When Thessaly awoke one morning some fortnight later, and rubbed its eyes, and, looking again, discovered in truth that everything outside was white, the recognition of the familiar visitor was followed by a sigh. The children still had a noisy friendliness of greeting for the snow, and got out their sleds and bored anticipatory holes in their boot-heels with a thrill of old-time enthusiasm; but even their delight became subdued in its manifestations before noon had arrived—their elders seemed to take the advent of winter so seriously. Villagers, when they spoke to one another that morning, noted that the voice of the community had suddenly grown graver in tone and lower in pitch. The threat of the approaching season weighed with novel heaviness on the general mind.
For the first time since the place had begun its manufacturing career, Thessaly was idle. The Minster furnaces had been closed for more than two weeks; the mills of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company, for nearly that length of time. Half the bread-winners in the town were out of work and saw no prospect of present employment.
Usage is most of all advantageousinadversity; These artisans of Thessaly lacked experience in enforced idleness and the trick of making bricks without straw. Employment, regular and well requited, had become so much a matter of course that its sudden cessation now bewildered and angered them. Each day brought to their minds its fresh train of calamitous consequences. Children needed shoes; the flour-barrel was nearly empty; to lay in a pig for the winter might now be impossible. The question of rent quarter loomed black and menacing like a thunder-cloud on the horizon; and there were those with mortgages on their little homes, who already saw this cloud streaked with the lightning of impending tempest. Anxious housewives began to retrench at the grocer’s and butcher’s; but the saloons and tobacco shops had almost doubled their average of receipts.
Even on ordinary holidays the American workman, bitten as he is with the eager habitude of labor, more often than not some time during the day finds himself close to the place where at other times he is employed. There his thoughts are: thither his steps all unconsciously bend themselves. So now, in this melancholy, indefinite holiday which November had brought to Thessaly, the idlers instinctively hung about the deserted works. The tall, smokeless chimneys, the locked gates, the grimy windows—through which the huge dark forms of the motionless machines showed dimly, like the fossils of extinct monsters in a museum—the dreary stretches of cinder heaps and blackened waste which surrounded the silent buildings—all these had a cruel kind of fascination for the dispossessed toilers.
They came each day and stood lazily about in groups: they smoked in taciturnity, told sardonic stories, or discussed their grievance, each according to his mood; but they kept their eyes on the furnaces and mills whence wages came no more and where all was still. There was something in it akin in pathos to the visits a mother pays to the graveyard where her child lies hidden from sight under the grass and the flowers. It was the tomb of their daily avocation that these men came to look at.
But, as time went on, there grew to be less and less of the pathetic in what these men thought and said. The sense of having been wronged swelled within them until there was room for nothing but wrath. In a general way they understood that a trust had done this thing to them. But that was too vague and far-off an object for specific cursing. The Minster women were nearer home, and it was quite clear that they were the beneficiaries of the trust’s action. There were various stories told about the vast sum which these greedy women had been paid by the trust for shutting down their furnaces and stopping the output of iron ore from their fields, and as days succeeded one another this sum steadily magnified itself.
The Thessaly Manufacturing Company, which concerned a much larger number of workmen, stood on a somewhat different footing. Mechanics who knew men who were friendly with Schuyler Tenney learned in a roundabout fashion that he really had been forced into closing the mills by the action of the Minster women. When you came to think of it, this seemed very plausible. Then the understanding sifted about among the men that the Minsters were, in reality, the chief owners of the Manufacturing Company, and that Tenney was only a business manager and minor partner, who had been overruled by these heartless women. All this did not make friends for Tenney. The lounging workmen on the street comers eyed him scowlingly when he went by, but their active hatred passed him over and concentrated itself upon the widow and daughters of Stephen Minster. On occasion now, when fresh rumors of the coming of French Canadian workmen were in the air, very sinister things were muttered about these women.
Before the lockout had been two days old, one of the State officers of a labor association had visited Thessaly, had addressed a hastily convened meeting of the ejected workmen, and had promised liberal assistance from the central organization. He had gone away again, but two or three subordinate officials of the body had appeared in town and were still there. They professed to be preparing detailed information upon which their chiefs could act intelligently. They had money in their pockets, and displayed a quite metropolitan freedom about spending it over the various bars. Some of the more conservative workmen thought these emissaries put in altogether too much time at these bars, but they were evidently popular with the great bulk of the men. They had a large fund of encouraging reminiscence about the way bloated capitalists had been beaten and humbled and brought down to their knees elsewhere in the country, and they were evidently quite confident that the workers would win this fight, too. Just how it was to be won no one mentioned, but when the financial aid began to come in it would be time to talk about that. And when the French Canadians came, too, it would be time—The rest of this familiar sentence was always left unspoken, but lowering brows and significant nods told how it should be finished.
So completely did this great paralytic stroke to industry monopolize attention, that events in the village, not immediately connected with it, passed almost unnoticed. Nobody gave a second thought, for example, to the dissolution of the law firm of Tracy & Boyce, much less dreamed of linking it in any way with the grand industrial drama which engaged public interest.
Horace, at the same time, took rooms at the new brick hotel, the Central, which had been built near the railroad depot, and opened an office of his own a block or two lower down Main Street than the one he had vacated. This did not attract any special comment, and when, on the evening of the 16th of November, a meeting of the Thessaly Citizens’ Club was convened, fully half those who attended learned there for the first time that the two young lawyers had separated.
