CHAPTER XVIITHE DUST DAYS
July held Granite in a hot, dry grip that parched the leaves and grass into a grayish green and with every vagrant breeze set the dust devils a-dancing.
Almost everybody was out of town,—with the exception of some nine-tenths of the city’s total population. These unfortunate town-bound mortals sweltered and sweated in office, store and cottage, or sweltered and died in the network of mean streets beyond the railroad tracks. Daily from the slums crept slow lines of carriages, headed too often by a hideous white vehicle which in grisly panoply was carrying some silent child on its first trip to the country; there to have the day of blesséd release from noise and overcrowding marked—if the parents could scrape together enough insurance money—with a white stone. In gutter and alleyway of the tenement district swarmed the gaunt little survivors. In doorways or in shaded corners of roofs or in overcrowded bars panted their elders.
The residence streets one by one had gone blind and lay empty, fraught with a strange lifelessness. Ultra-exclusive Pompton Avenue, its houses converted into still mausoleums, baked under the merciless sun. Itslawns ran rank. From the wide thoroughfare itself arose endless whirls of dust and the smell of boiling asphalt. A few homes still wore the awnings and veranda lattices of June; proclaiming the presence of tenants who could not yet shake from their feet—or from any other part of their grimed anatomies—the dust of the city.
Caleb Conover, in his suffocating private office, toiled on untiring. On his chilled steeled nerves and toughened body, the heat hurled itself in vain. Coatless, collarless, without waistcoat, his shirt neck wide open, his suspenders hanging, he ploughed his daily route through mountains of work; his worn out office force plodding wearily in his impetuous wake. And in these days of dust and scorching sun, Caleb was indeed making hay, after his own fashion. To him was due the fact that more Pompton Avenue residences were open this summer than ever before. Men who in social life were wont to look on him as a pariah, were none the less jumping as he pulled the commercial strings and were dancing to his music. For Caleb, his slow lines at length laid out, was making a general advance upon the financial defenses behind which for years the staid business men of the county had dozed in short-sighted security.
The first news of the attack came with the announcement of his merger of two railroads—the Broomell-Shelp and the Upstate—with the C. G. & X.; which virtually gave the last named road a monopoly of state traffic. Stocks had been hammereddown, share-holders stampeded by calamity-rumors, and holdings bought in at panic rates by the Fighter. Then had come reorganization and—presto! the C. G. & X. had benevolently assimilated its two chief rivals. Men who had considered their railroad stock as safe an investment as government bonds now stayed in town for lack of funds to go away for the summer; or else in order to seek eager alliance with the Fighter’s swift-swelling interests. Pompton Avenue was hard hit.
Nor was this the sum of Caleb’s warm weather activities. There were other deals less widely blazoned, yet quite as remunerative; deals that plunged so far beneath the surface of practical politics as to emerge black with the mire of the bottom. But it was gold-bearing mud, and Caleb knew the secret of assaying it. These submerged ventures brought at odd hours to the stuffy private office a succession of slum-dwellers; even as the mergers brought, at other hours, the Pompton Avenue element. Long were the conferences and deeply was the Underworld stirred thereby. Thus, in the maze of hovels “across the tracks,” as well as along the hill boulevards, did Caleb Conover cause unwonted activity of a sort, during the stifling days of dust.
Caine, remaining in town, more to glean in the path of Conover’s sickle than to look after the interests of his own newspaper, was moved to admiring envy. The Steeloid deal which a few months earlier had meant so much for both himself and Conover, wasnow but a side issue with the latter; a mere detail whose ultimate fate could not materially affect his fast multiplying wealth. The campaign which for years had been Caleb’s objective, was carried through now with a rush and daring that led onlookers, who knew not how long-devised was each seemingly wild move, to catch their breath and wonder when the crash would come. But the crash did not come. It would not come. Conover could have told them that, had he in these hot weeks of ceaseless rush possessed the leisure and will to explain his lightning moves.
Blacarda, too,—emerging from retirement with scarred face, a useless left arm and a heart black with mingled dread, deathless hatred and an obsessed craving for revenge,—Blacarda noted his foe’s sudden triumph and yearned to the depths of his semi-Semitic soul to turn in some way the Fighter’s flank. But, for the moment, he was helpless. He could but set into motion such few schemes of his own as seemed feasible; and begin a course of underground counterplanning, whose progress was by no means rapid enough to ease the hate that mastered him. Meantime, he kept out of the Fighter’s way. For, even yet, his wrecked nerves thrilled treacherously at fear of physical nearness to the brute who had broken him.
To Caine’s casual warning anent Blacarda, Caleb gave no heed whatever. He had conquered the man once. Should the need arise, he could do so again. In the meantime he had no time to waste in following his victim’s crawling movements.
