THE FALLS
According to his promise, Dick presented himself at Ellery's office on
the next afternoon. He wore a brisk and moving air.
"Miss Quincy is not here to-day," Norris said without looking up.
"I know it," Dick answered promptly. "Are you through yet?"
"I've finished with the ephemeræ of this particular Tuesday, and before
I begin on those of Wednesday, I have a few precious moments to waste on
you." Ellery wheeled his chair around.
"Do you know that this is Decoration Day and a holiday?"
"Is there anything a sub-editor does not know?"
"Have you ever been to the Falls of Wabeno?"
"No."
"And you call yourself a true citizen of St. Etienne? Come with me and
see the populace chew gum amid scenes of natural beauty."
"I thought we were going to agitate civic reform."
"We'll agitate as we go along. Come, Ellery, it's a superb day. I feel
like the bursting buds. Let's get out."
"My dear Dick," said Norris, "the trouble with you is that you never
want to do anything; you always want to do something else. I begin to
think that there are compensations to a man in having fate hold his nose
to the grindstone. He learns persistence, willy-nilly."
"Stop your growling. Up, William, up, and quit your galley-proof. I am
willing to bet that my flashes in the pan will do things before I am
through."
"I dare swear they will get way ahead of my grubbing," Ellery rejoined,
slamming his desk. "Come, I'll go with you."
On the southern outskirts of the city lay a park where art had done no
more than retouch nature. Here a placid stream suddenly transformed
itself into an imposing waterfall, plunging with roars over a rocky
cliff, and sending its spray whirling high in air to paint a hundred
illusive rainbows amid outstretching tree-branches or against a somber
background of stone.
Dick left his motor near the brink of the cliff above the Falls and the
two climbed down the steep bank, stopping now and again to yield to the
fascination of rushing water and to snuff the fresh-flying mist as it
swept into their faces.
Caught in the gully below, the stream, which had suddenly contracted a
habit of unruliness, tumbled onward under trees and through overhanging
rocks until it joined the Mississippi a half-mile away.
There were other people, hordes of them, tempted by May sunshine.
"What is it, Ellery," Dick demanded, "what deep-seated idealism is it
that draws these crowds to the most beautiful spot near town as soon as
spring offers more than half an invitation?"
"It certainly isn't a poetry that crops out in their clothes or in their
conversation," Norris grumbled. "The staple remark seems to be, 'Gee,
ain't it pretty?'"
"You mustn't expect to see aristocracy here; this is too cheap, and too
easy to reach. Your aristocrat prefers less beauty at greater effort
and more cost. This is the place to touch elbows with the populace."
They had climbed down the long winding steps by this time, and were
leaning against the parapet of a small rustic bridge that crossed below
the Falls.
"Let's sit down on that bench," said Dick, "and let the sunshine trickle
through the trees and through us, and feel the spray in our nostrils,
and delight in hanging maidenhair ferns, and watch the girls go by--the
girls in pink and blue dresses, each leaning on the arm of a swain who
grins. It's vastly more fun than a fashionable parade."
The branches met overhead, darkening the narrow chasm; the steep banks
were spattered with dutchman's breeches that fluttered like butterflies
poised for a moment; down stream a few yards, where the valley widened,
lay a tiny meadow where the sun fell full on a carpet of crow-foot
violets that gave back the May sky. Two squirrels chased each other
around a big maple, and a blue jay looked on and commented.
"Why is this stream of girls and men out for their holiday like baked
ice-cream?" asked Dick. "That isn't a conundrum; it's a philosophic
question."
"I know, they give you the same sense of incongruity," Ellery answered
lazily.
"But I like them," Dick pursued. "I like a great many more kinds of
people than you do, Norris. You are narrow-minded. You want to associate
only with the good and true and bathed."
"Oh, I wish well to the majority of the race, but there are some that I
do not care to eat with."
Something in Ellery's voice made his friend turn and survey him.
"You look tired. You're working too hard. Don't make the western mistake
of thinking frazzled nerves mean energy."
"That isn't my kind," Ellery smiled. "I'm all right. Let me spurt for a
while. I got my position through favor, Dick, yours and Uncle Joe's. I
didn't particularly deserve it, and I didn't know anything about the
work; so, for your sake as well as my own, I have determined to make
good. Friendship may give a fellow his chance, but it doesn't hold down
a job, you know."
"Pooh! You've made good already. A man can be tremendously
experienced--for the West--when he's been at a thing a year. Look at me
and my work."
"What do you consider your work? Road inspector?" For, to tell the
truth, Norris was not wholly satisfied with Dick's year of dawdling
around the streets.
