IVAn Honorable Discharge
DAVID VALLORY lost little time in crossing the square from the St. Nicholas to the bank corner; in point of fact, he was boyish enough to run. In the bank he found his father relocking the vault after having given the frightened farmer his money.
“Is your heart-action still pretty good, Dad?” he asked. “No high blood pressure, or anything like that, is there?”
“No, David. If I were as sound in mind as I am in body——”
But David would not let him finish. “Take a look at this and tell the blues to go hang,” he laughed, fishing the cheque of salvation out of an inner pocket.
Adam Vallory held the strip of paper up to the electric vault light, saw the figures and the signature, and dropped back into a chair, shaken and tremulous.
“David!” he gasped reproachfully. “Did you tell him?”
“I did. Because it was evident that you hadn’t told him, I tried my best to dodge; but it was no manner of use. When Mr. Eben Grillage goes after a thing, he is not to be denied. He nearly bit my head off when he saw that I was trying to keep something from him. He said I was to give you that piece of paper with his love; that was after he’d ordered me to call Tom Judson on the ’phone for him and had told Judson that the Middleboro Security was his bank, and that he must draw through you for the money to pay for the shipment of scrapers and dump-cars. He said it so that the people standing around in the hotel lobby couldn’t help hearing and knowing that he is backing you. Isn’t that just about the finest thing you ever heard of?”
Adam Vallory was shaking his head dubiously.
“It is too fine, David; the obligation, even from an old friend like Eben.... It’s crushing. But we must consider it as a loan, no matter how he regards it. Yet I don’t see how we shall ever be able to pay it back.”
The young man had perched himself upon the bookkeeper’s high stool, and he had his answer ready.
“You’ve been doing all the scrapping, thus far, Dad, but now you must let me take my whirl atit. We’ll let the old ship go decently and honorably ashore, and then climb out and save the pieces. We’ll pay Mr. Grillage back all we can rake and scrape out of the wreck; and beyond that——”
“Well?—beyond that, what, son?”
“It sounds rather stagy, but I’m going to say it. Beyond what money payment we may be able to make, we shall owe Mr. Grillage a debt of gratitude that will be canceled only when we are both under the sod. That is about the way it strikes me. I don’t care what people say about his business methods and the way he rides rough-shod over his competitors; that doesn’t cut any figure in his relations with you. He has done this thing for you, individually, and I don’t come even into the outer edges of it; just the same, he has laid an obligation upon me that I shall never live long enough to forget.”
For a long minute Adam Vallory sat staring into vacancy. When he looked up it was to say: “You are bone of my bone, David, and I thank God for a son who can see eye to eye with me at a time like this. And yet ... you are young, David; in many ways you are younger than your years. You are maturing slowly, just as I did. Sometimes I’ve been afraid—afraid you mightthrow yourself into something as a boy throws himself, without reserve, you know; blind to everything but the one thing, whatever it might be. If you can only have time to ripen——”
David’s laugh was entirely care free. “That was the way you talked when I went to college, Dad, and again, when I left for Florida. I haven’t noticed that I’m particularly raw, compared with other men.”
“It isn’t that,” the father hastened to say, “it’s just that, up to to-day, you’ve never had to shoulder a man’s load. Perhaps I am foolishly apprehensive, but the way in which you spoke just now of our obligation—your obligation—to Eben Grillage.... I don’t know how to express it, but it made me feel as I have sometimes felt before; that if anything which you might conceive to be a duty were pushing you, you’d shut your eyes and go to any length.”
David laughed and shook his head. “Some day, Dad, you’ll wake up and find that I’m a man grown; or I hope you will. Just the same, we do owe Mr. Grillage a lot more than we can ever pay, and if it ever comes in my way to chop the debt down a bit, you may be sure I’ll sharpen my axe. Now, if you are not too wretchedly tired and worn out, suppose we turn in and make ourplans before we sleep. I told Lucille that we’d most likely be late coming home and she won’t be sitting up for us. To-morrow morning you’re going to turn the winding up of this thing over to me and let me save what I can. That is what Mr. Grillage said I must do, and it is what I mean to do.”
Deep into the night father and son sat together in the private room in the rear, poring over the books and bank paper and setting things in order for the speedy beaching of the outworn business ship. But it was not until after they had left the bank and were walking home that David won his final point.
“You shall do as you think best, David,” the father conceded, closing an argument which had begun at the very outset of the planning. “If it were left to me, I should probably be too easy with the bank’s debtors, as I’ve always been. You may retain Oswald, if you think best; only don’t let him be too hard on the borrowers who are in difficulties.”