The club at last had secured a building for itself—or rather the refusal of one—and this meeting was called to decide upon ratifying the purchase. It was held in a large upper room of the building under discussion, which had been the gymnasium of a German Turn Verein, and still had stowed away in its comers some of the apparatus that the athletes had used.
When Horace, as president, called the gathering to order, there were some forty men present, representing very fairly the business and professional classes of the village. Schuyler Tenney was there as one of the newer members; and Reuben Tracy, with John Fairchild, Dr. Lester, Father Chance, and others of the founders, sat near one another farther back in the hall.
The president, with ready facility, laid before the meeting the business at hand. The building they were in could be purchased, or rented on a reasonably extended lease. It seemed to the committee better to take it than to think of erecting one for themselves—at least for the present. So much money would be needed: so much for furniture, so much for repairs, etc.; so much for heating and lighting, so much for service, and so on—a very compact and lucid statement, indeed.
A half hour was passed in more or less inconclusive discussion before Reuben Tracy rose to his feet and began to speak. The story that he and Boyce were no longer friends had gone the round of the room, and some men turned their chairs to give him the closer attention with eye and ear. Before long all were listening with deep interest to every word.
Reuben started by saying that there was something even more important than the question of the new building, and that was the question of what the club itself meant. In its inception, the idea of creating machinery for municipal improvement had been foremost. Certainly he and those associated with him in projecting the original meeting had taken that view of their work. That meeting had contented itself with an indefinite expression of good intentions, but still had not dissented from the idea that the club was to mean something and to do something. Now it became necessary, before final steps were taken, to ask what that something was to be. So far as he gathered, much thought had been given as to the probable receipts and expenditure, as to where the card-room, the billiard-room, the lunch-room, and so forth should be located, and as to the adoption of all modern facilities for making themselves comfortable in their new club-house. But about the original objects of the club he had not heard a syllable. To him this attitude was profoundly unsatisfactory. At the present moment, the village was laboring under a heavy load of trouble and anxiety. Nearly if not quite a thousand families were painfully affected by the abrupt stoppage of the two largest works in the section. If actual want was not already experienced, at least the vivid threat of it hung over their poorer neighbors all about them. This fact, it seemed to him, must appeal to them all much more than any conceivable suggestion about furnishing a place in which they might sit about at their ease in leisure hours. He put it to the citizens before him, that their way was made exceptionally clear for them by this calamity which had overtaken their village. If the club meant anything, it must mean an organization to help these poor people who were suddenly, through no fault of their own, deprived of incomes and employment. That was something vital, pressing, urgent; easy-chairs and billiard-tables could wait, but the unemployed artisans of Thessaly and their families could not.
This in substance was what Reuben said; and when he had finished there succeeded a curious instant of dead silence, and then a loud confusion of comment. Half a dozen men were on their feet now, among them both Tenney and John Fairchild.
The hardware merchant spoke first, and what he said was not so prudent as those who knew him best might have expected. The novel excitement of speaking in public got into his head, and he not only used language like a more illiterate man than he really was, but he attacked Tracy personally for striving to foment trouble between capital and labor, and thereby created an unfavorable impression upon the minds of his listeners.
Editor Fairchild had ready a motion that the building be taken on a lease, but that a special committee be appointed by the meeting to devise means for using it to assist the men of Thessaly now out of employment, and that until the present labor crisis was over, all questions of furnishing a club-house proper be laid on the table. He spoke vigorously in support of this measure, and when he had finished there was a significant round of applause.
Horace rose when order had been restored, and speaking with some hesitation, said that he would put the motion, and that if it were carried he would appoint such a committee, but——
“I said ‘to be appointed by the meeting’!” called out John Fairchild, sharply.
The president did not finish his sentence, but sat down again, and Tenney pushed forward and whispered in his ear. Two or three others gathered sympathetically about, and then still others joined the group formed about the president, and discussed eagerly in undertones this new situation.
“I must decline to put the motion. It does not arise out of the report. It is out of order,” answered Horace at last, as a result of this faction conference.
“Then I will put it myself,” cried Fairchild, rising. “But I beg first to move that you leave the chair!” Horace looked with angered uncertainty down upon the men who remained seated about Fairchild. They were as thirty to his ten, or thereabouts. He could not stand up against this majority. For a moment he had a fleeting notion of trying to conciliate it, and steer a middle course, but Tenney’s presence had made that impossible. He laid down his gavel, and, gathering up his hat and coat, stepped off the platform to the floor.
“There is no need of moving that,” he said. “I’ll go without it. So far as I am concerned, the meeting is over, and the club doesn’t exist.”
He led the way out, followed by Tenney, Jones the match-manufacturer, the Rev. Dr. Turner, and five or six others. One or two gentlemen rose as if to join the procession, and then thinking better of it sat down again.
By general suggestion, John Fairchild took the chair thus vacated, but beyond approving the outlines of his plan, and appointing a committee with Tracy at its head to see what could be done to carry it out, the meeting found very little to do. It was agreed that this committee should also consider the question of funds, and should call a meeting when it was ready to report, which should be at the earliest possible date.
Then the meeting broke up, and its members dispersed, not without well-founded apprehensions that they had heard the last of the Thessaly Citizens’ Club.
HORACE Boyce was too enraged to preserve a polite demeanor toward the sympathizers who had followed him out of the hall, and who showed a disposition to discuss the situation with him now the street was reached. After a muttered word or two to Tenney, the young man abruptly turned his back on the group, and walked with a hurried step down the street toward his hotel.
