Duncan hesitated; then the vision of what he must
return to, otherwise, decided him. In desperation he accepted. "It's a
drowning man's straw," he said, a little breathlessly. "I'm sure I
shouldn't. But I will."

Kellogg flung a hand across the table, palm uppermost.

"Word of honour, Nat?"

Duncan let his hand fall into it. "Word of honour! I'll see it
through."

"Good! It's a bargain." Kellogg lifted his glass high in air. "To the
fortune hunter!" he cried, half laughing.

Duncan nervously fingered the stem of his glass. "God help the future
Mrs. Duncan!" he said, and drank.




IV


TRIUMPH OF MR. HOMER LITTLEJOHN

The twenty-first of June was a day of memorable triumph to me, a day of
memorable events for Radville.

Only the evening previous Will Bigelow and I had indulged in
acrimonious argument in the office of the Bigelow House, the subject of
contention being the importance of the work to which I am devoting my
declining years, to wit, the recording of _The History of Radville
Township, Westerly County, Pennsylvania_; Will maintaining with that
obstinacy for which he is famous, that nothing ever had happened, does
happen, can or will happen in our community, I insisting gently but
firmly that it knows no day unmarked by important occurrence (for it
would ill become me, as the only literary man in Radville, to yield a
point in dispute with the proprietor of the town tavern). Besides, he
was wrong, even as I was indisputably right--only he had not the grace
to admit it. We ended vulgarly with a bet, Will wagering me the best
five-cent Clear Havana in the Bigelow House sample-room that nothing
worth mentioning would take place in Radville before sundown of the
following day.

I left him, returning to my room at Miss Carpenter's (Will and I are
old friends, but I refuse to eat the food he serves his guests), warmed
by the prospect of certain triumph if a little appalled by the prospect
of winning the stake; and sympathising a little with Will, who, for all
his egregious stubborness, has some excuse for upholding his
unreasonable and ridiculous views. He knows no better, having never had
the opportunity to find out for himself how utterly absurd are his
claims for the outside world. Whereas I have.

He's an adventurer at heart, Will Bigelow, a romantic soul crusted
heavily with character--like a volcano smouldering beneath its lava.
For many years he has managed the Bigelow House, with his thoughts
apart from it, his eyes ever seeking the horizon that recedes beyond
the soaring rim of our encircling cup of hills, his heart forever
yearning forth to the outer world; which he erroneously conceives to be
a theatre of events--as if outside of Radville only could there be
things worth seeing, considering, or doing, or matters of any sort that
move momentously! As long as I've known the man (and we played truant
together fifty years ago--hookey, we called it then) he's had his heart
set on going forth from Radville, "for to admire and for to see, for to
view this wide world o'er"; always he has presented himself to me as
one poised on the pinnacle of purpose, ready the next instant to dive
and strike out into the teeming unknown beyond the barrier hills. But
this promise he has never fulfilled. He still maintains that he will
surely go--next week--after the hayin's over--as soon as the ice is
in--the minute Mary graduates from High School. ... But I know he never
will.

So to Will Radville is as dull as ditchwater to a teamster; to me it's
as fascinating as that same ditchwater to a biologist with a
microscope. I see nothing going on in the world outside of Radville
more important than our daily life. Too long I have lived away from it,
a stranger in strange lands, not to appreciate its relative
significance in the scheme of things. It makes all the difference--the
view-point: Will sees Radville from its homely heart outwards, I stand
on its boundaries, a native but yet, somehow in the local esteem (by
reason of my long residence in the East) an outlander. Thus I get a
perspective upon the place, to Will and his ilk denied.

It seems curious that things should have fallen out thus for the two of
us: that Will Bigelow, all afire with the lust for travel, should never
have mustered up enterprise enough to break his home ties, whilst I
whose dearest desire had always been to live no day of my alloted span
away from Radville, should have been, in a manner which I'm bound
presently to betray, forced out into the world; that he, the rebellious
stay-at-home, cursing the destiny which chained him, should have
prospered and become the man of substance he is, while I, mutinously
venturing, should have returned only to watch my sands run out in
poverty--what's little better.

Not that I would have you think me whining: I have enough, little but
ample for my simple needs, if inadequate for my ambitions or my
neighbours' necessities. My editorial work for the _Radville
Citizen_ is quite remunerative, while my weekly column of local
gossip for the _Westerly Gazette_ brings me in a little, and I've
one or two other modest sources of still more modest income. But
Radville folks are poor, many of them, many who are very dear to me for
old sake's sake. There's Sam Graham.... Though I wouldn't have you
understand that as a community we are not moderately prosperous and
contented, comfortable if not energetic and advanced. This is not a
pushing town: it has never known a boom. That I'm sure will some day
come, but I hope not in my time. I have faith in the mountains that
fold us roundabout; they are rich with the possibilities of coal and
iron, and year by year are being more and more widely opened up and
developed; year by year the ranks of flaming, reeking coke ovens push
farther on beside the railway that penetrates our valley. But as yet
their smoke does not foul our skies, nor does their refuse pollute our
river, nor their soot tarnish our vegetation. And as I say, I hope this
is not to be while I live, though sometimes I have fears: Blinky
Lockwood made a fortune selling the coal that was discovered beneath
his father's old farm over Westerly way, and ever since that there's
been more or less quiet prospecting going on in our vicinity. I shall
be sorry to see the day when Radville is other than as it is: the
quiet, peaceful, sleepy little town, nestling in the bosom of the
hills, clean, sweet and wholesome....

But this is rambling far from the momentous twenty-first of June, my
day of triumph.

I shall try to set down connectedly and coherently the events which
culminated in the humbling of Will Bigelow to the dust.

To begin with, we were early startled by the rumour that Hiram Nutt,
theretofore deemed unconquerable, had been disastrously defeated at
checkers in Willoughby's grocery--and that by Watty the tailor, of all
men in Radville. The rumour was confirmed by eleven in the forenoon,
and in itself should have provided us with a nine days' wonder.

As it happened, an event happening almost simultaneously confused our
minds. At eleven-fifteen Miss Carpenter's household was thrown into
consternation by the scandalous behaviour of her black cat, Caesar, who
chose suddenly to terminate a long and outwardly respectable career as
Miss Carpenter's familiar by having kittens under the horse-hair sofa
in the parlour. Incidentally this indelicate and ungentlemanly
behaviour temporarily unloosed the hinges of Miss Carpenter's reason,
so that my supper suffered that evening, and for several days she
wandered round the house with blank and witless eyes. Perhaps I should
have warned her, for I had latterly come to suspect Caesar of leading a
double life; but for reasons which seemed sufficient I had refrained.

By the noon train Roland Barnette received his new summer suit from
Chicago. I did not see it till evening, but heard of it before one,
since Roland donned it immediately and wore it to the bank that very
afternoon. I understand it caused something very near a run on the
bank; people came in to draw a dollar or so or get change and lingered
to feast their outraged visions, so that Blinky Lockwood, the
president, had to send Roland home to change before closing-time. He
changed back, however, as soon as off duty, and spent the rest of the
afternoon and evening hours in Sothern and Lee's, at the soda-fountain;
which Sothern and Lee did not object to, since it drew trade.

