[p3]MR. OPPI“Ihopeyour passenger hasn’t missed his train,” observed the ferryman to Mr. Jimmy Fallows, who sat on the river bank with the painter of his rickety little naphtha launch held loosely in his hand.“Mr. Opp?” said Jimmy. “I bet he did. If there is one person in the world that’s got a talent for missing things, it’s Mr. Opp. I never seen him that he hadn’t just missed gettin’ a thousand dollar job, or inventin’ a patent, or bein’ hurt when he had took out a accident policy. If he did ketch a train, like enough it was goin’ the wrong way.”[p4]Jimmy had been waiting since nine in the morning, and it was now well past noon. He was a placid gentleman of curvilinear type, short of limb and large of girth. His trousers, of that morose hue termed by the country people “plum,” reached to his armpits, and his hat, large and felt and weather-beaten, was only prevented from eclipsing his head by the stubborn resistance of two small, knob-like ears.“Mr. Opp ain’t been back to the Cove for a long while, has he?” asked the ferryman, whose intellectual life depended solely upon the crumbs of information scattered by chance passers-by.“Goin’ on two years,” said Mr. Fallows. “Reckon he’s been so busy formin’ trusts and buyin’ out railways and promotin’ things generally that he ain’t had any time to come back home. It’s his step-pa’s funeral that’s bringin’ him now. The only time city folks seem to want to see their kin folks in the country is when they are dead.”“Ain’t that him a-comin’ down the[p5]bank?” asked the ferryman, shading his eyes with his hands.Mr. Fallows, with some difficulty, got to his feet.“Yes, that’s him all right. Hustlin’ to beat the band. Wonder if he takes me for a street car.”Coming with important stride down the wharf, and whistling as he came, was a small man of about thirty-five. In one hand he carried a large suit-case, and in the other a new and shining grip. On both were painted, in letters designed to be seen, “D. Webster Opp, Kentucky.”In fact, everything about him was evidently designed to be seen. His new suit of insistent plaid, his magnificent tie sagging with the weight of a colossal scarf-pin, his brown hat, his new tan shoes, all demanded individual and instant attention.The only insignificant thing about Mr. Opp was himself. His slight, undeveloped body seemed to be in a chronic state of apology for failing properly to set off the glorious raiment wherewith it was[p6]clothed. His pock-marked face, wide at the temples, sloped to a small, pointed chin, which, in turn, sloped precipitously into a long, thin neck. It was Mr. Opp’s eyes, however, that one saw first, for they were singularly vivid, with an expression that made strangers sometimes pause in the street to ask him if he had spoken to them. Small, pale, and red of rim, they nevertheless held the look of intense hunger—hunger for the hope or the happiness of the passing moment.As he came bustling down to the water’s-edge he held out a friendly hand to Jimmy Fallows.“How are you, Jimmy?” he said in a voice freighted with importance. “Hope I haven’t kept you waiting long. Several matters of business come up at the last and final moment, and I missed the morning train.”Jimmy, who was pouring gasolene into a tank in the launch, treated the ferryman to a prodigious wink.“Oh, not more’n four or five hour,” he said, casting side glances of mingled[p7]scorn and admiration at Mr. Opp’s attire. “It is a good thing it was the funeral you was tryin’ to get to instid of the death-bed.”“Oh, that reminds me,” said Mr. Opp, suddenly exchanging his air of cheerfulness for one of becoming gravity—“what time is the funeral obsequies going to take place?”“Whenever we git there,” said Jimmy, pushing off the launch and waving his hand to the ferryman. “You’re one of the chief mourners, and I’m the undertaker; there ain’t much danger in us gettin’ left.”Mr. Opp deposited his baggage carefully on the seat, and spread his coat across the new grip to keep it from getting splashed.“How long was Mr. Moore sick?” he asked, fanning himself with his hat.“Well,” said Jimmy, “he was in a dangerous and critical condition for about twenty-one years, accordin’ to his own account. I been seein’ him durin’ that time on a average of four times a[p8]day, and last night when I seen him in his coffin it was the first time the old gentleman failed to ask me to give him a drink on account of his poor health.”“Is Ben there?” asked Mr. Opp, studying a time-table, and making a note in his memorandum-book.“Your brother Ben? Yes; he come this mornin’ just before I left. He was cussin’ considerable because you wasn’t there, so’s they could go on and git through. He wants to start back to Missouri to-night.”“Is he out at the house?”“No; he’s at Your Hotel.”Mr. Opp looked up in surprise, and Jimmy chuckled.“That there’s the name of my new hotel. Started up sence you went away. Me and old man Tucker been running boardin’-houses side by side all these years. What did he do last summer but go out and git him a sign as big as the side of the house, and git Nick Fenny to paint ‘Our Hotel’ on it; then he put it up right across the sidewalk, from the[p9]gate clean out to the road. I didn’t say nothin’, but let the boys keep on a-kiddin’ me till the next day; then I got me a sign jus’ like his, with ‘Your Hotel’ on it, and put it up crost my sidewalk. He’d give a pretty if they was both down now; but he won’t take his down while mine is up, and I ain’t got no notion of taking it down.”“Yes,” said Mr. Opp, absently, for his mind was still on the time-table; “I see that there’s an accommodation that departs out of Coreyville in the neighborhood of noon to-morrow. It’s a little unconvenient, I’m afraid, but do you think you could get me back in time to take it?”“Why, what’s yer hurry?” asked Jimmy, steering for mid-stream. “I thought you’d come to visit a spell, with all them bags and things.”Mr. Opp carelessly tossed back the sleeve of the coat, to display more fully the name on the suit-case. “Them’s drummers’ samples,” he said almost reverently—“the finest line of shoes that[p10]have ever been put out by any house in the United States, bar none.”“Why, I thought you was in the insurance business,” said Jimmy.“Oh, no; that was last year, just previous to my reporting on a newspaper. This”—and Mr. Opp tried to spread out his hands, but was slightly deterred by the size of his cuffs—“this is the chance I been looking for all my life. It takes brains and a’ educated nerve, and a knowledge of the world. I ought to create considerable capital in the next few years. And just as soon as I do”—and Mr. Opp leaned earnestly toward Jimmy, and tapped one finger upon the palm of his other hand—“just as soon as I do, I intend to buy up all the land lying between Turtle Creek and the river. There’s enough oil under that there ground to ca’m the troubled waters of the Pacific Ocean. You remember old Mr. Beeker? Well, he told me, ten years ago, that he bored a well for brine over there, and it got so full of black petroleum he had to abandon it.[p11]Now, I’m calculating on forming a stock company,—you and Mr. Tucker, I and old man Hager, and one or two others,—and buying up that ground. Then we’ll sink a test well, get up a derrick and a’ engine, and have the thing running in no time. The main thing is a competent manager. You know I’m thinking seriously of taking it myself? It’s too big a proposition to run any risks with.”“Here, say, wait a minute; how long have you had this here shoe job?” Jimmy caught madly at the first fact in sight to keep him from being swept away by the flood of Mr. Opp’s oily possibilities.“I taken it last week,” said Mr. Opp; “had to go all the way to Chicago to get my instructions, and to get fitted out. My territory is a specially important one; four counties, all round Chicago.”“I was in Chicago oncet,” said Jimmy, his eyes brightening at the memory. “By golly! if the world is as big in every direction as it is in that, she’s a whopper!”[p12]The wind, freshening as they got under way, loosened the canvas overhead, and Mr. Opp rose to buckle it into place. As he half knelt in the bow of the boat, he lifted his face to the cool breeze, and took a deep breath of satisfaction. The prosaic river from Coreyville to the Cove was the highway he knew best in the world. Under the summer sunshine the yellow waters lost their sullen hue, and reflected patches of vivid red and white from the cottages and barns that dotted the distant shore.“I don’t consider there’s any sceneries in the country that’ll even begin to compare with these here,” Mr. Opp announced, out of the depths of his wide experience. “Just look at the sunshine pouring forth around the point of the island. It spills through the trees and leaks out over the water just like quicksilver. Now, that’s a good thought! It’s perfectly astounding, you might say surprising, how easy thoughts come to me. I ought to been a writer; lots of folks have said so. Why, there ain’t a[p13]day of my life that I don’t get a poem in my head.”“Shucks!” observed Jimmy Fallows. “I’d as lief read figgers on a tow-boat as to read poetry. Old man Gusty used to write poetry, but he couldn’t get nobody to print it, so he decided to start a newspaper at the Cove and chuck it full of his own poems. He bought a whole printin’ outfit, and set it up in Pete Aker’s old carpenter shop out there at the edge of town, opposite his home. But ’fore he got his paper started he up and died. Yes, sir; and the only one of his poems that he ever did git in print was the one his wife had cut on his tombstone.”Mr. Opp was not listening. With his head bared and his lips parted he was indulging in his principal weakness. For Mr. Opp, it must be confessed, was given to violent intoxication, not from an extraneous source, but from too liberal draughts of his own imagination. In extenuation, the claims of genius might be urged, for a genius he unquestionably[p14]was in that he created something out of nothing. Out of an abnormal childhood, a lonely boyhood, and a failure-haunted manhood, he had managed to achieve an absorbing career. Each successive enterprise had loomed upon his horizon big with possibilities, and before it sank to oblivion, another scheme, portentous, significant, had filled its place. Life was a succession of crises, and through them he saw himself moving, now a shrewd merchant, now a professional man, again an author of note, but oftenest of all a promoter of great enterprises, a financier, and man of affairs.While he was thus mentally engaged in drilling oil-wells, composing poetry, and selling shoes, Jimmy Fallows was contemplating with fascinated wonder an object that floated from his coat pocket. From a brown-paper parcel, imperfectly wrapped, depended a curl of golden hair, and it bobbed about in the breeze in a manner that reduced Mr. Fallows to a state of abject curiosity.So intent was Jimmy upon his investigation[p15]that he failed to hold his course, and the launch swung around the end of the island with such a sudden jerk that Mr. Opp took an unexpected seat.As he did so, his hand touched the paper parcel in his pocket, and realizing that it was untied, he hastily endeavored, by a series of surreptitious manœuvers, to conceal what it contained. Feeling the quizzical eye of his shipmate full upon him, he assumed an air of studied indifference, and stoically ignored the subterranean chuckles and knowing winks in which Mr. Fallows indulged.Presently, when the situation had become poignant, Mr. Opp observed that he supposed the funeral would take place from the church.“I reckon so,” said Jimmy, reluctantly answering to the call of the conversational rudder. “I told the boys to have a hack there for you and Mr. Ben and Miss Kippy.”“I don’t think my sister will be there,” said Mr. Opp, with dignity; “she seldom or never leaves the house.”[p16]“Reckon Mr. Ben will have to take keer of her now,” said Jimmy; “she surely will miss her pa. He never done a lick of work since I knowed him, but he was a nice, quiet old fellow, and he certainly was good to pore Miss Kippy.”“Mr. Moore was a gentleman,” said Mr. Opp, and he sighed.“Ain’t she got any kin on his side? No folks except you two half-brothers?”“That’s all,” said Mr. Opp; “just I and Ben.”“Gee! that’s kind of tough on youall,ain’t it?”But the sympathy was untimely, for Mr. Opp’s dignity had been touched in a sensitive place.“Our sister will be well provided for,” he said, and the conversation suffered a relapse.Mr. Opp went back to his time-tables and his new note-book, and for the rest of the trip Jimmy devoted himself to his wheel, with occasional ocular excursions in the direction of Mr. Opp’s coat pocket.[p17]IILyingin the crook of the river’s elbow, with the nearest railroad eighteen miles away, Cove City, familiarly known as the Cove, rested serenely undisturbed by the progress of the world. Once a day, at any time between sundown and midnight, it was roused from its drowsiness by the arrival of the mail-boat, and, shaking itself into temporary wakefulness, sat up and rubbed its eyes. This animation was, however, of short duration, for before the packet had whistled for the next landing, the Cove had once more settled back into slumber.Main Street began with a shabby, unpainted school-house, and following dramatic sequence, ended abruptly in the graveyard. Two cross-streets, which had started out with laudable ideas of[p18]independence, lost courage at Main Street and sought strength in union; but the experiment was not successful, and a cow-path was the result. The only semblance of frivolity about the town was a few straggling cottages on stilts of varying height as they approached the river; for they seemed ever in the act of holding up their skirts preparatory to wading forth into the water.On this particular summer afternoon Cove City was less out of crimp than usual. The gathering of loafers that generally decorated the empty boxes piled along the sidewalk was missing. The old vehicles and weary-looking mules which ordinarily formed an irregular fringe along the hitching rail were conspicuously absent. A subdued excitement was in the air, and at the slightest noise feminine heads appeared at windows, and masculine figures appeared in doorways, and comments were exchanged in low tones from one side of the street to the other. For the loss of a citizen, even a poor one, disturbs the[p19]surface of affairs, and when the event brings two relatives from a distance, the ripples of excitement increase perceptibly.Mr. Moore had been a citizen-in-law, as it were, and had never been considered in any other light than poor Mrs. Opp’s widower. Mrs. Opp’s poor widower might have been a truer way of stating it, but even a town has its parental weaknesses.For two generations the Opp family had been a source of mystery and romance to the Cove. It stood apart, like the house that held it, poor and shabby, but bearing a baffling atmosphere of gentility, of superiority, and of reserve.Old women recalled strange tales of the time when Mrs. Opp had come to the Cove as a bride, and how she refused to meet any of the townspeople, and lived alone in the old house on the river-bank, watching from hour to hour for the wild young husband who clerked on one of the river steamers. They told how she grew thin and white with waiting, and how,[p20]when her two boys were small, she made them stand beside her for hours at a time, watching the river and listening for the whistle of his boat. Then the story went that the gay young husband stopped coming altogether, and still she watched and waited, never allowing the boys out of her sight, refusing to send them to school, or to let them play with other children. By and by word was brought that her husband had been killed in a quarrel over cards, and little Mrs. Opp, having nothing now to watch for and to wait for, suddenly became strangely changed.Old Aunt Tish, the negro servant, was the only person who ever crossed the threshold, and she told of a strange life that went on behind the closely curtained windows, where the sunlight was never allowed to enter, and lamps burned all day long.