Great was Caleb Conover. He was fighting. He had always been fighting. Just now, battle was as the breath of his nostrils. For he was waging a winning fight; warring and winning on a scale to which he had never before been able to attain. And the militant bulldog part of him was strangely elate.
But, when the hot night came, and the day’s warfare was over, there would ever come upon Conover an odd sense of emptiness, of lonely depression. More than once, absent-mindedly, he caught himself planning to banish the feeling by picking up his hat and hurrying across to Desirée’s home. Then, with a slight shock, he would remember that Desirée was in the Adirondacks and that he was—alone.
He had always known the absent girl was necessary to his happiness; that without her he was a loveless, unlovable financial machine. But now he realized with a sick ache at his heart how utterly he had grown to depend upon her actual presence—on the constant knowledge that she was near. When this, his first clumsy effort at self-analysis, had been worked out, Caleb laughed at himself for a fool. But there was as little merriment in the laugh as with most mortals who seek to evoke self-amusement from the same cause.
It was in one of these desolate moods, after a twelve-hour day’s ceaseless work, that it occurred to Conover one evening to call on Letty Standish. He had not for a moment abandoned his idea of making her his wife. But that would come in due time; andmeanwhile he had been busy with matters that could not be so readily postponed. True, he had at last paid the deferred dinner call. But Miss Standish, the butler had said, was not at home. Twice he had repeated the visit, and both times had been met by the same message. This did not strike him as at all peculiar. In summer, people were apt to be out of doors. Perhaps to-night he might find her at home. At all events, the walk would lighten his loneliness.
Painfully donning his highest collar, gayest tie and new cream-colored crash suit, the Fighter turned his face toward Pompton Avenue. As he neared the Standish house, the murmur of voices, occasional bursts of low laughter and the idle twanging of a guitar reached his ears. Several people were grouped on the piazza. So interested were they in a story one of their number was telling that Caleb stood on the topmost step before his approach was noticed.
Letty, following eagerly each tone of the narrator’s voice, in search of the psychological moment for laughing, looked up to see Conover towering over her, bulking huge against the dying dusk. Her involuntary little cry brought the story to a premature close.
It was Caine, who, sitting back among the shadows, rose as usual to the situation.
“Hello, old chap!” he said, cordially, as he came forward, “You loomed up before us like a six-by-four ghost. Letty,—”
Miss Standish had recovered herself sufficiently to welcome the late arrival with a deprecatory effort atcordiality and to introduce him to three or four young people of the neighborhood who dropped in for an informal summer’s evening chat.
“Glad to see you again, Miss Standish!” exclaimed Caleb, heartily, after nodding acknowledgement to the somewhat cold recognition of the other callers. “I’ve been around two or three times. But you’re always out when I call. My bad luck. But I’m goin’ to keep on callin’ just the same. It’s lonesome in town this summer. Lonesomer, seems to me, than it ever was before. So I’m goin’ to stroll ’round here kind of often if you’ll let me.”
He had taken the place on the steps momentarily vacated by a youth who had been sitting by Letty and who had risen when the girl introduced Conover. Letty, while she tried to murmur something gracious in reply to his remark, found herself looking at his shadowy form in abject terror. Even through the gloaming his light, alert eyes seemed to seize and hold her will. The hands she clasped nervously in her lap grew cold and damp. Her nose quivered a distress warning that the cruel darkness rendered of no avail.
“Been up to the Arareek lately?” he went on.
“No. Yes—I—notverylately,” she stammered.
“Neither’ve I,” he answered. “Too hot for the walk. When it gets cooler I’m goin’ to try and get there ev’ry week. I ought to go out more. I’m beginning to see that. My s’ciety manners are gettin’ rusty. Fact is, I’ve had to hustle so hard all my lifeI’ve never took time to have any fun. But things are shapin’ themselves now like I was goin’ to have a chance to look around me at last. Then I hope I’ll see more ofyou, Miss Standish,—a good deal more,” he continued, lowering his voice to a rumble that excluded the rest from thetête-à-tête.
“I—I shall be very glad,” faltered the poor girl.
“So’ll I,” he agreed. “I’m not such a stoopid, nose-to-the-grindstone feller as you may think, Miss Standish. I’ve been busy; that’s all. Now that the cash is runnin’ in, I’m goin’ to enjoy it; an’ try to do more in s’ciety than I’ve been able to, so far. A single man don’t get much show to rise in the social back yard; not without he has tricks. An’ I haven’t any,—thank the Lord! But even if I can’t get a lot of popularity for myself, why—maybe I can annex some of it in my wife’s name.”