Pete Willing established a record by getting drunk at Schwartz's bar by
three in the afternoon, his best previous time being four-thirty; and
Mrs. Willing chased him up Centre Street until, at the corner of Main,
he blundered into the arms of Judge Scott; who ordered him to arrest
and lock himself up; which Pete, being the sheriff, solemnly did,
saying that it was preferable to a return to home and wife.

At five o'clock there was a dog-fight in front of Graham's drug-store.

At five-forty-five the evening train lurched in, bearing The Mysterious
Stranger.

Tracey Tanner saw him first, having driven down to the station with his
father's surrey on the off-chance of picking up a quarter or so from
some drummer wishing to be conveyed to the Bigelow House. Only
outlanders pay money for hacks in Radville; everybody else walks, of
course. Naturally Tracey took The Mysterious Stranger for a drummer; he
had three trunks and a heavy packing-box, so Tracey's misapprehension
was pardonable. Instinctively he drove him to the Bigelow House; Will
now and again makes Tracey a present of a bottle of sarsaparilla or
lemon-pop, with the result that Tracey calls Tannehill, who runs the
opposition hotel, a skinflint and never takes strangers there except on
their express desire. The Mysterious Stranger merely asked to be driven
to the best hotel. This is not like most commercial travellers, who as
a rule know where they want to go, even in a strange town, having made
inquiry in advance from their brothers of the road. Tracey made a note
of this, and is further on record as having observed that this stranger
was rather better dressed than the run of drummers, if not so nobbily.
Moreover, he was reticent under the cross-fire of Tracey's
irrepressible conversation, and failed to ask the name of the first
pretty girl they passed; who happened to be Angle Tuthill. Finally The
Mysterious Stranger actually tipped Tracey a whole quarter for carrying
his suit-case into the hotel office.

With these incitements it would have been unreasonable to expect Tracey
to do otherwise than linger around for the good health of his sense of
inquisitiveness, which would else have been severely sprained.

Will Bigelow was dozing behind the desk, lulled by the sound of Hi
Nutt's voice in the barroom, as he explained to all and sundry just how
he had inadvertently permitted Watty the tailor to best him at checkers
that morning. Otherwise the office was deserted. Tracey wakened Will by
stamping heavily across the floor, and Will mechanically pushed down
his spectacles and dipped a pen in ink, slewing the register round for
the guest's signature. He says he knew at a glance that The Mysterious
Stranger was no travelling man, but this is a moot point, Tracey's
memory being minutely accurate and at variance with Will's assertion.

The Mysterious Stranger was a young man, rather severely clothed in a
dark suit which excited no interest in Bigelow's understanding,
although I, when I saw him later, had no difficulty in realising that
it had never been made by a tailor whose place of business was more
than five doors removed from Fifth Avenue. He was tallish, but not
really tall, and carried himself with a slight stoop which took way
from his real height. Tracey says he had a way of looking at you as if
he was smiling inside at some joke he'd heard a long time ago; and I
don't know but that's a fairly apt description of his ordinary
expression. He had a way, too, of nodding jerkily at you--just once--to
show he recognised you or understood what you were driving at; at other
times he carried his head a trifle to one side and slightly forward. He
was a man you wouldn't forget, somehow, though what there was about him
that was remarkable nobody seemed to know.

He nodded that jerky way in answer to Will Bigelow's "G'devenin'," and
without saying anything took the pen and started to register. He had to
stop, however, for Tracey was pressing him so close upon the right that
he couldn't get any play for his elbow, and after a minute or two he
asked Tracey politely would he mind stepping round to the left, where
he could see just as well. So Tracey did. Then he wrote his name in a
good round hand: "Nathaniel Duncan, N.Y."

"I'd like a room with a bath," he told Will: "something simple and
chaste, within the means of a man in moderate circumstances."

Will thought he was joking at first, but he didn't smile, so Will
explained that there was a bathroom on the third floor at the end of
the hall, though there wasn't much call for it. "I could give you a
room next to that," he said, "but you wouldn't want it, I guess."

"Why not?" asked The Mysterious Stranger.

"Because," said Will, "'taint near the sample-room."

"That doesn't make any difference; I'm on the wagon."

The only sense Will could get out of that was that the young man was
travelling for a buggy house and hadn't brought any samples with him.
"I thought," he allowed, "as how you'd be wantin' a place to display
your samples, but of course if you're in the wagon business--"

"Oh," said Mr. Duncan, "I thought you meant the 'sample-room' over
there." He nodded toward the bar. "That's what you call the
dispensaries of intoxicating liquors in this part of the country, is it
not?"

Will made a noise resembling an affirmative, and as soon as he got his
breath explained that travelling men generally wanted a sort of a
showroom next to theirs and that that was called a sample-room, too.

"But I'm not a travelling man," said The Mysterious Stranger. "So I
shall have as little use for the one as the other."

"Then the room on the third floor'll do for you," said Will. "How long
do you calculate on stayin'?"

"That will depend," said Mr. Duncan: "a day or so--perhaps longer;
until I can find comfortable and more permanent quarters."

In his amazement Will jabbed the pen so hard into the potato beside the
ink-well that he never could get the nib out and had to buy a new one.
"You don't mean to say you're thinkin' of coming here to live?" he
gasped.

"Yes, I do," said the young man apologetically. "I don't think you'll
find me in the way. I shall be very quiet and unobtrusive. I'm a
student, looking for a quiet place in which to pursue my studies."

"Well," said Will, "you've found it all right. There ain't no quieter
place in Pennsylvany than Radville, Mr. Duncan. I hope you'll like it,"
he said, sarcastic.

"I shall endeavour to," said the young man.

"And now may I go to my room, please? I should like to renovate my
travel-stained person to some extent before dinner."

"You'll have time," said Will; "dinner's at noon to-morrow. I guess
you're thinkin' about supper. That's ready now. Here, Tracey, you carry
this gentleman's things up to number forty-three."

But Tracey had already gone, and such was his haste to spread the news
that he forgot to take the horse and surrey back to the stable, but
left it standing in front of the hotel till eight o'clock; for which
oversight, I am credibly informed, his father justly dealt with him
before sending him to bed.

I have never been able to understand how we failed to hear of it at
Miss Carpenter's before seven o'clock. That was the hour when, having
finished supper and my first evening pipe, I started down-town to the
_Citizen_ office, intending to stop in at the Bigelow House on the
way and confound Will with the list of the day's happenings. Main
Street was pretty well crowded for that hour, I remember noticing, and
most of the townsfolk were grouped together on the corners, underneath
the lamps, discussing something rather excitedly. I paid no particular
attention, realising that between Caesar, Pete Willing, Roland
Burnette's suit and the checker game, they had enough to talk about. So
it wasn't until I walked into the Bigelow House office that I either
heard or saw anything of The Mysterious Stranger.

