James Wheaton was thirty-five years old, and was reckoned among the solid young business men of Clarkson. He had succeeded far beyond his expectations and was fairly content with the round of the ladder that he had reached. He never talked about himself and as he had no intimate friends it had never been necessary for him to give confidences. His father had been a harness-maker in a little Ohio town; he and his older brother were expected to follow the same business; but the brother grew restless under the threat of enforced apprenticeship and prevailed on James to run away with him. They became tramps and enjoyed themselves roaming through the country, until finally they were caught stealing in a little Illinois village and both were arrested.
James was discharged through the generosity of his brother in taking all the blame on himself; the older boy was sent to a reformatory alone. James then went to Chicago, where he sold papers and blacked boots for a year until he found employment as a train boy, with a company operating on various lines running out of Chicago. This gave him a wide acquaintance with western towns, and incidentally with railroads andrailroad men. He grew tired of the road, and obtained at Clarkson a position in the office of Timothy Margrave, the general manager of the Transcontinental, which, he had heard, was a great primary school for ambitious boys.
It was thus that his residence in Clarkson was established. He attended night school, was assiduous in his duties, and attained in due course the dignity of a desk at which he took the cards of Margrave's callers, indexed the letter books and copied figures under the direction of the chief clerk. After a year, hearing that one of the Clarkson National Bank's messengers was about to resign, he applied for this place. Margrave recommended him; the local manager of the news agency vouched for his integrity, and in due course he wended the streets of Clarkson with a long bill-book, the outward and visible sign of his position as messenger. He was steadily promoted in the bank and felt his past receding farther and farther behind him.
When, at an important hour of his life, Wheaton was promoted to be paying teller, he was in the receiving teller's cage. He had known that the more desirable position was vacant and had heard his fellow clerks speculating as to the possibility of a promotion from among their number. Thompson, the cashier, had a nephew in the bank; and among the clerks he was thought to have the best chance. They all knew that the directors were in session, and several whose tasks for the day were finished, lingered later than was their wont to see what would happen. Wheaton kept quietly at his work; but he had an eye on the door of the directors' room, and an ear that insensibly turnedtoward the annunciator by which messengers were called to the board room. It rang at last, and Wheaton wiped his pen with a little more than his usual care as he waited for the result of the summons. This was on his twenty-fifth birthday.
"Mr. Wheaton!" The other clerks looked at one another. The question that had been uppermost with all of them for a week past was answered. Thompson's nephew slammed his book shut and carried it into the vault. Wheaton put aside the balance sheet over which he had been lingering and went into the directors' room. There had been no note of joy among his associates. He knew that he was not popular with them; he was not, in their sense, a good fellow. When they rushed off after hours to the ball games or horse races, he never joined them. When their books did not balance he never volunteered to help them. As for himself, he always balanced, and did not need their help; and they hated him for it. This was his hour of triumph, but he went to his victory without the cheer of his comrades.
He heard Mr. Porter's question as to whether he felt qualified to accept the promotion; and he sat patiently under the inquiries of the others as to his fitness. It required no great powers of intuition to know that these old men had already appointed him; that if they had not known to their own satisfaction that he was the best available man, they would not be taking advice from him in the matter.
"Sanders leaves on Monday to take another position, and we will put you in his cage to give you a trial," the president said, finally. Wheaton expressed hisgratitude for this mark of confidence. He was not troubled by the suggestion of a trial. Porter and Thompson, the cashier, always spoke of his promotions as "trials." He had never failed thus far and his self-confidence was not disturbed by the care these men always took to tie strings to everything they did with a view to easy withdrawal, if the results were not satisfactory. The position had been filled and there was nothing more to be said. Thompson, however, always liked to have a last word.
"Wheaton, your family live here, don't they?"
"No," said Wheaton, smiling his difficult smile, "I haven't any family. My parents are dead. I came here from Ohio, and board over on the north side."
"Another Ohio man," said Porter, "you can't keep 'em down." They all laughed at Porter's joke and Wheaton bowed himself out under cover of it.
Later, when need arose for creating the position of assistant cashier, it was natural that the new desk should be assigned to Wheaton. He was faithful and competent; neither Porter nor Thompson had a son to install in the bank; and, as they said to each other and to their fellow directors, Wheaton had two distinguishing qualifications,—he did his work and he kept his mouth shut.
In the course of time Thompson's health broke down and the doctors ordered him away to New Mexico, and again there seemed nothing to do but to promote Wheaton. Thompson wished to sell his stock and resign, but Porter would not have it so; but when, after two years, it was clear that the cashier would never again be fit for continuous service in the bank, Wheaton wasduly elected cashier and Thompson was made vice-president.