Entering the building, he made his way direct to the bar-room back of the office—a place where he had rarely been before—and poured out for himself a heavy portion of whiskey, which he drank off without noticing the glass of iced water placed for him beside the bottle. He turned to go, but came back again to the bar after he had reached the swinging screen-doors, and said he would take a bottle of the liquor up to his room. “I haven’t been sleeping well these last few nights,” he explained to the bar-keeper.
Once in his room, Horace put off his boots, got into easy coat and slippers, raked down the fire, looked for an aimless minute or two at the row of books on his shelf, and then threw himself into the arm-chair beside the stove. The earlier suggestion of gray in his hair at the temples had grown more marked these last few weeks, and there were new lines of care on his clear-cut face, which gave it a haggard look now as he bent his brows in rumination.
An important interview with Tenney and Wendover was to take place in this room a half hour later; but, besides a certain hard-drawn notion that he would briskly hold his own with them, Horace did not try to form plans for this or even to fasten his mind upon it.
The fortnight or more that had passed since that terrible momentary vision of Kate Minster running up the stairs to avoid him, had been to the young man a period of unexampled gloominess and unrest, full of deep wrath at the fate which had played upon him such a group of scurvy tricks all at once, yet having room for sustained exasperation over the minor discomforts of his new condition.
The quarrel with his father had forced him to change his residence, and this was a peculiarly annoying circumstance coming at just such a time. He realized now that he had been very comfortable in the paternal house, and that his was a temperament extremely dependent upon well-ordered and satisfactory surroundings. These new rooms of his, though they cost a good deal of money, were not at all to his liking, and the service was execrable. The sense of being at home was wholly lacking; he felt as disconnected and out of touch with the life about him as if he had been travelling in a foreign country which he did not like.
The great humiliation and wrong—the fact that he had been rejected with open contumely by the rich girl he had planned to marry—lay steadily day and night upon the confines of his consciousness, like a huge black morass with danger signals hung upon all its borders. His perverse mind kept returning to view these menacing signals, and torturing him with threats to disregard them and plunge into the forbidden darkness. The constant strain to hold his thoughts back from this hateful abyss wore upon him like an unremitting physical pain.
The resolve which had chilled and stiffened him into self-possession that afternoon in the drawingroom, and had even enabled him to speak with cold distinctness to Mrs. Minster and to leave the house of insult and defeat with dignity, had been as formless and unshaped as poor, heart-torn, trembling Lear’s threat to his daughters before Gloster’s gate. Revenge he would have—sweeping, complete, merciless, but by what means he knew not. That would come later.
Two weeks were gone, and the revenge seemed measurably nearer, though still its paths were all unmapped. It was clear enough to the young man’s mind now that Tenney and Wendover were intent on nothing less than plundering the whole Minster estate. Until that fatal afternoon in the drawingroom, he had kept himself surrounded with an elaborate system of self-deception. He had pretended to himself that the designs of these associates of his were merely smart commercial plans, which needed only to be watched with equal smartness. Now the pretence was put aside. He knew the men to be villains, and openly rated them as such in his thoughts.
He had a stem satisfaction in the thought that their schemes were in his hands. He would join them now, frankly and with all his heart, only providing the condition that his share of the proceeds should be safe-guarded. They should have his help to wreck this insolent, purse-proud, newly rich family, to strip them remorselessly of their wealth. His fellow brigands might keep the furnaces, might keep everything in and about this stupid Thessaly. He would take his share in hard coin, and shake the mud and slush of Dearborn County from off his feet. He was only in the prime of his youth. Romance beckoned to him from a hundred centres of summer civilization, where men knew how to live, and girls added culture and dowries to beauty and artistic dress. Oh, yes! he would take his money and go.
The dream of a career in his native village had brought him delight only so long as Kate Minster was its central figure. That vision now seemed so clumsy and foolish that he laughed at it. He realized that he had never liked the people here about him. Even the Minsters had been provincial, only a gilded variation upon the rustic character of the section. Nothing but the over-sanguine folly of youth could ever have prompted him to think that he wanted to be mayor of Thessaly, or that it would be good to link his fortunes with the dull, under-bred place. Oh, no! he would take his money and go.
The two men for whom he had been waiting broke abruptly in upon his revery by entering the room. They came in without even a show of knocking on the door, and Horace frowned a little at their rudeness.
Stout Judge Wendover panted heavily with the exertion of ascending the stairs, and it seemed to have put him out of temper as well as breath. He threw off his overcoat with an impatient jerk, took a chair, and gruffly grunted “How-de-do!” in the direction of his host, without taking the trouble to even nod a salutation. Tenney also seated himself, but he did not remove his overcoat. Even in the coldest seasons he seemed to wear the same light, autumnal clothes, creaseless and gray, and mouselike in effect. The two men looked silently at Horace, and he felt that they disapproved his velveteen coat.
“Well?” he asked, at last, leaning back in his chair and trying to equal them in indifference. “What is new in New York, Judge?”
“Never mind New York! Thessaly is more in our line just now,” said Wendover, sternly.
The young man simulated a slight yawn. “You’re welcome to my share of the town, I’m sure,” he said; “I’m not very enthusiastic about it myself.”
“How much has Reuben Tracy got to work on? How much have you blabbed about our business to him?” asked the New Yorker.
“I neither know nor care anything about Mr. Tracy,” said Horace, coldly. “As for what you elegantly describe as my ‘blabbing’ to him, I daresay you understand what it means. I don’t.”