“Yas, ’m,” she used to say in answer to curious questionings; “hit’s jes like play-actin’ all de time. The Missis dress herself up, an’ ’tend like she’s a queen[p21]or a duke or somethin’, an’ dat little D. he jes acts out all dem fool things she tells him to, an’ he ain’t never bein’ hisself at all, but jes somebody big and mighty and grand-like.”When the boys were half-grown, a stranger appeared in the Cove, a dapper little man of about fifty in a shabby frock-coat and a shabbier high hat, kind of face and gentle of voice, but with the dignity of conscious superiority. The day of his arrival he called upon Mrs. Opp; the second day he took a preacher with him and married her. Whatever old romance had led to this climax could only be dimly guessed at by the curious townspeople.For two years Mr. Moore fought for the mind of his old sweetheart as he had long ago fought for her heart. He opened the house to the sunshine, and coaxed the little lady back into the world she had forgotten. The boys were sent to school, the old games and fancies were forbidden. Gradually the color returned to her cheeks, and the light to her eyes.Then little Kippy was born, and[p22]happiness such as seldom comes to one who has tasted the dregs of life came to the frail little woman in the big four-poster bed. For ten days she held the baby fingers to her heart, and watched the little blossom of a maid unfold.But one black night, when the rain beat against the panes, and the moan of the river sounded in her ears, she suddenly sat up in bed: she had heard the whistle ofhisboat! Full of dumb terror she crept to the window, and with her face pressed against the glass she waited and watched. The present was swallowed up in the past. She was once more alone, unloved, afraid. Stealthily snatching a cloak, she crept down into the garden, feeling her way through the sodden grass, and the jimpson weed which the rain had beaten down.And ever since, when children pass the house on their way to school, they peep through the broken fence rails, and point out to one another, in awed tones, the tree under which Miss Kippy’s mother killed herself. Then they look half-fearfully[p23]at the windows in the hope of catching a glimpse of Miss Kippy herself.For Kippy had had a long illness in her thirteenth year which left her with the face and mind of a little child, and kindly, shabby Mr. Moore, having made the supreme effort of his life, from this time on ceased to struggle against the weakness that for half a lifetime had beset him, and sought oblivion in innocuous but perpetual libations. The one duty which he recognized was the care of his invalid daughter.As soon as they were old enough, the boys launched their small craft and set forth to seek their fortunes. Ben, with no cargo on board but his own desires, went west and found a snug and comfortable harbor, while D. Webster, the hope of his mother and the pride of the town, was at thirty-five still putting out to sea, with all sail set, only to find himself again and again aground on the sandbars of the old familiar Cove.[p24]IIIJimmy Fallows, being the boastful possessor of the fleetest horse in town, was the first to return from the funeral. Extricating himself with some difficulty from the narrow-seated buggy, he held out his hand to Mrs. Fallows. But that imposing lady, evidently offended with her jovial lord, refused his proffered aid, and clambered out over the wheel on the other side.Mrs. Fallows, whose architectural effects were strictly perpendicular, cast a perpetual shadow of disapproval over the life partner whom it had pleased Providence to bestow upon her. Jimmy was a born satirist; he knew things are not what they seem, and he wickedly rejoiced thereat. To his literal,[p25]pious-minded wife he at times seemed the incarnation of wickedness.Sweeping with dignity beneath the arching sign of Your Hotel, she took her seat upon the porch, and, disposing her sable robes about her, folded her mitted hands, and waited to see the people return from the funeral.Jimmy, with the uncertain expression of one who is ready to apologize, but cannot remember the offense, hovered about uneasily, casting tempting bits of conversational bait into the silence, but failing to attract so much as a nibble of attention.“Miss Jemima Fenny was over to the funeral from Birdtown. Miss Jim is one of ’em, ain’t she?”There was no response.“Had her brother Nick with her. He’s just gettin’ over typhoid fever; looks about the size and color of a slate pencil. I bet, in spite of Miss Jim’s fine clothes, they ain’t had a square meal for a month. That’s because she kept him at school so long when he orter been at work. He did[p26]git a job in a newspaper office over at Coreyville not long ’fore he was took sick. They tell me he’s as slick as a onion about newspaper work.”Continued silence; but Jimmy boldly cast another fly:“Last funeral we had was Mrs. Tucker’s, wasn’t it? Old man Tucker was there to-day. Crape band on his hat is climbin’ up; it’ll be at high mast ag’in soon.”Dense, nerve-racking silence; but Jimmy made one more effort:“The Opps are coming back here tonight to talk things over before Ben goes on to Missouri. He counts on ketchin’ the night boat. It won’t give him much time, will it?”But Mrs. Fallows, unrelaxed, stared fixedly before her; she had taken refuge in that most trying of all rejoinders, silence, and the fallible Jimmy, who waxed strong and prospered upon abuse, drooped and languished under this new and cruel form of punishment.It was not until a buggy stopped at the[p27]door, and the Opp brothers descended, that the tension was in any way relieved.Jimmy greeted them with the joy of an Arctic explorer welcoming a relief party.“Come right on in here, in the office,” he cried hospitably; “your talkin’ won’t bother me a speck.”But Ben abruptly expressed his desire for more private quarters, and led the way up-stairs.The low-ceiled room into which he ushered D. Webster was of such a depressing drab that even the green and red bed-quilt failed to disperse the gloom. The sole decoration, classic in its severity, was a large advertisement for a business college, whereon an elk’s head grew out of a bow of ribbon, the horns branching and rebranching into a forest of curves and flourishes.The elder Opp took his seat by the window, and drummed with impatient fingers on the sill. He was small, like his brother, but of a compact, sturdy build. His chin, instead of dwindling to a point, was square and stubborn, and his eyes[p28]looked straight ahead at the thing he wanted, and neither saw nor cared for what lay outside. He had been trying ever since leaving the cemetery to bring the conversation down to practical matters, but D. Webster, seizing the first opportunity of impressing himself upon his next of kin, had persisted in indulging in airy and time-destroying flights of fancy.The truth is that our Mr. Opp was not happy. In his secret heart he felt a bit apologetic before the material success of his elder brother. Hence it was necessary to talk a great deal and to set forth in detail the very important business enterprises upon which he was about to embark.Presently Ben Opp looked at his watch.“See here,” he interrupted, “that boat may be along at any time. We’d better come to some decision about the estate.”D. Webster ran his fingers through his hair, which stood in valiant defense of the small bald spot behind it.“Yes, yes,” he said; “business is[p29]business. I’ll have to be off myself the very first thing in the morning. This funeral couldn’t have come at a more unfortunate time for me. You see, my special territory—”But Ben saw the danger of another bolt, and checked him:“How much do you think the old house is worth?”D. Webster drew forth his shiny note-book and pencil and made elaborate calculations.“I should say,” he said, as one financier to another, “that including of the house and land and contents of same, it would amount to the whole sum total of about two thousand dollars.”“That is about what I figured,” said Ben; “now, how much money is in the bank?”D. Webster produced a formidable packet of letters and papers from his inside pocket and, after some searching, succeeded in finding a statement, which set forth the fact that the Ripper County Bank held in trust one thousand dollars,[p30]to be divided between the children of Mary Opp Moore at the death of her husband, Curtis V. Moore.“One thousand dollars!” said Ben, looking blankly at his brother, “Why, for heaven’s sake, what have Mr. Moore and Kippy been living on all these years?”D. Webster moved uneasily in his chair. “Oh, they’ve managed to get along first rate,” he said evasively.His brother looked at him narrowly. “On the interest of a thousand dollars?” He leaned forward, and his face hardened: “See here, have you been putting up cash all this time for that old codger to loaf on? Is that why you have never gotten ahead?”D. Webster, with hands in his pockets and his feet stretched in front of him, was blinking in furious embarrassment at the large-eyed elk overhead.“To think,” went on Ben, his slow wrath rising, “of your staying here in Kentucky all these years and handing out what you made to that old sponger.[p31]I cut loose and made a neat little sum, married, and settled down. And what have you done? Where have you gotten? Anybody that would let himself be imposed upon like that deserves to fail. Now what do you propose to do about this money?”Mr. Opp did not propose to do anything. The affront offered his business sagacity was of such a nature that it demanded all his attention. He composed various denunciatory answers with which to annihilate his brother. He hesitated between two courses, whether he should hurl himself upon him in righteous indignation and demand physical satisfaction, or whether he should rise in a calm and manly attitude and wither him with blighting sarcasm. And while the decision was pending, he still sat with his hands in his pockets, and his feet stretched forth, and blinked indignantly at the ornate elk.“The estate,” continued Ben, contempt still in his face, “amounts at most to three thousand dollars, after the house[p32]is sold. Part of this, of course, will go to the maintenance of Kippy.”At mention of her name, Mr. Opp’s gaze dropped abruptly to his brother’s face.“What about Kippy? She’s going to live with you, ain’t she?” he asked anxiously.Ben Opp shook his head emphatically. “She certainly is not. I haven’t the slightest idea of burdening myself and family with that feeble-minded girl.”“But see here,” said Mr. Opp, his anger vanishing in the face of this new complication, “you don’t know Kippy; she’s just similar to a little child, quiet and gentle-like. Never give anybody any trouble in her life. Just plays with her dolls and sings to herself all day.”“Exactly,” said Ben; “twenty-five years old and still playing with dolls. I saw her yesterday, dressed up in all sorts of foolish toggery, talking to her hands, and laughing. Aunt Tish humors her, and her father humored her, but I’m not going to. I feel sorry for her[p33]all right, but I am not going to take her home with me.”D. Webster nervously twisted the large seal ring which he wore on his forefinger. “Then what do you mean,” he said hesitatingly—“what do you want to do about it?”“Why, send her to an asylum, of course. That’s where she ought to have been all these years.”Mr. Opp, sitting upon the small of his back, with one leg wrapped casually about the leg of the chair, stared at him for a moment in consternation, then, gathering himself together, rose and for the first time since we have met him seemed completely to fill his checked ready-made suit.“Send Kippy to a lunatic asylum!” he said in tones so indignant that they made his chin tremble. “You will do nothing whatever of the kind! Why, all she’s ever had in the world was her pa and Aunt Tish and her home; now he’s gone, you ain’t wanting to take the others away from her too, are you?”[p34]“Well, who is going to take care of her?” demanded Ben angrily.“I am,” announced D. Webster, striking as fine an attitude as ever his illustrious predecessor struck; “you take the money that’s in the bank, and leave me the house and Kippy. That’ll be her share and mine. I can take care of her; I don’t ask favors of nobody. Suppose I do lose my job; I’ll get me another. There’s a dozen ways I can make a living. There ain’t a man in the State that’s got more resources than me. I got plans laid now that’ll revolutionize—”“Yes,” said Ben, quietly, “you always could do great things.”D. Webster’s egotism, inflated to the utmost, burst at this prick, and he suddenly collapsed. Dropping limply into the chair by the table, he held his hand over his mouth to hide his agitation.“There’s—there’s one thing,” he began, swallowing violently, and winking after each word, “that I—I can’t[p35]do—and that’s to leave a—sister—to die—among strangers.”And then, to his mortification, his head went unexpectedly down upon his arms, and a flood of tears bedimmed the radiance of his twenty-five-cent four-in-hand.From far down the river came the whistle of the boat, and, in the room below, Jimmy Fallows removed a reluctant ear from the stove-pipe hole.“Melindy,” he said confidentially, entirely forgetting the late frost, “I never see anybody in the world that stood as good a show of gittin’ the fool prize as that there D. Opp.”