“The point we want to hammer in is that we--the Ward family--are the
only people in Sycamore county who are in touch with the Campbell
power, social and financial,” John elucidated to his friend Townley.
“Modest, retiring to the point of utter self-effacement as we, the
Wards, are, no other family in the community has ever been honored by
a visit from so big a bunch of assets. And when it comes to social
prominence their coming will link Kernville right on to Newport where
old Walter Scott Campbell owns one of the lordliest villas. Here’s
a picture of it I found in ‘Summer Homes of Great Americans.’ We’ll
feed in the pictorial stuff from time to time, using this photograph
of Mrs. Campbell mother keeps on the upright at home, and that cut of
Walter Scott I dug out of your office graveyard. Your record shows you
ran it the time the old money-devil was indicted under the Sherman law
for conspiracy against the peace and dignity of the United States in
a fiendish attempt to boost the price of bathtubs. The indictment was
quashed as to the said Walter because he was laid up with whooping
cough when the wicked attack on the free ablutions of the American
people was planned or concocted, and he denied all responsibility for
the acts of his proxy.”
“You’ve got to hand it to that lad,” said Townley ruminatively.
“Anything you can do to put me in the way of a soft snap as private
secretary for his majesty would be appreciated. I’ve had considerable
experience in keeping my friends out of jail and I might be of use to
him.”
John rose early on Sunday morning to inspect his handiwork in the
section of the _Journal_ devoted to the goings and comings, the
entertainments past and prospective and the club activities of
Kernville. Townley had eliminated the usual group of portraits of
the brides of the week that Mrs. Walter Scott Campbell’s handsome
countenance might be spread across three columns in the center of the
page. The photograph of Mrs. Campbell had been admirably reproduced,
and any one informed in such matters would know instantly that she was
the sort of woman who looks well in evening gowns and that her pearl
necklace was of unquestionable authenticity.
The usual double column “lead” was devoted wholly to the announcement
of the visit of the Walter Scott Campbells of New York and Newport
to the Robert Fleming Wards of Kernville, with all biographical data
necessary to establish the Campbells in the minds of intelligent
readers as persons of indubitable eminence entitled to the most
distinguished consideration in every part of the world. Mrs. Campbell,
John had learned from “Distinguished American Women,” was a Mayflower
descendant, a Colonial Dame and a Daughter of the Revolution, besides
being a trustee of eighteen separate and distinct philanthropies, and
all these matters were impressively set forth. Mr. Campbell’s clubs in
town and country required ten lines for their recital. Any jubilation
over the coming of so much magnificence was neatly concealed under the
generalization that the horizon of Kernville was rapidly widening and
that there was bound to be more and more communication between New York
and Kernville. Mrs. Ward, the article concluded, had not yet decided
in just what manner she would entertain for the Campbells, but the
representative people of the city would undoubtedly have an opportunity
to meet her guests.
“The first gun is fired!” John whispered, thrusting the paper through
Helen’s bed-room door. “Read and ponder well!”
Mrs. Ward read the announcement aloud at the breakfast table as soberly
as though it were a new constitution for her favorite club.
“That Miss Givens who does the society news for the _Journal_ has more
sense than I gave her credit for,” she said. “There isn’t a word in
that piece that isn’t true. But that portrait of Ruth is a trifle too
large; you ought to have warned them about that! When Tetrazzini sang
here they didn’t print her picture half as big as that.”
“Well, mother, the _Journal_ simply begged for a photograph. People of
note don’t mind publicity. They simply eat it up!”
“Well, the article is really very nice,” said Mrs. Ward, “but I hope
they won’t say anything more until the Campbells arrive.”
John, aware that several columns more bearing upon the Campbell visit
were already in type in the _Journal_ office, was grateful to Helen for
changing the subject to a pertinent discussion of the proper shade of
wall paper for the guest-room.
On Tuesday the _Journal’s_ first page contained a news-article on
the crying need of enlarged railway facilities, adroitly written to
embody the hope of the transportation committee of the Chamber of
Commerce, that when Mr. Walter Scott Campbell of the board of directors
of the Transcontinental paid his expected visit to the city he would
take steps to change the reactionary policy of the road’s operating
department. The same article stated with apparent authority that Robert
Fleming Ward, the well-known attorney, whose guest Mr. Campbell would
be, had pledged himself to assist the mayor and the Chamber of Commerce
to the utmost in urging Kernville’s needs upon the great capitalist.
“See here, John, you’ve got to be careful about this Campbell
business!” Mr. Ward’s tone was severe. “I know without your telling me
you inspired that piece in this morning’s paper. Campbell never saw me
in his life and that article gives the impression that he and I are old
cronies. It’s going to cause us all a lot of embarrassment. It won’t
do!”
