eager merchant redoubled his efforts. His perseverance was rewarded, at
length, and when the ship of bargain and sale was bowling merrily along
before a fair breeze of suggestion, Mr. Sonneschein interlarded his
solicitations with an account of the recent miscarriage of justice in
front of the near-at-hand saloon.
The customer listened with apparent incuriosity, as one whom these
doings in the city world touched but remotely; but the two or three
questions he asked were nicely calculated to bring out the more
important facts. The detectives had cautiously kept their own counsel as
to the details of their quest. Mr. Sonneschein had gossiped with the
policeman on the beat, and the policeman had talked with the red-faced
man who had come alone in the cab, and had taken an unofficial drink
with the roundsman before going down to the steamboat landing. He and
his "partner" were from New Orleans, and they were after a man who was
wanted for big money: that was all he would tell the roundsman.
"I suppose they've caught him again long before this," said the hesitant
customer, trying on a coat which might have been modelled upon a man
twice his size, and surveying himself in the shop looking-glass while
Mr. Sonneschein lovingly smoothed the lapels into place and gathered a
generous handful of the surplus material at the back.
"I don't know if dey have--ain'd dot der elegantist fit in der vorld,
now. See, Rachel; ain'd dot schplendit?"
"They didn't happen to mention the fellow's name, did they?" asked the
prospective purchaser.
"Not much dey didn't! Dem dedectifs iss too schmart for dot. Dey don't
give it avay when somepody else might got der rewards. How you like dot
schplendit coat, now?"
"Seems tolerable big, doesn't it?" said the customer, whose speech still
fitted his part to the final drawl. "Suppose we try something else. So
there is a reward, is there?"
Mr. Sonneschein took the reward for granted and expressed a devout wish
that he might be able to finger it. Whereupon the customer said he
wished _he_ might; and here the topic died a natural death and the
business of buying and selling went on without further interruption.
There was little suggestion of the tramp roustabout, and still less,
perhaps, of the gentleman, about the person who presently emerged from
the Sonneschein emporium. Nevertheless, he appeared to be well satisfied
with his acquisitions, bearing himself as a purchaser who has by no
means had the worse in the bargaining. At the first street corner he
inquired his way of a policeman and was directed cityward. A square
farther on he selected a barber's shop of cleanly promise, went in,
tossed his newly acquired hand-bag to the porter, and took the first
vacant chair.
"A hair-cut, a clean shave--not too close, and a bath afterward," was
his laconic order; and a modest tip facilitated things and provided the
little luxuries.
An hour later no one who had known him bearded and unkempt would have
recognized the clean-shaven, athletic-looking young man who ran down the
steps of the barber's shop and went swinging along on his way up-town.
But the transformation was still incomplete. Reaching the retail
district, he strolled purposefully up one street and down another,
passing many brilliantly lighted shops until he found one exactly to his
liking. A courteous salesman caught him up at the door, and led the way
to the designated departments.
By this time Mr. Sonneschein's hesitant and countrified customer had
undergone a complete metamorphosis. No longer reluctant and hard to
please, he passed rapidly from counter to counter, making his selections
with man-like celerity and certainty and bargaining not at all. When he
was quite through, there was enough to furnish a generous travelling
wardrobe; a head-to-foot change of garmentings with a surplus to fill
two lordly suit-cases; so he bought the suit-cases also, and had them
taken with his other purchases, to the dressing-room.
Here, in quiet and great comfort, he made his second change of clothing,
first carefully removing from each garment all the little tags and
trademarks which declared it St. Louis-bought. These tags, together with
the Gavitt and the Sonneschein costumes, were crowded into the
Sonneschein hand-bag, with the soiled red handkerchief to keep them
company; and he was carrying this hand-bag when he reappeared to the
waiting salesman.
"I see you have steam heat," he remarked. "Is your boiler-room
accessible?"
"Yes, sir; it's in the basement," was the reply, and the courteous clerk
wondered if his liberal customer were thinking of adding the heating
plant to his purchases.
Griswold saw the wonder and smiled. "No; I don't want to buy it," he
explained, with the exact touch of familiarity which bridges all chasms.