Wheaton had now been in Clarkson fifteen years, and he was well aware that other young men, with influential connections, had not done nearly so well as he. He treasured no illusions as to his abilities; he did not think he had a genius for business; but he had demonstrated to his own satisfaction that such qualities as he possessed,—industry, sobriety and obedience,—brought results, and with these results he was well satisfied. He hoped some day to be rich, but he was content to make haste slowly. He never speculated. He read in the newspapers every day of men holding responsible positions who embezzled and absconded, but there was never any question in his mind as between honesty and knavery. It irritated him when these occurrences were commented on facetiously before him; he did not relish jokes which carried an implication that he too might belong to the dubious cashier class; and inquiries as to whether he would spend his vacation in Canada or, if it were winter, in Guatemala, were not received in good part, for he had much personal dignity and little humor. He was counted among the older men of the town rather than among men of his own age, and he found himself much more at ease among his seniors. The young men appreciated his good qualities and respected him; but he felt that he was not one of them; socially, he was voted very slow, and there was an impression abroad that he was stingy. Certainly he did not spend his money frivolously, and he never had done so. Many fathers held him up as an example to their sons, and this tended further to the creation of a feeling amonghis contemporaries that he was lacking in good fellowship.
Raridan knew the personal history of most of his fellow townsmen, and he was fond of characterizing those whom he particularly liked or disliked, for the benefit of his friends. He took it upon himself to sketch Wheaton for John Saxton's benefit in this fashion.
"Jim Wheaton's one of those men who never make mistakes," said Raridan, with the scorn of a man whose own mistakes do not worry him. "He went into that bank as a boy, and was first a model messenger, and then a model clerk; and when they had to have a cashier there was the model assistant, who had been a model everything else, so they put him in. There wasn't anybody else for the job; and I guess he's a good man for it, too. A bank cashier doesn't dare to make mistakes; and as Wheaton is not of that warm, emotional nature that would lead him to lend money without getting something substantial to hold before the borrower got away, he's the model cashier. You've heard of those bank cashiers who can refuse a loan to a man and send him out of the bank singing happy chants. Well, Jim isn't that kind. When he turns down a man, the man doesn't go on his way rejoicing. I don't know how much money Wheaton's got. He's made something, of course, and Porter would probably sell him stock up to a certain point. He'll die rich, and nobody, I fancy, will ever be any gladder because he's favored this little old earth with his presence."
As a bank clerk the teller's cage had shut Wheaton off from the world. Young women of social distinctionwho came sometimes to get checks cashed, knew him as a kind of automaton, that looked at both sides of their checks and at themselves, and then passed out coin and paper to them; they saw him nowhere else, and did not bother themselves about him. After his promotion to be assistant cashier, he saw the world closer at hand. He had a desk and could sit down and talk to the men whom he had studied from the cage for so long. The young women, too, approached him no longer with checks to be cashed, but with little books in which they urged him officially and personally to subscribe to charities. Porter, who was naturally a man of generous impulses, knew his own weakness and made the cashier the bank's almoner. He was very sure that Wheaton would be as careful of the bank's money as of his own; he had taken judicial knowledge of the fact that Wheaton's balance on the bank's books had shown a marked and steady growth through all the years of his connection with it.
Wheaton's promotion to the cashiership had come in the spring; and shortly afterward he had changed his way of living in a few particulars. He had lodged for years in a boarding house frequented by clerks; a place where his fellow boarders were, among others, a music teacher, a milliner and the chief operator of the telephone exchange. He had not felt above them; their dancing class and occasional theater party had seemed fine to him. Porter now suggested that Wheaton should be a member of the Clarkson Club, and Wheaton assented, on the president's representation that "it would be a good thing for the bank." Vacant apartments were offered at this time in The Bachelors', as it was called, and he availed himself of the opportunity tochange his place of residence. He had considered the matter of taking a room at the club, but this, after reflection, he rejected as unwise. The club was a new institution in the town, and he was aware that there were conservative people in Clarkson who looked on it as a den of iniquity,—with what justification he did not know from personal experience, but he had heard it referred to in this way at the boarding house table. He knew Raridan and the others at The Bachelors', but his acquaintance with them was of a perfunctory business character. When he moved to The Bachelors', Raridan, who was always punctilious in social matters, formally called on him in his room, as did also Captain Wheelock, the army officer then stationed in Clarkson on recruiting service. The others in the house welcomed him less formally as they chanced to meet him in the hall or on the stairway; they were busy men who worked long hours and did not bother themselves about the amenities and graces of life.