[p36]IVTheold Opp House stood high on the river-bank and gazed lonesomely out into the summer night. It was a shabby, down-at-heel, dejected-looking place, with one side showing faint lights, above and below, but the other side so nailed up and empty and useless that it gave the place the appearance of being paralyzed down one side and of having scarcely enough vitality left to sustain life in the other.To make matters worse, an old hound howled dismally on the door-step, only stopping occasionally to paw at the iron latch and to whimper for the master whose unsteady footsteps he had followed for thirteen years.In the front room a shaded lamp,[p37]turned low, threw a circle of light on the table and floor, leaving the corners full of vague, uncertain shadows. From the wide, black fireplace a pair of rusty and battered andirons held out empty arms, and on the high stone shelf above the opening, flanked on each side by a stuffed owl, was a tall, square-faced clock, with the hour-hand missing. The minute-hand still went on its useless round, and behind it, on the face of the clock, a tiny schooner with all sail set rocked with the swinging of the pendulum.The loud ticking of the clock, and the lamentations of the hound without, were not the only sounds that disturbed the night. Before the empty fireplace, in a high-backed, cane-bottomed chair, slept an old negress, with head bowed, moaning and muttering as she slept. She was bent and ashen with age, and her brown skin sagged in long wrinkles from her face and hands. On her forehead, reaching from brow to faded turban, was a hideous testimony to some ancient conflict. A large, irregular hole, over which[p38]the flesh had grown, pulsed as sentiently and imperatively as a naked, living heart.A shutter slammed sharply somewhere in the house above, and something stirred fearfully in the shadow of the room. It was a small figure that crouched against the wall, listening and watching with the furtive terror of a newly captured coyote—the slight figure of a woman dressed as a child, with short gingham dress, and heelless slippers, and a bright ribbon holding back the limp, flaxen hair from her strange, pinched face.Again and again her wide, frightened eyes sought the steps leading to the room above, and sometimes she would lean forward and whisper in agonized expectancy, “Daddy?” Then when no answer came, she would shudder back against the wall, cold and shaking and full of dumb terrors.Suddenly the hound’s howling changed to a sharp bark, and the old negress stirred and stretched herself.“What ails dat air dog?” she[p39]mumbled, going to the window, and shading her eyes with her hand. “You’d ’low to hear him tell it he done heared old master coming up de road.”That somebody was coming was evident from the continued excitement of the hound, and when the gate slammed and a man’s voice sounded in the darkness, Aunt Tish opened the door, throwing a long, dim patch of light out across the narrow porch and over the big, round stepping-stones beyond.Into the light came Mr. Opp, staggering under the load of his baggage, his coat over his arm, his collar off, thoroughly spent with the events of the day.“Lord ’a’ mercy!” said Aunt Tish, “if hit ain’t Mr. D.! I done give you up long ago. I certainly is glad you come. Miss Kippy’s jes carrying on like ever’thing. She ain’t been to baid for two nights, an’ I can’t do nothin’ ’t all wif her.”Mr. Opp deposited his things in a corner, and, tired as he was, assumed an air of authority. It was evident that a man[p40]was needed, a person of firmness, of decision.“I’ll see that she goes to bed at once,” he said resolutely. “Where is she at?”“She’s behind de door,” said Aunt Tish; “she’s be’n so skeered ever sence her paw died I can’t do nothin’ wif her.”“Kippy,” said Mr. Opp, sternly, “come out here this minute.”But there was no response. Going to the corner where his coat lay, he took from the pocket a brown-paper parcel.“Say, Kippy,” he said in a greatly mollified tone, “I wish you would come on out here and see me. You remember brother D., don’t you? You ought to see what I brought you all the way from the city. It’s got blue eyes.”At this the small, grotesque figure, distrustful, suspicious, ready to take flight at a word, ventured slowly forth. So slight she was, and so frail, and so softly she moved, it was almost as if the wind blew her toward him. Every thought that came into her brain was instantly reflected in her hypersensitive face, and[p41]as she stood before him nervously plucking her fingers, fear and joy struggled for supremacy. Suddenly with a low cry she snatched the doll from him and clasped it to her heart.Meanwhile Aunt Tish had spread a cloth on the table and set forth some cold corn dodger, a pitcher of foaming butter-milk, and a plate of cold corned beef. The milk was in a battered pewter pitcher, but the dish that held the corn bread was of heavy silver, with intricate chasings about the rim.Mr. Opp, with his head propped on his hand, ate wearily. He had been up since four o’clock that morning, and to-morrow he must be up at daybreak if he was to keep his engagements to supply the dealers with the greatest line of shoes ever put upon the market. Between now and then he must decide many things: Kippy must be planned for, the house gone over, and arrangements made for the future. Being behind the scenes, as it were, and having no spectator to impress, he allowed himself to sink into an[p42]attitude of extreme dejection. And Mr. Opp, shorn of the dignity of his heavily padded coat, and his imposing collar and tie, and with even his pompadour limp upon his forehead, failed entirely to give a good imitation of himself.As he sat thus, with one hand hanging limply over the back of the chair, he felt something touch it softly, dumbly, as a dog might. Looking down, he discovered Miss Kippy sitting on the floor, close behind him, watching him with furtive eyes. In one arm she cradled the new doll, and in the other she held his coat.Mr. Opp patted her cheek: “Whatever are you doing with my coat?” he asked.Miss Kippy held it behind her, and nodded her head wisely: “Keeping it so you can’t go away,” she whispered. “I’ll hold it tight all night. To-morrow I’ll hide it.”“But I’m a business man,” said Mr. Opp, unconsciously straightening his shoulders. “A great deal of responsibility depends on me. I’ve got to be off[p43]early in the morning; but I’m coming back to see you real often—every now and then.”Miss Kippy’s whole attitude changed. She caught his hand and clung to it, and the terror came back to her eyes.“You mustn’t go,” she whispered, her body quivering with excitement. “It’ll get me if you do. Daddy kept It away, and you can keep It away; but Aunt Tish can’t: she’s afraid of It, too! She goes to sleep, and then It reaches at me through the window. It comes down the chimney, there—where you see the brick’s loose. Don’t leave me, D. Hush, don’t you hear It?”Her voice had risen to hysteria, and she clung to him, cold and shaken by the fear that possessed her.Mr. Opp put a quieting arm about her. “Why, see here, Kippy,” he said, “didn’t you know It was afraid of me? Look how strong I am! I could kill It with my little finger.”“Could you?” asked Miss Kippy, fearfully.[p44]“Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Opp. “Don’t you ever be scared of anything whatsoever when Brother D.’s round. I’m going to take care of you from now on.”“This me is bad,” announced Miss Kippy; “the other me is good. Her name is Oxety; she has one blue eye and one brown.”“Well, Oxety must go to bed now,” said Mr. Opp; “it must be getting awful late.”But Miss Kippy shook her head. “You might go ’way,” she said.Finding that he could not persuade her, Mr. Opp resorted to strategy: “I’ll tell you what let’s me and you do. Let’s put your slippers on your hands.”This proposition met with instant approval. It appealed to Miss Kippy as a brilliant suggestion. She assisted in unbuttoning the single straps and watched with glee as they were fastened about her wrists.[p45]“‘Don’t leave me’”“Now,” said Mr. Opp, with assumed enthusiasm, “we’ll make the slippers[p47]walk you up-stairs, and after Aunt Tish undresses you, they shall walk you to bed. Won’t that be fun?”Miss Kippy’s fancy was so tickled by this suggestion that she put it into practice at once, and went gaily forth up the steps on all fours. At the turn she stopped, and looked at him wistfully:“You’ll come up before I go to sleep?” she begged; “Daddy did.”Half an hour later Aunt Tish came down the narrow stairway: “She done gone to baid now, laughin’ an’ happy ag’in,” she said; “she never did have dem spells when her paw was round, an’ sometimes dat chile jes as clear in her mind as you an’ me is.”“What is it she’s afraid of?” asked Mr. Opp.Aunt Tish leaned toward him across the table, and the light of the lamp fell full upon her black, bead-like eyes, and her sunken jaws, and on the great palpitating scar.“De ghosties,” she whispered; “dey been worriting dat chile ever’ chance dey[p48]git.Ihear ’em! Dey wait till I take a nap of sleep, den dey comes sneakin’ in to pester her. She says dey ain’t but one, but I hears heaps ob ’em, some ob ’em so little dey kin climb onder de crack in de door.”“Look a-here, Aunt Tish,” said Mr. Opp, sternly, “don’t you ever talk a word of this foolishness to her again. Not one word, do you hear?”“Yas, sir; dat’s what Mr. Moore allays said, an’ Idon’ttalk to her ’bout hit, I don’t haf to. She done knows I know. I been livin’ heah goin’ on forty years, sence ’fore you was borned, an’ you can’t fool me, chile; no, sir, dat you can’t.”“Well, you must go to bed now,” said Mr. Opp, looking up at the clock and seeing that it was half-past something though he did not know what.“I never goes to baid when I stays here,” announced Aunt Tish; “I sets up in de kitchen an’ sleeps. I’s skeered dat chile run away; she ’low she gwine to some day. Her paw ketched her oncet[p49]gittin’ in a boat down on de river-bank. She ain’t gwine, while I’s here, no sir-ee! I never leaves her in de daytime an’ her paw never leaves her at night, dat is, when he’s livin’.”After she had gone, Mr. Opp ascended the stairway, and entered the room above. A candle sputtered on the table, and in its light he saw the wide, four-poster bed that had been his mother’s, and in it the frail figure of little Miss Kippy. Her hair lay loose upon the pillow, and on her sleeping face, appealing in its helplessness, was a smile of perfect peace. The new doll lay on the table beside the candle, but clasped tightly in her arms was the coat of many checks.For a moment Mr. Opp stood watching her, then he drew his shirt-sleeve quickly across his eyes. As he turned to descend, his new shoes creaked painfully and, after he had carefully removed them, he tiptoed down, passed through the sitting-room and out upon the porch, where he sank down on the step and dropped his head on his arms.[p50]The night was very still, save for the croaking of a bullfrog, and the incessant scraping of a cedar-tree against the corner of the roof. From across the river, faint sparks of light shone out from cabin windows, and, below, a moving light now and then told of a passing scow. Once a steamboat slipped weirdly out of the darkness, sparkling with lights, and sending up faint sounds of music; but before the waves from the wheel had ceased to splash on the bank below, she was swallowed up in the darkness, leaving lonesomeness again.Mr. Opp sat staring out into the night, outwardly calm, but inwardly engaged in a mortal duel. The aggressive Mr. Opp of the gorgeous raiment and the seal ring, the important man of business, the ambitious financier, was in deadly combat with the insignificant Mr. Opp, he of the shirt-sleeves and the wilted pompadour, the delicate, sensitive, futile Mr. Opp who was incapable of everything but the laying down of his life for the sake of another.[p51]A dull line of light hovered on the horizon, and gradually the woods on the opposite shore took shape, then the big river itself, gray and shimmering, with streaks on the water where a snag broke the swift current.“Mr. D.,” he heard Aunt Tish calling up the back stairs, “you better git out of baid; hit’s sun-up.”He rose stiffly and started back to the kitchen. As he passed through the front room, his eyes fell upon his new suit-case full of the treasured drummers’ samples. Stooping down, he traced the large black letters with his finger and sighed deeply.Then he got up resolutely and marched to the kitchen door.“Aunt Tish,” he said with authority, “you needn’t mind about hurrying breakfast. I find there’s very important business will keep me here in the Cove for the present.”[p52]VTherewere two methods of communication in Cove City, both of which were equally effective. One was the telephone, which from a single, isolated case had developed into an epidemic, and the other, which enjoyed the dignity of precedence and established custom, was to tell Jimmy Fallows.Both of these currents of information soon overflowed with the news that Mr. D. Webster Opp had given up a good position in the city, and expected to establish himself in business in his native town. The nature of this business was agitating the community at large in only a degree less than it was agitating Mr. Opp himself.One afternoon Jimmy Fallows stood[p53]with his back to his front gate, suspended by his armpits from the pickets, and conducted business after his usual fashion. As a general retires to a hill-top to organize his forces and issue orders to his subordinates, so Jimmy hung upon his front fence and conducted the affairs of the town. He knew what time each farmer came in, where the “Helping Hands” were going to sew, where the doctor was, and where the services would be held next Sunday. He was coroner, wharf-master, undertaker, and notary, and the only thing in the heavens above or the earth below concerning which he did not attempt to give information was the arrival of the next steamboat.As he stood whittling a stick and cheerfully humming a tune of other days, he descried a small, alert figure coming up the road. The pace was so much brisker than the ordinary slow gait of the Cove that he recognized the person at once as Mr. Opp. Whereupon he lifted his voice and hailed a boy who was[p54]just vanishing down the street in the opposite direction:“Nick!” he called. “Aw, Nick Fenny! Tell Mat Lucas that Mr. Opp’s uptown.”Connection being thus made at one end of the line, he turned to effect it at the other. “Howdy, Brother Opp. Kinder dusty on the river, ain’t it?”“Well, weareexperiencing considerable of warm weather at this juncture,” said Mr. Opp, affably.“Mat Lucas has been hanging round here all day,” said Jimmy. “He wants you to buy out a half-interest in his dry-goods store. What do you think about it?”“Well,” said Mr. Opp, thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, “I am considering of a great variety of different things. I been in the dry-goods business twice, and I can’t say but what it ain’t a pretty business. Of course,” he added with a twinge, “my specialty are shoes.”“Yes,” said Jimmy; “but the folks[p55]here all gets their shoes at the drug store. Mr. Toddlinger’s been carrying a line of shoes along with his pills and plasters ever sence he went into business.”Mr. Opp looked up at the large sign overhead. “If you and Mr. Tucker wasn’t both in the hotel business, I might be thinking of considering that.”This proposition tickled Jimmy immensely. Chuckles of amusement agitated his rotund figure.“Why don’t you buy us both out?” he asked. “We could sell out for nothing and make money.”“Why, there’s three boarders sitting over at Our Hotel now,” said Mr. Opp, who rather fancied himself in the rôle of a genial host.“Yes,” said Jimmy. “Old man Tucker’s had ’em hanging out on the line all morning. I don’t guess they got strength enough to walk around much after the meals he give ’em.”