"Come, father come upstairs," he said, and took him by the arm,
dragging him through the crowd.
In the next half-hour as they sat and waited for the arrest in the
false grandeur of the thousand-dollar suite-Tomlinson, his wife, and
Fred-the boy learnt more than all the teaching of the industrial
faculty of Plutoria University could have taught him in a decade.
Adversity laid its hand upon him, and at its touch his adolescent heart
turned to finer stuff than the salted gold of the Erie Auriferous. As
he looked upon his father's broken figure waiting meekly for arrest,
and his mother's blubbered face, a great wrath burned itself into his
soul.
"When the sheriff comes--" said Tomlinson, and his lip trembled as he
spoke. He had no other picture of arrest than that.
"They can't arrest you, father," broke out the boy. "You've done
nothing. You never swindled them. I tell you, if they try to arrest
you, I'll--" and his voice broke and stopped upon a sob, and his hands
clenched in passion.
"You stay here, you and mother. I'll go down. Give me your money and
I'll go and pay them and we'll get out of this and go home. They can't
stop us; there's nothing to arrest you for."
Nor was there. Fred paid the bill unmolested, save for the prying eyes
and babbling tongues of the rotunda.
And a few hours from that, while the town was still ringing with news
of his downfall, the Wizard with his wife and son walked down from
their thousand-dollar suite into the corridor, their hands burdened
with their satchels. A waiter, with something between a sneer and an
obsequious smile upon his face, reached out for the valises, wondering
if it was still worth while.
"You get to hell out of that!" said Fred. He had put on again his rough
store suit in which he had come from Cahoga County, and there was a
dangerous look about his big shoulders and his set jaw. And the waiter
slunk back.
So did they pass, unarrested and unhindered, through corridor and
rotunda to the outer portals of the great hotel.
Beside the door of the Palaver as they passed out was a tall official
with a uniform and a round hat. He was called by the authorities a
_chasseur_ or a _commissionaire_, or some foreign name to mean that he
did nothing.
At the sight of him the Wizard's face flushed for a moment, with a look
of his old perplexity.
"I wonder," he began to murmur, "how much I ought--"
"Not a damn cent, father," said Fred, as he shouldered past the
magnificent _chasseur_; "let him work."
With which admirable doctrine the Wizard and his son passed from the
portals of the Grand Palaver.
* * * * *
Nor was there any arrest either then or later. In spite of the
expectations of the rotunda and the announcements of the _Financial
Undertone_, the "man Tomlinson" was _not_ arrested, neither as he left
the Grand Palaver nor as he stood waiting at the railroad station with
Fred and mother for the outgoing train for Cahoga County.
There was nothing to arrest him for. That was not the least strange
part of the career of the Wizard of Finance. For when all the affairs
of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated were presently calculated up by the
labours of Skinyer and Beatem and the legal representatives of the
Orphans and the Idiots and the Deaf-mutes they resolved themselves into
the most beautiful and complete cipher conceivable. The salted gold
about paid for the cost of the incorporation certificate: the
development capital had disappeared, and those who lost most preferred
to say the least about it; and as for Tomlinson, if one added up his
gains on the stock market before the fall and subtracted his bill at
the Grand Palaver and the thousand dollars which he gave to Skinyer and
Beatem to recover his freehold on the lower half of his farm, and the
cost of three tickets to Cahoga station, the debit and credit account
balanced to a hair.
Thus did the whole fortune of Tomlinson vanish in a night, even as the
golden palace seen in the mirage of a desert sunset may fade before the
eyes of the beholder, and leave no trace behind.
* * * * *
It was some months after the collapse of the Erie Auriferous that the
university conferred upon Tomlinson the degree of Doctor of Letters _in
absentia_. A university must keep its word, and Dean Elderberry Foible,
who was honesty itself, had stubbornly maintained that a vote of the
faculty of arts once taken and written in the minute book became as
irrefragable as the Devonian rock itself.
So the degree was conferred. And Dean Elderberry Foible, standing in a
long red gown before Dr. Boomer, seated in a long blue gown, read out
after the ancient custom of the college the Latin statement of the
award of the degree of Doctor of Letters, "Eduardus Tomlinsonius, vir
clarrisimus, doctissimus, praestissimus," and a great many other things
all ending in _issimus_.
But the recipient was not there to receive. He stood at that moment
with his boy Fred on a windy hillside beside Lake Erie, where
Tomlinson's Creek ran again untrammelled to the lake. Nor was the scene
altered to the eye, for Tomlinson and his son had long since broken a
hole in the dam with pickaxe and crowbar, and day by day the angry
water carried down the vestiges of the embankment till all were gone.
The cedar poles of the electric lights had been cut into fence-rails;
the wooden shanties of the Italian gang of Auriferous workers had been
torn down and split into fire wood; and where they had stood, the
burdocks and the thistles of the luxuriant summer conspired to hide the
traces of their shame. Nature reached out its hand and drew its
coverlet of green over the grave of the vanished Eldorado.
And as the Wizard and his son stood upon the hillside, they saw nothing
but the land sloping to the lake and the creek murmuring again to the
willows, while the off-shore wind rippled the rushes of the shallow
water.