Part 21 (1/2)

”Here,” handing Bruce a hastily written list. ”You needn't tell them I sent you for it wouldn't do any good. Some of them come in here often but they look upon me as an office fixture--like this mahogany desk, or that Oriental rug.”

”This is mighty good of you,” said Bruce, as grateful as though he had written special letters of endors.e.m.e.nt for him to all his friends.

”Say,” with his impulsive hospitality, ”I wish you could come out and visit me. Couldn't you get away the end of August when the bull-trout and the redsides are biting good?”

”Me?” The clerk started, then he murmured wistfully: ”When the bull-trout and the redsides are biting good! Gee! I like the way that sounds! Then,” with a resigned gesture, ”I was never farther west than South Bethlehem; I never expect to have the price.”

He looked so efficient and well dressed that Bruce had thought he must receive a large salary and he felt badly to learn that the prosperity of such a nice chap was only clothes deep. He promised to look in on him before he left the city and tell him how he had gotten on; then he took his list and went back to the hotel prepared to spend some anxious hours in the time which must intervene before he could expect to hear from his night telegram. He hoped the answer would come in the morning, for disappointments, he had learned, were easier to bear when the sun shone.

The telegram was awaiting him when he returned from an excursion to a department store which had been fraught with considerable excitement. A majestic blonde had a.s.sumed a kind of protectorate over him and dissuaded him from his original intention of buying thirty yards of ruching for Ma Snow with a firmness that approached a refusal to sell him anything so old-fas.h.i.+oned, although he protested that it had looked beautiful in the neck and sleeves of his mother's gowns some fifteen years before. Neglecting to explain that his gift was for a woman all of fifty, a pink crepe-de-chine garment was held alluringly before his embarra.s.sed eyes and a filmy petticoat, from beneath which, in his mind's eye, Bruce could see Pa Snow's carpet-slippers, in which Ma Snow ”eased her feet,” peeping in and out. In the end he fought his way out--through more women than he had seen together in all his life--with a box of silk hose in appallingly vivid colors and a beaded bag which, he had it on the saleslady's honor, was ”all the rage.”

Bruce took the yellow envelope which the desk-clerk handed him and looked at it with a feeling of dread. He had counted the hours until it should come and now he was afraid to open it. It meant so much to him--everything in fact--the moment was a crisis but he managed to tear the envelope across with no outward indication of his dread.

He took in the contents at a glance and there was such relief, such renewed hope in his radiant face that the desk-clerk was moved to observe smilingly: ”Good news, I gather.” And Bruce was so glad, so happy, that for the moment he could think of nothing more brilliant to answer than--”Well I should say so! I should say so!”

XIV

HIS ONLY a.s.sET

It would be a pleasure to record that Capital found Bruce's personality so irresistible that his need of funds met with instant response, that the das.h.i.+ng picturesqueness of his appearance and charm of his unconventional speech and manner was so fascinating that Capital violated all the rules observed by experienced investors and handed out its checks with the cheery ”G.o.d bless you m' boy!” which warms the heart toward Capital in fiction. Such, however, was not the case.

It took only one interview to disabuse Bruce's mind of any faint, sneaking idea he may have had that he was doing Capital a favor for which it would duly thank him. The person whom he honored with his first call strongly conveyed the impression after he had stated his case that he considered that he, Bruce, had obtained valuable time under false pretenses. Certainly the last emotion which he seemed to entertain for the opportunity given him was grat.i.tude, and his refusal to be interested amounted to a curt dismissal.

The second interview, during which Bruce was cross-examined by a cold-eyed gentleman with a cool, impersonal voice, was sufficient to make him realize with tolerable clearness his total unpreparedness. What engineer of recognized standing had reported upon the ground? None! To what extent, then, had the ground been sampled? How many test-pits had been sunk, and how far to bed-rock? What was the yardage? Where were his certified a.s.say sheets, and his engineer's estimate for hydro-electric installation? What transportation facilities?

