"It's the way," said I, "with a great many of our cherished hopes."

"W'l, anyhow, you can see thet it's the wrong thing to put as much time an' money into fixin' a child up f'r a different kind o' life as we hev, an' then keep her on a farm out here. An' thet's why I want you to help this sale through, an' bring influence to bear on her. I give up; I'm all in."

To me Bill seemed entirely in the right. The new era made it absurd for the Trescotts to use their land longer as a farm. Lattimore was changing daily. The streets were gashed with trenches for gas- and water-mains; piled-up materials for curbing, paving, office buildings, new hotels, and all sorts of erections made locomotion a peril; but we were happy.

The water company was organized in our office, the gas and electric-light company in Cornish's; but every spout led into the same bin.

Mr. Hinckley had induced some country dealers who owned a line of local grain-houses to remove to Lattimore and put up a huge terminal elevator for the handling of their trade. Captain Tolliver had been for a long time working upon a project for developing a great water-power, by tunneling across a bend in the river, and utilizing the fall. The building of the elevator attracted the attention of a company of Rochester millers, and almost before we knew it their forces had been added to ours, and the tunnel was begun, with the certainty that a two-thousand-barrel mill would be ready to grind the wheat from the elevator as soon as the flume began carrying water. This tunnel cut through an isthmus between the Brushy Creek valley and the river, and brought to bear on our turbines the head from a ten-mile loop of shoals and riffles. It opened into the gorge near the southern edge of Lynhurst Park, and crossed the Trescott farm. So it was that Bill awoke one day to the fact that his farm was coveted by divers people, who saw in his fields and feed-yards desirable sites for railway tracks, mills, factories, and the cottages of a manufacturing suburb. This it was that had put the Captain, like a blood-hound, on his trial, to the end that he was run to earth in my office, and made his appeal for help in managing Josie.

"There she comes now," said he. "Labor with her, won't yeh?"

"Bring her with us to the hotel," said I, "to take dinner. If my wife and Elkins can't fix the thing, no one can."

So we five dined together, and after dinner discussed the Trescott crisis. Bill put the case, with all a veteran dealer's logic, in its financial aspects.

"But we don't want to be rich," said Josie.

"What've we ben actin' all these years like we have for, then?" inquired Bill. "Seem's if I'd been lab'rin' under a mistake f'r some time past. When your ma an' me was a-roughin' it out there in the old log-house, an' she a-lookin' out at the Feb'uary stars through the holes in the roof, a-holdin' you, a little baby in bed, we reckoned we was a-doin' of it to sort o' better ourselves in a property way. Wouldn't you 'a'thought so, Jim?"

"Well," said Mr. Elkins, with an air of judicial perpension, "if you had asked me about it, I should have said that, if you wanted to stay poor, you could have held your own better by staying in Pleasant Valley Township as a renter. This was no place to come to if you wanted to conserve your poverty."

"But, pa, we're not adapted to town life and towns," urged Josie. "I'm not, and you are not, and as for mamma, she'll never be contented. Oh, Mr. Elkins, why did you come out here, making us all fortunes which we haven't earned, and upsetting everything?"

"Now, don't blame me, Josie," Jim protested. "You ought to consider the fallacy of the post hoc, propter hoc argument. But to return to the point under discussion. If you could stay there, a rural Amaryllis, sporting in Arcadian shades, having seen you doing it once or twice, I couldn't argue against it, it's so charmingly becoming."

"If that were all the argument—" began Josie.

"It's the most important one—to my mind," said Jim, resuming the discussion, "and you fail on that point; for you can't live in that way long. If you don't sell, the Development Company will condemn grounds for railway tracks and switch-yards; you'll find your fields and meadows all shot to pieces; and your house will be surrounded by warehouses, elevators, and factories. Your larks and bobolinks will be scared off by engines and smokestacks, and your flowers spoiled with soot. Don't parley with fate, but cash in and put your winnings in some safe investment."

"Once I thought I couldn't stay on the old farm a day longer; but I feel otherwise now! What business has this 'progress' of yours to interfere?"

"It pushes you out of the nest," answered Jim. "It gives you the chance of your lives. You can come out into Lynhurst Park Addition, and build your house near the Barslow and Elkins dwellings. We've got about everything there—city water, gas, electric light, sewers, steam heat from the traction plant, beautiful view, lots on an established grade—"

"Don't, don't!" said Josie. "It sounds like the advertisements in the Herald."

"Well, I was just leading up to a statement of what we lack," continued Jim. "It's the artistic atmosphere. We need a dash of the culture of Paris and Dresden and the place where they have the dinky little windmills which look so nice on cream-pitchers, but wouldn't do for one of our farmers a minute. Come out and supply our lack. You owe it to the great cause of the amelioration of local savagery; and in view of my declaration of discipleship, and the effective way in which I have always upheld the standard of our barbarism, I claim that you owe it to me."

"I've abandoned the brush."

"Take it up again."

"I have made a vow."

"Break it!"

She refused to yield, but was clearly yielding. Alice and I showed Trescott, on a plat, the place for his new home. He was quite taken with the idea, and said that ma would certainly be tickled with it.

Josie sat apart with Mr. Elkins, in earnest converse, for a long time. She looked frequently at her father, Jim constantly at her. Mr. Cornish dropped in for a little while, and joined us in presenting the case for removal. While he was there the girl seemed constrained, and not quite so fully at her ease; and I could detect, I thought, the old tendency to scrutinize his face furtively. When he went away, she turned to Jim more intimately than before, and almost promised that she would become his neighbor in Lynhurst. After the Trescotts' carriage had come and taken them away, Jim told us that it was for her father, and the temptations of idleness in the town, that Miss Trescott feared.

"This fairy-godmother business," said he, "ain't what the prospectus might lead one to expect. It has its drawbacks. Bill is going to cash in all right, and I think it's for the best; but, Al, we've got to take care of the old man, and see that he doesn't go up in the air."



CHAPTER XIII.

A Sitting or Two in the Game with the World and Destiny.

Our game at Lattimore was one of those absorbing ones in which the sunlight of next morning sifts through the blinds before the players are aware that midnight is past. Day by day, deal by deal, it went on, card followed card in fateful fall upon the table, and we who sat in, and played the World and Destiny with so pitifully small a pile of chips at the outset, saw the World and Destiny losing to us, until our hands could scarcely hold, our eyes hardly estimate, the high-piled stacks of counters which were ours.

We saw the yellowing groves and brown fields of our first autumn; we heard the long-drawn, wavering, mounting, falling, persistent howl of the thresher among the settings of hive-shaped stacks; we saw the loads of red and yellow corn at the corn-cribs,—as men at the board of the green cloth hear the striking of the hours. And we heeded them as little. The cries of southing wild-fowl heralded the snow; winter came for an hour or so, and melted into spring; and some of us looked up from our hands for a moment, to note the fact that it was the anniversary of that aguish day when three of us had first taken our seats at the table: and before we knew it, the dust and heat and summer clouds, like that which lightened over the fete in the park, admonished us that we were far into our second year. And still shuffle, cut, deal, trick, and hand followed each other, and with draw and bluff and showdown we played the World and Destiny, and playing won, and saw our stacks of chips grow higher and higher, as our great and absorbing game went on.

Moreover, while we won and won, nobody seemed to lose. Josie spoke that night of fortunes which people had not earned; but surely they were created somehow; and as the universe, when the divine fiat had formed the world, was richer, rather than poorer, so, we felt, must these values so magically growing into our fortunes be good, rather than evil, and honestly ours, so far as we might be able to secure them to ourselves. I said as much to Jim one day, at which he smiled, and remarked that if we got to monkeying with the ethics of the trade, piracy would soon be a ruined business.

"Better, far better keep the lookout sweeping the horizon for sails," said he, "and when one appears, serve out the rum and gunpowder to the crew, and stand by to lower away the boats for a boarding-party!"

I am afraid I have given the impression that our life at this time was solely given over to cupidity and sordidness; and that idea I may not be able to remove. Yet I must try to do so. We were in the game to win; but our winnings, present and prospective, were not in wealth only. To surmount obstacles; to drive difficulties before us like scattering sparrows; to see a town marching before us into cityhood; to feel ourselves the forces working through human masses so mightily that, for hundreds of miles about us, social and industrial factors were compelled to readjust themselves with reference to us; to be masters; to create—all these things went into our beings in thrilling and dizzying pulsations of a pleasure which was not ignoble.

