XIIThorns—and a Few Roses
XIIThorns—and a Few Roses
Helen Dunbar was exercising that doubtful economy, walking to save car-fare, when she saw Mae Smith with her eyes fixed upon her in deadly purpose making a bee-line across the street. If there was any one thing more needed to complete her depression it was a meeting with Mae Smith.
She stopped and waited, trying to think what it was Mae Smith resembled when she hurried like that. A penguin! that was it—Mae Smith walked exactly like a penguin. But Helen did not smile at the comparison, instead, she continued to look somberly and critically at the woman who approached. When Helen was low spirited, as now, Mae Smith always rose before her like a spectre. She saw herself at forty another such passé newspaper woman trudging from one indifferent editor to another peddling “space.” And why not? Mae Smith had been young and good-looking once, also a local celebrity in her way when she had signed a column in a daily. But she had grown stale with the grind, and having no special talent or personality had been easily replaced when a new Managing Editor came. Now, though chipper as a sparrow, she was always in need of a small loan.
As Helen stood on the corner, in her tailor-made, which was the last word in simplicity and good lines, the time looked very remote when she, too, would be peddling space in a $15 gown, that had faded in streaks, but Helen had no hallucinations concerningher own ability. She knew that she had no great aptitude for her work and realized that her success was due more often to the fact that she was young, well-dressed, and attractive than to any special talent. This was all very well now, while she got results, but what about the day whenhershoes spread over the soles and turned over at the heels, and she boughtherblouse “off the pile?” When her dollar gloves were shabby and would not button at the wrist? What about the day when she was too dispirited to dress her hair becomingly, but combed it straight up at the back, so that her “scolding locks” hung down upon her coat-collar, and her home-trimmed hat rode carelessly on one ear?
All these things were characteristic of Mae Smith, who personified unsuccessful, anxious middle-age. But there was one thing, she told herself as she returned Mae Smith’s effusive greeting, that never, never, no matter how sordid her lot became, should there emanate from her that indefinable odor of poverty—cooking, cabbage, lack of ventilation, bad air—not if she had to hang her clothing out the window by a string!
“I’ve been over to theChronicleoffice,” Mae Smith chattered. “Left some fashion notes for the Sunday—good stuff—but I don’t know whether he’ll use ’em; that kid that’s holdin’ down McGennigle’s job don’t buy much space. He’s got it in for me anyhow. I beat him on a convention story when he was a cub. I was just goin’ down to your office.”
“Yes? I’m on the way to the doctor’s.”
“You don’t look well, that’s a fact. Sick?”
Helen smiled, faintly. “I do feel miserable. Likeevery one else I got a drenching at the Thanksgiving Game.”
“That’s too bad,” Mae Smith murmured absently. What was a cold compared to the fact that she needed two dollars and a half? “Say, I wonder if I could get a little loan for a few days? You know I bought this suit on the installment plan and I’m two weeks behind on it. The collector was around yesterday and said he’d have to take it back. I can’t go around gettin’ fashion notes in my kimono, and the milkman wouldn’t leave any milk until I paid for the last ticket. I’m up against it and I thought maybe—”
“How much do you want?”
“About two dollars and a half.” The tense look faded instantly from Miss Smith’s face.
Helen did not mention, as she laid that amount in her eager hand, that it was part of the money she had saved to buy a pair of long gloves.
“Thank you”—gaily—“ever so much obliged! I’ve got a corking idea in my head for a Sunday special and just as soon as I write it and get paid—”
“No hurry,” Helen answered with a quizzical smile, and she watched Mae Smith clamber joyously on a street car to ride two blocks and spend the fare that Helen had walked eight blocks to save.
The girl’s spirits were low and her face showed depression when she mounted the broad stone steps of the physician’s city office and residence, but when she came down the look had changed to a kind of frozen fright.
She had not felt like herself for weeks, but she did not dream that it was anything which time and a little medicine would not cure. Now, he had told herthat she must leave the city—stop her work at once.
He advised the South or West—particularly the West—some place where it was high and dry. How lovely—and so simple! Just stop work and start! Why didn’t he say St. Petersburg or the Arctic circle. With no income save what she earned from week to week they were equally impossible.
She had come in time, he had assured her, but she must not delay. Filled with consternation, sick with dread and horror of what she saw before her, Helen walked slowly to her hotel, the shabby place where she had found board and lodging within her means. She loathed it, everything about it—its faded tawdry splendor, the flashy, egotistical theatrical folk who frequented it, the salaried mediocrities who were “permanent” like herself, the pretentious, badly cooked food; but as she climbed the yellowish marble steps she thought despairingly that even this would be beyond her reach some day.