The following day saw the beginning of the end for the oldest banking institution in the county. At nine o’clock in the morning the cue leading to Winkle’s wicket was formed again; but in an hour or two the tide showed signs of turning.At Oswald’s suggestion the Vallorys had posted a notice in the bank window to the effect that Middleboro Security was going out of business, and inviting all who had claims upon the bank to present them and get their money. Coincidently with the posting of this notice, a rumor, starting from nobody knew just where, began to pass from lip to lip among the anxious depositors. It was to the effect that Eben Grillage, well known in the town and currently spoken of by his former townsmen as a multimillionaire, was backing Adam Vallory. The result was almost magical. First one and then another dropped out of the line in front of Winkle’s window; and by noon many of those who had already withdrawn their savings were coming back to furnish an object-lesson in the mutability of human nature by begging Adam Vallory to stay in business and reinstate them as depositors.
Early in the afternoon David persuaded his father to go home, and himself took the chair at the president’s desk, with Herbert Oswald at his elbow. By evening a good beginning had been made and the tangle was simplifying itself.
“Time is the thing we need to save,” said David, as he and the young lawyer went together to the St. Nicholas for their belated dinner. “Dadis needing a rest, and I’ve got to strike out and do something for myself; something better than making maps in a Government surveying office. Naturally, I can’t go until after things are wound up properly here, and Dad and Lucille are provided for in some fashion. How long do you think it is going to take?”
Oswald reserved his answer until after they had found their places in the café and had given their dinner order.
“As to the time, it will probably ask for more than you will care to give to it,” he predicted; “that is, if you mean to stay and see it through. But that isn’t at all necessary. We can shake you loose in a few days, after we have closed the bank doors and have brought matters down to a routine settlement with debtors and creditors. I can handle that part of it myself, as the bank’s counsel.”
In accordance with this outline of Oswald’s, David Vallory stood by for the few days, taking his father’s place in the bank and doing what he could to hasten the beaching of the Security ship. The end of that phase of it came when the last depositor had chequed out his account, and Winkle had closed his wicket for the final time. Only the deferred collections remained, and these were turned over to Oswald.
In the evening of this climaxing day, David and the young attorney were once more dining together in Vignaux’s café. The strain was off, and for the first time since his home-coming, David was free to begin the consideration of his own future. It was Oswald who gave the table talk its start in the proper direction.
“You are footloose at last, David, and I can imagine that you are mighty glad of it,” was the way the start was given. “It has been a new experience for you, and you have certainly buckled down to it like a man.”
David’s smile was boyishly complacent. “Sure I have; there was no reason why I shouldn’t. Isn’t that what a man’s son is for, in the last analysis?”
“Yes, but——”
“But what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A good many sons don’t seem to see it in that light; and in your case—well, I’ve known you a long time, David, and I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend,’” David quoted, with a return of the good-natured smile. “What have I done to make you think small of me? Or is it something that I haven’t done?”
“Neither,” was the thoughtful reply. “It’sjust—oh, well; I guess it is because we were boys together, and I couldn’t seem to realize that you have grown up.”
“You and Dad are the limit. Do you realize it now?”
“Y-yes; to some extent. I’ve been watching you through this business whirl. You’ve done well; splendidly well. But it was the fighting of the untrained soldier.”
“Of course it was. What I didn’t know of the actual details of the business would have filled a library.”
“That isn’t what I meant; I guess I can’t express myself clearly enough to make you understand just what it is that I do mean. It sizes itself up something like this: you’re so wholesome and straightforward and decent, David——”
“Break it off,” laughed David; “you make me blush!”
“That’s it,” said the keen-eyed young fellow across the table; “you do blush. Which is the proof of the pudding. But I mustn’t devil you when you’re tired; tired and more or less discouraged.”
“Discouraged? Not a bit of it. Why should I be discouraged?”
“Most fellows would be, in your shoes. You’vehad every reason to believe that you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth—or at least, a triple-plated one.”
“I? Not in a thousand years!” grinned the son whose light was of a proper filial brightness. “I’ve known all along that the Middleboro Security would have to be wound up some time. Dad is all the fine things you can say of him, Bert, but he wasn’t cut out for a successful banker. He knows it as well as anybody.”
Oswald looked up questioningly. “You haven’t any twinges of your own, Dave? It used to be the town’s idea that you’d some day come back and marry Judith Fallon and settle down to be Vallory Number Two in the banking business.”
“Marry Judith? What put that idea into the town’s head—or yours?”
“You did,” said Oswald gravely.
“Great Scott! Can’t a man be just ordinarily chummy with a girl he’s known all his life without having the gossips of a country-town tie a tin can to him?”