His change to The Bachelors' was of importance to Wheaton in many ways. He saw here, in the intimacies of their common table, men of a higher social standing than he had known before. Their way of chaffing one another seemed to him very bright; they mocked at the gods and were not destroyed. Raridan was a new species and spoke a strange tongue. Raridan and Wheelock appeared at the table in dinner-coats, and after a few weeks Wheaton followed their example. Raridan, he knew, dressed whether he went out or not, and he established his own habit in this particular with as little delay as possible. The table then balanced, the smelter manager, the secretary of the terra cotta manufacturingcompany, and the traveling passenger agent of the Transcontinental Railroad appearing in the habiliments which they wore at their respective places of business, and Raridan, Wheaton and Wheelock in black and white.
The humor of this division was not lost on the traveling passenger agent, who chaffed the "glad rag" faction, as he called it, until Raridan took up arms for his own side of the table.
"It may be true, sir, what you say about a division here between the working and non-working classes; but wit and beauty have from most ancient times bedecked themselves in robes of purity. A man like yourself, whose business is to persuade people to ride on the worst railroad on earth, should properly array himself in sackcloth and ashes, and not in purple and fine linen, which belong to those who severally give their thoughts to the,—er—promotion of peace"—indicating Wheelock—"sound finances," indicating Wheaton, "and—er—in my own case—"
"Yes, do tell us," said the railroad man, ironically.
"To faith and good works," said Warrick imperturbably.
"And mostly works,—I don't think!" declared Wheelock.
The relations between Porter and Wheaton were strictly of a business character. This was not by intention on Porter's part. He assumed that at some time he or Thompson had known all about Wheaton's antecedents; and after so many years of satisfactory service, during the greater part of which the bank had been protected against Wheaton, as against all the rest of theemployees, by a bonding company, he accepted the cashier without any question. Before Evelyn's return he had one day expressed to Wheaton his satisfaction that he would soon have a home again, and Wheaton remarked with civil sympathy that Miss Porter must now be "quite a young lady."
"Oh, yes; you must come up to the house when we get going again," Porter answered.
Wheaton had seen the inside of few houses in Clarkson. He had a recollection of having been sent to Porter's several times, while he was still an errand boy in the bank, to fetch Porter's bag on occasions when the president had been called away unexpectedly. He remembered Evelyn Porter as she used to come as a child and sit in the carriage outside the bank to wait for her father; the Porters stood to him then, and now, for wealth and power.
Raridan had a contempt for Wheaton's intellectual deficiencies; and praise of Wheaton's steadiness and success vexed him as having some sting for himself; but his own amiable impulses got the better of his prejudices, and he showed Wheaton many kindnesses. When the others at The Bachelors' nagged Wheaton, it was Raridan who threw himself into the controversy to take Wheaton's part. He took him to call at some of the houses he knew best, and though this was a matter of propinquity he knew nevertheless that he preferred Wheaton to the others in the house. Wheaton was not noisy nor pretentious and the others were sometimes both.
Wheaton soon found it easy to do things that he had never thought of doing before. He became knownto the florist and the haberdasher; there was a little Hambletonian at a certain liveryman's which Warry Raridan drove a good deal, and he had learned from Warry how pleasant it was to drive out to the new country club in a runabout instead of using the street car, which left a margin of plebeian walking at the end of the line. He had never smoked, but he now made it a point to carry cigarettes with him. Raridan and many other young men of his acquaintance always had them; he fancied that the smoking of a cigarette gave a touch of elegance to a gentleman. Captain Wheelock smoked cigarettes which bore his own monogram, and as he said that these did not cost any more than others of the same brand, Wheaton allowed the captain to order some for him. But while he acquired the superficial graces, he did not lose his instinctive thrift; he had never attempted to plunge, even on what his associates at The Bachelors' called "sure things"; and he was equally incapable of personal extravagances. If he bought flowers he sent them where they would tell in his favor. If he had five dollars to give to theGazette'sIce Fund for the poor, he considered that when the newspaper printed his name in its list of acknowledgments, between Timothy Margrave, who gave fifty dollars, and William Porter, who gave twenty-five, he had received an adequate return on his investment.
A few days after Evelyn Porter came home, Wheaton followed Raridan to his room one evening after dinner. Raridan had set The Bachelors' an example of white flannels for the warm weather, and Wheaton also had abolished his evening clothes. Raridan's rooms had not yet lost their novelty for him. The pictures, thestatuettes, the books, the broad couch with its heap of varicolored pillows, the table with its candelabra, by which Raridan always read certain of the poets,—these still had their mystery for Wheaton.
"Going out to-night?" he asked with a show of indifference.
"Hadn't thought of it," answered Raridan, who was cutting the pages of a magazine. "Kick the cat off the couch there, won't you?—it's that blessed Chinaman's beast. Don't know what a Mongolian is doing with a cat,—Egyptian bird, isn't it?"