"My profession," Dick answered with oracular gravity, "is a combination
of hard work and fine art. It requires both toil and genius. I think I
may say, with all natural modesty, that I have shown great natural
aptitude for it. My profession is making friends. I have made friends
useful and ornamental, friends great and small, friends beautiful and
friends the opposite--which reminds me of your previous question, city
politics. Whom do you suppose I supped with last night?"
"Whom?"
"With the Honorable, or by courtesy dubbed Honorable, William Barry,"
Dick replied triumphantly.
"'Piggy' Barry?" ejaculated Ellery, turning on Dick in surprise.
"Alderman Barry? The boss?"
"'Piggy' does somehow sound more appropriate than 'Honorable'," Dick
said meditatively.
"And is he one of the people you like?" questioned Ellery with unfeigned
surprise.
"For business purposes, yes. If I'm going to get into politics some day,
it becomes me to cultivate local statesmen, doesn't it? I took the great
man to the theater, or at least to something that called itself the
theater, and I gave him an excellent supper afterward. He seemed to
appreciate it and my society."
"I dare say you made yourself agreeable. Do you expect he will help you
in your public career?"
"Not voluntarily, perhaps; but I wanted to know him, better and better.
Under benign influences, he is indiscreet. He reminded me last night of
Louis XIV. He might have said, 'St. Etienne, it is I,' but in his
simpler and less sophisticated language, he was content to remark, 'I'm
the whole damn show, see?'"
"I'm glad he knew enough to put the appropriate adjective before show,"
said Ellery grimly.
"And yet I suspect that, even in that statement, he lied," Dick went on.
"I studied him last night. You'll never persuade me that that man, whose
head is all face and neck, does the intricate planning and wire-pulling
that runs this city. I've an idea Barry is only the two placards on each
side of the sandwich-man. He may be the adjective show, but I doubt if
he's the man."
"Have you discovered who is the real sandwich-man?"
"No, I haven't. My reasoning is inductive. I see numerous little holes
with small tips of threads sticking through them, but when I try to get
hold of the threads to pull them out and examine them, the ends are too
short or my fingers are too big. But get hold of them I shall, sooner or
later, by hook or crook. If I don't give some of those fellows the
slugging of their lives, my name isn't Richard Percival."
"I suspect that it is Richard Percival," said Ellery with a whimsical
glance of affection.
"This, as I read it, is the history," Dick went on. "Six years ago, when
you and I were sub-freshmen, and unable to take an active part, there
was a brief spasm of reform. It was a short episode of fisticuffs and
fighting, which is for a day--a very different thing from governing,
which goes steadily on from year to year. But this reform movement did
result in giving the city a good charter."
"The Garden of Eden was once fitted out with an excellent system of
government."
"Exactly. Charters, left to themselves, do not regulate human nature.
The good citizens of St. Etienne went their own busy business way and
left the less occupied bad citizens to adapt the charter to the needs of
life; and that was an easy job, so easy that it has apparently been
possible for one man to manage it. The charter put great power into the
hands of the mayor. There have been three mayors elected under it, and
they have all been 'friends' of Billy Barry."
"I wonder if the next will be," queried Ellery thoughtfully.
"And the majority of every working committee appointed by the city
council is made of 'friends' of Piggy, who shows a fine disregard of
party lines in his affiliations. William is one more product of this
horseless wireless age--a crownless king."
"What makes you think that he isn't the power he seems?"
"A lot of things. The business interests behind him do not seem to be
wholly his. That is another field for investigation."
"You started yesterday to tell me about a big policeman."
"Yes, Olaf Ericson, with the eyes and mustache of a viking above a blue
uniform. When I met him last he had just had the melancholy duty of
cutting down a poor wretch that had hung himself, and of sending for the
coroner. He told me that the pathetic part of it was that the dead man
was a total stranger in the city; and then he winked and asked if I knew
that though the city paid the coroner his salary, the state guaranteed
an extra fee of 'saxty dollar' to that official for every stranger who
met with sudden death within our limits? I didn't know, but I do now. I
took pains to look up last year's records and, curiously enough, out of
one hundred and seventy-six cases that required the services of a
coroner, one hundred and fifty-one were those of strangers. That would
add about nine thousand dollars to a quite moderate salary. Another
queer thing is that Doctor Niger--the coroner, you know--is Billy
Barry's brother-in-law."
"Great Scott!" said Ellery.
"Great Barry, say I. Now it may be my historic sense, or it may be mere
curiosity, but I mean to hunt up the personal history of those
hundred-odd strangers who died forlorn and lonely within our gates."
"Work quietly, Dick, and get your facts well in hand."
"I intend to. But when I have it all, don't you suppose your chief,
Lewis, will be willing to publish the record?"