“Your wife?” she interposed, a hope breaking through the pall of misery that was settling over her, “I didn’t know you were—”
“Married? I ain’t. But I hope to be before I’m so very much older. Ev’ry man ought to marry. ’Specially a man with my money an’ p’sition. I’m able to support a wife, better’n any other feller you know. Don’t you think I’d ought to get one?”
The girl’s dry tongue refused its office. Conover went on in the same loathed undertone of confidence:
“I’ve ’bout made up my mind on that point, Miss Standish. An’ when I an’ the young lady I have inmind gets to be a little better acquainted, I hope she’ll agree with me.”
“Suppose,” gasped Letty, for once fighting back the tears, “suppose the girl you picked out happened to be in love with someone else? Or even,” gasping again, at her own boldness, “even engaged to someone else.”
“I don’t think that’d worry me so very much,” he said slowly, bending nearer to his shrinking hostess, “I’m in the habit of takin’ what I want. An’ I never yet found anyone who could keep me from doin’ it. That sounds like a brag. But it ain’t; as I hope I’ll be able to show you some day.”
The girl rose, shaking, to her feet. The advent of a new guest alone saved her from fleeing panic-stricken to her room. But as a step sounded on the walk below, she paused irresolute.
“Good evening!” said the late comer, limping slightly as he mounted the steps.
At his voice a murmur of surprise rippled from the others. Letty went forward to welcome him.
“Why, Mr. Blacarda!” she exclaimed, “I didn’t even know you were out of the hospital. I’m so glad to see you again. You came to talk to Father, of course. I can’t venture to hope we young people drew you here. I’ll have him sent for,” touching the doorbell, “He’s in his study.”
As a servant departed in search of Reuben Standish, she went on; striving by words to drown her dull terror:
“You know everyone here, I think. Except perhaps—have you ever met Mr. Conover?”
Blacarda halted midway in a step forward, and stood uncertain, gaping. Caleb, however, was charmingly at his ease.
“Hello, Blacarda!” he said effusively, “Hear you’ve been laid up. Too bad! What was it that knocked you out?”
“Nothing that deserves mention from any honest man,” retorted Blacarda, his voice trembling with rage and an irresistible fear.
“As bad as that?” cried Conover, with pleasant badinage, “Be careful to keep out of its way in the future, then, son. These things that don’t ‘deserve mention’ are sometimes apt to be dangerous. ’Specially when you get a second attack of ’em. Hey?”
The words, blatantly meaningless to all save Caine and the man Caleb addressed, deprived Blacarda of speech. The injured guest had an insane impulse to run away. The coarse joviality of his conqueror seemed more fraught with menace than an open threat would have been. The situation was saved by the arrival of Reuben Standish. The banker after a word of recognition to Blacarda, greeted Caleb with a warmth that sent ice to Letty’s heart. Not knowing that her father, like Caine, was also gleaning in the Conover field (and with a profit that bade fair to rehabilitate the crumbling Standish fortune), the girl read in his cordiality only the news that another had fallen under the master sway of the Fighter’s will.
In the confusion of several guests’ simultaneous departure Letty found a chance to slip away to her own room. Nor did she reappear until the sound of a loud “Goodnight!” and the crunch of heavy feet upon the walk told her that Conover had at last gone. On the veranda she found Caine waiting in hope of another glimpse of her.
“What was the matter?” he asked, solicitously, “Why did you run away from us all? Conover waited a long time, hoping you’d come back. At last I told him you had a sick headache. Then—”
“It happened to be true,” she answered brokenly. “Oh, Amzi, I’m somiserable!Whydid that man come here? I’ve left word I’m never at home to him.”
“Be nice to him for my sake, won’t you, darling?” pleaded Caine, “I can’t explain. But I—need him very much just now. I can’t afford, for business reasons, to have him offended.”
“But if you only knew—!” she cried; then stopped.
“Knew what? Tell me,” he begged, “Is anything troubling you?”
The formless fear she sought to voice died on her lips.
“No,” she said. “Nothing at all. But I’m very tired. Goodnight.”
And with this lachrymose evasion he was forced to content himself. But before going to bed, Letty, as a last hope, sought out her father.
“I wish,” she entreated, nerving herself to the effort, “Iwishyou would forbid Mr. Conover the house. I—I hate him. I’mafraidof him. Oh, Father,pleasedon’t let him come here any more!”
Standish looked up from his evening paper with a frown of cold displeasure.
“I do wish, Letty,” he said with the dry little cough that nowadays accompanied his every sentence, “that you would learn self control. You are not a baby any longer. These childish prejudices of yours are absurd. Mr. Conover is—very useful to me—and to the bank,—just at present. Out of deference to me, you will please treat him with courtesy whenever he chances to call!”
But Letty, weeping uncontrollably, had run from the room. She felt herself helplessly enmeshed in a net whose cords her best-loved were drawing tighter and tighter about her.