“It means that you have made a fool of us; got us into trouble; perhaps ruined the whole business, by your God A’mighty stupidity! That’s what it means!” said Wendover, with his little blue-bead eyes snapping angrily in the lamplight.
“I hope it won’t strike you as irrelevant if I suggest that this is my room,” drawled Horace, “and that I have a distinct preference for civil conversation in it. If you have any criticisms to offer upon my conduct, as you seem to think that you have, I must beg that you couch them in the language which gentlemen—”
“Gentlemen be damned!” broke in the Judge, sharply. “We’ve had too much ‘gentleman’ in this whole business! Answer me a plain question. What does Tracy mean by his applications?”
“I haven’t the remotest idea what you are talking about. I’ve already told you that I know nothing of Mr. Tracy or his doings.”
Schuyler Tenney interposed, impassively: “He may not have heard of the application, Judge. You must remember that, for the sake of appearances, he then being in partnership, you were made Mrs. Minster’s attorney, in both the agreements. That is how notices came to be served on you.”
The Judge had not taken his eyes off the young man in the velveteen jacket. “Do you mean to tell me that you haven’t learned from Mrs. Minster that this man Tracy has made applications on behalf of the daughters to upset the trust agreement, and to have a receiver appointed to overhaul the books of the Mfg. Company?”
Horace sat up straight. “Good God, no!” he stammered. “I’ve heard nothing of that.”
“You never do seem to hear about things. What did you suppose you were here for, except to watch Mrs. Minster, and keep track of what was going on?” demanded Wendover.
“I may tell you,” answered Horace, speaking hesitatingly, “that circumstances have arisen which render it somewhat difficult for me to call upon Mrs. Minster at her house—for that matter, out of the question. She has only been to my office office within the—the last fortnight.”
Schuyler Tenney spoke again. “The ‘circumstances’ means, Judge, that he—”
“Pardon me, Mr. Tenney,” said Horace, with decision: “what the circumstances mean is neither your business nor that of your friend. That is something that we will not discuss, if you please.”
“Won’t we, though!” burst in Wendover, peremptorily. “You make a fool of us. You go sneaking around one of the girls up there. You think you’ll set yourself in a tub of butter, and let our schemes go to the devil. You try to play this behind our backs. You get kicked out of the house for your impudence. And then you sit here, dressed like an Italian organ-grinder, by God, and tell me that we won’t discuss the subject!”
Horace rose to his feet, with all his veins tingling. “You may leave this room, both of you,” he said, in a voice which he with difficulty kept down. His face was pale with rage.
Judge Wendover rose, also, but it was not to obey Horace’s command. Instead, he pointed imperiously to the chair which the young man had vacated.
“Sit down there,” he shouted. “Sit down, I tell you! I warn you, I’m in no mood to be fooled with. You deserve to have your neck wrung for what you’ve done already. If I have another word of cheek from you, by God, itshallbe wrung! We’ll throw you on the dungheap as we would a dead rat.”
Horace had begun to listen to these staccato sentences with his arms folded, and lofty defiance in his glance. Somehow, as he looked into his antagonist’s blazing eyes, his courage melted before their hot menace. The pudgy figure of the Judge visibly magnified itself under his gaze, and the threat in that dry, husky voice set his nerves to quaking. He sank into his seat again.
“All right,” he said, in an altered voice. “I’m willing enough to talk, only a man doesn’t like to be bullied in that way in his own house.”
“It’s a tarnation sight better than being bullied by a warder in Auburn State’s prison,” said the Judge, as he too resumed his chair. “Take my word for that.”
Schuyler Tenney crossed his legs nervously at this, and coughed. Horace looked at them both in a mystified but uneasy silence.
“You heard what I said?” queried Wendover, brusquely, after a moment’s pause.
“Undoubtedly I did,” answered Horace. “But—but its application escaped me.”
“What I mean is”—the Judge hesitated for a moment to note Tenney’s mute signal of dissuasion, and then went on: “We might as well not beat about the bush—what I mean is that there’s a penitentiary job in this thing for somebody, unless we all keep our heads, and have good luck to boot. You’ve done your best to get us all into a hole, with your confounded airs and general foolishness. If worse comes to worst, perhaps we can save ourselves, but there won’t be a ghost of a chance for you. I’ll see to that myself. If we come to grief, you shall pay for it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Horace, in a subdued tone, after a period of silent reflection. “Where does the penitentiary part come in?”
“I don’t agree with the Judge at all,” interposed Tenney, eagerly. “I don’t think there’s any need of looking on the dark side of the thing. We don’tknowthat Tracy knows anything. And then, why shouldn’t we be able to get our own man appointed receiver?”
“This is the situation,” said Wendover, speaking deliberately. “You advised Mrs. Minster to borrow four hundred thousand dollars for the purchase of certain machinery patents, and you drew up the papers for the operation. It happens that she already owned—or rather that the Mfg. Company already owned—these identical rights and patents. They were a part of the plant and business we put into the company at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars when we moved over from Cadmus. But nobody on her side, except old Clarke, knew just what it was that we put in. He died in Florida, and it was arranged that his papers should pass to you. There was no record that we had sold the right of the nail machine.”