Bruce, still dazed by the onslaught, had turned and looked at the door which had closed behind him with a briskness which seemed to say ”Good riddance,” and muttered, thinking of the clerk's one sanguine suggestion: ”Personality! I might as well be a hop-toad.”

But in his chagrin he went to extremes in his contemptuous estimate of himself, for there was that about him which generally got him a hearing and a longer one than would have been accorded the average ”promoter”

with nothing more tangible upon which to raise money than his unsupported word. His Western phraseology and sometimes humorous similes, his unexpected whimsicalities and a certain navete secretly amused many of those whom he approached, though they took the best of care not to show it lest he mistake their interest in himself for interest in his proposition.

One or two went so far as to pa.s.s him on by giving him the name of a friend, but, mostly, they listened coldly, critically, and refused with some faint excuse or none. There was no harder task that Bruce could have set himself than applying to such men for financial help for, underneath, he was still the sensitive boy who had bolted from the dinner-table in tears and anger to escape his father's ridicule, and, furthermore, he was accustomed to the friendly spirit and manner of the far West.

The chilling stiffness, the skepticism and suspicion, the curtness which was close to rudeness, at first bewildered, then hurt and humiliated him, finally filling him with a resentment which was rapidly reaching a point where it needed only an uncivil word or act too much to produce an explosion.

But if he was like that boy of other days in his quick pride, neither had he lost the tenacity of purpose which had kept him dragging one sore, bare foot after the other to get to his mother when the gulches he had to pa.s.s were black and full of ghostly, fearsome things that the hired man had seen when staying out late o' nights. This trait now kept him trudging grimly from one office to another, offering himself a target for rebuffs that to him had the sting of insults.

He had come to know so well what to expect that he shrank painfully from each interview. It required a strong effort of will to turn in at the given number and ask for the man he had come to see, and when he saw him it required all his courage to explain the purpose of his call. Bruce understood fully now how he was handicapped by the lack of data and the fact that he was utterly unknown, but so long as there was one glimmer of hope that someone would believe him, would see the possibilities in his proposition as he saw them, and investigate for himself Bruce would not quit. The list of names the clerk had given him and many others had long since been exhausted. Looking back it seemed to him that he was a babe in swaddling clothes when he started out with his telegram and his addresses, so full of high hopes and the roseate expectations of inexperience.

Day after day he plodded, his dark face set in grim lines of purpose, following up clews leading to possible investors which he obtained here and there, and always with the one result. What credentials had he? To what past successes could he point? None? Ah, good-day.

One morning Bruce opened his eyes and the conviction that he had failed leaped into his mind as though it had been waiting like a cat at a mouse hole to pounce upon him the instant of his return to consciousness.

”You have failed! You have got to give up! You are done!” The words pounding into his brain affected him like hammer blows over the heart.

He laid motionless, inert, his face grown sallow upon the pillow, and he thought that the feelings of a condemned man listening to the building of his gallows must be something like his own.

Those who have struggled for something, tried with all their heart and soul, fought to the last atom of their strength, and failed, know something of the sickening heaviness, the dull, aching depression which takes the vitality and seems actually to slow up the beating of the heart.

Out in the world, he told himself, where men won things by their brains, he had failed like any pitiable weakling; that he had been handicapped by unpreparedness was no palliation of the crime of failure. Ignorance was no excuse. In humiliation and chagrin he attributed the mistakes of inexperience to lack of intelligence. His mother had over-estimated him, he had over-estimated himself. It was presumption to have supposed he was fitted for anything but manual labor. Sprudell had been right, he thought bitterly, when he had sneered that muscle was his only a.s.set.

He could see himself loading his belongings into Slim's old boat, his blankets and the tattered soogan and bobbing through the rapids with the blackened coffee-pot, the frying pan, and lard cans jingling in the bottom, while Sprudell, with his hateful, womanish smile, watched his ignominious departure. Bruce drew his sleeve across his damp forehead.