If only Freddie were alive! There was a lump in her throat as she removed her hat and looked at her pale face in the old-fashioned bureau mirror in her room. She might have gone to him in such an emergency as this—she had saved money enough to have managed that. He had been a bad son and an utterly indifferent brother, but surely he would not have turned her out.
Her shoulders drooped and two tears slipped from beneath her lashes as she sat on the edge of her narrow bed with her hands lying passively in her lap. Tears were so weak and futile in a world where only action counted that it was seldom they ever reached her eyes, though they sometimes came close.
Practical as Helen’s life had made her in mostthings, she was still young enough to build high hopes on a romantic improbability. And nothing was more improbable than that “Slim” Naudain, even if he had lived, ever would have returned to make amends.
But she had thrown the glamour of romance about her scapegrace brother from the day he had flung out of the house in ignominy, boasting with the arrogance of inexperience that he would succeed and come back triumphant, to fill them with envy and chagrin. She never had heard from him directly since, but she had kept her childish, unreasoning faith that he would make good his boast and compensate her for her share of the fortune which it had cost to save him from his evil deeds.
She had not realized until Sprudell had told her of his death how strongly she had counted upon him. He was the only one left to her of her own blood, and had been the single means of escape that she could see from the exhausting, uncongenial grind and the long, lonely hours in the shabby hotel when her work was done. If the future had looked dark and hopeless before, how much worse it seemed with illness staring her in the face!
The money Freddie had left her would have gone a long way toward the vacation after she had used the larger part of it to pay off a long-standing obligation which her mother had incurred. The thought of the money reminded her of the letter and photograph. She brushed her wet cheeks with her hand and getting up took the soiled and yellowing envelope from the bureau drawer, wondering again why his murderer had sent it back.
The quick tears came once more as she read the ingenuousscrawl! What centuries ago it seemed since she had written that! She bit her lip hard but in spite of herself she cried—for her lost illusions—for her mother—for that optimistic outlook upon life which never would come back. She had learned much since that smiling “pitcher” was taken—what “mortgages” mean, for instance—that poverty has more depressing depths than the lack of servants and horses, and that “marrying well,” as she interpreted a successful marriage then, is seldom—outside of “fiction and Pittsburgh”—for the girl who earns her own living. Young men who inherit incomes or older men of affairs do not look in shops and offices for their wives. Helen Dunbar had no hallucinations on this score.
Propinquity, clothes, social backing, the necessary adjuncts to “marrying well,” had not been among her advantages for many years. There remained on her horizon only the friendly youths of mediocre attainments that she met in her daily life. She liked them individually and collectively in business, but socially, outside of the office, they made no appeal.
Ill-health was a misfortune she never had considered. It was a new spectre, the worst of all. If one were well one could always do something even without much talent, but helpless, dependent—the dread which filled her as she walked up and down the narrow confines of her room was different from the vague fears of the inexperienced. Hers came from actual knowledge and observation obtained in the wide scope of her newspaper life. The sordid straits which reduce existence to a matter of food and a roof, the ceaseless anxiety destroying every vestige of personal charm, the necessity of asking for loans that bothborrower and lender know to be gifts—grudgingly given—accepted in mingled bitterness and relief—Helen Dunbar had seen it all. The pictures which rose before her were real. In her nervous state she imagined herself some day envying even Mae Smith, who at least had health and irrepressible spirits.
But there must be no more tears, she told herself at last. They were a confession of weakness, they dissipated courage; and the handkerchief which had been a moist ball dried in her hot hand. She said aloud to her flushed reflection in the glass:
“Well,” determinedly, “I’ve never thought myself a coward and I won’t act like one now. There’s been many a thousand before me gone through this experience without whining and I guess I can do the same. Until I’m a sure enough down-and-outer I’ll do the best I can. I must find a cheaper room and buy an oil-stove. Ugh! the first step on the down grade.”
There was a rap upon the door and she lowered the shade a little so that the bell-boy with her evening paper should not see her reddened eyes. Instead of the paper he carried a long pasteboard box.
Flowers? How extraordinary—perhaps Peters; no, not Peters, as she read the name of a side street florist on the box, he was not to be suspected of any such economy as that. Roses—a dozen—a little too full blown to last very long but lovely. T. Victor Sprudell’s card fell out as she took them from the box.
XIII“Off His Range”
XIII“Off His Range”
Bruce stood before the blackboard in the Bartlesville station studying the schedule. A train went west at 11.45. The first train went east at 11.10. He hesitated a moment, then the expression of uncertainty upon his face hardened into decision. He turned quickly and bought a ticket east. If Sprudell had lied he was going to find it out.