Horace gazed with bewilderment into the hard-drawn, serious faces of the two men who sat across the little table from him. In the yellow lamplight these countenances looked like masks, and he searched them in vain for any sign of astonishment or emotion. The thing which was now for the first time being put into words was strange, but as it shaped itself in his mind he did not find himself startled. It was as if he had always known about it, but had allowed it to lapse in his memory. These men were thieves—and he was their associate! The room with its central point of light where the three knaves were gathered, and its deepening shadows round about, suggested vaguely to him a robber’s cave. Primary instincts arose strong within him. Terror lest discovery should come yielded precedence to a fierce resolve to have a share of the booty. It seemed minutes to him before he spoke again.
“Then she was persuaded to mortgage her property, to buy over again at four times its value what she had already purchased?” he asked, with an assumption of calmness.
“That seems to be about what you managed to induce her to do,” said the Judge, dryly.
“Then you admit that it was I who did it—that you owe the success of the thing to me!” The young man could not restrain his eagerness to establish this point. He leaned over the table, and his eyes sparkled with premature triumph.
“No: I said ‘seems,’” answered Wendover. “Weknow better.Weknow that from the start you have done nothing but swell around at our expense, and create as many difficulties for us and our business as possible. But the courts and the newspapers would look at it differently.Theywould be sure to regard you as the one chiefly responsible.”
“I should think we were pretty much in the same boat, my friend,” said Horace, coldly.
“I daresay,” replied the New Yorker, “only with this difference: we can swim, and you can’t. By that I mean, we’ve got money, and you haven’t. See the point?”
Horace saw the point, and felt himself revolted at the naked selfishness and brutality with which it was exposed. The disheartening fact that these men would not hesitate for an instant to sacrifice him—that they did not like him, and would not lift a finger to help him unless it was necessary for their own salvation—rose gloomily before his mind.
“Still, it would be better for all of us that the boat shouldn’t be capsized at all,” he remarked.
“That’s it—that’s the point,” put in Tenney, with animation; “that’s what I said to the Judge.”
“This Tracy of yours,” said Wendover, “has got hold of the Minster girls. He’s acting for them. He has been before Judge Waller with a whole batch of applications. First, in chambers, he’s brought an action to dissolve the trust, and asked for an order returnable at Supreme Court chambers to show cause why, in the mean time, the furnaces shouldn’t be opened. His grounds are, first, that the woman was deceived; and second, that the trust is against public policy. Now, it seems to me that our State courts can’t issue an order binding on a board of directors at Pittsburg. Isn’t it a thing that belongs to a United States court? How is that?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” answered Horace. “It’s a new question to me.”
“Tenney told me you knew something as a lawyer,” was Wendover’s angry comment. “I’d like to know where it comes in.”
The hardware merchant hastened to avert the threatened return to personalities. “Tell him about the receiver motion,” he said.
“Then Tracy, before the same judge, but in special term, has applied for a receiver for the Thessaly Mfg. Company, on the ground of fraud.”
“That’s the meanest thing about the whole business,” commented Tenney.
“Well, what do you advise doing?” asked Horace, despondently.
“There are two things,” said Wendover. “First, to delay everything until after New Year, when Mrs. Minster’s interest becomes due and can’t be paid. That can be done by denying jurisdiction of the State court in the trust business, and by asking for particulars in the receiver matter. The next thing is to make Thessaly too hot for those women, and for Tracy, too, before New Year. If a mob should smash all the widow’s windows for her, for instance, perhaps burn her stable, she’d be mighty glad to get out of town, and out of the iron business, too.”
“But that wouldn’t shut Tracy up,” observed Tenney. “He sticks at things like a bull-dog, once he gets a good hold.”
“I’m thinking about Tracy,” mused the Judge.
Horace found himself regarding these two visitors of his with something like admiration. The resourcefulness and resolution of their villainy were really wonderful. He felt his courage coming back to him. Such men would be sure to win, if victory were not absolutely impossible. At least, there was nothing for it but to cordially throw in his lot with them.
“Whatever is decided upon, I’ll do my share,” he said, with decision. Upon reflection, he added: “But if I share the risks, I must be clearly understood to also share the profits.”
Judge Wendover looked at the young man sternly, and breathed hard as he looked. “Upon my word,” he growled at last, “you’re the cheekiest young cub I’ve seen since before the war!”
Horace stood to his guns. “However that may be,” he said, “you see what I mean. This is a highly opportune time, it strikes me, to discover just how I stand in this matter.”
“You’ll stand where you’re put, or it will be the worse for you!”
“Surely,” Schuyler Tenney interposed, “you ought to have confidence that we will do the fair thing.”
“My bosom may be simply overflowing with confidence in you both”—Horace ventured upon a suggestion of irony in his intonation—“but experience seems to indicate the additional desirability of an understanding. If you will think it over, I daresay you will gather the force of my remark.”
The New Yorker seemed not to have heard the remark, much less to have understood it. He addressed the middle space between Horace and Tenney in a meditative way: “Those two speech-making fellows who are here from the Amalgamated Confederation of Labor, or whatever it is, can both be had to kick up a row whenever we like. I know them both of old. They notified me that they were coming here ten days ago. We can tell them to keep their hands off the Canadians when they come next week, and lead their crowd instead up to the Minster house. We’ll go over that together, Tenney, later on. But about Tracy—perhaps these fellows might—”
Wendover followed up the train of this thought in silence, with a ruminative eye on vacancy.
“What I was saying,” insisted Horace, “was that I wanted to know just how I stand.”
“I suppose it’s out of the question to square Tracy,” pursued Wendover, thinking aloud, “and that Judge Waller that he’s applied to, he’s just another such an impracticable cuss. There’s no security for business at all, when such fellows have the power to muddle and interfere with it. Tenney,youknow this Tracy. Why can’t you think of something?”