"I hope so."
"I dare say the day will come when Barry and I shall cease to be
friends," said Dick cheerfully. "One must submit to the inevitable. But
let's keep the papers dribbling out information to the public. By the
time the coroner story is finished, I expect to have another ready."
"Tell me."
"Not yet. What used old Eddy to preach to us in rhetoric? 'Before you
attempt composition, be sure that you have a rounded thought.' This
isn't round, it's elliptical. Big Olaf is a friend useful. He's a shrewd
fellow, who's been looking stupid for some time. The 'bunch' hasn't been
treating him square. You can guess what that means. Anyway, he is sore
as well as shrewd, and now I fancy he belongs to me."
Norris turned with a start and stared Dick in the face.
"How did you get possession of him?" he asked sharply.
"Well, what if I bought him?"
"Do you mean that you are making up to him what Barry's dirty hands
have failed to give? You are bribing him to act as your spy?"
"I do not suppose there is any harm in my hiring a private detective."
"That depends on whether he is already a public official, and on how you
pay him, and what you pay him for."
"Ellery, those fellows have sentries and pickets and fortifications and
guns always in battle-array against us and our kind. The only thing to
do is to gather hosts and ammunition on the other side."
"True. But there isn't any use in fighting dishonesty with dishonor.
Dick, don't lower your standard to the mere flinging of mud."
But Dick did not appear to listen. His eyes were caught by one of the
passing couples and he sprang to his feet.
"Let's follow the stream a little farther," he said, moving as he spoke.
"The gorge grows wilder and more enticing the farther you go."
He walked hurriedly down the path, and Ellery, whose mind seldom leaped,
but progressed by orderly steps, followed in some bewilderment. An
instant before Dick's face had worn the profound air of a man on whose
shoulders rested mighty problems. Now every movement was boyish and
exultant. He laughed to himself. The stream thundered and one does not
ask a friend to shout out his minor moods, so Ellery forbore to
question.
Suddenly the brook burst through overhanging cliffs of party-colored
sandstone out of its thread-like gorge into the wide chasm of the
Mississippi. A small steamer lay at anchor and tooted a discordant horn
to signify to the world that she intended to be up and doing. A crowd of
phlegmatic-faced revelers stood upon the bank and watched her with
absorbed indifference, while a smaller number pushed aboard and prepared
for true joy by laying in a store of cracker-jack and peanuts at a
diminutive counter.
"Just in time!" Dick ejaculated and he shoved Ellery on to the swaying
deck as the hawsers were swung loose.
They whirled out into mid-stream and exchanged the fine feminine
delights of the brook for the bold masculine ones of the great river,
whose craggy banks rose high, like fortifications, forest-crowned.
Tangles of woodbine, clematis and bitter-sweet sprawled down over
striated rocks. The boat twisted its way through a current that boiled
up from below in whirlpools. Here and there huge logs plunged downward
like water-monsters, as they threaded between wooded islands, where
meek-looking cottontails squatted and twiddled their noses at the
passing craft; on, on, until, far off, loomed the boldest highest cliff
of all, its top crested by a quaint old slit-windowed round tower of a
fort, once a border defense against Chippewa and Sioux, now backed by
the sleek lawns of well-groomed officers.
Ellery looked around at his fellow passengers, contentedly munching
their peanuts and conversing in broad English flavored with Norse. They
were a good-natured assemblage, who choked and snorted and chuckled and
whinnied in their laughter. Norris' eyes were caught by one girl,
conspicuously because plainly dressed. As she turned her profile, he
glanced at Dick. Dick too was staring at her, and even while Ellery eyed
him, he raised his hat and bowed gravely, with a deferential air that
became him.
"So," exclaimed Norris under his breath, "that was why we tore like
madmen to catch this boat!"
"It would have been a pity to lose it," Dick responded innocently. "It
is a delicious bit of scenery from here to the fort. I wanted you to see
it."
"Pink and white scenery with yellow curls," jeered Ellery.
Dick made no reply and Ellery went on.
"She has a young man already. You can't go and take her away from him.
That wouldn't be playing fair."
"The man with her is an oaf. He has a loose mouth that wabbles when he
opens it to pick his teeth."
"So you think that though you may not snatch her bodily, you may make
her wish to be with you instead of with him, and that the wish will lie
fallow in her heart. Dick, you are a student of human nature," Ellery
said, half amused, half irritated.
"I dare say he is a gentleman at heart. Oafs always are."
"What you really do," Ellery continued, "is to make her uncomfortable
and conscious of his clothes and his sprawl. She flushed when she saw
you, and she has been sitting stiffly ever since."
"Oh, drop it, Norris."