Will Bigelow was in his usual place behind the desk, and looked, I
thought, rather disgruntled. His reply to my "Howdy, Will?" sounded
somewhat snappish. But he got out of his chair and moved round the end
of the desk just as the young man came out of the dining-room door.
Then Will pulled up and I realised that he was calling my attention to
the stranger.

So far as I could see, he seemed an ordinary, everyday, good-looking,
good-natured young man, whose naturally sunny disposition had been
insulted by the food recently set before him. He wandered listlessly
out upon the porch and stood there, with his hands in his pockets,
looking up and down Centre Street, just then being shadowed into the
warm, purple June dusk, beneath its double row of elms. We've always
thought it a rather attractive street, and that night it seemed
especially lively with its trickle of girls and boys strolling up and
down, and the groups of grown folks on the corners, and Roland
Burnette's summer suit conspicuous through Sothern and Lee's
plate-glass windows; and I supposed the young man was admiring it all.
But now I know him better. He felt just the same about Main Street,
corner of Centre, Radville, as I should have about Broadway and
Forty-second Street, New York, if you had set me down there and told me
I'd got to get accustomed to the idea that I must live there. He was
saying, deep down in his heart: "O _Lord_!"--with the rising
inflection.

Will grabbed my arm, without saying anything, and pulled me into the
bar.

"Hello!" I said, as he went round behind and opened the cigar-case,
"what's up?"

He took out two boxes of the finest five-centers in town and placed
them before me. "Them's up," he said. "You win. Have one."

It staggered me to have him give in that way; I had been looking
forward to a long and diverting dispute. "I guess you've heard
everything worth hearing about to-day's history," I said, disappointed,
as I selected the least unpleasant looking of the cigars.

"No, I haven't," he said. "I didn't have to hear anything. What earned
you that smoke took place right here in this office.... Here," he said,
striking a match for me.

I had been trying to put the cigar away so that I might dispose of it
without hurting Will's feelings, but he had me, so I recklessly poked
the thing into the automatic clipper and then into my mouth. "What do
you mean?" I asked, puffing.

"Come 'long outside," said Will; and we went out on the porch just in
time to see Mr. Duncan going wearily upstairs to his room. "I mean,"
said Will, _"him"_. And then he told me all about it.

"But things like that don't happen every day," he wound up defensively.
"I'll go you another cigar on to-morrow."

"No, you won't," I said indignantly; and furtively dropped the infamous
thing over the railing.

I am never successful in my little attempts at deception, even in
self-defence. In all candour I believe my disposition of that cigar
would have gone undetected but for my notorious bad luck. Of course
Bigelow's setter, Pompey, had to be asleep right under the spot where I
dropped the cigar, and equally of course the burning end had to make
instantaneous connection with his nerve centres, via his hide, with such
effect that he arose in agony and subsequently used coarse language.
Investigation naturally discovered my empty-handed perfidy. To no one
else in Radville would this have happened.

On the other hand, no one else in Radville would have thrown away the
cigar.




V


MARGARET'S DAUGHTER

Discomfort roused Duncan from his rest at an early hour, the morning
following his arrival in Radville. I must confess that the beds in the
Bigelow House are no better than they should be; in fact, according to
Duncan, not so good. Duncan ought to know; he has slept in one of them,
or tried to; a trial thus far to me denied. From what he has said,
however, I shudder to think what will become of me should I ever lose
the shelter of Miss Carpenter's second-story front and be thrown out
into a heartless world to choose between the Bigelow House and Frank
Tannehill's Radville Inn....

Duncan arose and consulted the two-dollar watch which he had left on
the pine washstand by the window. It was half-past seven o'clock, and
that seemed early to him. He was tired and would willingly have turned
in again, but a rueful glance at the couch of his night-long vigil
sufficed him. He lifted a hand to Heaven and vowed solemnly: "Never
again!"

As he bent over the washstand and poured a cupful of water into the
china basin, thus emptying the pitcher, he was conscious of a pain in
his back; but a thought cheered him. "They must have decent stables in
this town," he considered, brightening. "The haymows for mine, after
this."

He dressed with scrupulous care, mindful of Kellogg's parting words,
the sense of which was that first impressions were most important. "All
the same," Duncan thought, "I don't believe they count in a dead-and-
alive place like this. There's no one here with sufficient animation to
realise I'm in town." This shows how little he understood our little
community. A day of enlightenment was in store for him.

Pansy Murphy was scrubbing out the office when he came down for
breakfast. She is large, of what is known as a full complexion,
good-hearted and energetic. His pause at the foot of the stairs, as he
surveyed in dismay the seven seas of soapy water that occupied the
floor, aroused her. She sat back suddenly on her heels and looked her
fill of him, with her blue Irish eyes very wide, and her mouth a trap.
He bowed politely. Pansy saved herself from falling over backwards by a
supreme effort, scrubbed her hair out of her eyes with a very wet hand,
and gave him "Good-marrin', Misther Dooncan," in a brogue as rich as
you could wish for.

He started violently. "Heavens!" he said. "I am discovered!"

"Make yer moind aisy about thot," Pansy assured him. "'Tis known all
over town who ye arre, what's yer name, how manny troonks ye've brought
wid ye, and th' rayson f'r yer comin' here."

"A comforting thought, thank you," he commented: "to awake to find
one's self grown famous over-night!..."

"Now ye know," she returned, emboldened, "what it is to be a big toad
in a small puddle."

"I thank you." He nodded again, with a comprehensive survey of the
reeking floor. "I'm afraid I do." With which he slipped and slid over
to and through the swinging wicker doors of the dining-room.

It was deserted. From the negligee of the tables, littered with the
plates and dishes, dreary survivors of a dozen breakfasts, he divined
that he was the tardiest guest in the household. A slatternly young
woman in a soiled shirt-waist--the waitress--received him with great
calm and waved him toward a table by the window, where an unused cover
was laid. He went meekly, dogged by her formidable presence. She stood
over him and glared down.

"Haman neggs," she said defiantly, "steakan nomlette."

"I'll be a martyr," he told her civilly. "Me for the steak."

She frowned gloomily and tramped away. He folded his hands and, cheered
by an appetising aroma of warm water and yellow soap from the office,
considered the prospect from the window by his side. Three children and
a yellow dog came along and watched him do it, dispassionately
reviewing his points in clear young voices. Tracey Tanner ambled into
view on the other side of the street and beamed at him generously, his
round red face resembling, Duncan thought, more than anything else a
summer sun rising through mist. Josie Lockwood (he was to discover her
name later) passed with her pert little nose ostentatiously pointed
away from him; none the less he detected a gleam in the corner of her
eye.... Others went by, singly or in groups, all more or less openly
interested in him.

