Part 18 (2/2)

”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 a.s.sociations 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 pa.s.sengers. 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 gra.s.s, 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 partners.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.suah 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.

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