“Sorry if it bothers you, father; but there’s nothing untrue in that
article. You’ll be the only man in town who can get Campbell’s ear. If
he refuses to interest himself in a new freight house and that sort of
thing, that’s his affair.”
The stenographer knocked to announce Mr. Pickett.
“Say to him,” replied John, indifferently, “that we are in conference
but he can see us in just a moment.”
“Pickett!” exclaimed Ward, senior, as the door closed. “What on earth
brings him here!”
“The Campbells are coming,” replied John with a grin. “Pickett’s
president of the Water Power Company, and he wants to line us up to get
Campbell interested in making a new bond deal.”
“Humph! If that’s what he wants I like his nerve. We don’t even speak
when we meet.”
“You’ll be speaking now! Let’s go out and give him the glad hand of
brotherly greeting.”
A little diffident at first, Wesley T. Pickett warmed under the spell
of the Wards’ magnanimity.
“I’ve regretted very much our little differences----” he began.
“There’s no feeling on our side at all, Mr. Pickett,” John declared and
his father, a little dazed, murmured his acquiescence in this view of
the matter, and eyed with interest a formidable bundle of documents in
Pickett’s hands.
“Fact is,” remarked Pickett, with a sheepish grin as he re-crossed
his legs, “you were dead right on that matter of the pollution of the
river. Swiggert probably did the best he could with our defense but you
were right when you told me I’d save money and avoid arousing hostile
feeling in the community by pleading guilty.”
“It’s always disagreeable to be obliged to tell a man he hasn’t a good
case,” Ward announced.
“Well, I want you to know I respect you for your honesty. Swiggert
encouraged me to think he might get us off on some technical defect in
the statute, and it cost me a two thousand dollar fee to find he was
wrong.”
“The point he raised was an interesting one,” Ward remarked mildly,
“and he might have made it stick.”
“But he didn’t!” Pickett retorted a little savagely. “Now I got a
matter I want the God’s truth about, absolutely. It’s a row I’ve got
into with a few of my stockholders in the glass company. The fools got
the idea of freezing me out! It’s all in these papers, and I want you
to give it all the time it needs, but I want an opinion,--no more than
you can get on a letter sheet. Swiggert uses too many words and I’ve
got to have a yes or no.”
The thought of being frozen out caused Mr. Pickett to swell with
indignation. He turned from father to son in an unvoiced but eloquent
appeal to be saved from so monstrous and impious an assault upon his
dignity.
“Certainly, Mr. Pickett,” said the senior Ward, accepting the papers.
“We’ll be glad to take up the matter. It’s possible I may have to ask
some questions----”
“That will be all right, Ward! I don’t mind telling you I’m a good deal
worried about this thing. I’m at the Elks Club most every noon, and
if you’ll just ’phone when you’re ready to see me we can have lunch
together. Now, I guess a retainer’s the usual thing. What do you say to
a thousand or two?”
John with difficulty refrained from screaming that two would be much
more to the taste of the firm, but his father’s gentle and slightly
tremulous murmur that one thousand would be satisfactory stilled him.
The check written with a flourish, lay on the edge of Ward senior’s
desk while Pickett abused the enemies who were trying to wrest from him
the control of the glass company.
“I’m familiar with the general question you indicate,” said Ward,
senior; “I went into it a while back in a similar case for a client in
Newton county; we shall give it our best attention.”
“I got confidence in you!” blurted Pickett. “That’s why I brought the
job here.” He thrust a big cigar into his mouth and began feeling in
his pocket for a match which John instantly supplied.
“Notice by the paper,” remarked Pickett, “that Campbell of the
Transcontinental’s comin’ out. If you could arrange it, I’d like a
chance to talk to him about the Water Power bonds the Sutphen Trust’s
handled for us. I went to New York a couple of weeks ago to see
about refunding and I couldn’t get near anybody but the fourth vice
president. Wouldn’t want to bother you, but if I could just get a
chance at Campbell and show him the plant----”
“I’m sure that can be arranged very easily,” John answered quickly,
noting a look of apprehension on his father’s face. “It will be a
pleasure to arrange a meeting for you.”
“I’d particularly appreciate it,” said Pickett, shaking hands with both
of them; and John accompanied him to the head of the stairway, where
they shook hands again.
“You don’t think,” asked Ward, senior, looking up from Pickett’s
papers, which he had already spread out on his desk,--“you don’t really
think the Campbells had anything to do with this----”
“Not a thing, dad!” John replied gayly. “I’ll just call up Helen and
tell her to go ahead with the redecorating and other things necessary
to put our house in order for royalty!”