“Of course,” said Mr. Opp, wholly absorbed in his own affairs, “this is just[p56]temporarily for the time being, as it were. In a year or so, when my financial condition is sorter more established in a way, I intend to put through that oil-wells proposition. The fact that I am aiming at arriving to is what would you think the Cove was at present most in need of?”“Elbow-grease,” said Jimmy, promptly. “The only two things that we ain’t got that a city has, is elbow-grease and a newspaper.”For a moment there was a silence, heavy with significance. Mr. Fallows’s gaze penetrated the earth, while Mr. Opp’s scanned the heavens; then they suddenly looked at each other, and the great idea was born.An editor! Mr. Opp’s whole being thrilled responsive to the call. The thought of dwelling above the sordid bartering of commercial life, of being in a position to exercise those mental powers with which he felt himself so generously endowed, almost swept him off his feet. He had been a reporter[p57]once; for two golden weeks he had handed in police-court reports that fairly scintillated with verbal gems plucked at random from the dictionary. But the city editor had indicated as kindly as possible that his services were no longer required, vaguely suggesting that it was necessary to reduce the force; and Mr. Opp had assured him that he understood perfectly, and that he was ready to return at any future time. That apprenticeship, brief though it was, served as a foundation upon which Mr. Opp erected a tower of dazzling possibilities.“What’s the matter with you takin’ Mr. Gusty’s old printin’-shop and startin’ up business for yourself?” asked Jimmy.“Do you reckon she’d sell it?” asked Mr. Opp, anxiously.“Sell it?” said Jimmy. “Why, she’s ’most ready to give it away to keep from having to pay Pete Aker’s rent for the shop. Say—Mr. Gall—up,” he called up the street to a man who was turning the corner, “is Mrs. Gusty at home?”[p58]The man, thus accosted, turned and came toward them.“Who is Mr. Gallop?” asked Mr. Opp.“He’s the new telephone girl,” said Jimmy, with relish; “ain’t been here but a month, and he’s doing the largest and most profitable trade in tending to other folks’s business you ever seen. Soft! Why, he must ’a’ been raised on a pillow—He always puts me in mind of a highly educated pig: it sorter surprises and tickles you to see him walkin’ round on his hind legs and talking like other people. Other day one of the boys, just to devil him, ast him to drive his team out home. I liked to ’a’ died when I seen him tryin’ to turn the corner, pullin’ ‘Gee’ and hollerin’ ‘Haw’ with every breath. Old mules got their legs in a hard knot trying to do both at once, and the boys says when Gallop got out in the country he felt so bad about it he got down and ’pologized to the mules. How ’bout that, Gallop—did you!” he concluded as the subject of the conversation arrived upon the scene.[p59]The new-comer, a plump, fair young man, who held one hand clasped affectionately in the other, blushed indignantly, but said nothing.“This here is Mr. Opp,” went on Jimmy; “he wants to see Mrs. Gusty. Do you know whether he will ketch her at home or not?”Mr. Gallop was by this time paying the tribute of many an admiring glance to every detail of Mr. Opp’s costume, and Mr. Opp, realizing this, assumed an air of cosmopolitan nonchalance, and toyed indifferently with his large watch-fob.When Mr. Gallop’s admiration and attention had become focused upon Mr. Opp’s ring, he suddenly turned on the faucet of his conversation, and allowed such a stream of general information to pour forth that Mr. Opp quite forgot to look imposing.“Mrs. Gusty telephoned early this morning to Mrs. Dorsey that she would come over and help her make preserves. Mrs. Dorsey got a big load of peaches from her father across the river. He’s[p60]been down with the asthma, and had to call up the doctor twice in the night. And the doctor couldn’t get the right medicine in town, and had me call up the city. They are going to send it down on theBig Sandy, but she’s stuck in the locks, and goodness knows when she’ll get here. She’s—”“Excuse me,” interrupted Mr. Opp, politely but firmly, “I’ve got to see Mrs. Gusty on very important business. Have you any idea whatsoever of when she will return back home?”“Yes,” said Mr. Gallop, eager to oblige. “She’s about home by this time. Miss Lou Diker is making her a dress, and she telephoned she’d be by to try it on ’bout four o’clock. I’ll go up there with you, if you want me to.”“Why don’t you drive him!” suggested Jimmy. “You can borrow a pair of mules acrost the street.”“Mr. Opp,” said Mr. Gallop, feelingly, as they walked up Main Street, “I wouldn’t treat a’ insect like he treats me.”[p61]“Oh, you mustn’t mind Jimmy,” said Mr. Opp, kindly; “he always sort of enjoys a little joke as he goes along. Why, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he even made a joke on me sometime. How long have you been in Cove City?”“Just a month,” said Mr. Gallop. “It must look awful little to you, after all the big cities you been used to.”Mr. Opp lengthened his stride. “Yes,” he said largely; “quite small, quite little, in fact. No place for a business man; but for a professional man, a man that requires leisure to sort of cultivate his brain and that means to be a influence in the community, it’s a good place, a remarkably good place.”A hint, however vague, dropped into the mind of Mr. Gallop, caused instant fermentation. From long experience he had become an adept at extracting information from all who crossed his path. A preliminary interest, a breath or two of flattery by way of anesthetic, and his victim’s secret was out before he knew it.“Reckon you are going up to talk[p62]insurance to Mrs. Gusty,” he ventured tentatively.“No; oh, no,” said Mr. Opp. “I formerly was in the insurance business, some time back. Very little prospects in it for a man of my nature. I have to have a chance to sorter spread out, you know—to use my own particular ideas about working things out.”“What is your especial line?” asked Mr. Gallop, deferentially.“Shoe—” Mr. Opp began involuntarily, then checked himself—“journalism,” he said, and the word seemed for the moment completely to fill space.At Mrs. Gusty’s gate Mr. Gallop stopped.“I guess I ought to go back now,” he said regretfully; “the telephone and telegraph office is right there in my room, and I never leave them day or night except just this one hour in the afternoon. It’s awful trying. The farmers begin calling each other up at three o’clock in the morning. Say, I wish you’d step in sometime. I’d just[p63]love to have you. But you are so busy and got so many friends, you won’t have much time for me, I guess.”Mr. Opp thought otherwise. He said that no matter how pressed he was by various important duties, he was never too busy to see a friend. And he said it with the air of one who confers a favor, and Mr. Gallop received it as one who receives a favor, and they shook hands warmly and parted.[p64]VIMr. Opp, absorbed in the great scheme which was taking definite form in his mind, did not discover until he reached the steps that some one was lying in a hammock on the porch.It was a dark-haired girl in a pink dress, with a pink bow in her hair and small bows on the toes of her high-heeled slippers—the very kind of person, in fact, that Mr. Opp was most desirous of avoiding.Fortunately she was asleep, and Mr. Opp, after listening in vain at the door for sounds of Mrs. Gusty within, tiptoed cautiously to the other end of the porch and took his seat on a straight-backed settee.Let it not for a moment be supposed[p65]that Mr. Opp was a stranger to the fascinations of femininity. He had been inoculated at a tender age, and it had taken so completely, so tragically, that he had crept back to life with one illusion sadly shattered, and the conviction firm within him that henceforth he was immune. His attitude toward the subject remained, however, interested, but cautious—such as a good little boy might entertain toward a loaded pistol.As he sat very straight and very still on the green settee, he tried to compose his mind for the coming interview with Mrs. Gusty. Directly across the road was Aker’s old carpenter-shop, a small, square, one-story edifice, shabby, and holding out scant promise of journalistic possibilities. Mr. Opp, however, seldom saw things as they were; he saw them as they were going to be. Before five minutes had elapsed he had the shop painted white, with trimmings of red, new panes in the windows, ground glass below and clear above, an imposing sign over the door, and the roadway blocked with[p66]eager subscribers. He would have to have an assistant, of course, some one to attend to the general details; but he would have charge of everything himself. He would edit a paper, comprehensive in its scope, and liberal in its views. Science, art, religion, society, and politics would all be duly chronicled. Politics! Why, his paper would be an organ—an organ of the Democratic Party!At the thought of being an organ, Mr. Opp’s bosom swelled with such pride that his settee creaked, and he glanced apprehensively toward the other end of the porch.The young lady was still asleep, with her head resting on her bare arm, and one foot hanging limply below her ruffled petticoat.Suddenly Mr. Opp leaned forward and viewed her slipper with interest. He had recognized the make! It was xxx-aa. He had carried a sample exactly like it, and had been wont to call enthusiastic attention to the curve of the instep and the set of the heel. He now realized that[p67]the effect depended entirely on the bow, and he seriously considered writing to the firm and suggesting the improvement.In the midst of his reflections the young lady stirred and then sat up. Her hair was tumbled, and her eyes indicated that she had been indulging in recent tears. Resting her chin on her palms, she gazed gloomily down the road.Mr. Opp, at the other end of the porch, also gazed gloomily down the road. The fact that he must make his presence known was annihilated by the yet more urgent fact that he could think of nothing to say. A bumblebee wheeled in narrowing circles above his head and finally lighted upon his coat-sleeve. But Mr. Opp remained immovable. He was searching his vocabulary for a word which would gently crack the silence without shattering it to bits.The bumblebee saved the situation. Detecting some rare viand in a crack of the porch midway between the settee and the hammock, and evidently being a[p68]bibulous bee, it set up such a buzz of excitement that Mr. Opp looked at it, and the young lady looked at it, and their eyes met.“Excuse me,” said Mr. Opp, rather breathlessly; “you was asleep, and I come to see Mrs. Gusty, and—er—the fact is—I’m Mr. Opp.”At this announcement the young lady put her hand to her head, and by a dexterous movement rearranged the brown halo of her hair, and twisted the pink bow into its proper, aggressive position.“Mother’ll—be back soon,”—she spoke without embarrassment, yet with the hesitation of one who is not in the habit of speaking for herself,—“I—I—didn’t know I was going to sleep.”“No,” said Mr. Opp; then added politely, “neither did I.” Silence again looming on the horizon, he plunged on: “I think I used to be in the habit of seeing you when you was—er—younger, didn’t I?”“Up at the store.” She smiled faintly. “You bought me a bag of pop-corn once[p69]with a prize in it. It was a breastpin; I’ve got it yet.”Mr. Opp scowled slightly as he tried to extract an imaginary splinter from his thumb. “Do you—er—attend school?” he asked, taking refuge in a paternal attitude.“I’m finished,” she said listlessly. “I’ve been going to the Young Ladies’ Seminary at Coreyville.”“Didn’t you taken to it?” asked Mr. Opp, wishing fervently that Mrs. Gusty would return.“Oh, yes,” said his companion, earnestly. “I love it; I was a special. I took music and botany and painting. I was in four concerts last year and played in the double duets at the commencements.” During the pause that followed, Mr. Opp considered various names for his newspaper. “Mother isn’t going to let me go back,” the soft, drawling voice continued; “she says when a girl is nineteen she ought to settle down. She wants me to get married.”Mr. Opp laid “The Cove Chronicle”[p70]and “The Weekly Bugle” aside for further consideration, and inquired politely if there was any special person whom Mrs. Gusty desired for a son-in-law.“Oh, no,” said the girl, indifferently; “she hasn’t thought of anybody. But I don’t want to get married—yet. I want to go back to the seminary and be a music teacher. I hate it here, every bit of it. It’s so stupid—and lonesome, and—”A break in her voice caused Mr. Opp to postpone a decision of the day on which his paper was to be published, and to give her his undivided attention. Distress, even in beauty, was not to be withstood, and the fact that she was unusually pretty had been annoying Mr. Opp ever since she had spoken to him. As she turned her head away and wiped her eyes, he rose impulsively and moved toward her:“Say, look a-here now, you ain’t crying, are you?” he asked.She shook her head in indignant denial.“Well—er—you don’t seem exactly[p71]happy, as you might say,” suggested Mr. Opp, boldly.“I’m not,” she confessed, biting her lip. “I oughtn’t to talk to you about it, but there isn’t anybody here that would understand. They think I’m stuck up when I talk about books and music and—and other kind of people. They just keep on doing the same stupid things till they get old and die. Only mother won’t even let me do stupid things; she says I bother her when I try to help around the house.”“Can’t you sew or make mottoes or something?” asked Mr. Opp, very vague as to feminine accomplishments.“What’s the use?” asked the girl. “Mother does everything for me. She always says she’d rather do it than teach me how.”“Don’t you take to reading?” asked Mr. Opp.“Oh, yes,” she said; “I used to read all the time down at school; but there never is anything to read up here.”The editor-elect peopled the country[p72]with similar cases, and he immediately saw himself as a public benefactor supplying starved subscribers with a bountiful repast of weekly news.“Won’t you sit down?” asked the girl, interrupting his reflections. “I don’t know what can be keeping mother.”Mr. Opp looked about for a chair, but there was none. Then he glanced at his companion, and saw that she was holding aside her pink skirt and evidently offering him a seat beside her in the hammock. He advanced a step, retreated, then weakly capitulated. Sitting very rigid, nursing his hat on his knees, and inserting his forefinger between his neck and his collar as if to breathe better, he remarked that it was getting warmer all the time.“This isn’t anything to what it will be later,” said the girl; “it keeps on getting hotter and dustier all the time. I don’t believe there’s such a stupid, poky, little old place anywhere else in the world. You ought to be mighty glad you don’t live here.”
“Ihopeyour passenger hasn’t missed his train,” observed the ferryman to Mr. Jimmy Fallows, who sat on the river bank with the painter of his rickety little naphtha launch held loosely in his hand.