“With a number of them, yes; but with one, no.”
“Bosh!” said David.
“No, it isn’t ‘bosh.’ You’ve specialized on Judith; I’ve seen it myself. Candidly, David,I’ve tried to shut my eyes to it, partly because I hoped it might die out. Judith’s a good girl, and in her own class she is the prettiest thing that was ever turned loose in a world of more or less squashy young men. But I can’t seem to see her calling herself Mrs. Vallory.”
“You needn’t try.”
Oswald’s eyebrows went up. “She has turned you down?”
“Bert, if this place wasn’t so public I should blow up! Good Lord, man! there has never been anything sentimental between Judith and me!—nothing on top of earth more than a bit of jolly good-comradeship!”
Being already up, Oswald’s eyebrows stayed in that position.
“On your part, perhaps; but how about Judith? Listen, David: within the past month I’ve heard half a dozen times that you and Judith were to be married as soon as you got yourself relocated in some more habitable place than a Florida swamp. You may howl all you want to about country-town gossip, but——”
This time David Vallory interrupted with a twist of the square jaw that took Oswald swiftly back to a day long remembered in Middleboro school annals when David had plunged, headdown, into battle with the leader of the “factory gang” and had for all time vindicated the superiority of “town-side” brain over mere brawn.
“Drop it, Herbert,” he said quietly; and then: “Let’s get back on the main track again. You were saying that the town expected me to come back and follow in Dad’s footsteps. There’s nothing doing. In another way, I’m as incompetent as he is. Money-handling doesn’t appeal to me; it never has appealed to me. I’d rather go out as a transit-man on some building job worth while than to be the president of the biggest bank in the State. It’s all in the way a man happens to be built.”
“You are beginning at the bottom in your profession, though, aren’t you?”
“Of course; any man worth his salt begins that way. And that brings us down to the finances again. Have you carried the figuring far enough along to be able to guess at what will be left after all the bills are paid?”
Oswald shook his head. “Your father hasn’t taken either of us fully into his confidence,” he averred. “He insists that we must try to realize on the assets so as to have a hundred thousand dollars left to pay a personal debt which doesn’t appear on the bank’s books. If we subtract evenhalf of that amount from the most favorable outcome at present in sight, there will be nothing of any account left for him and your sister.”
“It will be enough; with what I may be able to add to it,” said David, neither affirming nor denying the lawyer’s hint that he was not entirely in his father’s confidence.
“You are going away to look for a job?” Oswald asked.
“As it happens, I don’t have to look for one. I leave for Chicago on the eleven-fifteen to-night, and my job is waiting for me.”
“Fine!” was the friendly approval. “Is it a secret?”
“Not at all. I’m going to work for the Grillage Engineering Company; an assistant engineer’s billet on a bridge construction job up in Wisconsin. There is a reason why I shouldn’t take the job, and a still stronger reason why I can’t refuse.”
“That’s capital!” said Oswald, ignoring the qualifying part of the announcement. “You are lucky—or I guess you are. They say Mr. Eben Grillage can dig his profit out of the shrewdest contract that was ever drawn and never turn a hair. But as an engineer in the field, you won’t have anything to do with that part of it.”
David glanced up quickly with a little frown coming and going between the honest eyes.
“Again I’ll have to ask you to break it off, Bert. Mr. Grillage is my father’s friend.”
“Of course he is; I forgot for the moment,” was the placative reply. “I shouldn’t have repeated the gossip—which is only gossip, after all. I suppose you remember his daughter Vinnie, as a little girl, don’t you?”
“Very well, indeed,” said David, with his eyes on his plate.
“She has grown up to be a raving, tearing, heart-smashing beauty,” the lawyer went on, entirely unmindful of the sudden change in his table-mate. “I met her in Indianapolis last summer when I was there on a business trip. She was stopping with friends, and she gave me exactly five minutes by the watch—which was all the time she could spare; all the time a dozen other fellows would let her spare. Somebody told me she was, or is, going to marry an English title.”
“That is gossip, too,” said David, still looking down.
“I suppose so. You can hear all sorts of things if you’ll only hold your ears open. Finished your dinner? If you have, let’s go and smoke.”
At this, David Vallory came to life again.
“No; I can’t take the time, Bert. I must go out home and pack my trunk. And I’m going to ask a favor of you. Will you be at the train to see me off.”
“Surest thing in the world,” said the young lawyer; and after David had gone he sauntered out to the office-lobby and bought a cigar with thoughtful deliberation, recalling, now that he had time to do so, David’s cryptic remark about the reasons—still unexplained—for and against his new employment.