"Don't let me interrupt if you're reading," said Wheaton. "But I thought some of dropping in at Mr. Porter's. Miss Porter's home now, I believe."
"That's a good idea," said Raridan, who saw what was wanted. He threw his magazine at the cat and got up and yawned. "Suppose we do go?"
The call had been successfully managed. Miss Porter was very pretty, and not so young as Wheaton expected to find her. Raridan left him talking to her and went across to the library, where Mr. Porter was reading his evening paper. Raridan had a way of wandering about in other people's houses, which Wheaton envied him. Miss Porter seemed to take his call as a matter of course, and when her father came out presently and greeted him casually as if he were a familiar of the house he felt relieved and gratified.
Raridan stayed in town all summer, and he and Saxton saw a good deal of each other. They drove often to the country club together, and Saxton became, as people said, another of Warry's enthusiasms. Saxton was no idler, and he was conscientiously striving to bring order out of chaos in the interests which had been confided to him. He was annoyed, at first, when Raridan in his unlimited leisure, began to invade his office; but as the confidence and ease of real friendship grew between them he did not scruple to send him away, or to throw him a newspaper and bid him read and keep still. Raridan was the plaything of many moods; Saxton was equable and steady. They sought each other with the old perversity of antipodal natures.
Saxton came in unexpectedly on Raridan at The Bachelors' one evening in September. The day had been hot with the final fling of summer, but a thunder shower had cooled the atmosphere, and there stole in pleasantly the drip, drip, of the rain which was now abating. Heat lightning glowed in the west with the luminousness so marked in that region.
"It's an infernal, hideous shame," called Raridan fiercely through the dark, recognizing Saxton's step.
"Thanks! I'm glad I came," said Saxton, cheerfully.
"I'd like to be a cannibal for a few hours," growled Raridan, kicking a chair toward Saxton without rising from the couch where he lay sprawled. Saxton went about quietly, lighting the gas, picking up the books and newspapers which Raridan had evidently cast from him in his rage, and making a seat for himself by the window.
"I'm not an expert in lunacy, but I'll hear your trouble. Go ahead."
Raridan got up suddenly, his glasses swinging wildly from their cord.
"Put out that light," he commanded savagely; and Saxton did as he was bidden.
"Do you know what Evelyn Porter's going to do?" demanded Raridan.
"I certainly do not. You seem to want to leave me in the dark; and that's no joke."
"She's going to be queen of their infernal Knights of Midas ball, that's what."
"Your language is spirited, I must say. I think we may classify that as important if true."
"It's an outrage; an infernal damned shame!" Raridan went on.
"Language unbecoming an officer and a gentleman—"
"There's a fine girl, as charming as any girl dare be. She has a father who doesn't appreciate her;—a good fellow and all that and he wouldn't hurt her for anything on earth; but he hasn't got any sensibility; that's the trouble with scores of American fathers. These Western ones are worse than any others. They breaktheir sons in, whenever they can, to the same collars they've worn themselves. Their daughters they usually don't understand at all! They intimidate their wives so that the poor things don't dare call their souls their own; but the women are the saving remnant out here. And when a particularly fine one turns up she ought to be protected from the curse of our infernal commercialism."
He threw himself into a chair and lighted a cigarette.
Saxton laughed silently.
"Isn't this a new responsibility you've taken on? I don't believe these things are as bad as you make them out to be. The commercial curse is one of the things you can't dodge these days. It's just as bad in Boston as it is here; and you find it wherever you find live people who want bread to eat and cake if they can get it."
"But to visit the curse on a girl,—a fine girl,—"
"A pretty girl,—" Saxton suggested.
"A really charming girl," continued Warrick, with unabated earnestness, "is a rotten shame."
"I'm afraid you're taking it too seriously," said Saxton. "If Miss Porter were not a very sensible young woman it would be different. You don't think for a moment that she would have her head turned—"
"No, sir; not a bit of it; but it's the principle of the thing that I'm kicking about. This is one of the things that I detest in these Western towns. It's the inability to escape from their infernal business. On the face of it their Midas ball is a social event, but at the bottom, it's merely a business venture. All the business men havegot to go in for it, but it doesn't stop there; they must drag their families in. Evelyn Porter has got to mix up with the daughters of the plumbers and the candlestick makers in order that the god of commerce may be satisfied."
"You don't quite grasp the situation," said Saxton. "If you had to get out among these men who have hard work to do every day you'd have a different feeling about such things. They've got to make the town go, and this carnival is one of the ways in which they can stir things up commercially, and at the same time give pleasure to a whole lot of people."
"Now look here, you know as well as I do that you can't mix up all sorts and conditions of men, and particularly women, in this way, without making a mess of it. A man may introduce the green grocer at the corner, and all that kind of ruck, to his wife and daughter, but what's the good of it?"