“As I remarked before,” Horace interposed once more, “what am I to get out of this thing?”
This time the New Yorker heard him. He slowly turned his round, white-framed face toward the speaker, and fixed upon him a penetrating glance of wrath, suspicion, and dislike.
“Oh,thatis what you want to know, is it?” he said, abruptly, after a momentary silence. “Well, sir, if you had your deserts, you’d get about seven years’ hard labor. As it is, you’ve had over seven thousand dollars out of the concern, and you’ve done seven hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage. If you can make a speech before Judge Waller this week that will stave off all these things until after New Year’s, perhaps I may forgive you some of the annoyance and loss your infernal idiocy and self-conceit have caused us. When you’ve done that, it will be time enough to talk to me about giving you another chance to keep your salary. But understand this, sir! You never made a bigger mistake in your life than in thinking you could dictate terms to Peter Wendover, now or any other time! Why, you poor empty-headed creature, who do you supposeyoucould frighten? You’re as helpless as a June-bug in a cistern with the curb shut down.”
The Judge had risen while speaking, and put on his overcoat. He took his hat now, and glanced to note that Tenney was also on his feet. Then he added these further words to the young man, whose head was drooping in spite of himself, and whose figure had sunk into a crouching posture in the easy-chair:
“Let me give you some advice. Take precious good care not to annoy me any more while this business is on. I never did take much stock in you. It was Tenney who picked you out, and who thought you could be useful. I didn’t believe in you from the start. Now that I’ve summered and wintered you, I stand amazed, by God! that I could ever have let you get mixed up in my affairs. But here you are, and it will be easier for us to put up with you, and carry you along, than throw you out. Besides, you may be able to do some good, if what I’ve said puts any sense into your head. But don’t run away with the idea that you are necessary to us, or that you are going to share anything, as you call it, or that you can so much as lift your finger against us without first of all crushing yourself. This is plain talk, and it may help you to size yourself up as you really are. According to your own notion of yourself, God Almighty’s overcoat would have about made you a vest. My idee of you is different, you see, and I’m a good deal nearer right than you are. I’ll send the papers over to you to-morrow, and let us see what you will do with them.”
The New York magnate turned on his heel at this, and, without any word of adieu, he and Tenney left the room.
Horace sat until long after midnight in his chair, with the bottle before him, half-dazed and overwhelmed amidst the shapeless ruins of his ambition.
REUBEN Tracy rose at an unwontedly early hour next morning, under the spur of consciousness that he had a very busy day before him. While he was still at his breakfast in the hotel dining-room, John Fairchild came to keep an appointment made the previous evening, and the two men were out on the streets together before Thessaly seemed wholly awake.
Their first visit was to the owner of the building which the Citizens’ Club had thought of hiring, and their business here was promptly despatched; thence they made their way to the house of a boss-carpenter, and within the hour they had called upon a plumber, a painter, and one or two other master artisans. By ten o’clock those of this number with whom arrangements had been made had put in an appearance at the building in question, and Tracy and Fairchild explained to them the plans which they were to carry out. The discussion and settlement of these consumed the time until noon, when the lawyer and the editor separated, and Reuben went to his office.
Here, as had been arranged, he found old ’Squire Gedney waiting for him. A long interview behind the closed door of the inner office followed, and when the two men came out the justice of the peace was putting a roll of bills into his pocket.
“This is Tuesday,” he said to Tracy. “I daresay I can be back by Thursday. The bother about it is that Cadmus is such an out-of-the-way place to get at.”
“At all events, I’ll count on seeing you Friday morning,” answered Reuben. “Then, if you’ve got what I expect, we can go before the county judge and get our warrants by Saturday, and that will be in plenty of time for the grand jury next week.”
“If they don’t all eat their Christmas dinner in Auburn prison, call me a Dutchman!” was Gedney’s confident remark, as he took his departure.
Reuben, thus left alone, walked up and down the larger room in pleased excitement, his hands in his pockets and his eyes aglow with satisfaction. So all-pervasive was his delight that it impelled him to song, and he hummed to himself as he paced the floor a faulty recollection of a tune his mother had been fond of, many years before. Reuben had no memory for music, and knew neither the words nor the air, but no winged outburst of exultation from a triumphant Viking in the opera could have reflected a more jubilant mood.
He had unearthed the conspiracy, seized upon its avenues of escape, laboriously traced all its subterranean burrowings. Even without the proof which it was to be hoped that Gedney could bring from Cadmus, Reuben believed he had information enough to justify criminal proceedings. Nothing could be clearer than guilty collusion between this New Yorker, Wendover, and some of the heads of the pig-iron trust to rob Mrs. Minster and her daughters. At almost every turn and corner in the ramification of the huge swindle, Tenney and Boyce also appeared. They too should not escape. Reuben Tracy was the softest-hearted of men, but it did not occur to him to relent when he thought of his late partner. To the contrary, there was a decided pleasure in the reflection that nothing could avert well-merited punishment from this particular young man.
The triumph had its splendid public side, moreover. Great and lasting good must follow such an exposure as he would make of the economic and social evils underlying the system of trusts. A staggering blow would be dealt to the system, and to the sentiment back of it that rich men might do what they liked in America. With pardonable pride he thrilled at the thought that his arm was to strike this blow. The effect would be felt all over the country. It could not but affect public opinion, too, on the subject of the tariff—that bomb-proof cover under which these men had conducted their knavish operations. Reuben sang with increased fervor as this passed through his mind.