As he sat by the car window watching the smug, white farm-houses and big red barns of the middle west fly by, their dull respectability, their commonplace prosperity vaguely depressed him. What if he should be sentenced for life to walk up to his front door between two rows of whitewashed rocks, to live surrounded by a picket fence, and to die behind a pair of neat green blinds? But mostly his thoughts were a jumble of Sprudell, of his insincere cordiality and the unexpected denouement when Abe Cone’s call had forced his hand; of Dill and his mission, and disgust at his own carelessness in failing to record his claims.
They concentrated finally upon the work which lay before him once he had demonstrated the truth or falsity of Sprudell’s assertion that Slim’s family were not to be found. He turned the situation over and over in his mind and always it resolved itself into the same thing, namely, his lack of money. That obstacle confronted him at every turn and yet in spite of it, in spite of the doubts and fears which reason and caution together thrust into his mind, hisdetermination to win, to outwit Sprudell, to make good his boast, grew stronger with every turn of the car wheels.
Ambition was already awake within him; but it needed Sprudell’s sneers to sting his pride, Sprudell’s ingratitude and arrogant assumption of success in whatever it pleased him to undertake, to arouse in Bruce that stubborn, dogged, half-sullen obstinacy which his father had called mulishness but which the farmer’s wife with her surer woman’s intuition had recognized as one of the traits which make for achievement. It is a quality which stands those who have it in good stead when failure stares them in the face.
It did not take Bruce long to discover that in whatever else Sprudell had prevaricated he at least had told the truth when he said that the Naudain family had disappeared. They might never have existed, for all the trace he could find of them in the city of a million.
The old-fashioned residence where “Slim” had lived, with its dingy trimmings, and its marble steps worn in hollows, affected him strangely as he stood across the street where he could see it from roof to basement. It made “Slim” seem more real, more like “folks” and less like a malignant presence. It had been an imposing house in its time but now it was given over to doctors’ offices and studios, while a male hair-dresser in the basement transformed the straight locks of fashionable ladies into a wonderful marcelle.
Bruce went down to make some inquiries and he stared at the proprietor as though he were some strange, hybrid animal when he came forward testing the heat of a curling-iron against his fair cheek.
No, the hair-dresser shook his fluffy, blonde head, he never had heard of a family named Naudain, although he had been four years in the building and knew everyone upstairs. A trust company owned the place now; he was sure of that because the rent collector was just a shade more prompt than the rising sun. Yes, most certainly he would give Bruce the company’s address and it was no trouble at all.
He was a fascinating person to Bruce, who would have liked to prolong the conversation, but the disheveled customer in the chair was growing restless, so he took the address, thanked him, and went out wondering whimsically if through any cataclysm of nature he should turn up a hair-dresser, sweet-scented, redolent of tonique, smelling of pomade, how it would seem to be curling a lady’s hair?
Back in the moderate-priced hotel where he had established himself, he set about interviewing by telephone the Naudains whose names appeared in the directory. It was a nerve-racking task to Bruce, who was unfamiliar with the use of the telephone, and those of the name with whom he succeeded in getting in communication seemed singularly busy folk, indifferent to the amenities and entirely uninterested in his quest. But he persisted until he had exhausted the list.
Since there was no more to do that night, in fact no more to do at all if the trust company failed him, he went to bed: but everything was too strange for him to sleep well.
A sense of the nearness of people made him uneasy, and the room seemed close although there was no steam and the window was wide open. The noises of the street disturbed him; they were poor substitutesfor the plaintive music of the wind among the pines. His bed was far too soft; he believed he could have slept if only he had had his mattress of pine-boughs and his bear-grass pillow. The only advantage that his present quarters had over his cabin was the hot and cold water. It really was convenient, he told himself with a grin, to have a spring in the room.
The street lamp made his room like day and as he lay wide-eyed in the white light listening to the clatter of hoofs over the pavement, he recalled his childish ambition to buy up all the old horses in the world when he was big—he smiled now at the size of the contract—all the horses he could find that were stiff and sore, and half dead on their feet from straining on preposterous loads; the horses that were lashed and cut and cursed because in their wretched old age they could not step out like colts. He meant to turn them into a pasture where the grass was knee-deep and they could lie with their necks outstretched in the sun and rest their tired legs.
He had explained the plan to his mother and he remembered how she had assured him gravely that it was a fine idea indeed. It was from her that he had inherited his passionate fondness for animals. Cruelty to a dumb brute hurt him like a blow.