"But I'm just up from the coast, where they have a good bit of fever the
year round, and it's as well to be on the safe side. May I trouble you
to show me the way?"
"Certainly," said the salesman, wondering no more; and when he had led
the way to the boiler-room, and had seen his customer thrust the
hand-bag well back among the coals in the furnace, he thought it a
worthy precaution and one which, if generally practiced, would
considerably accelerate the clothing trade.
All traces of the deck-hand Gavitt, and of the Sonneschein
planter-customer having been thus obliterated, there remained only the
paying of his bill and the summoning of a cab. Oddly enough, the cab,
when it came, proved to be a four-wheeler driven by a little,
wizen-faced man whose thin, high-pitched voice was singularly familiar.
"The Hotel Chouteau?--yis, sorr. Will you plaze hand me thim grips? I
can't lave me harrses."
The driver's excuse instantly tied the knot of recognition, and the man
who had just cremated his former identities swore softly.
"Beg your pardon, sorr; was ye spakin' to me?"
"No; I was merely remarking that the world isn't as big as it might be."
"Faith, then, it's full big enough for a man wid a wife and sivin
childer hangin' to um. Get in, sorr, and I'll have you at the Chouteau
in t'ree shakes av a dead lamb's tail."
The little cabman was better than his word, but on the short drive to
the hotel he found time to work out a small problem, not entirely to his
satisfaction, but to at least a partial conclusion.
"'Tis the divil's own self he is, and there's nothing left av him but
thim eyes and that scar on his forrud, and his manner of spakin'. But
thim I'd swear to if I'd live to be as old as Father M'Guinness--rest
his sowl."
XIV
PHILISTIA
All things considered, it was the Griswold of the college-graduate
days--the days of the slender patrimony which had capitalized the
literary beginning--who presented himself at the counter of the Hotel
Chouteau at half-past nine o'clock on the evening of the _Belle Julie's_
arrival at St. Louis, wrote his name in the guest-book, and permitted an
attentive bell-boy to relieve him of his two suit-cases.
The clerk, a rotund little man with a promising bald spot and a
permanent smile, had appraised his latest guest in the moment of
book-signing, and the result was a small triumph for the Olive Street
furnishing house. Next to the genuinely tailor-made stands the quality
of verisimilitude; and the keynote of the clerk's greeting was
respectful affability.
"Glad to have you with us, Mr. Griswold. Would you like a room, or a
suite?"
Griswold was sufficiently human to roll the long-submerged courtesy
prefix as a sweet morsel under his tongue. With a day to spare he might
have clinched the clerk's respect by taking a suite; the more luxurious,
the better. But St. Louis, with at least two men in it who would sweep
the corners in their search for him, was only a place to put behind
him. So he said: "Neither; if I have time to get my supper and catch a
train. Have you a railway guide?"
"There is one in the writing-room. But possibly I can tell you what you
wish to know. Which way are you going?"
Without stopping to think of the critical happenings which had
intervened since the forming of the impulsive resolution fixing his
destination, Griswold named the chosen field for the hazard of fresh
fortunes, and its direction.
"North; to a town in Minnesota called Wahaska. Do you happen to know the
place?"
"I know it very well, indeed; southern Minnesota is my old
stamping-ground. Are you acquainted in Wahaska?--but I know you are not,
or you wouldn't pronounce it 'Wayhaska'."
"You are quite right; I know next to nothing about the town. But I have
been given the impression that it is a quiet little place out of the
beaten track, where a man might spend a summer without having to share
it with a lot of other city runaways of his kind."
The clerk smiled and shook his head.
"You might have done that a few years ago, but there's a fine lake, you
know, and some New Orleans people have built a resort house. I
understand it does a pretty fair business in the season."
Having assured himself that the New Orleans leaf in his book of
experience was safely turned and securely pasted down, Griswold was
nettled to find that the mere mention of the name sent creeping little
chills of apprehension trickling up and down his spine. But innate
stubbornness scoffed at the warning; derided and craved further details.
"How large a place is it?"
"Oh, four or five thousand, I should say; possibly more: big enough and
busy enough so that a hundred-room resort house doesn't make it a
souvenir town. It's a nice little city; modern, progressive, and
business-like; trolleys, electric lights, and some manufacturing. Good
people, too. _Front!_ Check the gentleman's grips and show him the café.