For instance, let us take the building of the Lattimore & Great Western Railway. Before Mr. Elkins went to Lattimore this line had been surveyed by the cooeperation of Mr. Hinckley, Mr. Ballard, the president of the opposition bank, and some others. It was felt that there was little real competition among the railways centering there, and the L. & G.W. was designed as a hint to them of a Lattimore-built connection with the Halliday system, then a free-lance in the transportation field, and ready to make rates in an independent and competitive way. The Angus Falls extension brought this system in, but too late to do the good expected; for Mr. Halliday, in his dealings with us, convinced us of the truth of the rumors that he had brought the other roads to terms, and was a free-lance no longer. Month by month the need of real competition in our carrying trade grew upon us. Rates accorded to other cities on our commercial fighting line we could not get, in spite of the most persistent efforts. In the offices of presidents and general managers, in St. Louis, Chicago, St. Paul and Minneapolis, Kansas City, Omaha and New York we were received by suave princes of the highways, who each blandly assured us that his road looked with especial favor upon our town, and that our representations should receive the most solicitous attention. But the word of promise was ever broken to the hope.

After one of these embassies the syndicate held a meeting in Cornish's elegant offices on the ground-floor of the new "Hotel Elkins" building. We sent Giddings away to prepare an optimistic news-story for to-morrow's Herald, and an editorial leader based upon it, both of which had been formulated among us before going into executive session on the state of the nation. Hinckley, who had an admirable power of seeing the crux of a situation, was making a rather grave prognosis for us.

"If we can't get rates which will let us into a broader territory, we may as well prepare for reverses," said he. "Foreign cement comes almost to our doors, in competition with ours. Wheat and live-stock go from within twenty miles to points five hundred miles away. Who is furnishing the brick and stone for the new Fairchild court-house and the big normal-school buildings at Angus Falls? Not our quarries and kilns, but others five times as far away. If you want to figure out the reason of this, you will find it in nothing else in the world but the freight rates."

"It's a confounded outrage," said Cornish. "Can't we get help from the legislature?"

"I understand that some action is expected next winter," said I; "Senator Conley had in here the other day a bill he has drawn; and it seems to me we should send a strong lobby down at the proper time in support of it."

"Ye-e-s," drawled Jim, "but I believe in still stronger measures; and rather than bother with the legislature, owned as it is by the roads, I'd favor writing cuss-words on the water-tanks, or going up the track a piece and makin' faces at one of their confounded whistling-posts or cattle-guards—or something real drastic like that!"

Cornish, galled, as was I, by this irony, flushed crimson, and rose.

"The situation," said he, "instead of being a serious one, as I have believed, seems merely funny. This conference may as well end. Having taken on things here under the impression that this was to be a city; it seems that we are to stay a village. It occurs to me that it's time to stand from under! Good-evening!"

"Wait!" said Hinckley. "Don't go, Cornish; it isn't as bad as that!"

As he spoke he laid his hand on Cornish's arm, and I saw that he was pale. He felt more keenly than did I the danger of division and strife among us.

"Yes, Mr. Hinckley," said Jim, as Cornish sat down again, "it is as bad as that! This thing amounts to a crisis. For one, I don't propose to adopt the 'stand-from-under' tactics. They make an unnecessary disaster as certain as death; but if we all stand under and lift, we can win more than we've ever thought. In the legislature they hold the cards and can beat us. It's no use fooling with that unless we seek martyrs' deaths in the bankruptcy courts. But there is a way to meet these men, and that is by bringing to our aid their greatest rival."

"Do you mean—" said Hinckley.

"I mean Avery Pendleton and the Pendleton system," replied Elkins. "I mean that we've got to meet them on their own ground. Pendleton won't declare war on the Halliday combination by building in here, but there is no reason why we can't build to him, and that's what I propose to do. We'll take the L. & G. W., swing it over to the east from the Elk Fork up, make a junction with Pendleton's Pacific Division, and, in one week after we get trains running, we'll have the freight combine here shot so full of holes that it won't hold corn-stalks! That's what we'll do: we'll do a little rate-making ourselves; and we'll make this danger the best thing that ever happened to us. Do you see?"

Cornish saw, sooner than any one else. As he spoke, Jim had unrolled a map, and pointed out the places as he referred to them, like a general, as he was, outlining the plan of a battle. He began this speech in that quiet, convincing way of his, only a little elevated above the sarcasm of a moment before. As he went on, his voice deepened, his eye gleamed, and in spite of his colloquialisms, which we could not notice, his words began to thrill us like potent oratory. We felt all that ecstasy of buoyant and auspicious rebellion which animated Hotspur the night he could have plucked bright honor from the pale-faced moon. At Jim's final question, Cornish, forgetting his pique, sprang to the map, swept his finger along the line Elkins had described, followed the main ribs of Pendleton's great gridiron, on which the fat of half a dozen states lay frying, on to terminals on lakes and rivers; and as he turned his black eyes upon us, we knew from the fire in them that he saw.

"By heavens!" he cried, "you've hit it, Elkins! And it can be done! From to-night, no more paper railroads for us; it must be grading-gangs and ties, and steel rails!"

So, also, there was good fighting when Cornish wired from New York for Elkins and me to come to his aid in placing our Lattimore & Great Western bonds. Of course, we never expected to build this railway with our own funds. For two reasons, at least: it is bad form to do eccentric things, and we lacked a million or two of having the money. The line with buildings and rolling stock would cost, say, twelve thousand dollars per mile. Before it could be built we must find some one who would agree to take its bonds for at least that sum. As no one would pay quite par for bonds of a new and independent road, we must add, say, three thousand dollars per mile for discount. Moreover, while the building of the line was undertaken from motives of self-preservation, there seemed to be no good reason why we should not organize a construction company to do the actual work of building, and that at a profit. That this profit might be assured, something like three thousand dollars per mile more must go in. Of course, whoever placed the bonds would be asked to guarantee the interest for two or three years; hence, with two thousand more for that and good measure, we made up our proposed issue of twenty thousand dollars per mile of first-mortgage bonds, to dispose of which "the former member of the firm of Lusch, Carskaddan & Mayer" was revisiting the glimpses of Wall Street, and testing the strength of that mighty influence which the Herald had attributed to him.

"You've just got to win," said Giddings, who was admitted to the secret of Cornish's embassy, "not only because Lattimore and all the citizens thereof will be squashed in the event of your slipping up; but, what is of much more importance, the Herald will be laid in a lie about your Wall Street pull. Remember that when foes surround thee!"

When we joined him, Cornish admitted that he was fairly well "surrounded." He had failed to secure the aid of Barr-Smith's friends, who said that, with the street-car system and the cement works, they had quite eggs enough in the Lattimore basket for their present purposes. In fact, he had felt out to blind ends nearly all the promising burrows supposedly leading to the strong boxes of the investing public, of which he had told us. He accounted for this lack of success on the very natural theory that the Halliday combination had found out about his mission, and was fighting him through its influence with the banks and trust companies. So he had done at last what Jim had advised him to do at first—secured an appointment with the mighty Mr. Pendleton; and, somewhat humbled by unsuccess, had telegraphed for us to come on and help in presenting the thing to that magnate.

Whom, being fenced off by all sorts of guards, messengers, clerks, and secretaries, we saw after a pilgrimage through a maze of offices. He had not the usual features which make up an imposing appearance; but command flowed from him, and authority covered him as with a mantle. We knew that he possessed and exerted the power to send prosperity in this channel, or inject adversity into that, as a gardener directs water through his trenches, and this knowledge impressed us. He was rather thin; but not so much so as his sharp, high nose, his deep-set eyes, and his bony chin at first sight seemed to indicate. Whenever he spoke, his nostrils dilated, and his gray eyes said more than his lips uttered. He was courteous, with a sort of condensed courtesy—the shorthand of ceremoniousness. He turned full upon us from his desk as we entered, rose and met us as his clerk introduced us.

"Mr. Barslow, I'm happy to meet you; and you also, Mr. Cornish. Mr. Wilson 'phoned about your enterprise just now. Mr. Elkins," as he took Jim's hand, "I have heard of you also. Be seated, gentlemen. I have given you a time appropriation of thirty minutes. I hope you will excuse me for mentioning that at the end of that period my time will be no longer my own. Kindly explain what it is you desire of me, and why you think that I can have any interest in your project."

And, with a judgment trained in the valuing of men, he turned to Jim as our leader.

"If our enterprise doesn't commend itself to your judgment in twenty minutes," said Jim, with a little smile, and in much the same tone that he would have used in discussing a cigar, "there'll be no need of wasting the other ten; for it's perfectly plain. I'll expedite matters by skipping what we desire, for the most part, and telling you why we think the Pendleton system ought to desire the same thing. Our plan, in a word, is to build a hundred and fifty miles of line, and from it deliver two full train-loads of through east-bound freight per day to your road, and take from you a like amount of west-bound tonnage, not one pound of which can be routed over your lines at present."

Mr. Pendleton smiled.

"A very interesting proposition, Mr. Elkins," said he; "my business is railroading, and I am always glad to perfect myself in the knowledge of it. Make it plain just how this can be done, and I shall consider my half-hour well expended."