Ellery shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know what you want to do it for," he said. "You're a queer
combination, Dick, of the whole-souled reformer and the abject goose."
"Nothing inconsistent about being a philanthropist and a philogynist. By
Jove! She's pretty in her _malaise_, pink, and pecking like a little
wren at her oaf. Ellery, it's a brute of a shame that such as she should
be cast before him--she, a fine lacy creature who shows her breeding
through it all."
"How much are you in earnest?"
"There you go again!" Dick turned on his friend with a kind of
exasperation. "You belong to that period of social development when they
ask a man's intentions if he looks twice at the girl he dances with. I
don't have to be in earnest, thank Heaven! But when I get a chance to
look at anything so lovely as that girl, I mean to do it, just as I look
at a flower or a picture. I don't mean to lose all the delicious froth
of life. Do you happen to know her first name?"
"Lena," answered Ellery shortly.
"Lena! It's a delicate fragile little name--not meant for a girl who has
to plug her way through life. Her real name is Andromeda, poor
child--chained to the rock and momently expecting the jaws of poverty."
"You know, Dick, the attention that seems like a trifle to you, with a
life full of interests, may look like a serious affair to her."
"See here, old man, you needn't be so snippy. Must I confine my
philanthropy to the old and ugly to keep it above suspicion? I'm just so
far interested in this, and no more, that I'm sorry for that little
girl, and if I saw a chance, I'd do her a good turn, as I pass along;
and if I didn't think more of you than of any other man, I wouldn't give
you the satisfaction of rendering so much of an account of myself."
Ellery was silent and looked at the river with its whirlpools, at the
cliffs, gray with stone and pale green with May, and sometimes at Dick,
who leaned forward with his chin in his hand, apparently absorbed in
thought, but occasionally shooting a glance at Lena who laughed and
chattered with Mr. Nolan in a sort of intermittent fever.
The steamer tooted and splashed at the landing below the fort, and
turned herself about for the return trip. Sand-martins dropped from
their holes in the cliffs and skimmed across the bows, and the breeze
blew fresher as they headed up stream. Still the two friends sat in
silence, though once Percival looked across and laughed, as though he
enjoyed the other's seriousness.
"Norris, you are funny," he said.
"Why?"
"You always see consequences to things."
"Most things have both causes and effects," Ellery retorted, ruffled.
"I deny it," said Dick.
When they creaked at the dock, Dick suddenly pushed forward so that he
almost touched Lena in the crowd that was hurrying to shore.
"Good afternoon, Miss Quincy," he said. "I hope you have enjoyed this
little sail as much as I have."
Knowing that he had watched her ever since they started, she looked up
at him with flushed inquiry.
"Yes, it was lovely," she said.
"Come on, Lena," exclaimed her escort, seizing her arm. "I guess we
ought to hurry. There'll be an awful crowd on the street-cars."
"If you'll allow me," said Dick, "I have an automobile up near the
Falls, and I'd be delighted to--"
"We come by the cars and I guess they're good enough for us to go home
by," Mr. Nolan interrupted roughly. "We're blocking the way here. Come,
Lena." He glowered at Dick's lifted hat and added quite audibly:
"Confound the dude! Thought he could cut in, did he?"
"Now then," said Dick as he dropped back, "the oaf made a mistake. If
he'd gracefully accepted my offer, he'd have gone up several pegs in her
estimation. As it is, when her pretty little feet get trodden on by the
crowd on the back platform, she will view us with regret as we whizz by.
Poor little Andromeda!"
They loitered as the other "trippers", now filled with zeal to catch the
trolley, pushed past them up the glen, and soon they were practically
alone. Nature reasserted her sway as though there had never been
laughter and babble along the musical stream and under the over-arching
trees. The friends walked more and more slowly. A white thing lay on the
path before them, and Dick stooped to pick it up, while Ellery looked on
with mild curiosity.
"It's a letter, stamped and sealed." Percival peered at it closely, for
though the level sunlight flooded the tops of the trees, down here by
the stream it was fast growing dark.
"Not much sealed, either," he added, noticing what a tiny spot of the
flap stuck tight to the paper beneath. "Some one has dropped it here. By
Jove, Ellery, it's addressed to William Barry! I'd give a farm in North
Dakota to know what's in it."
He turned it again and stared at the back.
"I noticed," said Ellery, "that there was a mail-box near where we left
the automobile. You can post it as we go along."
"Yes," assented Dick. He glared at the name of William Barry as though
it fascinated him. Then he tucked the letter into his breast pocket.
As the motor began to champ its bit, Norris remarked:
"You forgot to mail that letter, Dick."
"So I did," said Dick. "No matter. I'll post it in town. It will go all
the quicker."