John had deposited Pickett’s check and was crossing the lobby of the
Kernville National when he met Jason V. Kirby leaving the officers’
corner.
“Hello, John!” exclaimed the brick manufacturer affably. “Haven’t seen
you round much of late. Funny I ran into you; just going up to see you.
You know Taylor’s my lawyer, but he’s in Chicago trying a long case,
and I got an abstract of title I’m in a hurry to have examined. Glad
if you or your father would pass on it. Farm I’m buying out in Decatur
township.”
“Certainly, Mr. Kirby; we can give it immediate attention,” John
replied as though it were a common occurrence for him to pick up
business in this fashion.
To Kirby’s suggestion that if he didn’t mind he might walk over to
the brick company’s office and get the abstract, John answered that
he didn’t mind in the least. The abstract was bulky, and John roughly
estimated that a report on it would be worth at least a hundred
dollars. Kirby explained that the land was needed for the extension of
the brick business and that he had taken a ten-day option to keep a
rival company from picking it up.
“Look here, John,” remarked Kirby carelessly, as John started off with
the abstract in his pocket, “I see that the Campbells are coming out to
visit your folks. Don’t let ’em overlook Kirby brick. We’re reachin’
right out for New York business.”
“Certainly, Mr. Kirby. Father has it in mind to take Mr. Campbell for
an inspection of all our industries, and I’ll give you the tip so you
can be all set to show off your plant.”
“Occurs to me Campbell might make a short speech to our workmen; just a
nice friendly jolly, you understand.”
“That will be perfectly simple, Mr. Kirby. Trust me to arrange it.”
V
When John and his father reached home, Helen fell upon her brother’s
neck.
“I’ve lost that wager! We’re invited!”
“Ah! The poison is at work, is it? Did it come special post, or did
their dusky Senegambian bear the cards hither upon a golden plate?”
“Neither! Mrs. Kirby and Jeannette called and left them personally. I
was making bread when they arrived but I had the presence of mind to
shed my apron on my way to the door to let them in. Mother was darning
socks but she came down and they stayed so long the bread burned to a
cinder.”
“A few loaves of bread are nothing--nothing!”
“But, John, dear, I think maybe----” began Mrs. Ward, uncertainly and
paused, noting that her husband was emptying a satchel of important
looking papers as though he expected to spend the evening at work. He
appeared more cheerful than she had seen him in years.
“Better let John have his way,” said Ward, senior. “The Campbells are
driving business into the office and we’re not going to turn it away.”
“It’s your ability that’s bringing the business; you’ve always been a
bigger man than Taylor or Swiggert!” declared Mrs. Ward, when the day’s
events had been explained to her.
“We’ll pretend that’s it anyhow,” Ward assented. “There’s a mighty
interesting question in that case of Pickett’s. You may be sure I’m
going to give it my best care.”
“I’m so proud of you, Robert!”
“Be proud of John,” he laughed; “the boy’s bound to make or ruin us in
these next few weeks.”
It was astonishing the number of ways in which the prospective visit
of the Campbells became a matter of deep concern to Kernville. Billy
Townley had entered with zest into John’s campaign, and Martin
Cowdery, the owner of the _Journal_ and the congressman from the
district, wired instructions from Washington to cut things loose on
the Campbell visit. Under the same potent inspiration the _Journal’s_
venerable editorial writer took a vacation from his regular business
of explaining and defending the proprietor’s failure to land a fish
hatchery for the old Sycamore district and celebrated the approach
of the Campbells under such captions as “The Dawn of a New Era,” and
“Stand up, Kernville.” He called loudly upon the mayor, who was not
of the _Journal’s_ politics, to clean the streets that their shameful
condition might not offend the eyes and the nostrils of the man of
millions who was soon to honor the city with his presence.
The _Sun_, not to be outdone, boldly declared that Campbell was coming
to Kernville as the representative of interests that were seeking an
eligible site for a monster steel casting plant, an imaginative flight
that precipitated a sudden call for a meeting of the Bigger Kernville
Committee of the Chamber of Commerce, and the expenditure of fifteen
dollars with war tax to wire a set of resolutions to Walter Scott
Campbell. A five-line dispatch in the press report announcing that
Walter Scott Campbell had given half a million toward the endowment of
a hospital in Honolulu was handled as a local item, quite as though
Kernville alone vibrated to Campbell’s generous philanthropies.