"Well, what's the good of a democracy anyhow?" demanded Saxton. "I used to have those ideas, too, when I was younger, but I thought it all over when I was herding cattle up in Wyoming and I renounced such notions for all time, even before I went broke. I found when I got back East that I carried my new convictions with me, and the sight of civilized people and good food did not change me."
"Well, the girl oughtn't to be sacrificed anyhow," said Warrick, spitefully.
Saxton bit his pipe hard and grinned.
"Look here, Raridan, I'm afraid it's the girl and not the philosophy of the thing that's worrying you.Why didn't you tell me it was the girl, and not the social fabric generally, that you want to defend?"
Both Saxton and Raridan were a good deal at the Porters'. He knew that Raridan had been a playmate of Evelyn's in their youth, when the elder Porters and Raridans had been friends and neighbors. There existed between them the lighthearted camaraderie that young people carry from youth to maturity, and it had touched Saxton with envy. As a man having no fixed duties, Raridan sometimes went, in the middle of the hot mornings, to the Porter hilltop, where it was pleasant to sit and talk to a pretty girl and look down on the seething caldron below, when every other man of the community was sweltering at the business of earning his daily bread.
"You oughtn't to get so violent about these things," Saxton went on to say. "You will yourself be one of the ornaments of the show, and you will dance before the throne and be glad of the chance. They have a king, don't they? You might get the job. Who's going to be king, by the way?"
"Wheaton, I fancy; the announcement hasn't been made yet."
"Oh," said Saxton, significantly. "Is this a little jealousy? Are we sorry that we're not to wear the royal robes ourself? Well! well, I begin to understand!"
"I don't like that either, if you want to know. It all gets back to the accursed commercial idea. Wheaton's the cashier in Porter's bank. It's very fitting that the president's daughter and the young and brilliant cashier should be identified together in a public function like this. No doubt Wheaton is fixing it up."
"Well, why don't you fix it up? I have been deluding myself with the idea that you were a person of consequence in this town, yet you admit that in a mere trifling social matter you are outwitted, or about to be, by one of these commercial persons you hate so much, or say you do."
He spoke tauntingly, but Raridan was evidently serious in his complaint, and Saxton turned the talk into other channels. The Chinese servant came in presently with a card for Raridan.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "it's Bishop Delafield." He plunged downstairs and returned immediately with a man whose great figure loomed darkly in the doorway.
Raridan made a light.
"We've been doing the dim, religious act here," he said, after introducing Saxton. "The lightning out there has been fine."
"You feel that you can't trust me in the dark," said the bishop; "or perhaps that I won't appreciate the 'dim religious,' as you call it. Turn down the gas and save my feelings."
Saxton was well acquainted with Warrick's zeal in church matters and was not surprised to find a church dignitary in his friend's rooms. He had never met the Bishop of Clarkson before, and he was a little awestruck at the heroic size of this man who had just given him so masculine a grasp of the hand and so keen a scrutiny.
The bishop extended his vast bulk in Raridan's easiest chair, and accepted a cigar from the box which Warry passed to him.
"You've come just in time to save us from fiercecontentions," said Raridan, all amiability once more, while the bishop lighted his cigar. He was very bald, and his head shone so radiantly that Saxton felt that he could still see it in the dark after Warrick had turned down the lights. There was an atmosphere about the man of great physical strength, and his deep-set eyes under their shaggy brows were quick and penetrating. Here was a man famous in his church for the energy and sacrifice which he had brought to the work of a missionary in one of the great Western dioceses. He had been bereft, in his young manhood, of his wife and children, and had thereafter offered himself for the roughest work of his church. He was sixty years old and for twenty years had been a bishop, first in a vast region of the farther Northwest, where the diocesan limits were hardly known, and where he had traveled ponyback and muleback until called to be the Bishop of Clarkson. He was famous as a preacher, and when he appeared from time to time in the pulpits of Eastern churches, he swayed men mightily by the vigor and simplicity of his eloquence. He had, in his younger days, been reckoned a scholar, but the study of humanity at close hand had superseded long ago his interest in books and learning. He had a deep, melodious voice and there was charm and magnetism in him, as many people of many sorts and conditions knew.
"What's the subject, gentlemen?" he asked, smoking contentedly. "I'm sure something very serious must be before the house."
"Mr. Raridan has been abusing the commercialism of his neighbors," said Saxton.
"Saxton's a new-comer, Bishop, and doesn'tunderstand the situation here as you and I do. You know that I'm the only native that dares to hold honest opinions. The rest all follow the crowd."