“Mr. Opp?” said Jimmy. “I bet he did. If there is one person in the world that’s got a talent for missing things, it’s Mr. Opp. I never seen him that he hadn’t just missed gettin’ a thousand dollar job, or inventin’ a patent, or bein’ hurt when he had took out a accident policy. If he did ketch a train, like enough it was goin’ the wrong way.”
[p4]Jimmy had been waiting since nine in the morning, and it was now well past noon. He was a placid gentleman of curvilinear type, short of limb and large of girth. His trousers, of that morose hue termed by the country people “plum,” reached to his armpits, and his hat, large and felt and weather-beaten, was only prevented from eclipsing his head by the stubborn resistance of two small, knob-like ears.
“Mr. Opp ain’t been back to the Cove for a long while, has he?” asked the ferryman, whose intellectual life depended solely upon the crumbs of information scattered by chance passers-by.
“Goin’ on two years,” said Mr. Fallows. “Reckon he’s been so busy formin’ trusts and buyin’ out railways and promotin’ things generally that he ain’t had any time to come back home. It’s his step-pa’s funeral that’s bringin’ him now. The only time city folks seem to want to see their kin folks in the country is when they are dead.”
“Ain’t that him a-comin’ down the[p5]bank?” asked the ferryman, shading his eyes with his hands.
Mr. Fallows, with some difficulty, got to his feet.
“Yes, that’s him all right. Hustlin’ to beat the band. Wonder if he takes me for a street car.”
Coming with important stride down the wharf, and whistling as he came, was a small man of about thirty-five. In one hand he carried a large suit-case, and in the other a new and shining grip. On both were painted, in letters designed to be seen, “D. Webster Opp, Kentucky.”
In fact, everything about him was evidently designed to be seen. His new suit of insistent plaid, his magnificent tie sagging with the weight of a colossal scarf-pin, his brown hat, his new tan shoes, all demanded individual and instant attention.
The only insignificant thing about Mr. Opp was himself. His slight, undeveloped body seemed to be in a chronic state of apology for failing properly to set off the glorious raiment wherewith it was[p6]clothed. His pock-marked face, wide at the temples, sloped to a small, pointed chin, which, in turn, sloped precipitously into a long, thin neck. It was Mr. Opp’s eyes, however, that one saw first, for they were singularly vivid, with an expression that made strangers sometimes pause in the street to ask him if he had spoken to them. Small, pale, and red of rim, they nevertheless held the look of intense hunger—hunger for the hope or the happiness of the passing moment.
As he came bustling down to the water’s-edge he held out a friendly hand to Jimmy Fallows.
“How are you, Jimmy?” he said in a voice freighted with importance. “Hope I haven’t kept you waiting long. Several matters of business come up at the last and final moment, and I missed the morning train.”
Jimmy, who was pouring gasolene into a tank in the launch, treated the ferryman to a prodigious wink.
“Oh, not more’n four or five hour,” he said, casting side glances of mingled[p7]scorn and admiration at Mr. Opp’s attire. “It is a good thing it was the funeral you was tryin’ to get to instid of the death-bed.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” said Mr. Opp, suddenly exchanging his air of cheerfulness for one of becoming gravity—“what time is the funeral obsequies going to take place?”
“Whenever we git there,” said Jimmy, pushing off the launch and waving his hand to the ferryman. “You’re one of the chief mourners, and I’m the undertaker; there ain’t much danger in us gettin’ left.”
Mr. Opp deposited his baggage carefully on the seat, and spread his coat across the new grip to keep it from getting splashed.
“How long was Mr. Moore sick?” he asked, fanning himself with his hat.
“Well,” said Jimmy, “he was in a dangerous and critical condition for about twenty-one years, accordin’ to his own account. I been seein’ him durin’ that time on a average of four times a[p8]day, and last night when I seen him in his coffin it was the first time the old gentleman failed to ask me to give him a drink on account of his poor health.”
“Is Ben there?” asked Mr. Opp, studying a time-table, and making a note in his memorandum-book.
“Your brother Ben? Yes; he come this mornin’ just before I left. He was cussin’ considerable because you wasn’t there, so’s they could go on and git through. He wants to start back to Missouri to-night.”
“Is he out at the house?”
“No; he’s at Your Hotel.”
Mr. Opp looked up in surprise, and Jimmy chuckled.
“That there’s the name of my new hotel. Started up sence you went away. Me and old man Tucker been running boardin’-houses side by side all these years. What did he do last summer but go out and git him a sign as big as the side of the house, and git Nick Fenny to paint ‘Our Hotel’ on it; then he put it up right across the sidewalk, from the[p9]gate clean out to the road. I didn’t say nothin’, but let the boys keep on a-kiddin’ me till the next day; then I got me a sign jus’ like his, with ‘Your Hotel’ on it, and put it up crost my sidewalk. He’d give a pretty if they was both down now; but he won’t take his down while mine is up, and I ain’t got no notion of taking it down.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Opp, absently, for his mind was still on the time-table; “I see that there’s an accommodation that departs out of Coreyville in the neighborhood of noon to-morrow. It’s a little unconvenient, I’m afraid, but do you think you could get me back in time to take it?”
“Why, what’s yer hurry?” asked Jimmy, steering for mid-stream. “I thought you’d come to visit a spell, with all them bags and things.”
Mr. Opp carelessly tossed back the sleeve of the coat, to display more fully the name on the suit-case. “Them’s drummers’ samples,” he said almost reverently—“the finest line of shoes that[p10]have ever been put out by any house in the United States, bar none.”
“Why, I thought you was in the insurance business,” said Jimmy.
“Oh, no; that was last year, just previous to my reporting on a newspaper. This”—and Mr. Opp tried to spread out his hands, but was slightly deterred by the size of his cuffs—“this is the chance I been looking for all my life. It takes brains and a’ educated nerve, and a knowledge of the world. I ought to create considerable capital in the next few years. And just as soon as I do”—and Mr. Opp leaned earnestly toward Jimmy, and tapped one finger upon the palm of his other hand—“just as soon as I do, I intend to buy up all the land lying between Turtle Creek and the river. There’s enough oil under that there ground to ca’m the troubled waters of the Pacific Ocean. You remember old Mr. Beeker? Well, he told me, ten years ago, that he bored a well for brine over there, and it got so full of black petroleum he had to abandon it.[p11]Now, I’m calculating on forming a stock company,—you and Mr. Tucker, I and old man Hager, and one or two others,—and buying up that ground. Then we’ll sink a test well, get up a derrick and a’ engine, and have the thing running in no time. The main thing is a competent manager. You know I’m thinking seriously of taking it myself? It’s too big a proposition to run any risks with.”
“Here, say, wait a minute; how long have you had this here shoe job?” Jimmy caught madly at the first fact in sight to keep him from being swept away by the flood of Mr. Opp’s oily possibilities.
“I taken it last week,” said Mr. Opp; “had to go all the way to Chicago to get my instructions, and to get fitted out. My territory is a specially important one; four counties, all round Chicago.”
“I was in Chicago oncet,” said Jimmy, his eyes brightening at the memory. “By golly! if the world is as big in every direction as it is in that, she’s a whopper!”
[p12]The wind, freshening as they got under way, loosened the canvas overhead, and Mr. Opp rose to buckle it into place. As he half knelt in the bow of the boat, he lifted his face to the cool breeze, and took a deep breath of satisfaction. The prosaic river from Coreyville to the Cove was the highway he knew best in the world. Under the summer sunshine the yellow waters lost their sullen hue, and reflected patches of vivid red and white from the cottages and barns that dotted the distant shore.
“I don’t consider there’s any sceneries in the country that’ll even begin to compare with these here,” Mr. Opp announced, out of the depths of his wide experience. “Just look at the sunshine pouring forth around the point of the island. It spills through the trees and leaks out over the water just like quicksilver. Now, that’s a good thought! It’s perfectly astounding, you might say surprising, how easy thoughts come to me. I ought to been a writer; lots of folks have said so. Why, there ain’t a[p13]day of my life that I don’t get a poem in my head.”
“Shucks!” observed Jimmy Fallows. “I’d as lief read figgers on a tow-boat as to read poetry. Old man Gusty used to write poetry, but he couldn’t get nobody to print it, so he decided to start a newspaper at the Cove and chuck it full of his own poems. He bought a whole printin’ outfit, and set it up in Pete Aker’s old carpenter shop out there at the edge of town, opposite his home. But ’fore he got his paper started he up and died. Yes, sir; and the only one of his poems that he ever did git in print was the one his wife had cut on his tombstone.”
Mr. Opp was not listening. With his head bared and his lips parted he was indulging in his principal weakness. For Mr. Opp, it must be confessed, was given to violent intoxication, not from an extraneous source, but from too liberal draughts of his own imagination. In extenuation, the claims of genius might be urged, for a genius he unquestionably[p14]was in that he created something out of nothing. Out of an abnormal childhood, a lonely boyhood, and a failure-haunted manhood, he had managed to achieve an absorbing career. Each successive enterprise had loomed upon his horizon big with possibilities, and before it sank to oblivion, another scheme, portentous, significant, had filled its place. Life was a succession of crises, and through them he saw himself moving, now a shrewd merchant, now a professional man, again an author of note, but oftenest of all a promoter of great enterprises, a financier, and man of affairs.
While he was thus mentally engaged in drilling oil-wells, composing poetry, and selling shoes, Jimmy Fallows was contemplating with fascinated wonder an object that floated from his coat pocket. From a brown-paper parcel, imperfectly wrapped, depended a curl of golden hair, and it bobbed about in the breeze in a manner that reduced Mr. Fallows to a state of abject curiosity.
So intent was Jimmy upon his investigation[p15]that he failed to hold his course, and the launch swung around the end of the island with such a sudden jerk that Mr. Opp took an unexpected seat.
As he did so, his hand touched the paper parcel in his pocket, and realizing that it was untied, he hastily endeavored, by a series of surreptitious manœuvers, to conceal what it contained. Feeling the quizzical eye of his shipmate full upon him, he assumed an air of studied indifference, and stoically ignored the subterranean chuckles and knowing winks in which Mr. Fallows indulged.
Presently, when the situation had become poignant, Mr. Opp observed that he supposed the funeral would take place from the church.
“I reckon so,” said Jimmy, reluctantly answering to the call of the conversational rudder. “I told the boys to have a hack there for you and Mr. Ben and Miss Kippy.”
“I don’t think my sister will be there,” said Mr. Opp, with dignity; “she seldom or never leaves the house.”
[p16]“Reckon Mr. Ben will have to take keer of her now,” said Jimmy; “she surely will miss her pa. He never done a lick of work since I knowed him, but he was a nice, quiet old fellow, and he certainly was good to pore Miss Kippy.”
“Mr. Moore was a gentleman,” said Mr. Opp, and he sighed.
“Ain’t she got any kin on his side? No folks except you two half-brothers?”
“That’s all,” said Mr. Opp; “just I and Ben.”
“Gee! that’s kind of tough on youall,ain’t it?”
But the sympathy was untimely, for Mr. Opp’s dignity had been touched in a sensitive place.
“Our sister will be well provided for,” he said, and the conversation suffered a relapse.
Mr. Opp went back to his time-tables and his new note-book, and for the rest of the trip Jimmy devoted himself to his wheel, with occasional ocular excursions in the direction of Mr. Opp’s coat pocket.
Lyingin the crook of the river’s elbow, with the nearest railroad eighteen miles away, Cove City, familiarly known as the Cove, rested serenely undisturbed by the progress of the world. Once a day, at any time between sundown and midnight, it was roused from its drowsiness by the arrival of the mail-boat, and, shaking itself into temporary wakefulness, sat up and rubbed its eyes. This animation was, however, of short duration, for before the packet had whistled for the next landing, the Cove had once more settled back into slumber.
Main Street began with a shabby, unpainted school-house, and following dramatic sequence, ended abruptly in the graveyard. Two cross-streets, which had started out with laudable ideas of[p18]independence, lost courage at Main Street and sought strength in union; but the experiment was not successful, and a cow-path was the result. The only semblance of frivolity about the town was a few straggling cottages on stilts of varying height as they approached the river; for they seemed ever in the act of holding up their skirts preparatory to wading forth into the water.
On this particular summer afternoon Cove City was less out of crimp than usual. The gathering of loafers that generally decorated the empty boxes piled along the sidewalk was missing. The old vehicles and weary-looking mules which ordinarily formed an irregular fringe along the hitching rail were conspicuously absent. A subdued excitement was in the air, and at the slightest noise feminine heads appeared at windows, and masculine figures appeared in doorways, and comments were exchanged in low tones from one side of the street to the other. For the loss of a citizen, even a poor one, disturbs the[p19]surface of affairs, and when the event brings two relatives from a distance, the ripples of excitement increase perceptibly.
Mr. Moore had been a citizen-in-law, as it were, and had never been considered in any other light than poor Mrs. Opp’s widower. Mrs. Opp’s poor widower might have been a truer way of stating it, but even a town has its parental weaknesses.
For two generations the Opp family had been a source of mystery and romance to the Cove. It stood apart, like the house that held it, poor and shabby, but bearing a baffling atmosphere of gentility, of superiority, and of reserve.