On the trip out from Ore City an overworked stage horse straining on a sixteen per cent. grade and more had dropped dead in the harness—a victim to the parsimony of a government that has spent millions on useless dams, pumping plants, and reservoirs, but continues to pay cheerfully the salaries of the engineers responsible for the blunders; footing the bills for the junkets of hordes of “foresters,” of “timber-inspectors” and inspectors inspecting the inspectors, andwhat not, yet forcing the parcel post upon some poor mountain mail-contractor without sufficient compensation, haggling over a pittance with the man it is ruining like some Baxter street Jew.
Like many people in the West, Bruce had come to have a feeling for some of the departments of the government, whose activities had come under his observation, that was as strong as a personal enmity.
He put the picture of the stage-horse, staggering and dying on its feet, resolutely from his mind.
“I never will sleep if I get to thinking of that,” he told himself. “It makes me hot all over again.”
From this disquieting subject his thought reverted to his own affairs, to “Slim’s” family and his self-appointed task, to the placer and Sprudell. Nor were these reflections conducive to sleep. More and more he realized how much truth there was in Sprudell’s taunts. Without money how could he fight him in the Courts? There were instances in plenty where prospectors had been driven from that which was rightfully theirs because they were without the means to defend their property.
Squaw Creek was the key to the situation. This was a fact which became more and more plain. However, Sprudell was undoubtedly quite as well aware of this as he was himself and would lose no time in applying for the water right. The situation looked dark indeed to Bruce as he tossed and turned. Then like a lost word or name which one gropes for for hours, days, weeks perhaps, there suddenly jumped before Bruce’s eyes a paragraph from the state mining laws which he had glanced over carelessly in an idle moment. It stood out before him now as though it were in double-leaded type.
“If it isn’t too late! If it isn’t too late!” he breathed excitedly. “Dog-gone, if it isn’t too late!”
With the same movement that he sprang out on the floor he reached for his hat; then he recalled that telegraph operators were sometimes ladies and it would be as well to dress. He made short work of the performance, however, and went downstairs two steps at a time rather than wait for the sleepy bell-boy, who did double duty on the elevator at night. The telegraph office was two squares away, the wondering night-clerk told him, and Bruce, stepping frequently on his shoelaces, went up the street at a gait which was more than half suspicious to the somnambulant officer on the beat.
The trust company’s doors had not been opened many minutes the next morning before Bruce arrived. The clerk who listened to his inquiries was willing enough to give him any information that he had but he had none beyond the fact that the property in question had passed from the possession of a family named Dunbar into the hands of the trust company many years ago, and no person named Naudain had figured in the transfer, or any other transfer so far as he could ascertain from consulting various deeds and documents in the vault.
It was puzzling enough to Bruce, who was sure that he had read the number and the street correctly and had remembered it, but the clerk was waiting politely for him to go, so he thanked him and went out.
As Bruce stood in the wide stone archway of the building watching the stream of passers-by hastening to their offices and shops, some faint glimmerings of the magnitude of the task he had set himself in raisingmoney among strangers to defend the placer ground if need be and install the hydro-electric plant for working it, came to him. He had little, if any, idea how to begin or where, and he had a feeling as he studied the self-centred faces of the hurrying throng that if he should fall on his knees before anyone among them and beg for a hearing they would merely walk around him and go on.
It occurred to Bruce that the clerk inside was an uncommonly good fellow, and friendly; he believed he would ask his advice. He might make some useful suggestions. Bruce acted at once upon the idea and again the clerk came forward cheerfully. Going to the point at once, Bruce demanded:
“How would a stranger go about raising money here for a mining proposition?”
A quizzical expression came into the clerk’s eyes and a faint smile played about his mouth. He looked Bruce over with some personal interest before he answered.
“If I was the stranger,” he said dryly, “I’d get a piece of lead-pipe and stand in an area-way about 11.30 one of these dark nights. That’s the only way I know to raise money for mining purposes in this town.”
Bruce stepped back abruptly and his dark face reddened.
“Sorry I bothered you,” he eyed the clerk steadily, “but I made a mistake in the way I sized you up.”
It was the clerk’s turn to flush, but because he really was a good fellow and there was that in Bruce’s unusual appearance that he liked, he called him back when he would have gone.
“I apologize,” he said frankly, “I hadn’t anybusiness to get funny when you asked me a civil question, but the fact is the town’s been worked to death with mining schemes. Nearly everyone’s been bitten to the point of hydrophobia and I doubt if you can raise a dollar without friends.”
“I wouldn’t say I had much show if that’s the case,” Bruce answered, “for I’m a long way off my range.”
In his well-worn Stetson, with his dark skin tanned by sun and wind and snow to a shade that was only a little lighter than an Indian’s; using, when he talked, the wide, careless gestures that bespeak the far West, Bruce was so obviously of the country beyond the Mississippi that the clerk could not repress a smile.