"Reformers always have a hard time of it," said the bishop. "If you're going to make over your fellowmen, you'll have to get hardened to their indifference. But what's the matter with things to-night; and what are you gentlemen doing in town, anyway? Aren't there places to go where it's cool and where there are pretty girls to enchant you?"
Raridan attacked the bishop about some question of ritual that was agitating the English Church. It was worse than Greek to Saxton, but Raridan seemed fully informed about it, and turned up the lights to read a paragraph from an English church paper which was, he protested, rankly heretical. The bishop smoked his cigar calmly until Raridan had finished.
"They tell me," he said, when Raridan had concluded by flinging the whole matter upon his clerical caller with an air of arraigning the entire episcopate, "that you're a pretty fair lawyer, Warry, only you won't work. And I hear occasionally that you're about to embrace the ministry. Now, just think what a time I'd have with you on my hands! You couldn't get the water hot enough for me. Isn't he ungracious"—turning to Saxton—"when I came here for rest and recreation, to put me on trial for my life? You ought to know, young man, that a bishop can be tried only by his peers."
Raridan threw down his paper, and rang for the Chinaman.
"When I embrace the ministry under you, Bishop, you may be sure that I'll be humble enough to be good."
The Chinaman brought a variety of liquids, from which they helped themselves.
"Don't be afraid of the Scotch, Saxton," said Raridan, "the bishop has seen the bottle before."
The bishop, who was pouring seltzer on his lemon juice, smiled tolerantly at Raridan's chatter, with whose temper and quality he had long been familiar, and addressed himself to Saxton. He liked young men, and had an agreeable way of drawing them out and making them talk about themselves. When it was disclosed that Saxton had been in the cattle business, the bishop showed an intimate knowledge of the range and its ways.
"You see, the bishop's ridden over most of the cattle country in his day," explained Raridan.
"And evidently not all in Pullman cars," said Saxton.
"I'm considered a heavy load for a cow pony," said the bishop, smiling down at his great bulk, "so they used sometimes to find a mule for me."
"How are the Porters?" he asked presently of Raridan.
"Very well, and staying on in the heat with the usual Clarkson fortitude."
"Porter's one of the men that never rest," said the bishop. "I've known him ever since I've known the West, and he's taken few vacations in that time."
"Well, he's showing signs of wear," said Raridan. "He's one of the men who begin with a small business where they do all the work themselves, and when the business outgrows them, they never realize that they need help, or that they can have any. Before they made Wheaton cashier, Porter carried the whole bank in hishead. He's improving a little, and has a stenographer now; but he's nervous and anxious all the while and terribly fussy over all he does."
"Wheaton ought to be a great help to him," said the bishop. "He seems a steady fellow, hard working and industrious."
"Oh, he's all those things," Raridan answered carelessly. "He'll never steal anybody's money."
The bishop talked directly to Raridan about some work which it seemed the young man had done for him, and rose to go. He had been in town only a few hours, after a business journey to New York, and on reaching his rooms had found a summons calling him to a neighboring jurisdiction, to perform episcopal functions for a brother bishop who was ill. Saxton and Warrick went down to the car with him, carrying the battered suit cases which contained his episcopal robes and personal effects. These cases showed rough usage; they had been to Canterbury and had found lodging many nights in the sod houses of the plains.
"How do you like him?" asked Raridan, as the bishop climbed into a street car headed toward the station.
"He looks like the real thing," said Saxton. "He has a voice and a beard like a prophet."
"He's a fine character,—one of the people that understand things without being told. A few men and women in the world have that kind of instinct. They're put here, I guess, to help those who don't understand themselves."
There was a tradition that no one had ever been black-balled in the Knights of Midas, so when Timothy Margrave got Wheaton's signature to an application for membership the cashier was beset by no fear of rejection. The citizens of Clarkson were indebted to Margrave for many schemes for booming their town. He lectured his fellow business men constantly about their lack of enterprise.
"Look at Kansas City," he would say at the club, bending forward ponderously on his fat knees, "they ain't got half the terminal facilities that we have, and there ain't any better country around 'em, but they're bigger than we are and ahead of us because they've got more hustle than we have; and hustle's what makes a town,—look at Chicago! But we've got a lot of salt mackerel business men here, so pickled in their brine of conservatism that they won't do anything. There's Billy Porter; when we want to raise money to help boom the town, I'm always dead sure that Billy will cough up, but you've got to show 'im;—tell 'im all about it, and he likes to play with you and guy you and rub it in before he puts his name down. Now he may be a safe banker and all that, but I say that there'ssuch a thing as pushing conservatism too damned far. We're going to be a long time getting over the panic and we've got to give a strong pull and all pull together if we get in the procession." His voice rose as he proceeded. "Look at little Sioux City! busted wide open and knocked over the ropes, but here they come waltzing up again, as full of sass as a fox terrier with a flea on his tail. Talk about grit, the time a man wants to show that article's when he's busted. Any fool can be cheerful on a bull market."