I'm sorry we can't give you dinner, but the dining-room closes at nine."
"Plenty of time, is there?" Griswold asked.
"Oh, yes; didn't I tell you? Your train leaves the Terminal at
eleven-thirty; but you can get into the sleeper any time after eight
o'clock."
The guest had crossed the lobby to the café, and the clerk was still
dallying with the memories stirred up by the mention of his boyhood
home, when a little man with weak eyes and a face that out-caricatured
all the caricatures of the Irish, sidled up to the registry desk. The
round-bodied clerk knew him and spoke in terms of accommodation.
"What is it, Patsy?"
"The young gentleman ye was spakin' to: is he gone?"
"He is in the café, getting his supper. What did you want of him?"
The weak-eyed little man was running a slow finger down the list of
names on the guest-book, blinking as if the writing or the glare of the
lights on the page dazzled him.
"I drove him, and he did be overpaying me, I think. What was ye saying
his name would be?"
"It's right there, under your finger: Kenneth Griswold, New York."
"Um. And I wondher, now, where does he be living, whin he's at home?"
"I don't know; New York, I suppose, since he registers from there."
"And does he be staying here f'r awhile?"
"No; he is on his way to Minnesota."
"Um." A long pause followed in which the cabman appeared to be counting
the coins in his pocket by the sense of touch. Then: "Would yez be
writing that down for me on a bit av paper, Misther Edwards?--his name,
and the name av the place where he does be going, I mane?"
"So you can write to him and refund the over-payment after you've been
to confession?" laughed the clerk. Nevertheless, he wrote the name and
address on a card for the petitioner.
"Thank ye, sorr; thank ye kindly. Whin a man has a wife and sivin
childer hangin' to um--" but here the singsong voice of the porter
calling the Burlington westbound silenced all other sounds and the clerk
heard no more.
Seated at a well-appointed table in the Chouteau café, Griswold had
ample time to overtake himself in the race reconstructive, and for the
moment the point of view became frankly Philistine. The luxurious hotel,
with its air of invincible respectability; the snowy napery, the cut
glass, the shaded lights, the deferential service; all these appealed
irresistibly to the epicurean in him. It was as if he had come suddenly
to his own again after an undeserved season of deprivation, and the
effect of it was to push the hardships and perils of the preceding weeks
and months into a far-away past.
He ordered his supper deliberately, and while he waited for its serving,
imagination cleared the stage and set the scenes for the drama of the
future. That future, with all its opportunities for the realizing of
ideals, was now safely assured. He could go whither he pleased and do
what seemed right in his own eyes, and there was none to say him nay.
It was good to be able to pick and choose in a whole worldful of
possibilities, and he gave himself a broad credit mark for persevering
in the resolution which held him steadfastly to the modest, workaday
plan struck out in the beginning. Apart from Miss Farnham's recognition
of him on the _Belle Julie_--a recognition which, he persuaded himself,
would never carry over from Gavitt the deck-hand to Griswold the student
and benefactor of his kind--there was nothing to fear; no reason why he
should not make Wahaska his workshop.
In this minor city of the clerk's describing he would find the
environment most favorable for a re-writing of his book and for a
renewal of his studies. Here, too, he might hope to become by
unostentatious degrees the beneficent god-in-the-car of his worthier
ambition, raising the fallen, succoring the helpless, and fighting the
battles of the oppressed.
Farther along, when she should have quite forgotten the _Belle Julie's_
deck-hand, he would meet Miss Farnham on an equal social footing; and
the conclusion of the whole matter should be a triumphant demonstration
to her by their refutable logic of good deeds and a life well-lived that
in his case, at least, the end justified the means.
Just here, however, there was an unresolved discord in the imaginative
theme. It was struck by the reflection that since he could never take
her fully into his confidence her approval would always lack the seal of
completeness. She knew the masquerading deck-hand, and what he had done;
and she would know Griswold the benefactor, and what he meant to do. But
until she could link the two together, there could be no demonstration.
Though he should build the bastion of good deeds mountain high, it could
never figure as a bastion to her unless she might come to know what it
was designed to defend.