Then began the fateful conversation out of which grew the building of the Lattimore & Great Western Railway. Jim walked to the map which covered one wall of the room, and dropped statement after statement into the mind of Pendleton like round, compact bullets of fact. It was the best piece of expository art imaginable. Every foot of the road was described as to gradients, curves, cuts, fills, trestles, bridges, and local traffic. Then he began with Lattimore; and we who breathed in nothing but knowledge of that city and its resources were given new light as to its shipments and possibilities of growth. He showed how the products of our factories, the grain from our elevators, the live-stock from our yards, and the meats from our packing-houses could be sent streaming over the new road and the lines of Pendleton.

Then he turned to our Commercial Club, and showed that the merchants, both wholesale and retail, of Lattimore were welded together in its membership, in such wise that their merchandise might be routed from the great cities over the proposed track. He piled argument on argument. He hammered down objection after objection before they could be suggested. He met Mr. Pendleton in the domain of railroad construction and management, and showed himself familiar with the relative values of Pendleton's own lines.

"Your Pacific Division," said he, "must have disappointed some of the expectations with which it was built. Its earnings cannot, in view of the distance they fall below those of your other lines, be quite satisfactory to you. Give us the traffic agreement we ask; and your next report after we have finished our line will show the Pacific Division doing more than its share in the great showing of revenue per mile which the Pendleton system always makes. I see that my twenty minutes is about up. I hope I have made good our promises as to showing cause for coming to you with our project."

Mr. Pendleton, after a moment's thought, said: "Have you made an engagement for lunch?"

We had not. He turned to the telephone, and called for a number.

"Is this Mr. Wade's office?... Yes, if you please.... Is this Mr. Wade?... This is Pendleton talking to you.... Yes, Pendleton.... There are some gentlemen in my office, Mr. Wade, whom I want you to meet, and I should be glad if you could join us at lunch at the club.... Well, can't you call that off, now?... Say, at one-thirty.... Yes.... Very kind of you.... Thanks! Good-by."

Having made his arrangements with Mr. Wade, he hung up the telephone, and pushed an electric button. A young man from an outer office responded.

"Tell Mr. Moore," said Pendleton to him, "that he will have to see the gentlemen who will call at twelve—on that lake terminal matter—he will understand. And see that I am not disturbed until after lunch.... And, say, Frank! See if Mr. Adams can come in here—at once, please."

Mr. Adams, who turned out to be some sort of a freight expert, came in, and the rest of the interview was a bombardment of questions, in which we all took turns as targets. When we went to lunch we felt that Mr. Pendleton had possessed himself of all we knew about our enterprise, and filed the information away in some vast pigeon-hole case with his own great stock of knowledge.

We met Mr. Wade over an elaborate lunch. He said, as he shook hands with Cornish, that he believed they had met somewhere, to which Cornish bowed a frigid assent. Mr. Wade was the head of The Allen G. Wade Trust Company, and seemed in a semi-comatose condition, save when cates, wine, or securities were under discussion. He addressed me as "Mr. Corning," and called Cornish "Atkins," and once in a while opened his mouth to address Jim by name, but halted, with a distressful look, at the realization of the fact that he could not remember names enough to go around. He made an appointment with me for the party for the next morning.

"If you will come to my office before you call on Mr. Wade," said Mr. Pendleton, "I will have a memorandum prepared of what we will do with you in the way of a traffic agreement: it may be of some use in determining the desirability of your bonds. I'm very glad to have met you, gentlemen. When Lattimore gets into my world—by which I mean our system and connections—I hope to visit the little city which has so strong a business community as to be able to send out such a committee as yourselves; good-afternoon!"

"Well," said I, as we went toward our hotel, "this looks like progress, doesn't it?"

"I sha'n't feel dead sure," said Jim, "until the money is in bank, subject to the check of the construction company. But doesn't it look juicy, right now! Why, boys, with that traffic agreement we can get the money anywhere—on the prairie, out at sea—anywhere under the shining sun! They can't beat us. What do you say, Cornish? Will, your friend Wade jar loose, or shall we have to seek further?"

"He'll snap at your bonds now," said Cornish, rather glumly, I thought, considering the circumstances; "but don't call him a friend of mine! Why, damn him, not a week ago he turned me out of his office, saying that he didn't want to look into any more Western railway schemes! And now he says he believes we've met before!"

This seemed to strike Mr. Elkins as the best practical joke he had ever heard of; and Cornish suggested that for a man to stop in Homeric laughter on Broadway might be pleasant for him, but was embarrassing to his companions. By this time Cornish himself was better-natured. Jim took charge of our movements, and commanded us to a dinner with him, in the nature of a celebration, with a theater-party afterward.

"Let us," said he, "hear the chimes at midnight, or even after, if we get buncoed doing it. Who cares if we wind up in the police court! We've done the deed; we've made our bluff good with Halliday and his gang of highwaymen; and I feel like taking the limit off, if it lifts the roof! Al, hold your hand over my mouth or I shall yell!"

"Come into my parlor, and yell for me," said Cornish, "and you may do my turn in police court, too. Come in, and behave yourself!"

I began writing a telegram to my wife, apprising her of our good luck. The women in our circle knew our hopes, ambitions, and troubles, as the court ladies know the politics of the realm, and there were anxious hearts in Lattimore.

"I'm going down to the telegraph-office with this," said I; "can I take yours, too?"

When I handed the messages in, the man who received them insisted on my reading them over with him to make sure of correct transmission. There was one to Mr. Hinckley, one to Mr. Ballard, and two to Miss Josephine Trescott. One ran thus, "Success seems assured. Rejoice with me. J. B. C." The other was as follows: "In game between Railway Giants and Country Jakes here to-day, visiting team wins. Score, 9 to 0. Barslow, catcher, disabled. Crick in neck looking at high buildings. Have Mrs. B. prepare porous plaster for Saturday next. Sell Halliday stock short, and buy L. & G. W. And in name all things good and holy don't tell Giddings! J. R. E."



CHAPTER XIV.

In which we Learn Something of Railroads, and Attend Some Remarkable Christenings.

And so, in due time, it came to pass that, our Aladdin having rubbed the magic ring with which his Genius had endowed him, there came, out of some thunderous and smoky realm, peopled with swart kobolds, and lit by the white fire of gushing cupolas and dazzling billets, a train of carriages, drawn by a tamed volcanic demon, on a wonderful way of steel, armed strongly to deliver us from the Castle Perilous in which we were besieged by the Giants. The way was marvelously prepared by theodolite and level, by tented camps of men driving, with shouts and cracking whips, straining teams in circling mazes, about dark pits on grassy hillsides, and building long, straight banks of earth across swales; by huge machines with iron fists thrusting trunks of trees into the earth; by mighty creatures spinning great steel cobwebs over streams.

At last, a short branch of steel shot off from Pendleton's Pacific Division, grew daily longer and longer, pushed across the level earth-banks, the rows of driven tree-trunks, and the spun steel cobwebs, through the dark pits, nearer and nearer to Lattimore, and at last entered the beleaguered city, amid rejoicings of the populace. Most of whom knew but vaguely the facts of either siege or deliverance; but who shouted, and tossed their caps, and blew the horns and beat the drums, because the Herald in a double-leaded editorial assured them that this was the event for which Lattimore had waited to be raised to complete parity with her envious rivals. Furthermore, Captain Tolliver, magniloquently enthusiastic, took charge of the cheering, artillery, and band-music, and made a tumultuous success of it.

"He told me," said Giddings, "that when the people of the North can be brought for a moment into that subjection which is proper for the masses, 'they make devilish good troops, suh, devilish good troops!'"

And so it also happened that Mr. Elkins found himself the president of a real railway, with all the perquisites that go therewith. Among these being the power to establish town-sites and give them names. The former function was exercised according to the principles usually governing town-site companies, and with ends purely financial in view. The latter was elevated to the dignity of a ceremony. The rails were scarcely laid, when President Elkins invited a choice company to go with him over the line and attend the christening of the stations. He convinced the rest of us of the wisdom of this, by showing us that it would awaken local interest along the line, and prepare the way for the auction sales of lots the next week.

"It's advertising of the choicest kind," said he. "Giddings will sow it far and wide in the press dispatches, and it will attract attention; and attention is what we want. We'll start early, run to the station Pendleton has called Elkins Junction, at the end of the line, lie over for a couple of hours, and come home, bestowing names as we come. Help me select the party, and we'll consider it settled."

As the train was to be a light one, consisting of a buffet-car and a parlor-car, the party could not be very large. The officers of the road, Mr. Adams, who was general traffic manager, and selected by the bondholders, and Mr. Kittrick, the general manager, who was found in Kansas City by Jim, went down first as a matter of course. Captain Tolliver and his wife, the Trescotts, the Hinckleys, with Mr. Cornish and Giddings, were put down by Jim; and to these we added the influential new people, the Alexanders, who came with the cement-works, of which Mr. Alexander was president, Mr. Densmore, who controlled the largest of the elevators, and Mr. Walling, whose mill was the first to utilize the waters of our power-tunnel, and who was the visible representative of millions made in the flouring trade. Smith, our architect, was included, as was Cecil Barr-Smith, sent out by his brother to be superintendent of the street-railway, and looking upon the thing in the light of an exile, comforted by the beautiful native princess Antonia. We left Macdonald out, because he always called the young man "Smith," and could not be brought to forget an early impression that he and the architect were brothers; besides, said Jim, Macdonald was afraid of the cars as he was of the hyphen, being most of the time on the range with the cattle belonging to himself and Hinckley. Which, being interpreted, meant that Mr. Macdonald would not care to go.