He tried to look unconscious, but with ill success. There was nothing
particularly engaging in the view: the broad, dusty street lined with
commonplace structures of "frame" and brick, glowing in the morning
sunshine. There were, to be sure, cool shadows beneath the trees, but
the suggestion was all of summer heat. There was a watering-trough and
hitching-rail directly opposite, a little to one side of Hemmenway's
feed-store, and there a well-fed mare stood, drooping dejectedly
between the shafts of a dilapidated buggy. On the corner was a
two-storey brick building with large plate-glass windows on the ground
floor for the display of intimate articles of feminine apparel. The
black and gold sign above proclaimed it: "The Fair. Dry Goods &
Notions. Leonard & Call." Duncan considered it with grave respect. "The
scene of my future activities," he observed.

By this time his audience had become too large and friendly for his
endurance. He rose and retired to a less public table.

In her own good time the waitress returned with a plate, and a small
oval platter in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. She placed
them before him with a manner that told him plainly he could never make
himself the master of her affections. The small oval platter was
discovered to contain a small segment of dark-brown ham and two fried
eggs swimming in grease.

Duncan questioned the woman with mute, appealing eyes.

"Steak's run out," she told him curtly.

"Leaving no address?" he inquired with forced gaiety.

A suppressed smile softened her austerity, and she turned away to hide
it. "To think," he wondered, "that a sense of humour should inhabit
that!" He broke a roll and munched it gloomily, pondering this
revelation. "And such humour !" he added, with justice.

After an interval the woman returned. He had refrained from the staple
dish. She indicated it with a grimy forefinger.

"Please!" he begged plaintively. "I'm never very hungry in the
morning."

"I guess you don't like the table here," she observed icily, clearing
away.

"Do you?"

"I don't have to; I live home."

He stared. Could it be possible...?

"I know a good old one, too," he ventured hopefully. "Now here." He
drew his coffee cup toward him and began to stir with energy. "You say:
'It looks like rain'; and I'll say: 'Yes, but it tastes a little like
coffee.'"

She clattered away indignantly. He rose, depressed, and sighing sought
the outer air.

In the course of a forenoon's stroll Radville discovered itself to him
in all its squalor and its loveliness. It sits in the centre of a broad
valley of rolling meadow-land, studded with infrequent homesteads,
broken into rather extensive farms, threaded by a shallow silver stream
that gives its all in tribute to the Susquehanna far in the south. The
barrier mountains rise about it like the sides of a bowl, with a great
V-shaped piece chipped out of the southern wall. This break we call the
Gap; through it the railroad comes to us, through it the river escapes.
The hills rear high and steep, their swelling flanks cloaked in sombre
green and grey, with here and there a bald spot like a splash of ochre
where there's been a landslide, climbing directly from the plain, with
no foothills. A recluse, I have thought, must have chosen this spot for
a town site; sickened of the world, he sought seclusion--and found it
here to his heart's content. Until the coke-ovens come, following the
miners, with their attendant hordes of Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians,
we shall be near to God, for we shall know peace....

The town has been laid out with great rectangularity; the river divides
it unequally. On the western bank is the larger community--locally, the
Old Town, retaining its characteristics of sobriety, quiet and comfort;
here, also, is the business centre--such business as there is. Here
Duncan found homely residences sitting back from the street in ample
grounds--grounds, perhaps, not very carefully groomed, but in spite of
that attractive and pleasant to the eye. With one or two exceptions,
none were strongly suggestive of wealth. He detected a trace of
ostentation, and no taste whatever, in Lockwood's new villa (I'm told
that's the polite designation for the edifice he caused to be erected
what time the plague of riches smote him and the old home on Cherry
Street became too small for the collective family chest), and there was
quiet dignity in the quaintly columned facade of the Bohun mansion, now
occupied solely by old Colonel Bohun, lonely and testy, reputed the
richest as well as the most miserable man in the county. But as to his
wealth, I doubt if rumour runs by more than tradition; Blinky
Lockwood's new-found hundred-thousands are growing rapidly toward the
million mark, unless Blinky's a worse business man than the town takes
him to be.

An old stone arch (whereon lovers linger in the moonlight) spans the
stream and links the Old Town with the new, which we sometimes term the
Flats, but more often simply Over There. It is a sordid huddle of dingy
and down-at-the-heel tenements, housing the poorer working classes and
the frankly worthless and ruffianly riff-raff of the neighbourhood.
There are eight gin-mills Over There as against two sample-rooms in the
Old Town, and of the local constabulary two-thirds lead exciting lives
patrolling the Flats; the remaining third is ordinarily to be found
dozing in the backroom of Schwartz's, and if roused will answer to the
name and title of Pete Willing, Sheriff and Chief of Police.

Duncan reviewed both sides of the municipal face with fine
impartiality--the Flats last; and turned back to the Old Town. "There's
one thing," he communed as he reached the bridge: "If these people ever
find me out they'll run me across the river--sure."

He paused there, looking up and down the valley with contemplative
gaze; and it was there I found him.

As is my custom, I had devoted the earlier morning hours to the
compilation of that work which is to gain for the name of Littlejohn a
trifle more respect than, I fear, it owns in Radville nowadays; and
afterwards, again in accordance with habit, had started out for my
morning constitutional. As I was about to leave the house Miss
Carpenter waylaid me and, in a voice still tremulous from the shock of
yesterday, asked me to hunt up Jake Sawyer in the Flats and tell him to
come and cut the grass.

I was not in the least unwilling, for the walk was not long, and the
morning very pleasant--not too warm, and bright with the smiling spirit
of June. I don't remember feeling more cheerful and at peace with the
world than when I marched off on my mission. The cloud I might, of
course, have anticipated: clouds always come, and a lifetime has taught
me to be sceptical of that tale about the silver lining. And even when
it came it seemed no more depressing, of no more significant moment,
than the cloud shadow that scurries across a wheat-field with no effect
other than to enhance the beauty of the sunshine that pursues it.

Old Colonel Bohun was the cloud-shadow of that morning. I met him
turning into Main Street from Mortimer--at the head of which his
mansion stands. He came down the sidewalk, but with a hint of haste in
his manner: a tall old man, bending beneath the burden of his years,
his fierce old face and iron-grey hair shaded as always by the black
slouch hat with the flapping brim, his rounded shoulders cloaked with
the black Inverness cape he wore summer and winter. In spite of his age
and evident decrepitude, he bodied forth the spirit of what he had
been, and none could pass him without knowledge of his presence; he
drew eyes as a magnet draws filings, and drawing, held them in respect.
I doubted if there were a man in Radville who could meet the old
colonel with anything but a mingling of fear and deference--with one or
two exceptions. For myself I hated him heartily, and he, looking down
at me from the peak of pride whereon his iron soul perched, despised me
with equal intensity. So we got along famously at our infrequent
encounters.

This morning I caught a flash of fire from his red-rimmed old eyes, and
told myself I was sorry for whoever crossed his path before he returned
to his lonely castle. It was his habit at odd intervals to foray down
the village streets with one grievance or another rankling in his
bosom, seeking some unlucky one upon whose head to wreak his
resentment. We had come to recognise the heavy, slow tapping of his
thick cane as a harbinger of trouble, even as you might prognosticate a
thunderstorm from the rumbling beneath the horizon.