Old women recalled strange tales of the time when Mrs. Opp had come to the Cove as a bride, and how she refused to meet any of the townspeople, and lived alone in the old house on the river-bank, watching from hour to hour for the wild young husband who clerked on one of the river steamers. They told how she grew thin and white with waiting, and how,[p20]when her two boys were small, she made them stand beside her for hours at a time, watching the river and listening for the whistle of his boat. Then the story went that the gay young husband stopped coming altogether, and still she watched and waited, never allowing the boys out of her sight, refusing to send them to school, or to let them play with other children. By and by word was brought that her husband had been killed in a quarrel over cards, and little Mrs. Opp, having nothing now to watch for and to wait for, suddenly became strangely changed.
Old Aunt Tish, the negro servant, was the only person who ever crossed the threshold, and she told of a strange life that went on behind the closely curtained windows, where the sunlight was never allowed to enter, and lamps burned all day long.
“Yas, ’m,” she used to say in answer to curious questionings; “hit’s jes like play-actin’ all de time. The Missis dress herself up, an’ ’tend like she’s a queen[p21]or a duke or somethin’, an’ dat little D. he jes acts out all dem fool things she tells him to, an’ he ain’t never bein’ hisself at all, but jes somebody big and mighty and grand-like.”
When the boys were half-grown, a stranger appeared in the Cove, a dapper little man of about fifty in a shabby frock-coat and a shabbier high hat, kind of face and gentle of voice, but with the dignity of conscious superiority. The day of his arrival he called upon Mrs. Opp; the second day he took a preacher with him and married her. Whatever old romance had led to this climax could only be dimly guessed at by the curious townspeople.
For two years Mr. Moore fought for the mind of his old sweetheart as he had long ago fought for her heart. He opened the house to the sunshine, and coaxed the little lady back into the world she had forgotten. The boys were sent to school, the old games and fancies were forbidden. Gradually the color returned to her cheeks, and the light to her eyes.
Then little Kippy was born, and[p22]happiness such as seldom comes to one who has tasted the dregs of life came to the frail little woman in the big four-poster bed. For ten days she held the baby fingers to her heart, and watched the little blossom of a maid unfold.
But one black night, when the rain beat against the panes, and the moan of the river sounded in her ears, she suddenly sat up in bed: she had heard the whistle ofhisboat! Full of dumb terror she crept to the window, and with her face pressed against the glass she waited and watched. The present was swallowed up in the past. She was once more alone, unloved, afraid. Stealthily snatching a cloak, she crept down into the garden, feeling her way through the sodden grass, and the jimpson weed which the rain had beaten down.
And ever since, when children pass the house on their way to school, they peep through the broken fence rails, and point out to one another, in awed tones, the tree under which Miss Kippy’s mother killed herself. Then they look half-fearfully[p23]at the windows in the hope of catching a glimpse of Miss Kippy herself.
For Kippy had had a long illness in her thirteenth year which left her with the face and mind of a little child, and kindly, shabby Mr. Moore, having made the supreme effort of his life, from this time on ceased to struggle against the weakness that for half a lifetime had beset him, and sought oblivion in innocuous but perpetual libations. The one duty which he recognized was the care of his invalid daughter.
As soon as they were old enough, the boys launched their small craft and set forth to seek their fortunes. Ben, with no cargo on board but his own desires, went west and found a snug and comfortable harbor, while D. Webster, the hope of his mother and the pride of the town, was at thirty-five still putting out to sea, with all sail set, only to find himself again and again aground on the sandbars of the old familiar Cove.
Jimmy Fallows, being the boastful possessor of the fleetest horse in town, was the first to return from the funeral. Extricating himself with some difficulty from the narrow-seated buggy, he held out his hand to Mrs. Fallows. But that imposing lady, evidently offended with her jovial lord, refused his proffered aid, and clambered out over the wheel on the other side.
Mrs. Fallows, whose architectural effects were strictly perpendicular, cast a perpetual shadow of disapproval over the life partner whom it had pleased Providence to bestow upon her. Jimmy was a born satirist; he knew things are not what they seem, and he wickedly rejoiced thereat. To his literal,[p25]pious-minded wife he at times seemed the incarnation of wickedness.
Sweeping with dignity beneath the arching sign of Your Hotel, she took her seat upon the porch, and, disposing her sable robes about her, folded her mitted hands, and waited to see the people return from the funeral.
Jimmy, with the uncertain expression of one who is ready to apologize, but cannot remember the offense, hovered about uneasily, casting tempting bits of conversational bait into the silence, but failing to attract so much as a nibble of attention.
“Miss Jemima Fenny was over to the funeral from Birdtown. Miss Jim is one of ’em, ain’t she?”
There was no response.
“Had her brother Nick with her. He’s just gettin’ over typhoid fever; looks about the size and color of a slate pencil. I bet, in spite of Miss Jim’s fine clothes, they ain’t had a square meal for a month. That’s because she kept him at school so long when he orter been at work. He did[p26]git a job in a newspaper office over at Coreyville not long ’fore he was took sick. They tell me he’s as slick as a onion about newspaper work.”
Continued silence; but Jimmy boldly cast another fly:
“Last funeral we had was Mrs. Tucker’s, wasn’t it? Old man Tucker was there to-day. Crape band on his hat is climbin’ up; it’ll be at high mast ag’in soon.”
Dense, nerve-racking silence; but Jimmy made one more effort:
“The Opps are coming back here tonight to talk things over before Ben goes on to Missouri. He counts on ketchin’ the night boat. It won’t give him much time, will it?”
But Mrs. Fallows, unrelaxed, stared fixedly before her; she had taken refuge in that most trying of all rejoinders, silence, and the fallible Jimmy, who waxed strong and prospered upon abuse, drooped and languished under this new and cruel form of punishment.
It was not until a buggy stopped at the[p27]door, and the Opp brothers descended, that the tension was in any way relieved.
Jimmy greeted them with the joy of an Arctic explorer welcoming a relief party.
“Come right on in here, in the office,” he cried hospitably; “your talkin’ won’t bother me a speck.”
But Ben abruptly expressed his desire for more private quarters, and led the way up-stairs.
The low-ceiled room into which he ushered D. Webster was of such a depressing drab that even the green and red bed-quilt failed to disperse the gloom. The sole decoration, classic in its severity, was a large advertisement for a business college, whereon an elk’s head grew out of a bow of ribbon, the horns branching and rebranching into a forest of curves and flourishes.
The elder Opp took his seat by the window, and drummed with impatient fingers on the sill. He was small, like his brother, but of a compact, sturdy build. His chin, instead of dwindling to a point, was square and stubborn, and his eyes[p28]looked straight ahead at the thing he wanted, and neither saw nor cared for what lay outside. He had been trying ever since leaving the cemetery to bring the conversation down to practical matters, but D. Webster, seizing the first opportunity of impressing himself upon his next of kin, had persisted in indulging in airy and time-destroying flights of fancy.
The truth is that our Mr. Opp was not happy. In his secret heart he felt a bit apologetic before the material success of his elder brother. Hence it was necessary to talk a great deal and to set forth in detail the very important business enterprises upon which he was about to embark.
Presently Ben Opp looked at his watch.
“See here,” he interrupted, “that boat may be along at any time. We’d better come to some decision about the estate.”
D. Webster ran his fingers through his hair, which stood in valiant defense of the small bald spot behind it.
“Yes, yes,” he said; “business is[p29]business. I’ll have to be off myself the very first thing in the morning. This funeral couldn’t have come at a more unfortunate time for me. You see, my special territory—”
But Ben saw the danger of another bolt, and checked him:
“How much do you think the old house is worth?”
D. Webster drew forth his shiny note-book and pencil and made elaborate calculations.
“I should say,” he said, as one financier to another, “that including of the house and land and contents of same, it would amount to the whole sum total of about two thousand dollars.”
“That is about what I figured,” said Ben; “now, how much money is in the bank?”
D. Webster produced a formidable packet of letters and papers from his inside pocket and, after some searching, succeeded in finding a statement, which set forth the fact that the Ripper County Bank held in trust one thousand dollars,[p30]to be divided between the children of Mary Opp Moore at the death of her husband, Curtis V. Moore.
“One thousand dollars!” said Ben, looking blankly at his brother, “Why, for heaven’s sake, what have Mr. Moore and Kippy been living on all these years?”
D. Webster moved uneasily in his chair. “Oh, they’ve managed to get along first rate,” he said evasively.
His brother looked at him narrowly. “On the interest of a thousand dollars?” He leaned forward, and his face hardened: “See here, have you been putting up cash all this time for that old codger to loaf on? Is that why you have never gotten ahead?”
D. Webster, with hands in his pockets and his feet stretched in front of him, was blinking in furious embarrassment at the large-eyed elk overhead.
“To think,” went on Ben, his slow wrath rising, “of your staying here in Kentucky all these years and handing out what you made to that old sponger.[p31]I cut loose and made a neat little sum, married, and settled down. And what have you done? Where have you gotten? Anybody that would let himself be imposed upon like that deserves to fail. Now what do you propose to do about this money?”
Mr. Opp did not propose to do anything. The affront offered his business sagacity was of such a nature that it demanded all his attention. He composed various denunciatory answers with which to annihilate his brother. He hesitated between two courses, whether he should hurl himself upon him in righteous indignation and demand physical satisfaction, or whether he should rise in a calm and manly attitude and wither him with blighting sarcasm. And while the decision was pending, he still sat with his hands in his pockets, and his feet stretched forth, and blinked indignantly at the ornate elk.
“The estate,” continued Ben, contempt still in his face, “amounts at most to three thousand dollars, after the house[p32]is sold. Part of this, of course, will go to the maintenance of Kippy.”
At mention of her name, Mr. Opp’s gaze dropped abruptly to his brother’s face.
“What about Kippy? She’s going to live with you, ain’t she?” he asked anxiously.
Ben Opp shook his head emphatically. “She certainly is not. I haven’t the slightest idea of burdening myself and family with that feeble-minded girl.”
“But see here,” said Mr. Opp, his anger vanishing in the face of this new complication, “you don’t know Kippy; she’s just similar to a little child, quiet and gentle-like. Never give anybody any trouble in her life. Just plays with her dolls and sings to herself all day.”
“Exactly,” said Ben; “twenty-five years old and still playing with dolls. I saw her yesterday, dressed up in all sorts of foolish toggery, talking to her hands, and laughing. Aunt Tish humors her, and her father humored her, but I’m not going to. I feel sorry for her[p33]all right, but I am not going to take her home with me.”
D. Webster nervously twisted the large seal ring which he wore on his forefinger. “Then what do you mean,” he said hesitatingly—“what do you want to do about it?”
“Why, send her to an asylum, of course. That’s where she ought to have been all these years.”
Mr. Opp, sitting upon the small of his back, with one leg wrapped casually about the leg of the chair, stared at him for a moment in consternation, then, gathering himself together, rose and for the first time since we have met him seemed completely to fill his checked ready-made suit.
“Send Kippy to a lunatic asylum!” he said in tones so indignant that they made his chin tremble. “You will do nothing whatever of the kind! Why, all she’s ever had in the world was her pa and Aunt Tish and her home; now he’s gone, you ain’t wanting to take the others away from her too, are you?”
[p34]“Well, who is going to take care of her?” demanded Ben angrily.
“I am,” announced D. Webster, striking as fine an attitude as ever his illustrious predecessor struck; “you take the money that’s in the bank, and leave me the house and Kippy. That’ll be her share and mine. I can take care of her; I don’t ask favors of nobody. Suppose I do lose my job; I’ll get me another. There’s a dozen ways I can make a living. There ain’t a man in the State that’s got more resources than me. I got plans laid now that’ll revolutionize—”
“Yes,” said Ben, quietly, “you always could do great things.”
D. Webster’s egotism, inflated to the utmost, burst at this prick, and he suddenly collapsed. Dropping limply into the chair by the table, he held his hand over his mouth to hide his agitation.
“There’s—there’s one thing,” he began, swallowing violently, and winking after each word, “that I—I can’t[p35]do—and that’s to leave a—sister—to die—among strangers.”
And then, to his mortification, his head went unexpectedly down upon his arms, and a flood of tears bedimmed the radiance of his twenty-five-cent four-in-hand.
From far down the river came the whistle of the boat, and, in the room below, Jimmy Fallows removed a reluctant ear from the stove-pipe hole.
“Melindy,” he said confidentially, entirely forgetting the late frost, “I never see anybody in the world that stood as good a show of gittin’ the fool prize as that there D. Opp.”
Theold Opp House stood high on the river-bank and gazed lonesomely out into the summer night. It was a shabby, down-at-heel, dejected-looking place, with one side showing faint lights, above and below, but the other side so nailed up and empty and useless that it gave the place the appearance of being paralyzed down one side and of having scarcely enough vitality left to sustain life in the other.
To make matters worse, an old hound howled dismally on the door-step, only stopping occasionally to paw at the iron latch and to whimper for the master whose unsteady footsteps he had followed for thirteen years.
In the front room a shaded lamp,[p37]turned low, threw a circle of light on the table and floor, leaving the corners full of vague, uncertain shadows. From the wide, black fireplace a pair of rusty and battered andirons held out empty arms, and on the high stone shelf above the opening, flanked on each side by a stuffed owl, was a tall, square-faced clock, with the hour-hand missing. The minute-hand still went on its useless round, and behind it, on the face of the clock, a tiny schooner with all sail set rocked with the swinging of the pendulum.