Mr. Ballard was invited on account of his early connection with the L. & G. W. project, although he was holding himself more and more aloof from the new movements, and held forth often upon the value of conservatism. Miss Addison, who was related to the Lattimore family, was commissioned to invite the old General, who very unexpectedly consented. His son Will, as solicitor for the railway company and one of the directors, was to be one of us if he could. These with their wives and some invited guests from near-by towns made up the party.

We were well acquainted with each other by this time, so that it was quite like a family party or a gathering of old friends. Captain Tolliver was austerely polite to General Lattimore, whose refusal to concern himself with the question as to whether our city grew to a hundred thousand or shrunk to five he accounted for on the ground that a man who had led hired ruffians to trample out the liberty of a brave people must be morally warped.

The General came, tall and spare as ever, wearing his beautiful white moustache and imperial as a Frenchman would wear the cross of the Legion of Honor. He was quite unable to sympathize with our lot-selling, our plenitude of corporations, or our feverish pushing of "developments." But the building of the railway attracted him. He looked back at the new-made track as we flew along; and his eyes flashed under the bushy white brows. He sat near Josie, and held her in conversation much of the outward trip; but Jim he failed to appreciate, and treated indifferently.

"He is History incarnate," said Mrs. Tolliver, "and cannot rejoice in the passing of so much that is a part of himself."

Giddings said that this was probably true; and under the circumstances he couldn't blame him. He, Giddings, would feel a little sore to see things which were a part of himself going out of date. It was a natural feeling. Whereupon Mrs. Tolliver addressed her remarks very pointedly elsewhere; and Antonia Hinckley privately admonished Giddings not to be mean; and Giddings sought the buffet and smoked. Here I joined him, and over our cigars he confessed to me that life to him was an increasing burden, rapidly becoming intolerable.

We had noticed, I informed him, an occasional note of gloom in his editorials. This ought not to be, now that the real danger to our interests seemed to be over, and we were going forward so wonderfully. To which he replied that with the gauds of worldly success he had no concern. The editorials I criticised were joyous and ebulliently hilarious compared with those which might be expected in the future. If we could find some blithesome ass to pay him for the Herald enough money to take him out of our scrambled Bedlam of a town, bring the idiot on, and he (Giddings) would arrange things so we could have our touting done as we liked it!

Now the Herald had become a very valuable property, and of all men Giddings had the least reason to speak despitefully of Lattimore; and his frame of mind was a mystery to me, until I remembered that there was supposed to be something amiss between him and Laura Addison. Craftily leading the conversation to the point where confidences were easy, I was rewarded by a passionate disclosure on his part, which would have amounted to an outburst, had it not been restrained by the presence of Cornish, Hinckley, and Trescott at the other end of the compartment.

"Oh, pshaw!" said I, "you've no cause for despair. On your own showing, there's every reason for you to hope."

"You don't know the situation, Barslow," he insisted, shaking his head gloomily, "and there's no use in trying to tell you. She's too exalted in her ideals ever to accept me. She's told me things about the qualities she must have in the one who should be nearest to her that just simply shut me out; and I haven't called since. Oh, I tell you, Barslow, sometimes I feel as if I could—Yes, sir, it'll be accepted as the best piece of railroad building for years!"

I was surprised at the sudden transition, until I saw that our fellow passengers were crowding to our end of the car in response to the conductor's announcement that we were coming into Elkins Junction. I made a note of Giddings's state of mind, as the subject of a conference with Jim. The Herald was of too much importance to us for this to be neglected. The disciple of Iago must in some way be restored to his normal view of things. I could not help smiling at the vast difference between his view of Laura and mine. I, wrongly perhaps, thought her affectedly pietistic, with ideals likely to be yielding in spirit if the letter were preserved.

Elkins Junction was a platform, a depot, an eating-house, and a Y; and it was nothing else.

"We've come up here," said Jim, "to show you probably the smallest town in the state, and the only one in the world named after me. We wanted to show you the whole line, and Mr. Schwartz felt as if he'd prefer to turn his engine around for the return trip. The last two towns we came through, and hence the first two going back, are old places. The third station is a new town, and Conductor Corcoran will take us back there, where we'll unveil the name of the station, and permit the people to know where they live. While we're doing the sponsorial act, lunch will be prepared and ready for us to discuss during the next run."

On the way back there was a stir of suppressed excitement among the passengers.

"It's about this name," said Miss Addison to her seat-mate. "The town is on the shore of Mirror Lake, and they say it will be an important one, and a summer resort; and no one knows what the name is to be but Mr. Elkins."

"Really, a very odd affair!" said Miss Allen, of Fairchild, Antonia's college friend. "It makes a social function of the naming of a town!"

"Yes," said Mr. Elkins, "and it is one of the really enduring things we can do. Long after the memory of every one here is departed, these villages will still bear the names we give them to-day. If there's any truth in the belief that some people have, that names have an influence for good or evil, the naming of the towns may be important as building the railroad."

I was sitting with Antonia. Miss Allen and Captain Tolliver were with us, our faces turned toward one another. General Lattimore, with Josie and her father, was on the opposite side of the car. Most of the company were sitting or standing near, and the conversation was quite general.

"Oh, it's like a romance!" half whispered Antonia to us. "I envy you men who build roads and make towns. Look at Mr. Elkins, Sadie, as he stands there! He is master of everything; to me he seems as great as Napoleon!"

She neither blushed nor sought to conceal from us her adoration for Jim. It was the day of his triumph, and a fitting time to acknowledge his kinghood; and her admission that she thought him the greatest, the most excellent of men did not surprise me. Yet, because he was older than she, and had never put himself in a really loverlike attitude toward her, I thought it was simply an exalted girlish regard, and not at all what we usually understand by an affair of the heart. Moreover, at that time such praise as she gave him would not have been thought extravagant in almost any social gathering in Lattimore. Let me confess that to me it does not now seem so ... Cecil Barr-Smith walked out and stood on the platform.

General Lattimore was apparently thinking of the features of the situation which had struck Antonia as romantic.

"You young men," said he, "are among the last of the city-builders and road-makers. My generation did these things differently. We went out with arms in our hands, and hewed out spaces in savagery for homes. You don't seem to see it; but you are straining every nerve merely to shift people from many places to one, and there to exploit them. You wind your coils about an inert mass, you set the dynamo of your power of organization at work, and the inert mass becomes a great magnet. People come flying to it from the four quarters of the earth, and the first-comers levy tribute upon them, as the price of standing-room on the magnet!"

"I nevah hea'd the real merit and strength and safety of ouah real-estate propositions bettah stated, suh!" said Captain Tolliver ecstatically.

Jim stood looking at the General with sober regard.

"Go on, General," said he.

"Not only that," went on the General, "but people begin forestalling the standing-room, so as to make it scarcer. They gamble on the power of the magnet, and the length of time it will draw. They buy to-day and sell to-morrow; or cast up what they imagine they might sell for, and call the increase profit. Then comes the time when the magnet ceases to draw, or the forestallers, having, in their greed, grasped more than they can keep, offer too much for the failing market, and all at once the thing stops, and the dervish-dance ends in coma, in cold forms and still hands, in misery and extinction!"

There was a pause, during which the old soldier sat looking out of the widow, no one else finding aught to say. Elkins remained standing, and once or twice gave that little movement of the head which precedes speech, but said nothing. Cornish smiled sardonically. Josie looked anxiously at Jim, apprehensive as to how he would take it. At last it was Ballard the conservative who broke silence.

"I hope, General," said he, "that our little movement won't develop into a dervish-dance. Anyhow, you will join in our congratulations upon the completion of the railroad. You know you once did some railroad-building yourself, down there in Tennessee—I know, for I was there. And I've always taken an interest in track-laying ever since."

"So have I," said the General; "that's what brought me out to-day."

"Oh, tell us about it," said Josie, evidently pleased at the change of subject; "tell us about it, please."

"No, no!" he protested, "you may read it better in the histories, written by young fellows who know more about it than we who were there. You'll find, when you read it, that it was something like this: Grant's host was over around Chattanooga, starving for want of means for carrying in provisions. We were marching eastward to join him, when a message came telling us to stop at Decatur and rebuild the railroad to Nashville. So, without a thought that there was such a thing as an impossibility, we stopped—we seven or eight thousand common Americans, volunteer soldiers, picked at random from the legions of heroes who saved liberty to the world—and without an engineering corps, without tools or implements, with nothing except what any like number of our soldiers had, we stopped and built the road. That is all. The rails had been heated, and wound about trees and stumps. The cross-ties were burned to heat the rails. The cars had been destroyed by fire, and their warped ironwork thrown into ditches. The engines lay in scrap-heaps at the bottoms of ravines and rivers. The bridges were gone. Out of the chaos to which the structure had been resolved, there was nothing left but the road-bed.