“Helen, we’ve got ’em going!” John chortled at the beginning of the
second week. “Three automobile agents have offered me the biggest
cars in their show rooms to carry the Campbells hither and yon. I’m
encouraging competition for the honor. The Chamber of Commerce wants
to give a banquet with speeches and everything for our old friend
Walter. Old man Shepherd climbed our stairs today, risking apoplexy at
every step, to ask as a special favor that the Chamber be granted this
high privilege.”
“Ned’s asked me to go to the Kirby party with him,” confessed Helen.
“The embargo seems to be off.”
“Ha!” cried John dramatically. “Mrs. Hovey called me up to request my
presence at dinner Wednesday night. Alice has a friend visiting her.
Alice with the hair so soft and so brown, as stated in the ballad, is
the dearest girl in the world next to you, sis; no snobbery about her;
but her mama! Ah, mama has seen a great light in the heavens!”
The population of Kernville was now divided into two classes, those
who would in all likelihood be permitted to meet the Campbells, and
those who could hardly hope for this coveted privilege. The _Journal_
followed a picture of the Campbells’ Newport villa, fortified with a
glowing description of its magnificence, with a counterfeit presentment
of the _White Gull_, which had almost the effect of anchoring the
Campbells’ seagoing yacht in the muddy Sycamore at the foot of Harrison
street.
“The yacht’s the biggest thing we’ve pulled yet,” John announced to
Helen, a few days after the craft’s outlines had been made familiar to
the _Journal’s_ constituency. “Since we sprung it our office has drawn
four good cases, not including the collection business of the Tilford
Casket Company, which ought to be good for a thousand bucks a year if
the death rate in the rich valley of the Sycamore doesn’t go down on
us.”
“It’s wonderful, John!” said Helen, in an awed tone. “Mrs. Montgomery
spent an hour with mother this afternoon talking of the good old times,
and how all us old families must stand together, and she insisted on
throwing a tea for Mrs. Campbell--just for our old friends--you know
how she talks! She’d no sooner rolled away than Mrs. Everett Crawford
invaded our home and interfered terribly with the paper hangers while
she begged to be allowed to give a dinner for the Campbells in the new
home they’ve built with boodle they’ve made canning our native fruits.”
“Splendid! There may be some business there before we get through with
it! Young Freddie Crawford is the gayest of our joy riders, and it
would be worth a big retainer to keep him out of the penal farm.”
A second stenographer had been established in the office of Ward &
Ward to care for the increased business when Cowdery left the halls
of Congress for a look at his fences, held conferences with John in
an upper room of the Kipperly House, sacred to political conspiracy,
and caused the _Journal_ forthwith to launch a boom for John Ward for
prosecuting attorney subject to the decision of the April primaries.
“Look here, little brother,” said Helen, coming in from a dance to
which Ned Shepherd had taken her, and finding John in the sitting room
at work on one of the new cases that had been bestowed upon Ward &
Ward, “we’ve got to put on brakes.”
“What’s troubling you, sis? Isn’t everybody treating you all right?”
“A queen couldn’t receive more consideration! But what’s worrying me
is how we’re ever going to satisfy these silly people. If all the
plutocrats in New York should come to visit us we couldn’t spread
them around in a way to please all our fellow townsmen. We’re
certainly in the lime light! People were buzzing me tonight about the
prosecutorship--say you’ll win in a walk. But tell me what you think
Cowdery’s going to expect from you in return. Does he want to shake the
Campbell cherry tree?”
John eyed her with philosophical resignation.
“Now that you’ve been enfranchised by the Nineteenth Amendment to the
Constitution of this more or less free republic, you must learn to view
matters with a mind of understanding. Cowdery hankers for a promotion
to the senate. If the accursed money interests of the nation are
persuaded that he is not a menace to the angels of Wall street they can
sow some seed over the rich soil of this noble commonwealth that will
be sure to bear fruit. There’s a lot of Eastern capital invested in the
state and a word carelessly spoken by the right persons, parties or
groups in tall buildings in New York and a substantial corruption fund
sent out from the same quarter will do much to help Cowdery through the
primary. In me, sweet child, Cowdery sees a young man of great promise,
who can hitch the powerful Campbell to his wagon.”
“And if you can’t do the hitching----?”
“Been giving thought to that, sis. Those resolutions the enterprising
Bigger Kernville Committee sent Campbell annoy me a great deal. We can
only hope that Walter has a sense of humor. The _Journal’s_ got a new
untouched photograph of him from somewhere and the boy looks cheerful.
He has a triple chin and there are lines around his eyes and mouth that
argue for a mirthful nature. The rest, dearest, is on the knees of the
gods!”