The loud ticking of the clock, and the lamentations of the hound without, were not the only sounds that disturbed the night. Before the empty fireplace, in a high-backed, cane-bottomed chair, slept an old negress, with head bowed, moaning and muttering as she slept. She was bent and ashen with age, and her brown skin sagged in long wrinkles from her face and hands. On her forehead, reaching from brow to faded turban, was a hideous testimony to some ancient conflict. A large, irregular hole, over which[p38]the flesh had grown, pulsed as sentiently and imperatively as a naked, living heart.
A shutter slammed sharply somewhere in the house above, and something stirred fearfully in the shadow of the room. It was a small figure that crouched against the wall, listening and watching with the furtive terror of a newly captured coyote—the slight figure of a woman dressed as a child, with short gingham dress, and heelless slippers, and a bright ribbon holding back the limp, flaxen hair from her strange, pinched face.
Again and again her wide, frightened eyes sought the steps leading to the room above, and sometimes she would lean forward and whisper in agonized expectancy, “Daddy?” Then when no answer came, she would shudder back against the wall, cold and shaking and full of dumb terrors.
Suddenly the hound’s howling changed to a sharp bark, and the old negress stirred and stretched herself.
“What ails dat air dog?” she[p39]mumbled, going to the window, and shading her eyes with her hand. “You’d ’low to hear him tell it he done heared old master coming up de road.”
That somebody was coming was evident from the continued excitement of the hound, and when the gate slammed and a man’s voice sounded in the darkness, Aunt Tish opened the door, throwing a long, dim patch of light out across the narrow porch and over the big, round stepping-stones beyond.
Into the light came Mr. Opp, staggering under the load of his baggage, his coat over his arm, his collar off, thoroughly spent with the events of the day.
“Lord ’a’ mercy!” said Aunt Tish, “if hit ain’t Mr. D.! I done give you up long ago. I certainly is glad you come. Miss Kippy’s jes carrying on like ever’thing. She ain’t been to baid for two nights, an’ I can’t do nothin’ ’t all wif her.”
Mr. Opp deposited his things in a corner, and, tired as he was, assumed an air of authority. It was evident that a man[p40]was needed, a person of firmness, of decision.
“I’ll see that she goes to bed at once,” he said resolutely. “Where is she at?”
“She’s behind de door,” said Aunt Tish; “she’s be’n so skeered ever sence her paw died I can’t do nothin’ wif her.”
“Kippy,” said Mr. Opp, sternly, “come out here this minute.”
But there was no response. Going to the corner where his coat lay, he took from the pocket a brown-paper parcel.
“Say, Kippy,” he said in a greatly mollified tone, “I wish you would come on out here and see me. You remember brother D., don’t you? You ought to see what I brought you all the way from the city. It’s got blue eyes.”
At this the small, grotesque figure, distrustful, suspicious, ready to take flight at a word, ventured slowly forth. So slight she was, and so frail, and so softly she moved, it was almost as if the wind blew her toward him. Every thought that came into her brain was instantly reflected in her hypersensitive face, and[p41]as she stood before him nervously plucking her fingers, fear and joy struggled for supremacy. Suddenly with a low cry she snatched the doll from him and clasped it to her heart.
Meanwhile Aunt Tish had spread a cloth on the table and set forth some cold corn dodger, a pitcher of foaming butter-milk, and a plate of cold corned beef. The milk was in a battered pewter pitcher, but the dish that held the corn bread was of heavy silver, with intricate chasings about the rim.
Mr. Opp, with his head propped on his hand, ate wearily. He had been up since four o’clock that morning, and to-morrow he must be up at daybreak if he was to keep his engagements to supply the dealers with the greatest line of shoes ever put upon the market. Between now and then he must decide many things: Kippy must be planned for, the house gone over, and arrangements made for the future. Being behind the scenes, as it were, and having no spectator to impress, he allowed himself to sink into an[p42]attitude of extreme dejection. And Mr. Opp, shorn of the dignity of his heavily padded coat, and his imposing collar and tie, and with even his pompadour limp upon his forehead, failed entirely to give a good imitation of himself.
As he sat thus, with one hand hanging limply over the back of the chair, he felt something touch it softly, dumbly, as a dog might. Looking down, he discovered Miss Kippy sitting on the floor, close behind him, watching him with furtive eyes. In one arm she cradled the new doll, and in the other she held his coat.
Mr. Opp patted her cheek: “Whatever are you doing with my coat?” he asked.
Miss Kippy held it behind her, and nodded her head wisely: “Keeping it so you can’t go away,” she whispered. “I’ll hold it tight all night. To-morrow I’ll hide it.”
“But I’m a business man,” said Mr. Opp, unconsciously straightening his shoulders. “A great deal of responsibility depends on me. I’ve got to be off[p43]early in the morning; but I’m coming back to see you real often—every now and then.”
Miss Kippy’s whole attitude changed. She caught his hand and clung to it, and the terror came back to her eyes.
“You mustn’t go,” she whispered, her body quivering with excitement. “It’ll get me if you do. Daddy kept It away, and you can keep It away; but Aunt Tish can’t: she’s afraid of It, too! She goes to sleep, and then It reaches at me through the window. It comes down the chimney, there—where you see the brick’s loose. Don’t leave me, D. Hush, don’t you hear It?”
Her voice had risen to hysteria, and she clung to him, cold and shaken by the fear that possessed her.
Mr. Opp put a quieting arm about her. “Why, see here, Kippy,” he said, “didn’t you know It was afraid of me? Look how strong I am! I could kill It with my little finger.”
“Could you?” asked Miss Kippy, fearfully.
[p44]“Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Opp. “Don’t you ever be scared of anything whatsoever when Brother D.’s round. I’m going to take care of you from now on.”
“This me is bad,” announced Miss Kippy; “the other me is good. Her name is Oxety; she has one blue eye and one brown.”
“Well, Oxety must go to bed now,” said Mr. Opp; “it must be getting awful late.”
But Miss Kippy shook her head. “You might go ’way,” she said.
Finding that he could not persuade her, Mr. Opp resorted to strategy: “I’ll tell you what let’s me and you do. Let’s put your slippers on your hands.”
This proposition met with instant approval. It appealed to Miss Kippy as a brilliant suggestion. She assisted in unbuttoning the single straps and watched with glee as they were fastened about her wrists.
[p45]“‘Don’t leave me’”
“Now,” said Mr. Opp, with assumed enthusiasm, “we’ll make the slippers[p47]walk you up-stairs, and after Aunt Tish undresses you, they shall walk you to bed. Won’t that be fun?”
Miss Kippy’s fancy was so tickled by this suggestion that she put it into practice at once, and went gaily forth up the steps on all fours. At the turn she stopped, and looked at him wistfully:
“You’ll come up before I go to sleep?” she begged; “Daddy did.”
Half an hour later Aunt Tish came down the narrow stairway: “She done gone to baid now, laughin’ an’ happy ag’in,” she said; “she never did have dem spells when her paw was round, an’ sometimes dat chile jes as clear in her mind as you an’ me is.”
“What is it she’s afraid of?” asked Mr. Opp.
Aunt Tish leaned toward him across the table, and the light of the lamp fell full upon her black, bead-like eyes, and her sunken jaws, and on the great palpitating scar.
“De ghosties,” she whispered; “dey been worriting dat chile ever’ chance dey[p48]git.Ihear ’em! Dey wait till I take a nap of sleep, den dey comes sneakin’ in to pester her. She says dey ain’t but one, but I hears heaps ob ’em, some ob ’em so little dey kin climb onder de crack in de door.”
“Look a-here, Aunt Tish,” said Mr. Opp, sternly, “don’t you ever talk a word of this foolishness to her again. Not one word, do you hear?”
“Yas, sir; dat’s what Mr. Moore allays said, an’ Idon’ttalk to her ’bout hit, I don’t haf to. She done knows I know. I been livin’ heah goin’ on forty years, sence ’fore you was borned, an’ you can’t fool me, chile; no, sir, dat you can’t.”
“Well, you must go to bed now,” said Mr. Opp, looking up at the clock and seeing that it was half-past something though he did not know what.
“I never goes to baid when I stays here,” announced Aunt Tish; “I sets up in de kitchen an’ sleeps. I’s skeered dat chile run away; she ’low she gwine to some day. Her paw ketched her oncet[p49]gittin’ in a boat down on de river-bank. She ain’t gwine, while I’s here, no sir-ee! I never leaves her in de daytime an’ her paw never leaves her at night, dat is, when he’s livin’.”
After she had gone, Mr. Opp ascended the stairway, and entered the room above. A candle sputtered on the table, and in its light he saw the wide, four-poster bed that had been his mother’s, and in it the frail figure of little Miss Kippy. Her hair lay loose upon the pillow, and on her sleeping face, appealing in its helplessness, was a smile of perfect peace. The new doll lay on the table beside the candle, but clasped tightly in her arms was the coat of many checks.
For a moment Mr. Opp stood watching her, then he drew his shirt-sleeve quickly across his eyes. As he turned to descend, his new shoes creaked painfully and, after he had carefully removed them, he tiptoed down, passed through the sitting-room and out upon the porch, where he sank down on the step and dropped his head on his arms.
[p50]The night was very still, save for the croaking of a bullfrog, and the incessant scraping of a cedar-tree against the corner of the roof. From across the river, faint sparks of light shone out from cabin windows, and, below, a moving light now and then told of a passing scow. Once a steamboat slipped weirdly out of the darkness, sparkling with lights, and sending up faint sounds of music; but before the waves from the wheel had ceased to splash on the bank below, she was swallowed up in the darkness, leaving lonesomeness again.
Mr. Opp sat staring out into the night, outwardly calm, but inwardly engaged in a mortal duel. The aggressive Mr. Opp of the gorgeous raiment and the seal ring, the important man of business, the ambitious financier, was in deadly combat with the insignificant Mr. Opp, he of the shirt-sleeves and the wilted pompadour, the delicate, sensitive, futile Mr. Opp who was incapable of everything but the laying down of his life for the sake of another.
[p51]A dull line of light hovered on the horizon, and gradually the woods on the opposite shore took shape, then the big river itself, gray and shimmering, with streaks on the water where a snag broke the swift current.
“Mr. D.,” he heard Aunt Tish calling up the back stairs, “you better git out of baid; hit’s sun-up.”
He rose stiffly and started back to the kitchen. As he passed through the front room, his eyes fell upon his new suit-case full of the treasured drummers’ samples. Stooping down, he traced the large black letters with his finger and sighed deeply.
Then he got up resolutely and marched to the kitchen door.
“Aunt Tish,” he said with authority, “you needn’t mind about hurrying breakfast. I find there’s very important business will keep me here in the Cove for the present.”
Therewere two methods of communication in Cove City, both of which were equally effective. One was the telephone, which from a single, isolated case had developed into an epidemic, and the other, which enjoyed the dignity of precedence and established custom, was to tell Jimmy Fallows.
Both of these currents of information soon overflowed with the news that Mr. D. Webster Opp had given up a good position in the city, and expected to establish himself in business in his native town. The nature of this business was agitating the community at large in only a degree less than it was agitating Mr. Opp himself.
One afternoon Jimmy Fallows stood[p53]with his back to his front gate, suspended by his armpits from the pickets, and conducted business after his usual fashion. As a general retires to a hill-top to organize his forces and issue orders to his subordinates, so Jimmy hung upon his front fence and conducted the affairs of the town. He knew what time each farmer came in, where the “Helping Hands” were going to sew, where the doctor was, and where the services would be held next Sunday. He was coroner, wharf-master, undertaker, and notary, and the only thing in the heavens above or the earth below concerning which he did not attempt to give information was the arrival of the next steamboat.
As he stood whittling a stick and cheerfully humming a tune of other days, he descried a small, alert figure coming up the road. The pace was so much brisker than the ordinary slow gait of the Cove that he recognized the person at once as Mr. Opp. Whereupon he lifted his voice and hailed a boy who was[p54]just vanishing down the street in the opposite direction:
“Nick!” he called. “Aw, Nick Fenny! Tell Mat Lucas that Mr. Opp’s uptown.”
Connection being thus made at one end of the line, he turned to effect it at the other. “Howdy, Brother Opp. Kinder dusty on the river, ain’t it?”
“Well, weareexperiencing considerable of warm weather at this juncture,” said Mr. Opp, affably.
“Mat Lucas has been hanging round here all day,” said Jimmy. “He wants you to buy out a half-interest in his dry-goods store. What do you think about it?”
“Well,” said Mr. Opp, thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, “I am considering of a great variety of different things. I been in the dry-goods business twice, and I can’t say but what it ain’t a pretty business. Of course,” he added with a twinge, “my specialty are shoes.”
“Yes,” said Jimmy; “but the folks[p55]here all gets their shoes at the drug store. Mr. Toddlinger’s been carrying a line of shoes along with his pills and plasters ever sence he went into business.”
Mr. Opp looked up at the large sign overhead. “If you and Mr. Tucker wasn’t both in the hotel business, I might be thinking of considering that.”
This proposition tickled Jimmy immensely. Chuckles of amusement agitated his rotund figure.
“Why don’t you buy us both out?” he asked. “We could sell out for nothing and make money.”
“Why, there’s three boarders sitting over at Our Hotel now,” said Mr. Opp, who rather fancied himself in the rôle of a genial host.