"When I think of what we did, I know that with liberty and intelligence men with their naked hands could, in short space, re-create the destroyed wealth of the world. We made tools of the scraps of iron and steel we found along the line. We felled trees. We impressed little sawmills and sawed the logs into timbers for bridges and cars. Out of the battle-scarred and march-worn ranks came creative and constructive genius in such profusion as to astound us, who thought we knew them so well. Those blue-coated fellows, enlisted and serving as food for powder, and used to destruction, rejoiced in once more feeling the thrill there is in making things."

"Out of the ranks came millers, and ground the grain the foragers brought in; came woodmen, and cut the trees; came sawyers, and sawed the lumber. We asked for blacksmiths; and they stepped from the ranks, and made their own tools and the tools of the machinists. We called for machinists; and out of the ranks they stepped, and rebuilt the engines, and made the cars ready for the carpenters. When we wanted carpenters, out of the same ranks of common soldiers they walked, and made the cars. From the ranks came other men, who took the twisted rails, unwound them from the stumps and unsnarled them from one another, as women unwind yarn, and laid them down fit to carry our trains. And in forty days our message went back to Grant that we had 'stopped and built the road,' and that our engines were even then drawing supplies to his hungry army. Such was the incomparable army which was commanded by that silent genius of war; and to have been one of such an army is to have lived!"

The withered old hand trembled, as the great past surged back through his mind. We all sat in silence; and I looked at Captain Tolliver, doubtful as to how he would take the old Union general's speech. What the Captain's history had been none of us knew, except that he was a Southerner. When the general ceased, Tolliver was sitting still, with no indication of being conscious of anything special in the conversation, except that a red spot burned in each dark cheek. As the necessity for speech grew with the lengthening silence, he rose and faced General Lattimore.

"Suh," said he, "puhmit a man who was with the victohs of Manasses; who chahged with mo' sand than sense at Franklin; and who cried like a child aftah Nashville, and isn't ashamed of it, by gad! to offah his hand, and to say that he agrees with you, suh, in youah tribute to the soldiers of the wah, and honahs you, suh, as a fohmah foe, and a worthy one, and he hopes, a future friend!"

Somehow, the Captain's swelling phrases, his sonorous allusions to himself in the third person, had for the moment ceased to be ridiculous. The environment fitted the expression. The general grasped his hand and shook it. Then Ballard claimed the right, as one of the survivors of Franklin, to a share in the reunion, and they at once removed the strain which had fallen upon us with the General's first speech, by relating stories and fraternizing soldierwise, until Conductor Corcoran called in at the door, "Mystery Number One! All out for the christening!"

As we gathered on the platform, we saw that the signboard on the station-building, for the name of the town, had been put up, but was veiled by a banner draped over it. Tents were pitched near, in which people lived waiting for the lot-auction, that they might buy sites for shops and homes. The waters of the lake shone through the trees a few rods away; and in imagination I could see the village of the future, sprinkled about over the beautiful shore. The future villagers gathered near the platform; and when Jim stepped forward to make the speech of the occasion, he had a considerable audience.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said he, "our visit is for the purpose of showing the interest which the Lattimore & Great Western takes and will continue to take in the towns on its line, and to add a name to what, I notice, has already become a local habitation. In conferring that name, we are aware that the future citizens of the place have claims upon us. So one has been selected which, as time passes, will grow more and more pleasant to your ears; and one which the person bestowing it regards as an honor to the town as high as could be conferred in a name. No station on our lines could have greater claims upon our regard than the possession of this name. And now, gentlemen—"

Mr. Elkins removed his hat, and we all followed his example. Some one pulled a cord, the banner fell away, and the name was revealed. It was "JOSEPHINE." The women looked at it, and turned their eyes on Josie, who blushed rosily, and shrank back behind her father, who burst into a loud laugh of unalloyed pleasure.

"I propose three cheers for the town of Josephine," went on Mr. Elkins, "and for the lady for whom it is named!"

They were real cheers—good hearty ones; followed by an address, in the name of the town, by a bright young man who pushed forward and with surprising volubility thanked President Elkins for his selection of the name, and closed with flowery compliments to the blushing Miss Trescott, whose identity Jim had disclosed by a bow. He was afterwards a thorn in our flesh in his practice as a personal-injury lawyer. At the time, however, we warmed to him, as under his leadership the dwellers in the tents and round about the waters of Mirror Lake all shook hands with Jim and Josie.

Cornish stood with a saturnine smile on his face, and glared at some of the more pointed hits of the young lawyer. Cecil Barr-Smith beamed radiant pleasure, as he saw the evident linking in this public way of Jim's name and Josie's. Antonia stood close to Cecil's side, and chatted vivaciously to him—not with him; for her words seemed to have no correlation with his.

"Quite like the going away of a bridal party!" said she with exaggerated gayety, and with a little spitefulness, I thought. "Has any one any rice?"

"All aboard!" said Corcoran; and the joyful and triumphant party, with their outward intimacy and their inward warfare of passions and desires, rolled on toward "Mystery Number Two," which was duly christened "Cornish," and celebrated in champagne furnished by its godfather.

"Don't you ever drink champagne?" said Cornish, as Josie declined to partake.

"Never," said she.

"What, never?" he went on, Pinaforically.

"My God!" thought I, "the assurance of the man!" And the palm-encircled alcove at Auriccio's, as it was wont so often to do, came across my vision, and shut out everything but the Psyche face in its ruddy halo, speeding by me into the street, and the vexed young man in the faultless attire slowly following.

Mystery Number Three was "Antonia," a lovely little place in embryo; "Barslow" came next, followed by "Giddings" and "Tolliver." We were tired of it when we reached "Hinckley," platted on a farm owned by Antonia's father, and where we ceased to perform the ceremony of unveiling. It was a memorable trip, ending with sunset and home. Captain Tolliver assisted General Lattimore to alight from the train, and they went arm in arm up to the old General's home.

That night, according to his wont, Jim came to smoke with me in the late evening. "Let's take a car," said he, "and go up and have a look at the houses."

These were our new mansions up in Lynhurst Park Addition, now in process of erection. In the moonlight we could see them dimly, and at a little distance they looked like masses of ruins—the second childhood of houses. A stranger could have seen, from the polished columns and the piles of carved stone, that they were to be expensive and probably beautiful structures.

"What do you think of the General in the role of Cassandra?" asked Jim, as we sat in the skeleton room which was to be his library.

"It struck me," said I, "as a particularly artistic bit of croaking!"

"The Captain says frequently," said Jim, his cigar glowing like a variable star, "that opportunity knocks once. The General, I'm afraid, knocks all the time. But if it should turn out that he's right about the—the—dervish-dance ... it would be ... to put it mildly ... a horse on us, Al, wouldn't it?"

I had no answer to this fanciful speech, and made none. Instead, I told him of Giddings's love-sickness.

"The philosophy of Iago has broken down," said he, "and the boy is sort of short-circuited. Antonia can take him in hand, and turn him out full of confidence; and with that, I'll answer for the lady. That can be fixed easy, and ought to be. Let's walk back."

"What was it he said?" he asked, as we parted. "'Coma, cold forms, still hands, and extinction.' Well, if the dervish-dance does wind up in that sort of thing, it's only a short-cut to the inevitable. Those are pretty houses up there; we'd have been astounded over them when we used to fish together on Beaver Creek;—but suppose they are?

"'They say the Lion and the Lizard keep The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep; And Bahram, that great hunter—the Wild Ass Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep!'

Good-night, Al!"



CHAPTER XV.

Some Affairs of the Heart Considered in their Relation to Dollars and Cents.

Antonia was sitting in a hammock. Josie and Alice were not far away watching Cecil Barr-Smith, who was wading into the lake to get water-lilies for them, contrary to the ordinances of the city of Lattimore in such cases made and provided. The six were dawdling away our time one fine Sunday in Lynhurst Park. I forgot to say Mr. Elkins and myself were discussing affairs of state with Miss Hinckley.

"He's such a ninny," said Antonia.

"Aren't all people when in his forlorn condition?" asked Jim.

Antonia looked away at the clouds, and did not reply.

"But if he had a morsel of the cynical philosophy he boasts of," said she, "he could see."

"I don't know about that," said Jim lazily, looking over at the other group; "a woman can conceal her feelings in such a case pretty completely."

"I don't know about that," echoed Antonia. "I wish I did; it would simplify things."

"I believe," said I, "that it's a simple enough matter for you to solve and manage as it is."

"But it's so absurd to bother with!" said she; "and what's the use?"