I saw he recognised me and gave him a civil salute, which he returned
with a brusque nod and a sharper, "Good-morning, Littlejohn," as he
passed. Then he swung into Main Street, paralleling my course on the
opposite sidewalk, and went _thump-thumping_ along, darting quick
glances hither and yon beneath his heavy brows, like some dark
incarnation of perverse pride and passion.

Partly because the sight of him sensibly influenced my mood, and partly
because inevitably he made me think of Sam Graham, I turned off at
Beech Street, leaving him to pursue his way toward the centre of town.
Graham's one-horse drug-store stood on Beech, a block south of Main.
That being the least promising location in town for a business of any
sort, Sam had naturally selected it when he concluded to set up shop.
If Sam had ever in his life displayed any symptoms of business
sagacity, Radville would never have recovered from the shock. I believe
it was Legrand Gunn, our only really certificated village wit, who
coined the epigram: "As useless as to take a prescription to Graham's."
The implication being that Graham didn't carry sufficient stock to
fill any prescription; which was largely true; he couldn't; he hadn't
the money to stock up with. What little he took in from time to time
went in part to the support of Betty and himself, but mainly to pay
interest on his debts and buy raw materials for models of his
thousand-and-one inventions. Most Radvillians firmly believed that Sam
has at some time or other in his busy, worthless career invented
everything under the sun, practicable or impracticable--the former
always a few days after somebody else had taken out patents for the
identical device. But at that time no one believed he would ever make a
cent out of any one of the children of his ingenious brain; nor was I,
in this respect, more credulous than any of my fellow-townsmen.

I lingered a moment outside the shop, thinking of the change that had
come over it since the death of Margaret Graham, Betty's mother. For,
despite its out-of-the-way location, the shop had not always been
unprofitable; while Margaret lived (my heart still ached with the
memory of her name) Sam's business had prospered. She had been one of
those woman who can rise to any emergency in the interest of her loved
ones; the first to realise Sam's improvidence and lack of executive
ability, she had taken hold of the business with a firm hand and made
it pay--while she lived. It has never ceased to be a source of
wondering speculation to me, that she, with her gentle training, so
wholly aloof from every thought of commerce or economy, should have
proven herself so thorough and level-headed a business woman. There's
no accounting for it, indeed, save on the theory that she conceived it
a woman's function to make up for man's deficiencies; Sam needed her,
so she become his wife; he needed a manager, so she had became that
also....

During Margaret's regime, as I say, the shop had thrived. Sam had few
ill-wishers in Radville; the trade came his way. Then Betty was born
and Margaret died....

Most of this I have on hearsay. I left Radville shortly after their
marriage and did not return until some months after Margaret's burial.
By that time the shop had begun to show signs of neglect; its stock was
decimated, its trade likewise. Sam was struggling with his inventions
more fiercely than ever--seeking forgetfulness, I always thought. The
business was allowed to take care of itself. He had always a serene
faith in his tomorrows.

Now the little shop had been far distanced by the competition of
Sothern and Lee. It was twenty years behind the times, as the saying
is. Small, darksome, dreary and dingy, it served chiefly as a
living-room for Sam, his daughter, and his cronies, as well as for his
workshop. He had a bench and a ramshackle lathe in one corner, where
you might be sure to find him futilely pottering at almost any hour. He
owned the little building--or that portion in it which it were a farce
to term the equity above the mortgage--and Betty kept house for him in
three rooms above the store.

I saw nothing of him as I stepped across the street, and was wondering
if he were at home when, through the small, dark panes of glass in his
show windows I discerned his white old head bobbing busily over
something on the rear counter. I pushed the door open and entered. He
looked up with his never-failing smile of welcome and a wave of his
hand.

"Howdy, Homer? Come in. Well, well, I'm glad to see you. Sit down--I
think that chair there by the stove will hold together under you."

"What are you doing, Sam?" I asked.

"Fixin' up the sody fountain. 'Meant to get it working last month,
Homer, but somehow I kind of forgot."

He rubbed away briskly at the single faucet which protruded above the
counter, lathering it briskly with a metal polish that smelt to Heaven.

"Do much sody trade, Sam?"

He paused, passing his worn old fingers reflectively across a chin
snowy with a stubble of neglected beard. "No," he allowed thoughtfully,
"not so much as we used to, now that Sothern and Lee've got this
new-fangled notion of puttin' ice cream in a nickel glass of sody. Most
of the young folks go there, now, but still I get a call flow and
then--and every little bit helps." He rubbed on ferociously for a
moment. "'Course, I'd do more, likely, if I carried a bigger line of
flavours."

"How many do you carry?"

"One," he admitted with a sigh, "vanilly."

While I filled my pipe he continued to rub very industriously.

"Why don't you get more?"

He flashed me one of his pale, genial smiles. "I'm thinkin' of it,
Homer, soon's I get some money in. Next week, mebbe. There's a man in
N'York that mebbe can be int'rested in one of my inventions, Roland
Barnette says. Mebbe he'd be willin' to put a little money in it,
Roland says, and of course if he does, I'll be able to stock up
considerable."

I sighed covertly for him. He rubbed, humming a tuneless rhythm to
himself.

"Roland's goin' to write to him about it."

"What invention?" I asked, incredulous.

Sam put down his bottle of polish and came round the counter, beaming;
nothing pleases him better than an opportunity to exhibit some one of
his innumerable models. "I'll show you, Homer," he volunteered
cheerfully, shuffling over to his work-bench. He rasped a match over
its surface and applied the flame to a small gas-bracket fixed to the
wall. A strong rush of gas extinguished the match, and he turned the
flow half off before trying again. This time the vapour caught and
settled to a steady, brilliant flame as white as and much softer than
acetylene.

"There!" he said in triumph. "What d'ye think of that, Homer?"

"Why," I said, "I didn't know you had an acetylene plant."

"No more have I, Homer."

"But what is that, then?" I demanded.

"It's my invention," he returned proudly.

"I've been workin' on it two years, Homer, and only got it goin'
yestiddy. It's going to be a great thing, I tell you."

"But what _is_ it, Sam?"

"It's gas from crude petroleum, Homer. See ..." he continued,
indicating a tank beneath the bench which seemed to be connected with
the bracket by a very simple system of piping, broken by a smaller,
cylindrical tank. "Ye put the oil in there--just crude, as it comes out
of the wells, Homer; it don't need refinin'--and it runs through this
and down here to this, where it's vaporised--much the same's they
vaporise gasoline for autymobile engines, ye know--and then it just
naturally flows up to the bracket--and there ye are."

"It's wonderful, Sam," said I, wondering if it really were.

"And the best part of it is the economy, Homer. A gallon will run one
jet six weeks, day in and out. And simple to install. I tell ye--"

"Have you got it patented yet?"

"Yes, siree! took out patents just as soon as it struck me how simple
it 'ud be--more than two years ago. Only, of course, it took time to
work it out just right, 'specially when I had to stop now and then
'cause I needed money for materials. But it's all right now, Homer,
it's all right now."