“Yes,” said Jimmy. “Old man Tucker’s had ’em hanging out on the line all morning. I don’t guess they got strength enough to walk around much after the meals he give ’em.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Opp, wholly absorbed in his own affairs, “this is just[p56]temporarily for the time being, as it were. In a year or so, when my financial condition is sorter more established in a way, I intend to put through that oil-wells proposition. The fact that I am aiming at arriving to is what would you think the Cove was at present most in need of?”
“Elbow-grease,” said Jimmy, promptly. “The only two things that we ain’t got that a city has, is elbow-grease and a newspaper.”
For a moment there was a silence, heavy with significance. Mr. Fallows’s gaze penetrated the earth, while Mr. Opp’s scanned the heavens; then they suddenly looked at each other, and the great idea was born.
An editor! Mr. Opp’s whole being thrilled responsive to the call. The thought of dwelling above the sordid bartering of commercial life, of being in a position to exercise those mental powers with which he felt himself so generously endowed, almost swept him off his feet. He had been a reporter[p57]once; for two golden weeks he had handed in police-court reports that fairly scintillated with verbal gems plucked at random from the dictionary. But the city editor had indicated as kindly as possible that his services were no longer required, vaguely suggesting that it was necessary to reduce the force; and Mr. Opp had assured him that he understood perfectly, and that he was ready to return at any future time. That apprenticeship, brief though it was, served as a foundation upon which Mr. Opp erected a tower of dazzling possibilities.
“What’s the matter with you takin’ Mr. Gusty’s old printin’-shop and startin’ up business for yourself?” asked Jimmy.
“Do you reckon she’d sell it?” asked Mr. Opp, anxiously.
“Sell it?” said Jimmy. “Why, she’s ’most ready to give it away to keep from having to pay Pete Aker’s rent for the shop. Say—Mr. Gall—up,” he called up the street to a man who was turning the corner, “is Mrs. Gusty at home?”
[p58]The man, thus accosted, turned and came toward them.
“Who is Mr. Gallop?” asked Mr. Opp.
“He’s the new telephone girl,” said Jimmy, with relish; “ain’t been here but a month, and he’s doing the largest and most profitable trade in tending to other folks’s business you ever seen. Soft! Why, he must ’a’ been raised on a pillow—He always puts me in mind of a highly educated pig: it sorter surprises and tickles you to see him walkin’ round on his hind legs and talking like other people. Other day one of the boys, just to devil him, ast him to drive his team out home. I liked to ’a’ died when I seen him tryin’ to turn the corner, pullin’ ‘Gee’ and hollerin’ ‘Haw’ with every breath. Old mules got their legs in a hard knot trying to do both at once, and the boys says when Gallop got out in the country he felt so bad about it he got down and ’pologized to the mules. How ’bout that, Gallop—did you!” he concluded as the subject of the conversation arrived upon the scene.
[p59]The new-comer, a plump, fair young man, who held one hand clasped affectionately in the other, blushed indignantly, but said nothing.
“This here is Mr. Opp,” went on Jimmy; “he wants to see Mrs. Gusty. Do you know whether he will ketch her at home or not?”
Mr. Gallop was by this time paying the tribute of many an admiring glance to every detail of Mr. Opp’s costume, and Mr. Opp, realizing this, assumed an air of cosmopolitan nonchalance, and toyed indifferently with his large watch-fob.
When Mr. Gallop’s admiration and attention had become focused upon Mr. Opp’s ring, he suddenly turned on the faucet of his conversation, and allowed such a stream of general information to pour forth that Mr. Opp quite forgot to look imposing.
“Mrs. Gusty telephoned early this morning to Mrs. Dorsey that she would come over and help her make preserves. Mrs. Dorsey got a big load of peaches from her father across the river. He’s[p60]been down with the asthma, and had to call up the doctor twice in the night. And the doctor couldn’t get the right medicine in town, and had me call up the city. They are going to send it down on theBig Sandy, but she’s stuck in the locks, and goodness knows when she’ll get here. She’s—”
“Excuse me,” interrupted Mr. Opp, politely but firmly, “I’ve got to see Mrs. Gusty on very important business. Have you any idea whatsoever of when she will return back home?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Gallop, eager to oblige. “She’s about home by this time. Miss Lou Diker is making her a dress, and she telephoned she’d be by to try it on ’bout four o’clock. I’ll go up there with you, if you want me to.”
“Why don’t you drive him!” suggested Jimmy. “You can borrow a pair of mules acrost the street.”
“Mr. Opp,” said Mr. Gallop, feelingly, as they walked up Main Street, “I wouldn’t treat a’ insect like he treats me.”
[p61]“Oh, you mustn’t mind Jimmy,” said Mr. Opp, kindly; “he always sort of enjoys a little joke as he goes along. Why, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he even made a joke on me sometime. How long have you been in Cove City?”
“Just a month,” said Mr. Gallop. “It must look awful little to you, after all the big cities you been used to.”
Mr. Opp lengthened his stride. “Yes,” he said largely; “quite small, quite little, in fact. No place for a business man; but for a professional man, a man that requires leisure to sort of cultivate his brain and that means to be a influence in the community, it’s a good place, a remarkably good place.”
A hint, however vague, dropped into the mind of Mr. Gallop, caused instant fermentation. From long experience he had become an adept at extracting information from all who crossed his path. A preliminary interest, a breath or two of flattery by way of anesthetic, and his victim’s secret was out before he knew it.
“Reckon you are going up to talk[p62]insurance to Mrs. Gusty,” he ventured tentatively.
“No; oh, no,” said Mr. Opp. “I formerly was in the insurance business, some time back. Very little prospects in it for a man of my nature. I have to have a chance to sorter spread out, you know—to use my own particular ideas about working things out.”
“What is your especial line?” asked Mr. Gallop, deferentially.
“Shoe—” Mr. Opp began involuntarily, then checked himself—“journalism,” he said, and the word seemed for the moment completely to fill space.
At Mrs. Gusty’s gate Mr. Gallop stopped.
“I guess I ought to go back now,” he said regretfully; “the telephone and telegraph office is right there in my room, and I never leave them day or night except just this one hour in the afternoon. It’s awful trying. The farmers begin calling each other up at three o’clock in the morning. Say, I wish you’d step in sometime. I’d just[p63]love to have you. But you are so busy and got so many friends, you won’t have much time for me, I guess.”
Mr. Opp thought otherwise. He said that no matter how pressed he was by various important duties, he was never too busy to see a friend. And he said it with the air of one who confers a favor, and Mr. Gallop received it as one who receives a favor, and they shook hands warmly and parted.
Mr. Opp, absorbed in the great scheme which was taking definite form in his mind, did not discover until he reached the steps that some one was lying in a hammock on the porch.
It was a dark-haired girl in a pink dress, with a pink bow in her hair and small bows on the toes of her high-heeled slippers—the very kind of person, in fact, that Mr. Opp was most desirous of avoiding.
Fortunately she was asleep, and Mr. Opp, after listening in vain at the door for sounds of Mrs. Gusty within, tiptoed cautiously to the other end of the porch and took his seat on a straight-backed settee.
Let it not for a moment be supposed[p65]that Mr. Opp was a stranger to the fascinations of femininity. He had been inoculated at a tender age, and it had taken so completely, so tragically, that he had crept back to life with one illusion sadly shattered, and the conviction firm within him that henceforth he was immune. His attitude toward the subject remained, however, interested, but cautious—such as a good little boy might entertain toward a loaded pistol.
As he sat very straight and very still on the green settee, he tried to compose his mind for the coming interview with Mrs. Gusty. Directly across the road was Aker’s old carpenter-shop, a small, square, one-story edifice, shabby, and holding out scant promise of journalistic possibilities. Mr. Opp, however, seldom saw things as they were; he saw them as they were going to be. Before five minutes had elapsed he had the shop painted white, with trimmings of red, new panes in the windows, ground glass below and clear above, an imposing sign over the door, and the roadway blocked with[p66]eager subscribers. He would have to have an assistant, of course, some one to attend to the general details; but he would have charge of everything himself. He would edit a paper, comprehensive in its scope, and liberal in its views. Science, art, religion, society, and politics would all be duly chronicled. Politics! Why, his paper would be an organ—an organ of the Democratic Party!
At the thought of being an organ, Mr. Opp’s bosom swelled with such pride that his settee creaked, and he glanced apprehensively toward the other end of the porch.
The young lady was still asleep, with her head resting on her bare arm, and one foot hanging limply below her ruffled petticoat.
Suddenly Mr. Opp leaned forward and viewed her slipper with interest. He had recognized the make! It was xxx-aa. He had carried a sample exactly like it, and had been wont to call enthusiastic attention to the curve of the instep and the set of the heel. He now realized that[p67]the effect depended entirely on the bow, and he seriously considered writing to the firm and suggesting the improvement.
In the midst of his reflections the young lady stirred and then sat up. Her hair was tumbled, and her eyes indicated that she had been indulging in recent tears. Resting her chin on her palms, she gazed gloomily down the road.
Mr. Opp, at the other end of the porch, also gazed gloomily down the road. The fact that he must make his presence known was annihilated by the yet more urgent fact that he could think of nothing to say. A bumblebee wheeled in narrowing circles above his head and finally lighted upon his coat-sleeve. But Mr. Opp remained immovable. He was searching his vocabulary for a word which would gently crack the silence without shattering it to bits.
The bumblebee saved the situation. Detecting some rare viand in a crack of the porch midway between the settee and the hammock, and evidently being a[p68]bibulous bee, it set up such a buzz of excitement that Mr. Opp looked at it, and the young lady looked at it, and their eyes met.
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Opp, rather breathlessly; “you was asleep, and I come to see Mrs. Gusty, and—er—the fact is—I’m Mr. Opp.”
At this announcement the young lady put her hand to her head, and by a dexterous movement rearranged the brown halo of her hair, and twisted the pink bow into its proper, aggressive position.
“Mother’ll—be back soon,”—she spoke without embarrassment, yet with the hesitation of one who is not in the habit of speaking for herself,—“I—I—didn’t know I was going to sleep.”
“No,” said Mr. Opp; then added politely, “neither did I.” Silence again looming on the horizon, he plunged on: “I think I used to be in the habit of seeing you when you was—er—younger, didn’t I?”
“Up at the store.” She smiled faintly. “You bought me a bag of pop-corn once[p69]with a prize in it. It was a breastpin; I’ve got it yet.”
Mr. Opp scowled slightly as he tried to extract an imaginary splinter from his thumb. “Do you—er—attend school?” he asked, taking refuge in a paternal attitude.
“I’m finished,” she said listlessly. “I’ve been going to the Young Ladies’ Seminary at Coreyville.”
“Didn’t you taken to it?” asked Mr. Opp, wishing fervently that Mrs. Gusty would return.
“Oh, yes,” said his companion, earnestly. “I love it; I was a special. I took music and botany and painting. I was in four concerts last year and played in the double duets at the commencements.” During the pause that followed, Mr. Opp considered various names for his newspaper. “Mother isn’t going to let me go back,” the soft, drawling voice continued; “she says when a girl is nineteen she ought to settle down. She wants me to get married.”
Mr. Opp laid “The Cove Chronicle”[p70]and “The Weekly Bugle” aside for further consideration, and inquired politely if there was any special person whom Mrs. Gusty desired for a son-in-law.
“Oh, no,” said the girl, indifferently; “she hasn’t thought of anybody. But I don’t want to get married—yet. I want to go back to the seminary and be a music teacher. I hate it here, every bit of it. It’s so stupid—and lonesome, and—”
A break in her voice caused Mr. Opp to postpone a decision of the day on which his paper was to be published, and to give her his undivided attention. Distress, even in beauty, was not to be withstood, and the fact that she was unusually pretty had been annoying Mr. Opp ever since she had spoken to him. As she turned her head away and wiped her eyes, he rose impulsively and moved toward her:
“Say, look a-here now, you ain’t crying, are you?” he asked.
She shook her head in indignant denial.
“Well—er—you don’t seem exactly[p71]happy, as you might say,” suggested Mr. Opp, boldly.
“I’m not,” she confessed, biting her lip. “I oughtn’t to talk to you about it, but there isn’t anybody here that would understand. They think I’m stuck up when I talk about books and music and—and other kind of people. They just keep on doing the same stupid things till they get old and die. Only mother won’t even let me do stupid things; she says I bother her when I try to help around the house.”
“Can’t you sew or make mottoes or something?” asked Mr. Opp, very vague as to feminine accomplishments.
“What’s the use?” asked the girl. “Mother does everything for me. She always says she’d rather do it than teach me how.”
“Don’t you take to reading?” asked Mr. Opp.
“Oh, yes,” she said; “I used to read all the time down at school; but there never is anything to read up here.”
The editor-elect peopled the country[p72]with similar cases, and he immediately saw himself as a public benefactor supplying starved subscribers with a bountiful repast of weekly news.
“Won’t you sit down?” asked the girl, interrupting his reflections. “I don’t know what can be keeping mother.”
Mr. Opp looked about for a chair, but there was none. Then he glanced at his companion, and saw that she was holding aside her pink skirt and evidently offering him a seat beside her in the hammock. He advanced a step, retreated, then weakly capitulated. Sitting very rigid, nursing his hat on his knees, and inserting his forefinger between his neck and his collar as if to breathe better, he remarked that it was getting warmer all the time.
“This isn’t anything to what it will be later,” said the girl; “it keeps on getting hotter and dustier all the time. I don’t believe there’s such a stupid, poky, little old place anywhere else in the world. You ought to be mighty glad you don’t live here.”