"Doesn't it seem that way?" said Jim. "And yet you know we brought him here for a definite purpose; and in his present state he can't make good. Just read his editorial this morning: it would add gloom to the proceedings, read at a funeral. We want things whooped up, and he wants to whoop 'em; but long screeds on 'The Sacred Right of Self-destruction' hurt things, and bring the paper into disrepute, and crowd out optimistic matter that we desire. And as long as both families want the thing brought about, and there is good reason to think that Laura will not prove eternally immovable, I take it to be an important enough matter, from the standpoint of dollars and cents, for the exercise of our diplomacy."

"Well, then," said Antonia, "get the people together on some social occasion, and we'll try."

"I've thought," said Jim, "of having a house-warming—as soon as the weather gets so that the very name of the function won't keep folks away. My house is practically done, you know."

"Just the thing," said Antonia. "There are cosy nooks and deep retreats enough to make it a sort of labyrinth for the ensnaring of our victims."

"Isn't it a queer thing in language," said Jim, "that these retreats are the places where advances are made!"

"Not when you consider," said Antonia, "that retreats follow repulses."

"We ought to have the Captain and the General here, if this military conversation is to continue," said I. "And here comes Cecil. Stop before he comes, or we shall never get through with the explanation of the jokes."

This remark elicited the laughter which the puns failed to provoke; for Cecil was color-blind in all things relating to the American joke. The humor of Punch appealed to him, and the wit of Sterne and Dean Swift; but the funny column and the paragrapher's niche of our newspapers he regarded as purely pathological phenomena. I sometimes feel that Cecil was right about this. Can the mind which continues to be charmed by these paragraphic strainings be really sound?—but this is not a dissertation. Cecil reconciled himself to his position as the local exemplification of the traditional Englishman whose trains of ideas run on the freight schedule—and was one of the most popular fellows in Lattimore. He gloried in his slavery to Antonia, and seemed to glean hope from the most sterile circumstances.

It was easy to hope, in Lattimore, then. It was not many days after our talk in the park before I noticed a change for the better in Giddings, even. Just before Jim's house-warming, he came to me with something like optimism in his appearance. I started to cheer him up, and went wrong.

"I'm glad to see by your cheerful looks," said I, "that the philosophy of Iago—"

"Say, now!" cried he, "don't remind me of that, for Heaven's sake!"

"Why, certainly not," said I, "if you object."

"I do object," said he most earnestly; "why, that damned-fool philosophy may have ruined my life, you know."

"Of course I know what you mean," said I; "but I'm convinced, and so are all your friends, that if you fail, it'll be your own lack of nerve, and nothing else, that you'll owe the disaster to. You should—"

"I should have refrained from trampling under foot the dearest ideals of the only girl— However, I can't talk of these things to any one, Barslow. But I have some hope now. Antonia and Josie have both been very kind lately—and say, Barslow, I see now how little foundation there is for that old gag about the women hating each other!"

"I've always felt," said I, anxious to draw him out so that I might see what the conspirators had been doing, "that there's nothing in that idea. But what has changed your view?"

"Antonia, and Josie, and even your wife," said he, "have been keeping up a regular lobby in my behalf with Laura. They think they've got the deal plugged up now, so that she'll give me a show again, and—"

"Why, surely," said I; "in my opinion, there never was any need for you to feel downcast."

"Barslow," he said, with the air of a man who has endured to the limit, "you are a good fellow, but you make me tired when you talk like that. Why, four weeks ago I had no more show than a snowball in—in the crater of Vesuvius. But now I'm encouraged. These girls have been doing me good, as I just said, and I'm convinced that my series of editorials on 'The Influence of Christianity on Civilization,' in which I've given the Church the credit of being the whole thing, has helped some."

"They ought to do good somewhere," said I, "they certainly haven't boomed Lattimore any."

"Damn Lattimore!" said he bitterly. "When a man's very life—But see here, Barslow, I know you're not in earnest about this. And I'll be all right in a day or two, or I'll be eternally wrong. I'm going to make one final cast of the die. I may go down to bottomless perdition, or I may be caught up to the battlements of heaven; but such a mass of doubts and miseries as I've been lately, I'll no longer be! Pray for me, Barslow, pray for me!"

This despairing condition of Giddings's was a sort of continuing sensation with us at that time. We discussed it quite freely in all its aspects, humorous and tragic. It was so unexpected a development in the young man's character, and, with all due respect to the discretion and resisting powers of Miss Addison, so entirely gratuitous and factitious.

"He has ability as a writer," said the Captain; "but in such a mattah anybody but a fool ought to see that the thing to do is to chahge the intrenchments. I trust that I may not be misunde'stood when I say that, in my opinion, a good rattling chahge would not be a fo'lo'n hope!"

"It bothers," said Jim; "and if it weren't for that, I'd feel conscience-stricken at doing anything to rob the idiot of a most delicious grief."

The coolness of early autumn was in the air the night of Jim's house-warming. To describe his dwelling, in these days when fortunes are spent on the details of a stairway, and a king's ransom for the tapestries of a salon, all of which luxuries are spread before the eyes of the public in the columns of Sunday papers and magazines, would be to court an anticlimax. But this was before the multimillionaire had made the need for an augmentative of the word "luxury"; and Jim's house was noteworthy for its beauty: its cunningly wrought iron and wood; and columned halls and stairways; and wide-throated fireplaces, each a picture in tile, wood, and metalwork; and vistas like little fairylands through silken portieres; and carven chairs and couches, reminiscent of royal palaces; and chambers where lovely color-schemes were worked out in rug, and bed, and canopy. There were decorations made by men whose names were known in London and Paris. From out-of-the-way places Mr. Elkins had brought collections of queer and interesting and pretty things which, all his life, he had been accumulating; and in his library were broad areas of well-worn book-backs. Somehow, people looked upon the Mr. Elkins who was master of all these as a more important man than the Elkins who had blown into the town on some chance breeze of speculation, and taken rooms at the Centropolis.

It was all light and color, that night. Even the formal flower-beds of the grounds and the fountain spouting on the lawn were like scenery in the lime-light. Only, back in the shrubbery there were darker nooks in summer-houses and arbors for those who loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds, to the common mind, were likely to seem foolish. I remember thinking that if Mr. Giddings really wanted a chance to take the high dive of which he had spoken to me, the opportunity was before him.

His Laura was there, her devotee-like expression striving with an exceedingly low-cut dress to sound the distinguishing note of her personality. Giddings was at the punch-bowl as on their arrival she swept past with the General. When he saw the nun-like glance over the swelling bosom, the poor stricken cynic blushed, turned pale, and wheeled to flee. But Cecil, as if following orders, arrested him and began plying him with the punch—from which Giddings seemed to draw courage: for I saw him, soon, gravitate to her whom he loved and so mysteriously dreaded.

"It's a pe'fect jewel-case of a house!" said the Captain, as he moved with the trooping company through the mansion.

"Indeed, indeed it is," said Mrs. Tolliver to Alice; "the jewel, whoever it may be, is to be envied."

"I hope," said Jim to Josie, "that you agree with Mrs. Tolliver?"

"Oh, yes," said Josie, "but you attach far too much importance to my judgment. If it is any comfort to you, however, I want to praise—everything—unreservedly."

"I won't know, for a while," said Jim, "whether it is to be my house only, or home in the full sense of the word."

"One doesn't know about that, I fancy," said Cecil; "for a long time—"

"I mean to know soon," said Jim.

Josie was looking intently at the carving on one of the chairs, and paid no heed, though the remark seemed to be addressed to her.

"What I mean, you know," said Cecil, "is that, no matter how well the house may be built and furnished, it's the associations, the history of the place, the things that are in the air, that makes 'Ome!"

There was in the manner of his capitalizing the word as he uttered it, and in the unwonted elision of the H, that tribute to his dear island which the exiled Briton (even when soothed by the consolation offered by street-car systems to superintend, and rose-pink blondes to serve), always pays when he speaks of Home.

"Associations," said Jim, "may be historical or prophetic. In the former case, we have to take them on trust; but as to those of the future, we are sure of them."

"Yahs," said Cecil, using the locution which he always adopted when something subtle was said to him, "I dare say! I dare say!"

"Well, then," Jim went on, "I have this matter of the atmosphere or associations under my own control."

"Just so," said Cecil. "Clever conceit, Miss Trescott, isn't it, now?"

But Miss Trescott had apparently heard nothing of Jim's speech, and begged pardon; and wouldn't they go and show her the bronzes in the library?

"This mansion, General," said the Captain, "takes one back, suh, to the halcyon days of American history. I refeh, suh, to those times when the plantahs of the black prairie belt of Alabama lived like princes, in the heart of an enchanted empire!"

"A very interesting period, Captain," said the General. "It is a pity that the industrial basis was one which could not endure!"