“I’ve never promoted anything more important than a theatre party or a motor trip,” the clerk vouchsafed, “but I should think some of the brokers who handle mining stocks would be the people to see. There’s a good firm two doors above. I can give you the names of a few people who sometimes take ‘flyers’ on the side but even they don’t go into anything that isn’t pretty strongly endorsed by someone they know. There’s always the chance though,” he continued, looking Bruce over speculatively, “that someone may take a fancy to you personally. I’ve noticed that personality sometimes wins where facts and figures couldn’t get a look in.”
Bruce answered simply:
“That lets me out again, I’ve no silver tongue. I’ve talked with too few people to have much fluency.”
The clerk did not contradict him though he was thinking that Bruce could thank his personality for the time he was giving him and the pains he was taking to help him.
“Here,” handing Bruce a hastily written list. “You needn’t tell them I sent you for it wouldn’t do any good. Some of them come in here often but they look upon me as an office fixture—like this mahogany desk, or that Oriental rug.”
“This is mighty good of you,” said Bruce, as grateful as though he had written special letters of endorsement for him to all his friends. “Say,” with his impulsive hospitality, “I wish you could come out and visit me. Couldn’t you get away the end of August when the bull-trout and the redsides are biting good?”
“Me?” The clerk started, then he murmured wistfully: “When the bull-trout and the redsides are biting good! Gee! I like the way that sounds! Then,” with a resigned gesture, “I was never farther west than South Bethlehem; I never expect to have the price.”
He looked so efficient and well dressed that Bruce had thought he must receive a large salary and he felt badly to learn that the prosperity of such a nice chap was only clothes deep. He promised to look in on him before he left the city and tell him how he had gotten on; then he took his list and went back to the hotel prepared to spend some anxious hours in the time which must intervene before he could expect to hear from his night telegram. He hoped the answer would come in the morning, for disappointments, he had learned, were easier to bear when the sun shone.
The telegram was awaiting him when he returned from an excursion to a department store which had been fraught with considerable excitement. A majestic blonde had assumed a kind of protectorate overhim and dissuaded him from his original intention of buying thirty yards of ruching for Ma Snow with a firmness that approached a refusal to sell him anything so old-fashioned, although he protested that it had looked beautiful in the neck and sleeves of his mother’s gowns some fifteen years before. Neglecting to explain that his gift was for a woman all of fifty, a pink crepe-de-chine garment was held alluringly before his embarrassed eyes and a filmy petticoat, from beneath which, in his mind’s eye, Bruce could see Pa Snow’s carpet-slippers, in which Ma Snow “eased her feet,” peeping in and out. In the end he fought his way out—through more women than he had seen together in all his life—with a box of silk hose in appallingly vivid colors and a beaded bag which, he had it on the saleslady’s honor, was “all the rage.”
Bruce took the yellow envelope which the desk-clerk handed him and looked at it with a feeling of dread. He had counted the hours until it should come and now he was afraid to open it. It meant so much to him—everything in fact—the moment was a crisis but he managed to tear the envelope across with no outward indication of his dread.
He took in the contents at a glance and there was such relief, such renewed hope in his radiant face that the desk-clerk was moved to observe smilingly: “Good news, I gather.” And Bruce was so glad, so happy, that for the moment he could think of nothing more brilliant to answer than—“Well I should say so! I should say so!”
XIVHis Only Asset
XIVHis Only Asset
It would be a pleasure to record that Capital found Bruce’s personality so irresistible that his need of funds met with instant response, that the dashing picturesqueness of his appearance and charm of his unconventional speech and manner was so fascinating that Capital violated all the rules observed by experienced investors and handed out its checks with the cheery “God bless you m’ boy!” which warms the heart toward Capital in fiction. Such, however, was not the case.
It took only one interview to disabuse Bruce’s mind of any faint, sneaking idea he may have had that he was doing Capital a favor for which it would duly thank him. The person whom he honored with his first call strongly conveyed the impression after he had stated his case that he considered that he, Bruce, had obtained valuable time under false pretenses. Certainly the last emotion which he seemed to entertain for the opportunity given him was gratitude, and his refusal to be interested amounted to a curt dismissal.
The second interview, during which Bruce was cross-examined by a cold-eyed gentleman with a cool, impersonal voice, was sufficient to make him realize with tolerable clearness his total unpreparedness. What engineer of recognized standing had reported upon the ground? None! To what extent, then, had the ground been sampled? How many test-pits had been sunk, and how far to bed-rock? Whatwas the yardage? Where were his certified assay sheets, and his engineer’s estimate for hydro-electric installation? What transportation facilities?