"And you say Roland Barnette's writing to some one in New York about
it?"

"Yes; he promised he would. I explained it to Roland and he seemed real
int'rested. He's kind, very kind."

I was inclined to doubt this, and would probably have said something to
that effect had not a shadow crossing the window brought me to my feet
in consternation. But before I could do more than rise, Colonel Bohun
had flung open the door and stamped in. He stopped short at sight of
me, misguided by his near-sighted eyes, and singled me out with a
threatening wave of his heavy stick.

"Well, sir!" he snarled. "I've come for my answer. Have you sense
enough in your addled pate to understand that, man? I've come for my
answer!"

"And may have it, whatever it may be, for all of me," I told him.

His face flushed a deeper red. "Oh, it's only you, is it, Littlejohn? I
took you for that fool Graham, in this damned dark hole. Where is he?"

I looked to Graham and he followed the direction of my gaze to the
work-bench, where Sam stood with his back to it, his worn hands folded
quietly before him. He seemed a little whiter than usual, I thought;
and perhaps it was only my fancy that made him appear to tremble ever
so slightly. For he was quite calm and self-possessed--so much so that
I realised for the first time there was another man in Radville besides
myself who did not fear old Colonel Bohun.

"I'm here, colonel," he said quietly. "What is it you wish?"

The colonel swung on him, shaking with passion. But he held his tongue
until he had mastered himself somewhat: a feat of self-restraint on his
part over which I marvel to this day.

"You know well, Graham," he said presently. "You got my letter--the
letter I wrote you a week ago?"

"Yes," said Sam, with a start of comprehension. "Yes, I got it."

"Then why the devil, man, don't you answer it?"

Sam's apologetic smile sweetened his face.

"Why," he said haltingly--"I'm sure I meant no offence, but--you see,
I'm a very busy man--I forgot it."

"The hell you forgot it. D'ye expect me to believe that, man?"

"I'm afraid you'll have to."

Bohun was speechless for a moment, stricken dumb by a second seizure of
fury. But again he calmed himself.

"Very well. I'll swallow that insolence for the present--"

"It wasn't meant as such, I assure--"

"Don't interrupt me! D'you hear? ... I've come for my answer. Yes, I've
come down to that, Graham. If you can't accord me the common courtesy
of a written reply--I've come to hear it from your mouth."

Sam nodded thoughtfully. "Mebbe," he said, "you forgot you have failed
to accord me the common courtesy of any sort of a communication
whatever for twenty years, Colonel Bohun. Even when my wife, your
daughter, died, you ignored my message asking you to her funeral...."

"Be silent!" screamed the colonel. "Do you think I'm here to bandy
words with you, fool? I demand my answer."

"And as for that," continued Sam as evenly as if he had not been
interrupted, "your proposition was so preposterous that it could have
come only from you, and deserved no answer. But since you want it
formally, sir, it's no."

For a moment I feared Bohun would have a stroke. The back of the chair
I had just vacated and his stick alone supported him through that dumb,
terrible transport. He shook so violently that I looked momentarily to
see the chair break beneath him. There was insanity in his eyes. When
finally he was able to articulate it was in broken gasps.

"I don't believe it," he stammered. "It's a lie. I don't believe it.
It's madness--the girl wouldn't be so mad. ..."

"What is it, father?"

I don't know which of us three was the more startled by that simple
question in Betty Graham's voice; Sam, at all events, showed the least
surprise; the old colonel wheeled toward the back of the store, his jaw
dropping and his eyes protruding as though he were confronted with a
ghost. As, in a way, he was: even I had been struck by that strange,
heartrending similarity to her mother's tone; and even I trembled a
little to hear that voice, as it seemed, from beyond the grave.

Betty stood at the foot of the staircase; alarmed by the noise of the
colonel's raging, she had stolen down, unheard by any of us. And in
that moment I realised as never before that the girl had more of her
mother in her than lay in that marvellous reproduction of Margaret
Graham's voice. As she waited there one detected in her pose something
of her mother's quiet dignity, in her eyes more than a little of
Margaret's tragedy. Of Margaret's beauty I saw scant trace, I own; but
in those days my eyes were blinded by the signs of overwork and
insufficient nourishment that marred her young features, by the
hopeless dowdiness of her garments.

Abruptly she moved swiftly to her father's side and slipped her hand
into his. "What is it, father?" she repeated, eyeing Colonel Bohun
coldly.

I thought Sam's eyes filled. His lips trembled and he had to struggle
to master his voice. He smiled through it all, tenderly at his girl,
but there was in that smile the weakness of the child grown old, the
dependence of the man whose womanfolk must ever mother him.

"Why, Betty," he said, tremulous--"why, Betty, your grandfather here
has been kind enough to offer to take you and educate you and make a
lady of you, and--and we were just talking it over, dear, just talking
it over."

"Do you mean that?" she flung at Bohun.

He straightened up and held himself well in hand. "Is it the first you
have heard of it?"

"Yes." She looked inquiringly at her father.

"Why didn't you tell her?" Bohun persisted harshly. "Were you afraid?"

"No." Sam shook his head slowly. "I wasn't
afraid. But it was unnecessary.... You see, Betty, Colonel Bohun is
willing to do all this for you on several conditions. You must leave me
and never see me again; you mustn't even recognise me should we meet
upon the street; you must change your name to Bohun and never permit
yourself to be known as Betty Graham. Then you must--"

"Never mind, daddy dear," said the girl. "That is enough. I know now--I
understand why you never told me. It's impossible. Colonel Bohun knew
that when he made the offer, of course; he made it simply to harass
you, daddy. It's his revenge...."

She looked Bohun up and down with a glance of contempt that would have
withered another man, poor, wan, haggard little maid of all work that
she was.

"And that's your answer, miss?" he snapped, livid with wrath.

"I would not," she told him slowly, "accept a favour from you, sir, if
I were starving...."

Bohun drew himself up. "Then starve," he told her; and walked out of
the shop.

I gaped after his retreating figure. It seemed impossible, incredible,
that he should have taken such an answer without yielding to a fit of
insensate passion. And I was still marvelling when I heard Graham
saying in a broken voice: "Betty! Betty, my little girl!"

Then I, too, went away, with a mist before my eyes to dim the golden
grace of June.




VI


INTRODUCTION TO MISS CARPENTER

On my way back from the Flats I discovered Duncan sitting on the wall
of the bridge, moodily donating pebbles to the water. His attitude
suggested preoccupation with unhappy reflections, a humour from which
the sound of my footsteps roused him. He looked up and caught my eye
with an uncertain nod, as though he half recognised me--presumably
having casually noticed me at the Bigelow House the previous evening.

"Good-morning," said I cheerfully, with a slight break in my stride
intended craftily to convey the impression that I was not altogether
averse to a pause for gossip.

He said "Good-morning," sombrely.

"A pleasant day," I observed spontaneously, stopping.

"Yes," he agreed. "By the way, have you a match about you?"