"In the midst of fo'ests, suh," went on the Captain, "we had ouah mansions, not inferio' to this—each a little kingdom with its complete wo'ld of amusements, its cote, and its happy populace, goin' singin' to the wo'k which supported the estate!"

"Yes," said the General, "I thought, when we were striking down that state of things, that we were doing a great thing for that populace. But I now see that I was only helping the black into a new slavery, the fruits of which we see here, around us, to-night."

"I hahdly get youah meaning, suh—"

"Well," said the General, looking about at the little audience. (It was in the smoking-room, and those present were smokers only.) "Well, now, take my case. I have some pretty valuable grounds down there where I live. When I got them, they were worthless. I could build as good a mansion as this or any of your ante-bellum Alabama houses for what I can get out of that little tract. What is that value? Merely the expression in terms of money of the power of excluding the rest of mankind from that little piece of ground. I make people give me the fruits of their labor, myself doing nothing. That's what builds this house and all these great houses, and breeds the luxury we are beginning to see around us; and the consciousness that this slavery exists, and is increasing, and bids fair to grow greatly, is what is making men crazy over these little spots of ground out here in the West! It is this slavery—"

"Suh," exclaimed the Captain, rising and grasping the General's hand, "you have done me the favo' of making me wisah! I nevah saw so cleahly the divine decree which has fo'eo'dained us to this opulence. Nothing so satisfactory, suh, as a basis and reason foh investment, has been advanced in my hearing since I have been in the real-estate business! Let us wo'k this out a little mo' in detail, if you please, suh—"

"Let us escape while there is yet time!" said Cornish; and we fled.

After supper there was a cotillion. The spacious ballroom, with its roof so high that the lights up there were as stars, was a sight which could scarcely be reconciled with the village community which he had found and changed. The palms, and flowers, and lights which decorated the room; the orchestra's river of dance-music; the men, all in the black livery which—on the surface—marks the final conquest of civilization over barbarism; the beautiful gowns, the sparkling jewels, and the white shoulders and arms of the ladies—all these made me wonder if I had not been transported to some Mayfair or Newport, so pictorial, so decorative, so charged with art, it seemed to be. The young people, carrying on their courtships in these unfamiliar halls, their disappearances into the more remote and tenebrous outskirts of the assembly—all seemed to me to be taking place on the stage, or in some romance.

I told Alice about this as we walked home—it was only across the street—to our own new house.

"Don't tell any one about this feeling of yours," said she. "It betrays your provincialism, my dear. You should feel, for the first time in your life, perfectly at home. 'Armor, rusting on his walls, On the blood of Clifford calls,' you know."

"Mine didn't hear the call," said I; "I'm probably the first of my race to wear this—But I enjoyed it."

"Well, I am too full of something that took place to discuss the matter," said she, as we sat down at home. "I am perplexed. You know about Mr. Cornish and Josie, don't you?"

She startled me, for I had never told her a word.

"Know about them!" I cried, a little dramatically. "What do you mean? No, I don't!"

"Why, what's the matter, Albert?" she queried. "I haven't charged them with midnight assassination, or anything like that! Only, it seems that he has been making love to her, for some time, in his cool and self-contained way. I've known it, and she's been perfectly conscious, that I knew; but never said anything to me of it, and seemed unwilling even to approach the subject. But to-night Cecil and I found her out in the canopied seat by the fountain, and I knew something was the matter, and sent Cecil away. Something told me that Mr. Cornish was concerned in it, and I asked her at once where he went.

"'He is gone!' said she. 'I don't know where he is, and I don't care! I wish I might never see him any more!'

"You may imagine my surprise. When a young woman uses such language about a man, it is a certainty that she isn't voicing her true feelings, or that it isn't a normal love affair. So I wormed out of her that he had made her an offer."

"'Well,' said I, 'if, as I infer from your conversation, you have refused him, there's an end of the matter; and you need not worry about seeing him any more.'

"'But,' said she, 'Alice, I haven't refused him!'

"That took me aback a little," went on Alice, "for I had other plans for her; so I said: 'You haven't accepted the fellow, have you?'

"'Oh, no, no!' said she, in a sort of quivery way, 'but what right have you to speak of him in that way?' And that is all I could get out of her. She was so unreasonable and disconnected in her talk, and the others came out, and I tell you what, Albert Barslow, that man Cornish will do evil yet, among us! I have always thought so!"

"I don't see any ground for any such prediction," said I, "in anything you have told me. Her inability to make up her mind—"

"Means that there's something wrong," said my wife dogmatically. "It means that he has some sinister influence over her, as he has over almost everybody, with those coal-black eyes of his and his satanic ways. And worse than all else, it means that he'll finally get her, in spite of herself!"

"Pshaw!" said I.

"Go away, Albert!" said she, "or we shall quarrel. Go back and find my fan—I left it on the mantel in the library. The house is lighted yet; and I was going to send you back anyhow. Kiss me, and go, please."

I felt that if Alice had had in her memory my vision of the supper at Auriccio's, she would have been confirmed in her fears; but to me, in spite of the memory, they seemed absurd. My only apprehension was that she might be right as to the final outcome, to the wreck of Jim's hopes. I did not take the matter at all seriously, in fact. I think we men must usually have such an affair worked out to some conclusion, for weal or woe, before we regard it otherwise than lightly. That was the reason that Giddings's distraught condition was only a matter of laughter to all of us. And as something like this passed through my mind, Giddings himself collared me as I crossed the street.

"Old man!" said he, "congratulate me! It's all right, Barslow, it's all right."

"Up on the battlements, are you?" said I. "Well, I congratulate you, Giddings; and don't make such an ass of yourself, please, any more. I never noticed until this evening what a fine girl Laura is. You're really a very fortunate fellow indeed!"

"You never noticed it!" said he with utter scorn. "Well, if—"

"It's late," said I. "Come and see me in the morning! Good-night."

I went in at the front door of the house. It stood wide open, as if the current of guests passing out had removed its tendency to swing shut. It seemed lonely now, inside, with all the decorations of the assembly still in place in the empty hall. I passed into the library, and found Jim sitting idly in a great leather chair. He seemed not to see me; or if he did, he paid no attention. I went to the mantel, picked up Alice's fan, and turned to Jim.

"Sit down," said he.

"Having a sort of 'oft in the stilly night' experience, Jim, or a case of William the Conqueror on the Field of Hastings?"

"Yes," said he. "Something like that."

"Well, your house-warming has been a success, Jim," said I, "though a fellow wouldn't think so to look at you. And the house is faultless. I envy you the house, but the ability to plan and furnish it still more. I didn't think it was in you, old man! Where did you learn it all?"

"You may have the house, if you want it, Al," said he. "I don't think it's going to be of any use to me."

"Why, Jim," said I, seeing that it was something more than a mere mood with him, "what is it? Has anything gone wrong?"

"Nothing that I've any right to complain of," said he. "Of course, no man puts as much of his life into such a thing as I have into this—without thinking of more than living in it—alone. I've never had what you can really call a home—not since I was a little chap, when it was home wherever there were trees and mother. I've filled this—with those associations I spoke to Barr-Smith about—to-night—a little more than I seem to have had any warrant to do. I tried to make sure about the jewel for the jewel-case to-night, and it went wrong, Al; and that's all there is of it. I don't think I shall need the house, and if you like it you can have it."

"Do you mean that Josie has refused you?" said I.

"She didn't put it that way," said he, "but it amounts to that."

"Nothing that isn't a refusal," said I, "ought to be accepted as such. What did she say?"

"Nothing definite," he answered wearily, "only that it couldn't be 'yes,' and when I urged her to make it 'yes' or 'no,' she refused to say either; and asked me to forget that I had ever said anything to her about the matter. There have been some things which—led me to hope—for a different answer; and I'm a good deal taken down, Al ... I wouldn't like to talk this way—with any one else."

There seemed to be no reason for abandonment of hope, I urged upon him, and after a cigar or so I left him, evidently impressed with this view of the case, but nevertheless bitterly disappointed. It meant delay and danger to his hopes; and Jim was not a man to brook delay, or suffer danger to go unchallenged. I dared not tell him of Cornish's offer, and of its fate, so similar to his.

"I wonder if it is coquetry on her part," thought I, as I went back with the fan. "I wonder if it will cause things to go wrong in our business affairs. I wonder if it is possible for her to be sincerely unable to make up her mind, or if there is anything in Alice's malign-influence theory. Anyhow, in the department of Cupid business certainly is picking up!"



CHAPTER XVI.

Some Things which Happened in Our Halcyon Days.

If there was any tension among us just after the house-warming, it was not noticeable. Mr. Cornish and Mr. Elkins seemed unaware of their rivalry. Had either of the two been successful, it might have made mischief; but as it was, neither felt that his rejection was more than temporary. Neither knew much of the other's suit, and both seemed full of hope and good spirits.