Having a sensitive ear for the imaginative harmonies, the unresolved
discord annoyed him. The effort to eliminate it brought him face to face
with a blunt demand, a query that was almost psychic in its clear-cut
distinctness. Why did these forecastings of the future always lead him
up to the closed door of this young woman's approval and leave him
there?
For one whose experience had all been bought on a rising market,
Griswold was singularly heart-whole and normal in his attitude toward
women. Beautiful women he had met before, among them a few who had lent
themselves facilely to the idealizing process; but in each instance it
was the artistic temperament, and not the heart, that was touched and
inspired. Was Charlotte Farnham going to prove the exception? Since he
could ask the question calmly and with no perceptible quickening of the
pulses, he concluded that she was not. Nevertheless----
The train of reflective thought was broken abruptly by the seating of
two other supper guests at his table; a big-framed man in the grizzled
fifties, and a young woman who looked as if she might have stepped the
moment before out of the fitting-rooms of the most famous of Parisian
dressmakers.
Griswold's supper was served, and for a time he made shift to ignore the
couple at the other end of the table. Then an overheard word, the name
of the town which he had chosen as his future abiding place, made him
suddenly observant.
It was the young woman who had named Wahaska, and he saw now that his
first impression had been at fault; she was not overdressed. Also he saw
that she was piquantly pretty; a bravura type, slightly suggesting the
Rialto at its best, perhaps, but equally suggestive of sophistication,
travel, and a serene disregard of chaperonage.
The young woman's companion was undeniably her father. Gray,
heavy-browed, and with a face that was a life-mask of crude strength and
elemental shrewdness, the man had bequeathed no single feature to the
alertly beautiful daughter; yet the resemblance was unmistakable.
Griswold did not listen designedly, but he could not help overhearing
much of the talk at the other end of the table. From it he gathered that
the young woman was lately returned from some Florida winter resort;
that her father had met her by appointment in St. Louis; and that the
two were going on together; perhaps to Wahaska, since that was the
place-name oftenest on the lips of the daughter.
Griswold was only moderately interested. The deliberately ordered
supper, enticing in anticipation, had fallen short of the zestful
promise in the fact. It came to him with a little shock that at least
one part of him, the civilized appetite, had become debased by the
plunge into the deck-hand depths, and he fought the suggestion fiercely.
It was an article in his creed that environment is always subjective,
and when one opens the door to an exception a host of ominous shapes may
be ready to crowd in. He was fighting off the evil shapes while he
listened; otherwise his interest might have been more acute.
It was at this point that the apex of Philistine contentment was passed
and the reaction set in. He had been spending strength and vitality
recklessly and the accounting was at hand. The descent began when he
took himself sharply to task for the high-priced supper. What right had
he to order costly food that he could not eat when the price of this
single meal would feed a family for a week?
After that, nothing that the obsequious and attentive waiter could bring
proved tempting enough to recall the vanished appetite. Never having
known what it was to be sick, Griswold disregarded the warning, drank a
cup of strong coffee, and went out to the lobby to get a cigar, leaving
his table companions in the midst of their meal. To his surprise and
chagrin the carefully selected "perfecto" made him dizzy and faint,
bringing a disquieting recurrence of the vertigo which had seized him
while he was searching for his negro treasure-bearer on the levee.
"I've had an overdose of excitement, I guess," he said to himself,
flinging the cigar away. "The best thing for me to do is to go down to
the train and get to bed."
He went about it listlessly, with a curious buzzing in his ears and a
certain dimness of sight which was quite disconcerting; and when a cab
was summoned he was glad enough to let a respectfully sympathetic porter
lend him a shoulder to the sidewalk.
The drive in the open air was sufficiently tonic to help him through the
details of ticket-buying and embarkation; and afterward sleep came so
quickly that he did not know when the Pullman porter drew the curtains
to adjust the screen in the window at his feet, though he did awake
drowsily later on at the sound of voices in the aisle, awoke to realize
vaguely that his two table companions of the Hotel Chouteau café were to
be his fellow travellers in the Pullman.