Bruce, still dazed by the onslaught, had turned and looked at the door which had closed behind him with a briskness which seemed to say “Good riddance,” and muttered, thinking of the clerk’s one sanguine suggestion: “Personality! I might as well be a hop-toad.”
But in his chagrin he went to extremes in his contemptuous estimate of himself, for there was that about him which generally got him a hearing and a longer one than would have been accorded the average “promoter” with nothing more tangible upon which to raise money than his unsupported word. His Western phraseology and sometimes humorous similes, his unexpected whimsicalities and a certain naïveté secretly amused many of those whom he approached, though they took the best of care not to show it lest he mistake their interest in himself for interest in his proposition.
One or two went so far as to pass him on by giving him the name of a friend, but, mostly, they listened coldly, critically, and refused with some faint excuse or none. There was no harder task that Bruce could have set himself than applying to such men for financial help for, underneath, he was still the sensitive boy who had bolted from the dinner-table in tears and anger to escape his father’s ridicule, and, furthermore, he was accustomed to the friendly spirit and manner of the far West.
The chilling stiffness, the skepticism and suspicion, the curtness which was close to rudeness, at first bewildered, then hurt and humiliated him, finallyfilling him with a resentment which was rapidly reaching a point where it needed only an uncivil word or act too much to produce an explosion.
But if he was like that boy of other days in his quick pride, neither had he lost the tenacity of purpose which had kept him dragging one sore, bare foot after the other to get to his mother when the gulches he had to pass were black and full of ghostly, fearsome things that the hired man had seen when staying out late o’ nights. This trait now kept him trudging grimly from one office to another, offering himself a target for rebuffs that to him had the sting of insults.
He had come to know so well what to expect that he shrank painfully from each interview. It required a strong effort of will to turn in at the given number and ask for the man he had come to see, and when he saw him it required all his courage to explain the purpose of his call. Bruce understood fully now how he was handicapped by the lack of data and the fact that he was utterly unknown, but so long as there was one glimmer of hope that someone would believe him, would see the possibilities in his proposition as he saw them, and investigate for himself Bruce would not quit. The list of names the clerk had given him and many others had long since been exhausted. Looking back it seemed to him that he was a babe in swaddling clothes when he started out with his telegram and his addresses, so full of high hopes and the roseate expectations of inexperience.
Day after day he plodded, his dark face set in grim lines of purpose, following up clews leading to possible investors which he obtained here and there, and always with the one result. What credentials hadhe? To what past successes could he point? None? Ah, good-day.
One morning Bruce opened his eyes and the conviction that he had failed leaped into his mind as though it had been waiting like a cat at a mouse hole to pounce upon him the instant of his return to consciousness.
“You have failed! You have got to give up! You are done!” The words pounding into his brain affected him like hammer blows over the heart. He laid motionless, inert, his face grown sallow upon the pillow, and he thought that the feelings of a condemned man listening to the building of his gallows must be something like his own.
Those who have struggled for something, tried with all their heart and soul, fought to the last atom of their strength, and failed, know something of the sickening heaviness, the dull, aching depression which takes the vitality and seems actually to slow up the beating of the heart.
Out in the world, he told himself, where men won things by their brains, he had failed like any pitiable weakling; that he had been handicapped by unpreparedness was no palliation of the crime of failure. Ignorance was no excuse. In humiliation and chagrin he attributed the mistakes of inexperience to lack of intelligence. His mother had over-estimated him, he had over-estimated himself. It was presumption to have supposed he was fitted for anything but manual labor. Sprudell had been right, he thought bitterly, when he had sneered that muscle was his only asset.
He could see himself loading his belongings into Slim’s old boat, his blankets and the tattered soogan and bobbing through the rapids with the blackenedcoffee-pot, the frying pan, and lard cans jingling in the bottom, while Sprudell, with his hateful, womanish smile, watched his ignominious departure. Bruce drew his sleeve across his damp forehead. If there was any one thing which could goad him to further action it was this picture.
He arose and dressed slowly. Bruce had known fatigue, the weakness of hunger, but never anything like the leaden, heavy-footed depression which comes from intense despondency and hopelessness.
As his finances had gone down he had gone up, until he was now located permanently on the top floor of the hotel where the hall carpets and furniture were given their final try-out before going into the discards. The only thing which stopped him from going further was the roof. He had no means of judging what the original colors in his rug had been save by an inch or two close to the wall, and every brass handle on the drawers of his dresser came out at the touch. The lone faucet of cold water dripped constantly and he had to stand on a chair each time he raised the split green shade. When he wiped his face he fell through the hole in the towel; he could never get over a feeling of surprise at meeting his hands in the middle, and the patched sheets on his bed looked like city plots laid out in squares.