Then he would settle himself back with an air of complacency, as if he had done all that he could do to arrest decay in the town; if his fellow citizens failed to rouse themselves it was not his fault. Margrave held no office in the Knights of Midas, but this was because he had learned by political experience that it was much simpler to lurk in the background and manipulate the men he placed in power. It was on this high principle that he built up the order of the Knights of Midas and directed its course from the office of the general manager of the Transcontinental. There was nothing incongruous to him in the annual ball, which was the only public social manifestation of the organization. It was he who directed that twenty members be chosen from the membership list each year, to conduct the purely social functions of the ball, and that these be taken in alphabetical order. Thus the Adamses and the Bakers and the Cummingses, who belonged in different constellations, found themselves in the same orbit. If they were unacquainted or were enemies of long standing, this did not trouble Margrave when the factwas brought to his notice. It was time, he said, that the people of Clarkson got together.
"We may as well get some work out of Jim Wheaton," he remarked to the grand chief of the Knights of Midas. "He's pretty solemn, but Jim was solemn when he was a kid and worked for me. Porter and Thompson have always been too slow for this earth and if we pull Wheaton in, it may wake up the old chaps so they'll do something besides sit on the fence and watch the rest of us hustle."
"See here," said Norton, the grand chief, "what's the matter with shoving him in for the king of the carnival? We've got to make a strong push this year to give tone to the show socially; that's the only way we can keep up the town interest. Having these jays come in from the country won't do any good unless we can hold these eminently respectable people who think they're Clarkson society."
"You're dead right on that point," said Margrave; "that's a big card with the jays,—they think they come to town and get right in the push and are tickled to pay ten dollars a ticket for a taste of high life. I tell you what we'll do, we'll get Porter to let his daughter appear as queen of the carnival, and if that ain't a big enough jolly, we can make Wheaton king. That's what I'd call giving the Clarkson National a run for its money. If Porter don't double his subscription on the strength of that—"
He looked at Norton and they both laughed.
A few days later Margrave called on Wheaton at the bank. He was a little proud of having discoveredWheaton. Since his quondam messenger had become a bank cashier he had begun to take notice of him.
"I guess we're going to need you to take a star part in the carnival this year," he said, leading him into the empty directors' room and looking carefully about to make sure that they were alone. "Yon see, we've been casting about to find a good representative from among the younger business men to take the part of king in the carnival. The board of control are unanimous that you're the man."
"But I've just gone into the Knights,—there are plenty of older members."
"That's the point! we want new men and you're just the fellow we're after."
He had been holding his hat in his hand and wiping his brow with his handkerchief, and he now backed toward the door, saying, without leaving Wheaton time for further quibble:
"Keep it mum. You understand about that; we always want to jar the public. We'll put you on to the curves all right."
"I'm sure I'm very much surprised," said Wheaton, "but—"
"Oh, it's all fixed," said Margrave, moving off. "You're the only one and we never let anybody decline. It would knock all the compliment out of it, if we let two or three fellows refuse before we caught one that would accept."
Wheaton went back to his desk, surprised and flattered. Margrave's good will was worth having. Wheaton had never outgrown the impression he formed of Margrave when, as a boy, he had indexed letterbooks and received callers in the general manager's outer office. He knew that Mr. Porter was more respectable and stood higher in the community, but there was something that took hold of even Wheaton's dull imagination in the bolder achievements of Timothy Margrave, who rolled over the country in a private car, dictating, when need arose, to the legislatures of a chain of states, and looming large in the press's discussions of those combinations and contests of transportation companies which marked the last years of the nineteenth century. Wheaton had acquired a banker's habitual distrust of men who offer favors; but as this came on the personal invitation of one who had no dealings with his bank he could see no harm in accepting.
Margrave winked at him a few days later when they met at the club.
"The boys are all glad you're going to lead the show, Jim," said the general manager; and Wheaton experienced a feeling of having fallen into the larger currents of Clarkson life. Margrave was the man who, more than any other, made things happen in Clarkson.
Evelyn acted on her father's suggestion that she ask some friends to visit her, and she summoned two of her classmates to come out for the carnival. She told Raridan of their coming one evening when they were alone, and he began propounding inquiries about them with the zealous interest, half mocking and half earnest, which he always manifested in girls that crossed his horizon.
"And Miss Warren—is she the one from Dedham Crossing, Connecticut? Yes, I suppose they will want to go right out to see the Indians. I'll see if the War Department won't lend us a few from a reservation to show off with. It's too bad for our guests to be disappointed. And Miss Marshall—she's from Virginia? It will really be rather amusing to bring the types together on our rude frontier."