The train was made up ready to leave, and the locomotive was filling the
great train-shed with stertorous hissings, when a red-faced man slipped
through the gates to saunter over to the Pullman and to peck
inquisitively at the porter.
"Much of a load to-night, George?"
"No, sah; mighty light: four young ladies goin' up to de school in
Faribault, Mistah Grierson and his daughter, and a gentleman from de
Chouteau."
"A gentleman from the Chouteau? When did he come down?"
The porter knew the calling of the red-faced man only by intuition; but
Griswold's tip was warming in his pocket and he lied at random and on
general principles.
"Been heah all de evenin'; come down right early afte' suppeh, and went
to baid like he was sick or tarr'd or somethin'."
"What sort of a looking man is he?"
"Little, smooth-faced, narr'-chisted gentleman; look like he might
be----"
But the train was moving out and the red-faced man had turned away.
Whereupon the porter broke his simile in the midst, picked up his
carpet-covered step, and climbed aboard.
XV
THE GOTHS AND VANDALS
In the day of its beginnings, Wahaska was a minor trading-post on the
north-western frontier, and an outfitting station for the hunters and
trappers of the upper Mississippi and Minnesota lake region.
Later, it became the market town of a wheat-growing district, and a
foundation of modest prosperity was laid by well-to-do farmers
gravitating to their county seat to give their children the benefit of a
graded school. Later still came the passing of the wheat, a re-peopling
of the farms by a fresh influx of home-seekers from the Old World, and
the birth, in Wahaska and elsewhere, of the industrial era.
Jasper Grierson was a product of the wheat-growing period. The son of
one of the earliest of the New-York-State homesteaders in the wheat
belt, he came of age in the year of the Civil War draft, and was
unpatriotic enough, some said, to dodge conscription, or the chance of
it, by throwing up his hostler's job in a Wahaska livery stable and
vanishing into the dim limbo of the Farther West. Also, tradition added
that he was well-spared by most; that he was ill-spared, indeed, by only
one, and that one a woman.
After the westward vanishing, Wahaska saw him no more until he returned
in his vigorous prime, a veteran soldier of fortune upon whom the
goddess had poured a golden shower out of some cornucopia of the
Colorado mines. Although rumor, occasionally naming him during the years
of absence, had never mentioned a wife, he was accompanied by a
daughter, a dark-eyed, red-lipped young woman, a rather striking beauty
of a type unfamiliar to Wahaska and owing nothing, it would seem, to the
grim, gray-wolf Jasper.
With the return to his birthplace, Jasper Grierson began a campaign, the
planning of which had tided him over many an obstacle in the road to
fortune. It had given him the keenest thrill of joy of which a frankly
sordid nature is capable to descend upon his native town rich enough to
buy and sell any round dozen of the well-to-do farmers; and when he had
looked about him he settled down to the attainment of his heart's
desire, which was to have the casting vote in the business affairs of
the community which had once known him as a helper in a livery stable.
Losing sight of the irresistible energy and momentum of wealth as
wealth, men said that fortune favored him from the outset. It was only a
half-truth, but it sufficed to account for what was really a campaign of
conquest. Grierson's touch was Midas-like, turning all things to gold;
and even in Wahaska there were Mammon worshippers enough to hail him as
a public benefactor whose wealth and enterprise would shortly make of
the overgrown village a town, and of the town a thriving city.
Since the time was ripe, Wahaska did presently burst its
swaddling-bands. Commercial enterprise is sheep-like; where one leads,
others will follow; and the mere following breeds success, if only by
the sheer impetus of the massed forward movement. Jasper Grierson was
the man of the hour, but the price paid for leadership by the led is apt
to be high. When Wahaska became a city, with a charter and a bonded
debt, electric lights, water-works, and a trolley system, Grierson's
interest predominated in every considerable business venture in it, save
and excepting the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works.
He was the president of one bank, and the principal stockholder in the
other, which was practically an allied institution; he was the sole
owner of the grain elevator, the saw- and planing-mills, the box
factory, and a dozen smaller industries in which his name did not
appear. Also, it was his money, or rather his skill as a promoter, which
had transformed the Wahaska & Pineboro Railroad from a logging switch,
built to serve the saw-mill, into an important and independent
connecting link in the great lake region system.