On his way back from luncheon—which he still thought of as dinner—Reuben Tracy stopped for a few moments at the building he and Fairchild had rented. The carpenters were already at work, ripping down the partitions on the ground floor, in a choking and clamorous confusion of dust and sound of hammering. The visible energy of these workmen and the noise they made were like a sympathetic continuation of his song of success. He would have enjoyed staying for hours, watching and listening to these proofs that he at last was doing something to help move the world around.
When he came out upon the street again, it was to turn his steps to the house of the Minsters. He had not been there since his visit in March, and there was a certain embarrassment about his going now. It was really Mrs. Minster’s house, and he had been put in the position of acting against her, as counsel for her daughters. It was therefore a somewhat delicate business. But Miss Kate had asked him to come, and he would be sincerely glad of the opportunity of telling Mrs. Minster the whole truth, if she would listen to it. Just what form this opportunity might take he could not foresee; but his duty was so clear, and his arguments must carry such absolute conviction, that he approached the ordeal with a light heart.
Miss Kate came down into the drawing-room to receive him, and Reuben noted with a deep joy that she again wore the loose robe of creamy cloth, girdled by that same enchanted rope of shining white silk. Something made him feel, too, that she observed the pleased glance of recognition he bestowed upon her garments, and understood it, and was not vexed. Their relations had been distinctly cordial—even confidential—for the past fortnight; but the reappearance of this sanctified and symbolical gown—this mystical robe which he had enshrined in his heart with incense and candles and solemn veneration, as does the Latin devotee with the jewelled dress of the Bambino—seemed of itself to establish a far more tender intimacy between them. He became conscious, all at once, that she knew of his love.
“I have asked mamma to see you,” she said, when they were seated, “and I think she will. Since it was first suggested to her, she has wavered a good deal, sometimes consenting, sometimes not. The poor lady is almost distracted with the trouble in which we have all become involved, and that makes it all the more difficult for her to see things in their proper connection. I hope you may be able to show her just how matters stand, and who her real friends are.”
The girl left at this, and in a few moments reappeared with her mother, to whom she formally presented Mr. Tracy.
If Mrs. Minster had suffered great mental anguish since the troubles came on, her countenance gave no hint of the fact. It was as regular and imperturbable and deceptively impressive as ever, and she bore herself with perfect self-possession, bowing with frosty precision, and seating herself in silence.
Reuben himself began the talk by explaining that the steps which he had felt himself compelled to take in the interest of the daughters implied not the slightest hostility to the mother. They had had, in fact, the ultimate aim of helping her as well. He had satisfied himself that she was in the clutch of a criminal conspiracy to despoil her estate and that of her daughters. It was absolutely necessary to act with promptness, and, as he was not her lawyer, to temporarily and technically separate the interest of her daughters from her own, for legal purposes. All that had been done was, however, quite as much to her advantage as to that of her daughters, and when he had explained to her the entire situation he felt sure she would be willing to allow him to represent her as well as her daughters in the effort to protect the property and defeat the conspiracy.
Mrs. Minster offered no comment upon this expression of confidence, and Reuben went on to lay before her the whole history of the case. He did this with great clearness—as if he had been talking to a child—pointing out to her how the scheme of plunder originated, where its first operations revealed themselves, and what part in turn each of the three conspirators had played.
She listened to it all with an expressionless face, and though she must have been startled and shocked by a good deal of it, Reuben could gather no indication from her manner of her feelings or her opinions. When he had finished, and his continued silence rendered it clear that he was not going to say any more, she made her first remark.
“I’m much obliged to you, I’m sure,” she said, with no sign of emotion. “It was very kind of you to explain it to me. But of coursetheyexplain it quite differently.”
“No doubt,” answered Reuben. “That is just what they would do. The difference is that they have lied to you, and that I have told you what the books, what the proofs, really show.”
“I have known Peter Wendover since we were children together,” she said, after a momentary pause, “andhenever would have advised my daughters to sue their own mother!”
Reuben suppressed a groan. “Nobody has sued you, Mrs. Minster; least of all, your daughters,” he tried to explain. “The actions I have brought—that is, including the applications—are directed against the men who have combined to swindle you, not at all against you. They might just as well have been brought in your name also, only that I had no power to act for you.”
“It is the same as suing me. Judge Wendover said so,” was her reply.
“What I seek to have you realize is that Judge Wendover purposely misleads you. He is the head and front of the conspiracy to rob you. I am going to have him indicted for it. The proofs are as plain as a pikestaff. How, then, can you continue to believe what he tells you?”
“I quite believe that you mean well, Mr. Tracy,” said Mrs. Minster. “But lawyers, you know, always take opposite sides. One lawyer tells you one thing; then the other swears to precisely the contrary. Don’t think I blame them. Of course they have to do it. But you know what I mean.”
A little more of this hopeless conversation ensued, and then Mrs. Minster rose. “Don’t let me drive you away, Mr. Tracy,” she said, as he too got upon his feet. “But if you will excuse me—I’ve had so much worry lately—and these headaches come on every afternoon now.”
As Reuben walked beside her to open the door, he ventured to say: “It is a very dear wish of mine, Mrs. Minster, to remove all this cause for worry, and to get you back control over your property, and to rid you of these scoundrels, root and branch. For your own sake and that of your daughters, let me beg of you to take no step that will embarrass me in the fight. There is nothing that you could do now to specially help me, except to do nothing at all.”