He loathed the shabbiness of it, and the suggestion of germs, decay, down-at-the-heel poverty added to his depression. He never had any such feelings about his rough bunk filled with cedar boughs and his pine table as he had about this iron bed, with its scratched enamel and tin knobs, which deceived nobody into thinking them brass, or the wobbly dresser that heswore at heartily each time he turned back a fingernail trying to claw a drawer open.
Bruce had vowed that so long as a stone remained unturned he would stay and turn it, but—he had run out of stones. Three untried addresses were left in his note-book and he looked at them as he ate his frugal breakfast speculating as to which was nearest.
“If I’d eaten as much beef as I have crow since I came to this man’s town,” he meditated as he dragged his unwilling feet up the street, “I’d be a ‘shipper’ in prime A1 condition. I’ve a notion I haven’t put on much weight since it became the chief article of my diet. If thirty days of quail will stall a man what will six weeks of crow do to him? I doubt if I will ever entirely get my self-respect back unless,” he added with the glimmer of a smile, “I go around and lick some of them before I leave.”
“I suppose,” his thoughts ran on, “that it’s a part of the scheme of life that a person must eat his share of crow before he gets in a position to make some one else eat it, but dog-gone!” with a wry face, “I’ve sure swallowed a double portion.” Then he fell to wondering if—he consulted his note-book—J. Winfield Harrah had specialized at all upon his method of serving up this game-bird which knows no closed season?
As he sat in Harrah’s outer office on a high-backed settee of teak-wood ornate with dragons and Chinese devils, with his feet on a rug which would have gone a long way toward installing a power-plant, looking at pictures of Jake Kilrain in pugilistic garb and pose, the racing yacht Shamrock under full sail, and Heatherbloom taking a record smashing jump, the spider-legged office boy came from inside endeavoringto hide some pleasurable excitement under a semblance of dignity and office reticence.
“Mr. Harrah has been detained and won’t be here for perhaps an hour.”
“I’ll wait,” Bruce replied laconically.
The office boy lingered. He fancied Bruce because of his size and his hat and a resemblance that he thought he saw between him and his favorite western hero of the movies; besides, he was bursting with a proud secret. He hunched his shoulders and looked cautiously behind toward the inner offices. Between his palms he whispered:
“He’s been arrested.”
It delighted him that Bruce’s eyes widened.
“Third time in a month—speedin’ in Jersey—his new machine is 80 horse-power—! A farmer put tacks in the road and tried to kill him wit’ a pitchfork. Say! my bossethim. I bet he’ll get fined the limit.” His red necktie swelled palpably and he swaggered proudly. “Pooh! he don’t care. My boss, he—”
“Willie!”
“Yes ma’am.” The stenographer’s call interrupted further confidences from Willie and he scuttled away, leaving Bruce with the impression that the boy’s admiration for his boss was not unmixed with apprehension.
The hour had gone when the door opened and a huge, fiery-bearded, dynamic sort of person went swinging past Bruce without a glance and on to the inner offices. The office boy’s husky “That’s him!” was not needed to tell him that J. Winfield Harrah had arrived. The air suddenly seemed charged electrically. The stenographer speeded up and dapperyoung clerks and accountants bent to their work with a zeal and assiduity which merited immediate promotion, while “Willie,” Bruce noticed, came from a brief session in the private office with the dazed look of one who has just been through an experience.
When Bruce’s turn came Harrah sat at his desk like an expectant ogre; there was that in his attitude which seemed to say: “Enter; I eat promoters.” His eyes measured Bruce from head to foot in a glance of appraisement, and Bruce on his part subjected Harrah to the same swift scrutiny.
Without at all being able to explain it Bruce felt instantly at his ease, he experienced a kind of relief as does a stranger in a strange land when he discovers someone who speaks his tongue.
Harrah appeared about Bruce’s age, perhaps a year or two older, and he was as tall, though lacking Bruce’s thickness and breadth of shoulder. His arms were long as a gorilla’s and he had huge white fists with freckles on the back that looked like ginger-snaps. Fiery red eyebrows as stiff as two toothbrushes bristled above a pair of vivid blue eyes, while his short beard resembled nothing so much as a neatly trimmed whisk broom, flaming in color. His skin was florid and his hair, which was of a darker shade than his beard, was brushed straight back from a high, white forehead. A tuft of hair stood up on his crown like the crest on a game-cock. Everything about him indicated volcanic temperament, virility, and impulsiveness which amounted to eccentricity.
Harrah represented to Bruce practically his last chance, but there was nothing in Harrah’s veiled, non-committal eyes as he motioned Bruce to a chair and inquired brusquely: “Well—what kind of a wild-cathaveyougot?” which would have led an observer to wager any large amount that his last chance was a good one.
