The next morning--it chanced to be a Friday--Crosman came over to
Halloran's desk.
“Have you a couple of minutes?” he asked.
“Surely. More than I want. Sit down.”
Crosman did not take the offered chair, but leaned on the desk.
“Miss Higginson spoke to me last night,” he said, with visible effort,
“about the family expenses. She thinks they ought to reduce them all
around, but you, she says, are the only one that knows about it. I
suggested that she talk it over with you herself; but she didn't want
to, for some reason.”
Halloran swung back in his chair.
“I don't know how well you understand this business, Crosman. It simply
amounts to this: The combine people are selling lumber below cost to
run us out of business, and we have shut down to let them go ahead until
they're sick of it. When the price rises we'll start up again. Of course
all this makes a big difference in Mr. Higginson's income. I suppose
there's no use trying to make that plain to women, but if you can do
anything to clear the air you'd better go talk to them. Anyhow, don't
let them make any difference in their living. We mustn't do anything
that will scare people; the Higginson credit is good, and it's our
business to keep it good.”
He meditated a moment and then looked up and said abruptly:
“Look here, Crosman, you can do me a favour if you want to. Mr.
Higginson's sickness seems to have left me in charge of his family
finances. Now suppose you take the whole business off my hands. You know
both Mrs. Higginson and Miss Higginson better than I do; and I think it
would be a good deal easier for them to talk things over with you than
with me. You can let me know if anything special comes up and I'll help
you work it out. How does that strike you?”
“All right,” he managed finally to get out. “I'll try it.”
“I don't believe this giving away lumber can last much longer,” said
Halloran.
Something about those phrases that had been floating in Halloran's mind
for weeks, “giving away lumber,” “selling at a loss,” “selling to our
customers,” stuck in his thoughts now. He sat there, leaning back in his
swivel-chair gazing at the rows of pigeon-holes--Crosman still leaning
on the desk--while his mind sailed off to Pewaukoe; he saw again the
great yards of the Bigelow Company crowded full of lumber--the mills
droning ceaselessly, the scores of men swarming over the work, the
steamer hurrying the cargo--and he thought again “all this is to be sold
below cost to our customers.”
Then Halloran's chair came down with a bang and his open hand slapped
the desk. He had got it. The idea that had evaded him all these weeks
was finally run to cover, was bagged securely. And the simplicity of it
all, the feeling of utter imbecility in having failed to see it before,
left him limp. But he recovered.
“Crosman,” he said, “I'm going to Chicago to-night and may not get back
before the first of the week. You look out for things here, will you?”
The assistant was growing hardened to surprises. He merely nodded now,
with a curious expression.
Halloran had got it. And for a moment he could only say to himself,
over and over: “What a fool! What a fool!” He could only think of that
tremendous output of lumber thrown on the market for a song. “Selling to
our customers, eh,” he thought; “selling to our customers!”
“Crosman,” he said, when he felt that he was on his legs again, “we're
going to buy lumber.”
Crosman did not grasp it at first.
“We're going to buy lumber--all we can get,” Halloran repeated; “and I'm
going down to get the money.”
It was sinking into Crosman's head--slowly he was gripping it, this idea
of Halloran's. Higgin-son & Company were going to buy lumber, were going
to buy it below cost--great quantities of it--to buy it secretly, in
many places, under many names, at half the normal price; they would sell
it later at or above normal. Then at last Crosman looked at Halloran and
grinned--broadly, happily. And Halloran said to himself again: “What a
fool! _Oh_, what a fool!”
There was much to be done that day. Crosman must have full instructions
for prompt action; the moment Halloran's message should come up from
Chicago he must cross the lake to Milwaukee, and from there command the
Wisconsin shore. Halloran himself would set the Chicago end of the line
in motion. Scattered here and there around the lake were men who had
occasionally handled business for Higginson & Company. These were to
be retained, wherever possible, and set to buying in Trust lumber.
Everything must be done secretly; every opportunity must be seized.
There would be storage to arrange for in a dozen cities, and insurance;
there were a score and odd contingencies to be foreseen and provided
against, a maximum price to be agreed on for each necessary step. But
the figuring and the talking had an end; and when Halloran finally
jumped on the night train and was rolled off toward Chicago he felt that
Bigelow's flank was as good as turned.
There was one bank in Chicago with which Mr. Higginson had been doing
business for twenty years. Thither Halloran went, shook hands with the
cashier and laid bare the situation. The cashier already knew a good
deal about the fight, and was interested to fill up the gaps in his
information.
“What is it you plan to do, Mr. Halloran?” he asked when they had talked
over the situation.
“We are going to buy lumber.”
The cashier inclined his head to show that he understood perfectly.
“We can buy it now for one or two dollars less than it costs us to get
it out of our own woods,” Halloran added.
This interested the cashier very much indeed. Higginson & Company were
good, all the way through; and their manager seemed to have a keen
business sense. Mr. Higginson's sickness entered his calculations; but
still the investment was sound. The amount must be discussed and one or
two details mentioned. But it was after a very few minutes of talk that
the cashier said:
“We shall be very glad to let you have the money, Mr. Halloran.”
The arrangements were soon made. Then Hal-loran said good-morning and
went down to the telegraph office in the basement of the building. And
as this short message hummed over the wires to Crosman, “_Go ahead.
Halloran_,” he walked out into the street to begin the battle. All
idleness was over now for Halloran--all merely defensive work, all
waiting for results. From now on it was to be straight-out fighting; and
he knew that the best man would win.
Before that Saturday afternoon was far advanced Halloran's agents were
at work. Their instructions were simple. “Buy all the one-inch and
two-inch stuff you can get, pine and hemlock, in regular lengths and
widths,” was what he had said, in starting them out; and before evening
orders had been placed in Chicago alone for nearly a million feet. The
work would be pushed still further on Monday and Tuesday. Every company
in the “combine” would be given an opportunity to sell heavily.