"But you're not to play tricks with these friends of mine, Warrick Raridan. You are to be very nice to them, but you are not to make too much of an impression—unless—!"
"I'm afraid Miss Warren's a trifle too serious for human nature's daily food," he said, complainingly.
"Yes? I remember that she was strong in entomology.She surely knows a moth from a bumblebee when she sees it."
"Tut! tut! One shouldn't be spiteful. Miss Warren is a nice girl. She knows where the pussy willows purr first in the harsh Connecticut spring. She is strong on golden rod and ah-tum leaves; she reads 'Sesame and Lilies' once a week, and Channing's 'Symphony' hangs in her room in blue and gold. She's very sweet with her Sunday School class. She shall be saluted with the Chautauqua salute—thus!" He flourished his handkerchief at a picture on the wall.
"How brutal! Deliver me from the cynical man! By the way, Warry, I saw Minnie Metchen in New York this spring, and she asked me all the questions about you she dared. That really wasn't good of you. She hadn't been an army girl long—her father was a new paymaster, or something like that; she wasn't fair game. You were her first, and she thought you meant it all,—the poems and the flowers and all that kind of thing. She thought you were very good, too. You remember, I hope, that you dragged her across town to that colored mission where you were lay-reading at the time. Now, you mustn't do that any more."
Raridan buried his face in his hands and groaned.
"My sins are more than I can bear. But I'm really disappointed in you. It isn't good form in this town to remember from one winter to another what my enthusiasms have been. But, Evelyn—"
His manner changed suddenly and he rose and walked the floor. He was so full of mockery, and his fun took so many unexpected turns, that Evelyn, who had known him from his wilful, spoiled childhood, was never sureof his moods. He seemed very serious as he stood before her with his arms folded and looked at her. His voice broke a little as he said:
"Evelyn, I don't want you to remember this kind of thing of me. Nobody takes me seriously; I'm getting tired of it. I'm all kinds of a failure. I ought to be doing things, like all the other men here. Maybe it's too late—"
"No, it's never too late to do what we want to do, Warry," she said very kindly. "But I don't know that you're such a failure." She was still on guard for some flash of the joke that he was always playing.
"But it's a question with me whether I haven't lost my chance," he persisted. He sat down, dejectedly. Then he laughed.
"Do you know why I'm like the Juniata River?" he demanded.
"I'm not good at guessing," she answered, wondering whether he was laying a trap for her.
"Why, Captain Wheelock told somebody that it was because I am very beautiful and very shallow." He did not laugh with her.
"Those things aren't funny to me any more," he declared, scowling.
"But to be called beautiful—"
"No man is beautiful," he returned savagely. "No man wants to be called that. It's my eye-glasses, I suppose." He took them off and played with them. "Maybe they do make me look dudish. I'd wear spectacles if they didn't cut my ears. Or I might go without and come to a sudden end by walking over some lonelyprecipice." He expected her to remonstrate, but she said:
"Well, I'll promise not to tell the new visitors about you;" as if, of course, this was what he had been leading up to.
"I don't care anything about them."
"I'm sorry. I had rather counted on you, as the only person here who has met them,—and an old friend of the family."
He stood up again.
"But I don't want to be your friend—"
"Oh!" She seized and fortified all the strategic positions. "This is certainly surprising in you, Warrick Raridan, after all the years I've known you. I didn't expect to be renounced so early." He stood looking at her quizzically, and too fixedly for her comfort.
"Tragedy doesn't become the Juniata type of beauty. You'd better sit down." He had been pacing the floor, but now threw himself into a chair.
"That chair," she continued, "is a relic of the Inquisition. If you'll move those cushions about a little on the divan you'll be a lot more comfortable."
He mumbled that he didn't want to be comfortable, but obeyed.
"Now, if you'll be good," she went on tranquilly, folding her arms and looking at him benignantly, "I'll tell you a secret."
He had thrust his hands into his pockets and sat watching her sulkily.
"Well?"
"I'm to be queen of the ball, sir, I'm to be queen of the ball."
"I'm sorry I can't congratulate you," he said grimly. "You have no business mixing up with their infernal idiocy. I've been expecting to hear that you'd refused." He grew hot as he went on. "Your father oughtn't to make you do such a thing."
"Warry!" She sat up straight and bent toward him in an attitude of remonstrance; "you really mustn't! Why, I'm amazed at you!"
The enormity of the thing, as Raridan saw it, had grown on him since his talk with Saxton, and he did not relent; but he relaxed his severity for the moment, to assume an aggrieved air.
"Maybe I'm presuming too far on old acquaintance!" he said gloomily.
"I still have that copy of Aldrich you gave me once,—you remember that they