Bruce’s eyes opened and he stared for the fraction of a second at the rudeness of the question, then they flashed as he answered shortly.
“I’m not peddling wild-cats, or selling mining stock to widows and orphans—if you happen to be either.”
Capital is not accustomed to tart answers to its humor caustic, from persons in need of financial assistance for their enterprises. Harrah raised his toothbrush eyebrows and once more he favored Bruce with a sweeping glance of interest, which Bruce, in his sensitive pride, resented.
“Who sent you?” Harrah demanded roughly.
“Never mind who sent me,” Bruce answered in the same tone, reaching for his hat which he had laid on the floor beside him, “but he had his dog-gone nerve directing me to an ill-mannered four-flusher like you.”
The color flamed to Harrah’s cheek bones and over his high, white forehead.
“You’ve got a curious way of trying to raise money,” he observed. “I suppose,” dryly, “that’s what you’re here for?”
“You suppose right,” Bruce answered hotly as he stood up, “but I’m no damn pauper. And get it out of your head,” he went on as the accumulated wrath of weeks swept over him, “that you’re talking to the office boy. I’ve found somebody at last that’s big enough to stand up to and tell ’em to go to hell! Sabe? You needn’t touch my proposition, you needn’t even listen to it, but, hear me, you talk civil!”
As Harrah arose Bruce took a step closer and looked at him squarely.
A lurking imp sprang to life in Harrah’s vivid eyes, a dare-devil look which found its counterpart in Bruce’s own.
“I believe you think you’re a better man than I am.”
“I can lick you any jump in the road,” Bruce answered promptly.
Harrah looked at him speculatively, without resentment, then his lips parted in a grin which showed two sharp, white, prominent front teeth.
“On the square,” eagerly, “do you think you can down me?”
“I know it,” curtly—“any old time or place.Now, if it suits you.”
To Bruce’s amazement Harrah took his hand and shook it joyfully.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you could! You look as hard as nails. Do you box or wrestle?”
Bruce wondered if he was crazy.
He answered shortly: “Some.”
“Bully!” excitedly. “The best luck ever! We’ll have a try-out in private and if you’re the moose I think you are you can break him in two!”
“Break who in two?”
“The Spanish Bull-dog! Eureka!” he chuckled gleefully. “I’ll back you to the limit!”
“What’s the matter with you?” Bruce demanded. “Are you loco?”
“Close to it!” the eccentric capitalist cried gaily,—“with joy! He bested me proper the other night at the Athletic Club—he dusted the mat with me—and I want to play even.” Seeing that Bruce’s facedid not lose its look of mystification he curbed his exuberance: “You see I’ve got some little reputation as a wrestler so when Billy Harper ran across this fellow in Central America he imported him on purpose to reduce the swelling in my head, he said, and he did it, for while the chap hasn’t much science he’s so powerful I couldn’t hold him. But you, by George! wait till I springyouon him!”
“Say,” Bruce answered resentfully, “I came East to raise money for a hydro-electric power plant, not to go into the ring. It looks as if you’re taking a good deal for granted.”
“That’s all right,” Harrah answered easily. “How much do you want? What you got? Where is it?”
Bruce told him briefly.
Harrah heard him through attentively and when he was done Harrah said candidly:
“Perhaps you’ve been told before that without a qualified engineer’s report it isn’t much of a business proposition to appeal to a business man.”
“Once or twice,” Bruce answered dryly.
“Nevertheless,” Harrah continued, “I’m willing to take a chance on you—not on the proposition as you’ve put it up to me but on you personally, because I like you. I’ll head your inscription list with $5000 and introduce you to some men that will probably take a ‘flyer’ on my say-so. If you’re still short of what you think you’ll need I’ll make up the remainder, all providing”—with a quick grin—“that you go in and wallop that Greaser!”
Bruce’s expression was a mixture of many.
Finally he replied slowly:
“Well, it isn’t just the way I’d figured out tointerest Capital and I reckon the method is unique in mine promotion, but as I’m at the end of my rope and have no choice, one more meal of ‘crow’ won’t kill me.” He went on with a tinge of bitterness, thinking of Sprudell: “Since muscle is my only asset I’ll have to realize on it.” Then his dark face lighted with one of the slow, whimsical smiles that transformed it—“Unchain the ‘Spanish Bull-dog,’ feller!”
Harrah rang for the office boy and reached for his hat.
“William,” he said sternly when the quaking youth stood before him, “tell those people outside not to wait. I’m called away on business—urgent, important business and I can’t say when I’ll be back.”