Farther up Lake Michigan Crosman was working with equal energy. It was
a chance for Crosman, an opportunity to show his metal, and he realized
it. There had been some pulling at odds in the office, and the assistant
had perhaps been inclined to misunderstand Halloran in more ways than
one; but all that was now swept away, and the enthusiasm of vigorous
work was in him.
For the first time since the fight began he fully understood it; he
had been made to see that there was a possibility of winning. And when
Halloran's message reached him that morning and he realized that no
regular steamer would cross the lake before evening, he hurried a tug
into commission, and with Captain Craig and MacGregor to get him over he
made the passage to Milwaukee in less than seven hours. Late as it
was when he arrived, he not only organized the work for Monday, but
succeeded in placing the first few orders.
And so it fell out that the reduction in price, made solely to ruin
Higginson, was suddenly and unexpectedly turned to his advantage. The
busy companies that were scattered about the northern shores of the
lake did not know this yet--did not dream that they were crowding extra
shifts of men into their mills to help out Higginson, that the logs
floating down a score of rivers in both peninsulas were to be cut for
Higginson, that the steamers loading at a score of wharves were running
for Higginson, that the long list of lake towns from which had arisen
the heavy demand for lumber were buying for Higginson. They did not know
these things, and Halloran did not mean that they should know them.
Perhaps it was the knowledge of all this, and the natural elation after
such a day's work, that between them took Halloran's actions out of his
own hands that Saturday evening. There were times when he was likely to
surprise himself; this seemed to be one of them. During these past
three years he had been in Chicago a number of times, but always only to
transact his business and go directly back to Wauchung, always heeding
that stubborn quality somewhere within him that had had so much to do
with pulling him up from nothing and pushing him on in the world, that
had kept him out of foolishness on at least one important occasion.
He had managed, until now, to side with the stubborn quality against a
certain impulse that had occasionally given him trouble, but to-night
the impulse caught him off his guard. There were a good many things he
might have done--there were even one or two details of the fight still
to be studied out--but the impulse, once securely planted in authority,
swept aside every other thought. And so, after dinner, Halloran caught a
train for Evanston.
An odd feeling took possession of him when he found himself once more,
after three years, on the scene of his struggles. It did not seem
so long ago. That he had greatly changed he knew; since the days of
furnace-tending, and study, and work as a surfman, and all the other
interests that had crowded those earlier years, he had thrown himself
out into the world. He had come to know something of the joy of
directing men and events, of playing a positive part in the life about
him. He had come to love the fighting, to love the play of fact upon
fact and mind upon mind. During the last year he had begun to understand
the feeling of the trained swimmer when he plunges into deep water.
There was the exhilaration, not only of keeping afloat where weak men
sink, but of laying a course and following it, sure of his strength
and endurance. While this change was taking place in him he had been
inclined to forget that these three years were, after all, but a ninth
or tenth part of his life so far, and that the other nine-tenths were
also a fact. But to-night, as he walked up toward the Ridge where the
big houses stood, he felt that he was taking up his old life where
he had laid it down that day when he took the boat for Wauchung. And
somehow he was not so sure of himself as he had been when he said
good-morning to the cashier.
He was almost relieved to find that Miss Davies and her mother had
stepped across the way. They would be back soon, he was told; so he went
in, left his hat and coat in the hall, and walked in through the parlour
to the long sitting-room, where there were rows upon rows of books and
a round-edged table covered with other books and with magazines, and
a great fireplace with a wood fire burning to take the edge off the
evening air.
He sat down in the Morris chair by the table and picked up a book--he
had not had time to read much of late years. But after a moment of
turning the pages the book was lowered to his knees and his eyes looked
over it at the fire. There had been a time when he had laid that fire
regularly every morning, and now to be sitting here, suddenly conscious
that his life had taken a new direction, that he was older, and that
his clothes were better--that he was, in fact, another person
altogether--was odd and haunting, was almost disconcerting.
He heard the front door open. There was a rustle out in the hall, and
voices. He let his head fall against the back of his chair and turned
his face toward the parlour door. He hardly knew what to make of
himself; he was almost afraid he had emotions. Certainly a peculiar
disturbance was going on somewhere within him, such a disturbance as
hardly could be looked for within the manager of a lumber company. He
did not like it at all. He wondered why she was so long about coming
in. Perhaps she would go on upstairs, not knowing he was there; and that
would be awkward. Altogether, it was probably a good thing that
Halloran had come out to Evanston before the new life had succeeded in
withdrawing him finally from the old, before the proportion of one-tenth
to nine-tenths had been evened up and he had wholly changed into
Michigan lumber--a very good thing indeed.
She came in through the hall doorway and paused surprised. He felt
himself rising and standing with his back to the table and the light.
She came slowly forward, inclining her head a little to get the light
out of her eyes so that she could see his face. The disturbance, now
increasing in that strange new part of him, out of all proportion to the
occasion, called his attention to her reserve, to the something--was it
pride?--that had disturbed him in other days; it taunted him with her
firm carriage, her fine, thoughtful face; it reminded him of her real
superiority, the superiority that comes only from pride in right living;
and so Halloran, the vigorous, the elated, at the moment of greeting an
old friend in her own house, was so far from equal to the situation that
for the life of him he could think of nothing but certain raw facts in
his own bringing-up, or fighting-up, whichever it might be called. And
not a word did he say--simply waited.
[Illustration: 0139]
She came a few steps nearer and hesitated. Then, after an instant, her
whole expression changed. Her eyes lighted up with gladness so real
that even he could not misread it; and she came rapidly forward with
outstretched hand.
“Why, John Halloran,” she cried; “where did you come from?”