Part 20 (1/2)

”Dr. Aylesbury has given him a morphia injection,” said he, ”and he is sound asleep. The doctor thinks it best for us to carry him right to his room. There is a man here from the hospital, who will stay and nurse him; and the doctor came, too.”

Mrs. Trescott started up, saying that she must arrange his room. Soon the four of us had placed him in bed, where he lay, puffy and purple, with a sort of pasty pallor overspreading his face. His limbs occasionally jerked spasmodically; but otherwise he was still under the spell of the opiate. His wife, now that there was something definite to do, was self-possessed and efficient, taking the physician's instructions with ready apprehension. The fact that Bill had now a.s.sumed the character of a patient rather than that of a portent seemed to make the trouble, somehow, more normal and endurable. The wife and daughter insisted upon a.s.suming the care of him, but a.s.sented to the nurse's remaining as a help in emergencies. It was nearing dawn when I took my leave. As I approached the door, I saw Jim and Josie in the hall, and heard him making some last tenders of aid and comfort before his departure. He put out his hand, and she clasped it in both of hers.

”I want to thank you,” said she, ”for what you have done.”

”I have done nothing,” he replied. ”It is what I wish to do that I want you to think of. I do not know whether I shall ever be able to forgive myself--”

”No, no!” said she. ”You must not talk--you must not allow yourself to feel in that way. It is unjust--to yourself and to--me--for you to feel so!”

I advanced to them, but she still stood looking into his face and holding his hand clasped in hers. There was something of appeal, of an effort to express more than the words said, in her look and att.i.tude. He answered her regard by a gaze so pathetically wistful that she averted her face, pressed his hand, and turned to me.

”Good-night to you both, and thank you both, a thousand times!” said she.

”I wonder if old Shep's relations and friends,” said Jim, as we stood under the arc light in front of my house, ”ever came to forgive the people who took him away from his flocks and herds.”

”After what I've seen in the last few minutes,” said I, ”I haven't the least doubt of it.”

”Al,” said he, ”these be troublous times, but if I believed all that what you say implies, I'd go home happy, if not jolly. And I almost believe you're right.”

”Well,” said I, a.s.suming for once the role of the mentor, ”I think that you are foolish to worry about it. We have enough actual, well-defined, surveyed and platted grief on our hands, without any mooning about hunting for the speculative variety. Go home, sleep, and bring down a clear brain for to-morrow's business.”

”To-day's,” said he gaily. ”Tear off yesterday's leaf from the calendar, Al. For, look! the morn, dressed as usual, 'walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.'”

CHAPTER XVII.

Relating to the Disposition of the Captives.

It was not later than the next day but one, that I met Giddings, alert, ingratiating, and natty as ever.

”When am I to have the third stanza?” I inquired, ”the one that's 'the best of all.'”

This question he seemed to take as a rebuke; for he reddened, while he tried to laugh.

”Barslow,” said he, ”there isn't any use in our discussing this thing.

You couldn't understand it. A man like you, who can calculate to a hair just how far he is going and just where to turn back, and--Oh, d.a.m.n!

There's no use!”

I sympathize with Giddings, at this present moment, in his despair of making people understand; for I doubt, sometimes, whether it is possible for me to make the reader understand the conditions with us in Lattimore at the time when poor Trescott lay there in his fine house, fighting for life, and for many things more important, and while the wedding preparations were going forward at the General's house.

To the steady-going, stationary, pa.s.sionless community these conditions approach the incomprehensible. No one seemed to doubt the city's future now. Sometimes the abnormal basis upon which our great new industries had been established struck the stranger with distrust, if he happened to have the insight to notice it; but the concerns _were there_ most undeniably, and had s.h.i.+fted population in their coming, and were turning out products for the markets of the world.

That they had been evolved magically, and set in operation, not by any slow process of meeting a felt want, but for this sole purpose of s.h.i.+fting population, might be, and undoubtedly was, unusual; but given the natural facilities for carrying the business on, and how did this forced genesis adversely affect their prospects?

I, for one, could see no reason for apprehension. Yet when the story of Trescott's maudlin plunging came to our ears, and the effect of his possible failure received consideration, or I thought of the business explosion which would follow any open breach between Jim and Cornish (though this seemed too remote for serious consideration), I began to ponder on the enormously complex system of credits we had built up.

Besides the regular line of bonds and mortgages growing out of debts due us on our real-estate sales, and against which we had issued the debentures and the guaranteed rediscounts of the Grain Belt Trust Company, the factories, stock yards, terminals, street-car system, and most of our other properties were pretty heavily bonded. Some of them were temporarily unproductive, and funds had from time to time to be provided, from sources other than their own earnings, for the payment of their interest-charges. On the whole, however, we had been able to carry the entire line forward from position to position with such success that the people were kept in a fever, and accessions to our population kept pouring in which, of their own force, added fuel to the fire of expectancy.

This one thing began to make me uneasy--there was no place to stop. A failure among us would quench this expectancy, and values would no longer increase. And everything was organized on the basis of the continued crescendo. That was the reason why every uplift in prices had been followed by a new and strenuous effort on our part to hoist them still higher. For that reason, we, who had become richer than we had ever hoped to be, kept toiling on to rear to greater and greater heights an edifice which the eternal forces of nature itself clutched, to drag down.