I searched my pockets, found a box and handed it over.

"I've been perishing for a ..." He slid his fingers into a waistcoat
pocket, as one who should seek a cigarette-case; but the hand came
forth empty. He bit his remark off abruptly, with a blank look in his
eyes which was promptly succeeded by an expression of deepest chagrin.
He got up and with a little bow returned the box.

"I forgot," he said, apologetic.

"I'm afraid I can't help you out," said I.

"Oh, that's all right. I'd just forgotten that I don't smoke."

I pretended not to notice his disconcertion.

"You're to be congratulated; it's a shameful waste of time and money."

"A filthy habit," said he warmly.

"Indeed, yes," I chanted, finding my pipe and tobacco pouch.

He caught my twinkle as I filled and lighted, and looked away, the
shadow of a smile lurking beneath his small, closely clipped moustache.

"I beg your pardon," he said a moment later, regarding me with more
interest, "but--do you live here?"

"Certainly. Why?"

"I was sure of it," he replied soberly. "But don't you feel a bit
lonesome, sometimes?"

"Not in the least. Radville's one of the most interesting places on
this side of the footstool." He sighed. "Indeed," I insisted, "you
won't feel any more lonely after you've lived here a while, than I do
now, Mr. Duncan."

He opened his eyes at my acquaintance with his name, but jerked his
head at me comprehendingly.

"To be sure," he said. "You would know. But I'm only beginning to
realise what it feels like to be a marked man."

"I hear you intend to make Radville your permanent residence, Mr.
Duncan?"

"It's part of the system," he said obscurely. "It may prove a life
sentence."

"Don't you think you'll like it here?"

"Oh, I'm strong for Radville," he declared earnestly. "It's all to the
merry ... I beg your pardon."

I stared curiously to see him colour like a school-girl. "What for?"

"My mistake, sir; I forgot myself again. I don't use slang."

"Oh!" I commented, wondering. He was beginning to puzzle me.

In the pause the air began to rock with the heavy clanging of the clock
in the Methodist Church steeple.

"That's noon," I said. "We'll have to cut along: dinner's ready."

Duncan immediately replanted himself firmly upon the parapet. "I know
it," he said with some indignation.

Again bewildered, I hesitated, but eventually advanced: "Our ways run
together, Mr. Duncan, as far as the Bigelow House. My name is
Littlejohn--Homer Littlejohn."

He rose again to take my hand and assured me he was glad to make my
acquaintance. "But," he added morosely, "I'll be damned if I go back to
that hotel before dinner's over.... Great Scott! I forgot again. I
don't swear!"

"Have you any other unnatural accomplishments?" I inquired, chuckling.

"I'm so full of 'em I can hardly stick," he assented gloomily. "I don't
drink or smoke or swear or play pool or cards, and on Sundays I go to
church."

I laughed outright. "You've come to the right place for such exemplary
virtues to be fully appreciated, Mr. Duncan."

"That's all right," he said with a return of his indignation, "but it
wasn't in the bargain that I should starve to death. Do you realise,
Mr. Littlejohn," he continued, warming, "that you behold in me a young
man in the prime of health actually on the point of wasting visibly
away to a shadow of my former hardy self? It's a fact: I am. For the
past two days I've had nothing to eat except railway sandwiches and
coffee and the kind of fodder they pitchfork you at the Bigelow House.
And I came here with a mind coloured with rosy anticipations of real
old-fashioned country cooking. It's an outrage!"

"Look here," said I: "why not come home with me for dinner? I'll be
glad to have you, and Miss Carpenter won't mind your coming, I'm sure."

He got up with alacrity. "Those are the first human words I've heard in
Radville, sir! I accept with joy and gratitude. Come--lead me to it!"

Now, Miss Carpenter doesn't like her meals delayed; so I would have
been inclined to hasten this Mr. Duncan; but he saved me the trouble.

"Miss Carpenter?" he asked without warning, as we hurried up Main
Street.

"My landlady, Mr. Duncan."

"She takes boarders? An old maid?" he persisted eagerly.

"An elderly spinster; boarders are her distraction as well as a source
of income."

"Do you think she'd take me in, Mr. Littlejohn?"

"I'm sure of it. There's a vacant room ..."

"Does she talk?"

"Moderately."

"Not a regular walking newspaper--no?"

"Not exactly--"

"Then I'm afraid it's no use," he sighed.

I glanced up at his face, but it was inscrutable.

"You--you want a landlady who talks?" I gasped, incredulous.

"It's one of the rules," he said, again obscurely.

I could make nothing of him. And had I any right to introduce to Hetty
Carpenter a guest who came without credentials and talked more or less
like a lunatic at large?

"Mr. Duncan--" I began, uncomfortable.

"Don't say it," he anticipated me. "I know you think I'm crazy--but I'm
not. You would think so, naturally, because you're the only man here
who's ever lived away from Radville long enough--not counting those who
went to the World's Fair--."

"How did you know?"

"Bigelow told me last night; said you'd be glad to meet somebody from
New York. I hope he's right. I'm glad, personally.... You see--May I
request that you regard this as confidential?"

"Yes--yes!"

"I've come to Radville to make my fortune."

The confession smote me witless: I could only gape. He nodded
confirmation, with a most serious mien. At length I found strength to
articulate. "From New York--?"

"Yes. It's a new scheme. You see, Mr. Littlejohn,
matters have come to such a state that a city-bred boy practically
doesn't stand any show on earth of making good in the cities; your
country-bred boys crowd him to the wall, nine times out of ten. They
invade us in hordes, fresh from the open, strong, vigorous,
clear-headed, ambitious.... What chance have we got? ... I've been
figuring it out, you see, and I've come to the conclusion that it's my
only salvation to get back to the country and improve some of the
opportunities--the golden opportunities--that your boys have neglected,
overlooked, in their mad desire to invade the commercial centres of the
country."

He seemed very much in earnest; I was watching him as closely as I
might without making my scrutiny offensive; and there seemed to be the
ring of conviction in his voice, while the expression of his eyes
indicated concentrated thought. And how was I to know, then, that the
concentration was due to the necessity of invention?

"You follow me, Mr. Littlejohn?"

"I was here first," I corrected. "Still, there's more in what you say
than perhaps you realise."

"If I'd made this discovery originally I'd agree with you, sir. But,
quite to the contrary, it was pointed out to me by one of the shrewdest
business minds in the United States--a man who'd been a country boy to
begin with. And I've come to the conclusion that he's right."

"So you're here."

"Here I am."

"And what do you propose doing?"

"I'm reading law, Mr. Littlejohn; that I shall continue. In the
meantime, I shall keep my eyes open. At any day, at any amount, the
opportunity may present itself, the opportunity I'm looking for."

"Probably you're right," I assented, impressed, as we turned a corner.

A young woman in a very attractive linen gown was strolling toward us,
quite prettily engaged with a book which she read as she walked, her
fair young head bowed beneath a sunshade which tinted her face
becomingly. She gave me a shy smile and a low-voiced greeting as we
passed. Only my knowledge of the young woman prevented me from being
blinded by her engaging appearance.