“If you mean for me not to sue my daughters,” she said, as he opened the door, “you may rest easy. Nothing would tempt me to dothat!The very idea of such a thing is too dreadful. Good-day, sir.”
Reuben this time did not repress the groan, after he had closed the door upon Mrs. Minster. He realized that he had made no more impression on her mind than ordnance practice makes on a sandbank. He did not attempt to conceal his dejection as he returned to where Kate sat, and resumed his chair in front of her. The daughter’s smiling face, however, partially reassured him, “That’s mamma all over,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful how those old race types reappear, even in our day? She is as Dutch as any lady of Haarlem that Franz Hals ever painted. Her mind works sidewise, like a crab. I’msoglad you told her everything!”
“If I could only feel that it had had any result,” said Reuben.
“Oh, but it will have!” the girl insisted confidently. “I’m sure she liked you very much.”
“That reminds me—” the lawyer spoke musingly—“I think I was told once that she didn’t like me; that she stipulated that I was not to be consulted about her business by—by my then partner. I wonder why that was. Do you know?”
“I have an idea,” said Kate. Then she stopped, and a delicate shadowy flush passed over her face. “But it was nothing,” she added, hastily, after a long pause. She could not bring herself to mention that year-old foolish gossip about the Lawton girl.
Reuben did not press for an answer, but began telling her about the work he and Fairchild had inaugurated that morning. “We are not going to wait for the committee,” he said. “The place can be in some sort of shape within a week, I hope, and then we are going to open it as a reading-room first of all, where every man of the village who behaves himself can be free to come. There will be tea and coffee at low prices; and if the lockout continues, I’ve got plans for something else—a kind of soup-kitchen. We sha’n’t attempt to put the thing on a business basis at all until the men have got to work again. Then we will leave it to them, as to how they will support it, and what shall be done with the other rooms. By the way, I haven’t seen much lately of the Lawton girl’s project. I’ve heard vaguely that a start had been made, and that it seemed to work well. Are you pleased with it?”
Kate answered in a low voice: “I have never been there but once since we met there last winter. I did what I promised, in the way of assistance, but I did not go again. I too have heard vaguely that it was a success.”
Reuben looked such obvious inquiry that that young lady felt impelled to explain: “The very next day after I went there last with the money and the plan, I heard some very painful things about the girl—about her present life, I mean—from a friend, or rather from one whom I took then to be a friend; and what he said prejudiced me, I suppose—”
A swift intuition helped Reuben to say: “By a friend’ you mean Horace Boyce!”
Kate nodded her head in assent. As for Reuben, he rose abruptly from his seat, motioning to his companion to keep her chair. He thrust his hands into his pockets, and began pacing up and down along the edge of the sofa at her side, frowning at the carpet.
“Miss Kate,” he said at last, in a voice full of strong feeling, “there is no possibility of my telling you what an infernal blackguard that man is.”
“Yes, he has behaved very badly,” she said. “I suppose I am to blame for having listened to him at all. But he had seen me there at her place, through the glass door, and he seemed so anxious to keep me from being imposed upon, and possibly compromised, that—”
“My dear young lady,” broke in Reuben, “you have no earthly idea of the cruelty and meanness of what he did by saying that to you. I can’t—or yes, why shouldn’t I? The fact is that that poor girl—and when she was at my school she was as honest and good and clever a child as I ever saw in my life—owed her whole misery and wretchedness to Horace Boyce. I never dreamed of it, either at the time or later; in fact, until the very day I met you at the milliner’s shop. Somehow I mentioned that he was my partner, and then she told me. And then, knowing that, I had to sit still all summer and see him coming here every day, on intimate terms with you and your sister and mother.” Reuben stopped himself with the timely recollection that this was an unauthorized emotion, and added hurriedly: “But I never could have imagined such baseness, to deliberately slander her to you!”
Kate did not at once reply, and when she did speak it was to turn the talk away from Horace Boyce. “I will go and see her to-morrow,” she said.
“I am very glad to hear you say that,” was Reuben’s comment. “It is like you to say it,” he went on, with brightening eyes. “It is a benediction to be the friend of a young woman like you, who has no impulses that are not generous, and whose only notion of power is to help others.”
“I shall not like you if you begin to flatter,” she replied, with mock austerity, and an answering light in her eyes. “I am really a very perverse and wrong-headed girl, distinguished only for having never done any good at all. And anybody who says otherwise is not a friend, but a flatterer, and I am weary of false tongues.”
Miss Ethel came in while Reuben was still turning over in his mind the unexpressed meanings of these words, and with her entrance the talk became general once more.
The lawyer described to the two sisters the legal steps he had taken, and their respective significance, and then spoke of his intention to make a criminal complaint as soon as some additional proof, now being sought, should come to hand.
Ethel clapped her hands. “And Horace Boyce will go to prison, then?” she asked, eagerly.
“There is a strong case against him,” answered Reuben.
The graveness of his tone affected the girl’s spirits, and led her to say in an altered voice: “I don’t want to be unkind, and I daresay I shall be silly enough to cry in private if the thing really happens; but when I think of the trouble and wickedness he has been responsible for, and of the far more terrible mischief he might have wrought in this family if I—that is, if we had not come to you as we did, I simplyhatehim.”
“Don’t let us talk about him any more, puss,” said Kate, soberly, rising as she spoke.