Altogether, these were our halcyon days. It seemed to crew and captain a time for the putting off of armor, and the donning of the garlands of complacent respite from struggle. The work we had undertaken seemed accomplished—our village was a city. The great wheel we had set whirling went spinning on with power. Long ago we had ceased to treat the matter jocularly; and to regard our operations as applied psychology only, or as a piratical reunion, no longer occurred to us. There is such a thing, I believe, as self-hypnotism; but if we knew it, we made no application of our knowledge to our own condition. This great, scattered, ebullient town, grown from the drowsy Lattimore of a few years ago, must surely be, even now, what we had willed it to be: and therefore, could we not pause and take our ease?

There was the General, of course. He, Jim said, "'knocked' so constantly as to be sort of ex-officio President of the Boiler-makers' Union," and talked of the inevitable collapse. But who ever heard of a city built by people of his way of thinking? And there was Josie Trescott, with her agreement on broad lines with the General, and her deprecation of the giving of fortunes to people who had not earned them; but Josie was only a woman, who, to be sure, knew more of most matters than the rest of us, but could not have any very valuable knowledge of the prospects for commercial prosperity.

That we were in the midst of an era of the most wonderful commercial prosperity none denied. How could they? The streets, so lately bordered with low stores, hotels, and banks, were now craggy with tall office buildings and great hostelries, through which the darting elevators shot hurrying passengers. Those trees which made early twilight in the streets that night when Alice, Jim, and I first rode out to the Trescott farm were now mostly cut down to make room for "improvements."

Brushy Creek gorge was no longer dark and cool, with its double sky-line of trees drowsing toward one another, like eyelashes, from the friendly cliffs. The cooing of the pigeons was gone forever. The muddied water from the great flume raced down through the ravine, turning many wheels, but nowhere gathering in any form or place which seemed good for trout. On either side stood shanties, and ramshackle buildings where such things as stonecutting and blacksmithing were done. Along the waterside ran the tracks of our Terminal and Belt Line System, on which trains of flat-cars always stood, engaged in the work of carrying away the cliffs, in which they were aided and abetted by giant derricks and the fiends of dynamite and nitro-glycerin. Limekilns burned all the time, turning the companionable gray ledges into something offensive and corrosive. One must now board a street-car, and ride away beyond Lynhurst Park before one could find the good and pure little Brushy Creek of yore.

The dwellers in the houses which stood in their lawns of vivid green had gone away into the new "additions," to be in the fashion, and to escape from the smoke and clang of engine and factory. Their old houses were torn away, or converted, by new and incongruous extensions, into cheap boarding-houses. Only the Lattimore house kept faith with the past, and stood as of old, in its five acres of trees and grass, untouched of the fever for platting and subdivision, its very skirts drawn up from the asphalt by austere retaining-walls. And here went on the preparation for the time when Laura and Clifford were to stand up and declare their purposes and intentions with reference to each other. The first wedding this was to be, in all our close-knit circle.

"I am glad," said I, "that they are all so sensible as not to permit rivalries to breed discord among us. It might be disastrous."

"There is time," said Alice, "for that to develop yet."

Not that everything happened as we wished. Indeed, some things gave us much anxiety. Bill Trescott, for instance, began at last to show signs of that going up in the air which Jim had said we must keep him from. Even Captain Tolliver complained that Bill's habits were getting bad: and he was the last person in the world to censure excess in the vices which he deemed gentlemanly. His own idea of morning, for instance, was that period of the day when the bad taste in the mouth so natural to a gentleman is removed by a stiff toddy, drunk just before prayers. He would, no doubt, have conceded to the inventor of the alphabet a higher place among men than that of the discoverer of the mint julep, had the matter been presented to him in concrete form; but would have qualified the admission by adding, with a seriousness incompatible with the average conception of a joke: "But the question is sutt'nly one not entiahly free from doubt, suh; not entiahly free from doubt!"

However, the Captain had his standards, and prescribed for himself limits of time, place, and degree, to which he faithfully conformed. But he had been for a long time doing business under a sort of partnership arrangement with Bill, and their affairs had become very much interwoven. So he came to us, one day, in something like a panic, on finding that Bill had become a frequenter of one of the local bucket-shops, and had been making maudlin boasts of the profitable deals he had made.

"This means, gentlemen," said the Captain, "that influences entiahly fo'eign to ouah investments hyah ah likely to bring a crash, which will not only wipe out Mr. Trescott, but, owin' to ouah association in the additions we have platted, cyah'y me down also! You can see that with sev'al hundred thousand dolla's of deferred payments on what we have sold, most of which have been rediscounted in the East by the G. B. T., Mr. Trescott's condition becomes something of serious conce'n fo' you-all, as well as fo' me. Nothing else, I assuah you, gentlemen, could fo'ce me to call attention to a mattah so puahly pussonal as a diffe'nce between gentlemen in theiah standahds of inebriety! Nothing else, believe me!"

By the G. B. T. the Captain meant the Grain Belt Trust Company, and anything which affected its solvency or welfare was, as he said, a matter of serious concern for all of us. In fact, at that very moment there were in Lattimore two officers of New England banks with whom we had placed a rather heavy line of G. B. T. securities, and who had made the trip for the purpose of looking us up. Suppose that they found out that the notes and mortgages of William S. Trescott & Co. really had back of them only some very desirable suburban additions, and the personal responsibility of a retired farmer, who was daily handing his money to board-of-trade gamblers, with whom he was getting an education in the great strides we are making in the matter of mixed drinks? This thought occurred to all of us at once.

"Well," said Cornish, stating the point of agreement after the Captain's trouble had been fully discussed, "unfortunately 'the right to be a cussed fool is safe from all devices human,' and there doesn't seem to be any remedy."

It all came, thought I, as Jim and I sat silent after Cornish and the Captain went out, from the fact that Bill's present condition in life gave those tendencies to which he had always been prone to yield, a chance for unrestricted growth. He ought to have staid with his steers. Cattle and corn were the only things in which he could take an interest sufficiently keen to keep him from drink. These habits of his were enacting the old story of the lop-eared rabbits in Australia—overrunning the country. Bill had been as sober a citizen as one could desire, as long as his house-building occupied his time; and he and Josie had worked together as companionably as they used to do in the hay and wheat. But now he was drifting away from her. Her father should have staid on the farm.

"Do you know," said I, "that Giddings is making about as great a fool of himself as Bill?"

"Yes," said Jim, "but that's because he's in a terrible state of mind about his marriage. If we can keep him from delirium tremens until after the wedding, he'll be all right. Some Italian brain-sharp has written up cases like his, and he'll be all right. But with Bill it's different.... Do you remember our old Shep?"

"No," I returned wonderingly, almost impatiently. "What about him?"

"Well," he mused, "I've been picking up knowledge of men for a while along back; and I've come to prize more highly the personal history of dogs; and Shep was worth a biography for its own sake, to say nothing of the value of a typical case. He was a woolly collie, who would cheerfully have given up his life for the cows and sheep. Anything in his line, that a dog could grasp, Shep knew, and he was busier than a cranberry-merchant the year around, and the happiest thing on the farm. Then our folks moved to Mayville, and took him along. He wasn't fitted for town life at all. He'd lie on the front piazza, and search the street for cows and sheep, and when one came along he'd stick his sharp nose through the fence, and whine as if some one was whipping him. In less than six weeks he bit a baby; in two months he was the most depraved dog in Mayville, and in three ... he died."

I had no answer for the apologue—not even for the self-condemnatory tone in which he told it. Presently he rose to go, and said that he would not be back.

"Don't forget our date at the club this evening," said he, as he passed out. "Your style of diplomacy always seems to win with these down-East bankers. Your experience as rob-ee gives you the right handshake and the subscribed-and-sworn-to look that does their business for 'em every time. Good-by until then."

Our club was the terminal bud of our growth, and was housed in a building of which we were enormously proud. It was managed by a steward imported from New York, whose salary was made large to harmonize with his manners—that being the only way in which the majority of our members felt equal to living up to them. So far as money could make a club, ours was of high rank. There were meat-cooks and pastry-cooks in incredible numbers, under the command of a French chef, who ruled the house committee with a rod of iron. We were all members as a matter of public duty. I have often wondered what the servants, brought from Eastern cities, thought of it all. To see Bill Trescott and Aleck Macdonald going in through the great door, noiselessly swung open for them by an attendant in livery, was a sight to be remembered. The chief ornament of the club was Cornish, who lived there.

"I want to see Mr. Cornish," said I to the servant who took my overcoat, that evening.

"Right this way, sir," said he. "Mr. Giddings is with him. He gave orders for you to be shown up."

Cornish sat at a little round table on which there were some bottles and glasses. The tipple was evidently ale, and Mr. Giddings was standing opposite, lifting a glass in one hand and pointing at it with the other, in evident imitation of the attitude in which the late Mr. Gough loved to have himself pictured; but the sentiments of the two speakers were quite different.

"'Turn out more ale; turn up the light!'"

Giddings glanced at the electric light-fixtures, and then looked about as if for a servant to turn them up.