"That," said I, when we were out of earshot, "shows you what a furore a
good-looking young man can create in a town like this. Josie Lockwood
has put on her best bib-and-tucker to go walking in this afternoon, on
the off-chance of meeting you, Mr. Duncan."

"Flattery note," he commented. "Who's Josie Lockwood?"

"Daughter of Blinky Lockwood, the richest man in Radville."

"Ah!" he said cryptically.

We had come to Miss Carpenter's. I opened the gate for him, but he
stood aside, refusing to precede me. And courtesy in the young folk of
to-day warms my old heart.

He had as much for Hetty Carpenter. Within an hour he had insinuated
himself into her good graces with a deftness, an ease, that astounded.
Within three hours he was established, bag and baggage, in her very
best room.

And thirty minutes after she had helped Duncan unpack, Hetty had to run
downtown to buy a spool of thread.




VII


A WINDOW IN RADVILLE

A jealous secret, which has never heretofore been divulged, is
responsible for the prosperity of the Radville _Citizen_--at
least, in very great measure. As the discoverer of this recipe for
circulation, I have kept it carefully locked in my guilty bosom for
many a year, and if I now betray it I do so without scruple, for the
_Gazette_ is now established firmly in a groove of popularity from
which you'd find it hard to oust the paper. So here's letting the cat
out of the bag:

The policy of the _Citizen_ has long been to devote its columns
mainly to the exploitation of what is known in newspaper terminology as
"the local story." Of the news of the great outside world we're
parsimonious, recognising the fact that the coronation of King Edward
VII. is a matter of much less import to our community than the
holocaust which was responsible for the destruction of Sir
Higginbottom's new hen-house. Similarly a West Indian tornado involving
losses running up into hundreds of thousands of dollars sinks into
relative insignificance as compared with the local weather forecast and
its probable effect on crops not worth ten thousand; while the enforced
abdication of the Sultan of Turkey gets a "stick" (a space in a
newspaper column about as long as your forefinger, if you have a small
hand) as contrasted with the column and a half assigned to the death of
old Colonel Bohun.

Now, naturally, a paper in a small country town can't afford a large
and hustling staff of enthusiastic reporters; and very probably the
_Citizen_ would overlook many items and stories of burning local
interest were it not for the fact that the population has been
cunningly made to serve in a reportorial capacity without either pay or
its own knowledge. We literally get our local news by wireless; and
from dawn to dark there's a constant supply of it on tap.

It's this way: our editorial rooms are in the second storey of a
building overlooking Court House Square. The lower floor is occupied by
the Post Office, and in front of the Post Office are a hitching-post
and two long, weather-scarred benches, while just across the road--I
mean street--on the boundary of the square proper--is a near-bronze
drinking-fountain and watering-trough erected from the proceeds of
several fairs given by the local branch of the W. C. T. U. Naturally,
indeed inevitably, all Radville gravitates to the Post Office, bringing
the news with it, and stops to discuss it on the steps or the benches
or by the fountain; and the acoustics are admirable. With a window open
and scratch-pad handy, the keen-eared scribe at his desk in our offices
can hardly fail to pick up every scrap of town information between
sunrise and dusk.... Of course, in winter the supply's not so good.
Winter before last we all suffered with colds acquired through keeping
the windows open; and last winter our circulation fell off surprisingly
through keeping them closed. This winter we contemplate cutting a
trap-door through the floor for the ostensible purpose of ventilation.

And thus it was that I managed to hear much of Mr. Duncan while I
myself was engaged in formulating an estimate of the young man. He
engaged the popular imagination no less than mine own, although I was
more intimately associated with him--as a fellow-resident at Hetty
Carpenter's. My professional duties making their habitual demands upon
my time, I saw, it may be, less of him than many of our people.
Certainly I learned less of his ways from first-hand knowledge. But
from my desk (it's the nearest to the window right above the Post
Office door) I was enabled to keep a pretty close line upon his habits
and movements, during the first fortnight of his stay in Radville.

At home I saw him with unvarying regularity at meal-times and less
frequently after supper. Between whiles he seemed to observe a fairly
regular routine: in the morning, after breakfast, he walked abroad for
his health's sake; in the afternoon and evening he sequestered himself
in his room for the pursuit of his legal studies. About the genuineness
of these latter I was long without a question: having been privileged
to inspect his room I found it redolent of an atmosphere of highly
commendable application. His writing table was a model of neatness, and
his store of legal treatises impressed one vastly. That no one, not
even Hetty Carpenter, ever saw the room without remarking the open
volume of "The Law of Torts," with its numerous pages painstakingly
spaced by slips of paper by way of bookmarks, is an attested fact. That
it was always the same volume is less widely known.

Less directly (that is to say, via my window) I learned of him
compendiously from sources which would have been anonymous but for my
long acquaintance with the voices of the townspeople.... I write these
pages at my desk at home and, if truth's to be told, somewhat
surreptitiously; but with these voices ringing in my memory's ear I
seem still to be sitting at my erstwhile desk by the window, looking
out over Court House Square, chewing the rubber heel of my pencil the
while I listen. It's summer weather and there's a smell in the air of
dust and heat; the square simmers and shimmers in unclouded sunshine,
its many green plots of grass a trifle grey and haggard with dust, the
flagstaff with its two flanking cannon by the bandstand in the middle
wavering slightly in the haze of heat; there are two rigs, a farm-wagon
and a buckboard, hitched to the post below, and some boys are squirting
water on one another by holding their hands over the lips of the
fountain across the way. Immediately opposite, on the far side of the
square, the Court House rises proudly in all the majesty of its
columned front and clapboarded sides; farther along there's the
Methodist Church, very severe, with its rows of sheds to one side for
the teams of the more rural members. Behind them all bulk our hills,
dim and purple against the overwhelming blue of the sky. It's very
quiet: there are few sounds, and those few most familiar: the raucous
war-cry of a rooster somewhere on the outskirts of town; an
intermittent thudding of hoofs in the inch-deep dust of the roadway;
Miles Stetson wringing faint but genuine shrieks of agony from his
cornet, in a room behind the Opery House on the next street;
periodically a shuffle of feet on the sidewalk below; less frequently
the whine of the swinging doors at Schwartz's place; above it all,
perhaps, the shrill but not unpleasant accents of Angie Tuthill as she
pauses on the threshold downstairs and injects surprising information
into the nothing-reluctant ears of Mame Garrison.

" ... He's got six suits of clothes, three for summer and three for
winter, and two others to wear to parties--one regular full-dress suit
and another without any tails on the coat that he told Miss Carpenter
was a dinner-coat, but Roland Barnette says he must've meant a Tuxedo,
because nobody wears that kind of clothes except at night; so how could
it be a dinner-coat?... And Miss Carpenter told Ma he's got twelve
striped shirts and eight white ones and dozens of silk socks and two
dozen neckties and handkerchiefs till you can't count a