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THE MAIN CHANCE
[Illustration]
THE MAIN CHANCE
BY
MEREDITH NICHOLSON
ILLUSTRATED BY
HARRISON FISHER
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1903
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
MAY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
TO
E. K. N.
WHO WILL REMEMBER AND UNDERSTAND
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A NEW MAN IN TOWN 1
II WARRICK RARIDAN 13
III SWEET PEAS 24
IV AT POINDEXTERS' 39
V DEBATABLE QUESTIONS 53
VI A SAFE MAN 70
VII WARRY RARIDAN'S INDIGNATION 82
VIII TIM MARGRAVE MAKES A CHOICE 92
IX PARLEYINGS 97
X A WRECKED CANNA BED 106
XI THE KNIGHTS OF MIDAS BALL 121
XII A MORNING AT ST. PAUL'S 136
XIII BARGAIN AND SALE 152
XIV THE GIRL THAT TRIES HARD 166
XV AT THE COUNTRY CLUB 174
XVI THE LADY AND THE BUNKER 193
XVII WARRY'S REPENTANCE 206
XVIII FATHER AND DAUGHTER 213
XIX A FORECAST AT THE WHIPPLES' 229
XX ORCHARD LANE 237
XXI JAMES WHEATON MAKES A COMPUTATION 241
XXII AN ANNUAL PASS 250
XXIII WILLIAM PORTER RETURNS FROM A JOURNEY 258
XXIV INTERRUPTED PLANS 266
XXV JAMES WHEATON DECLINES AN OFFER 272
XXVI THE KEY TO A DILEMMA 279
XXVII A MEETING BETWEEN GENTLEMEN 289
XXVIII BROKEN GLASS 299
XXIX JOHN SAXTON, RECEIVER 310
XXX GREEN CHARTREUSE 313
XXXI PUZZLING AUTOGRAPHS 319
XXXII CROSSED WIRES 323
XXXIII A DISAPPEARANCE 332
XXXIV JOHN SAXTON SUGGESTS A CLUE 339
XXXV SHOTS IN THE DARK 352
XXXVI HOME THROUGH THE SNOW 370
XXXVII "A PECULIAR BRICK" 379
XXXVIII OLD PHOTOGRAPHS 384
XXXIX "IT IS CRUEL" 389
XL SHIFTED BURDENS 399
XLI RETROSPECTIVE VANITY 403
XLII AT THE PARTING OF THE WAYS 407
THE MAIN CHANCE
CHAPTER I
A NEW MAN IN TOWN
"Well, sir, they say I'm crooked!"
William Porter tipped back his swivel chair and placidly puffed a cigar
as he watched the effect of this declaration on the young man who sat
talking to him.
"That's said of every successful man nowadays, isn't it?" asked John
Saxton.
The president of the Clarkson National Bank ignored the question and
rolled his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, as he waited
for his words to make their full impression upon his visitor.
"They say I'm crooked," he repeated, with a narrowing of the eyes, "but
they don't say it very loud!"
Porter kicked his heels together gently and watched his visitor with
eyes in which there was no trace of humor; but Saxton saw that he was
expected to laugh.
"No, sir;" the banker continued, "they don't say it very loud, and I
guess they don't any of them want to have to prove it. I'm afraid those
Boston friends of yours have given us up as a bad lot," he went on,
waiving the matter of his personal rectitude and returning to the
affairs of his visitor; "and they've sent you out here to get their
money, and I don't blame them. Well, sir; that money's got to come out
in time, but it's going to take time and money to get it."
"I believe they sent me because I had plenty of time," said Saxton,
smiling.
"Well, we want to help you win out," returned Porter. "And now what can
I do to start you off?" he asked briskly. "Have you got a place to stay?
Well, sir, I warn you solemnly against the hotels in this town; but
we've got a fairly decent club up here, and you'd better stay there till
you get acquainted. Been to breakfast? Breakfast on the train? That's
good. Just look over the papers till I get rid of these letters and I'll
be free."
Porter turned to his desk and replaced the eye-glasses which he had
dropped while talking. There was an air of great alertness in his small,
lean figure as he pushed buttons to summon various members of the
clerical force and rapidly dictated terse telegrams and letters to a
stenographer. He continued to smoke, and he shifted constantly the
narrow-brimmed, red-banded straw hat that he wore above his shrewd face.
It was an agreeable face to see, of a type that is common wherever the
North-Irish stock is found in America, and its characteristics were
expressed in his firm, lean jaw and blue eyes, and his reddish hair and
mustache, through which there were streaks of gray. He wore his hair
short, but it was still thick, and he combed it with precision. His
clothes fitted him; he wore a bright cravat, well tied, and his shoes
were carefully polished. Saxton was impressed by the banker's perfect
confidence and ease; it manifested itself in the way he tapped buttons
to call his subordinates, or turned to satisfy the importunities of the
desk-telephone at his elbow.
John Saxton had been sent to Clarkson by the Neponset Trust Company of
Boston to represent the interests of a group of clients who had made
rash investments in several of the Trans-Missouri states. Foreclosure
had, in many instances, resulted in the transfer to themselves of much
town and ranch property which was, in the conditions existing in the
early nineties, an exceedingly slow asset. It was necessary that some
one on the ground should care for these interests. The Clarkson National
Bank had been exercising a general supervision, but, as one of the
investors told his fellow sufferers in Boston, they should have an agent
whom they could call home and abuse, and here was Saxton, a
conscientious and steady fellow, who had some knowledge of the country,
and who, moreover, needed something to do. Saxton's acquaintance with
the West had been gained by a bitter experience of ranching in Wyoming.
A blizzard had destroyed his cattle, and the subsequent depression in
land values in the neighborhood of his ranch had left him encumbered
with a property for which there was no market. His friends had been
correct in the assumption that he needed employment, and he was,
moreover, glad of the chance to get away from home, where the impression
was making headway that he had failed at something in the vague,
non-interest-paying West. When, on his return from Wyoming, it became
necessary for his former acquaintances to identify him to one another,
they said, with varying degrees of kindness, that John had gone broke at
ranching; and if they liked him particularly, they said it was too bad;
if they had not known him well in his fortunate days, they mildly
intimated that a fool and his money found quicker divorce at ranching
than in any other way. Most of Saxton's friends and contemporaries had
made good beginnings at home, and he felt, unnecessarily perhaps, that
his failure made him a marked man among them.
"Now," said Porter presently, scrutinizing a telegram carefully before
signing it, "I'll take you up to the office we've been keeping for your
people, and show you what it looks like. Some of these things are run as
corporations, you understand, and in our state corporations have to
maintain a tangible residence."
"So that the sheriff may find them more easily," added Saxton.
"Well, that's no joke," returned Porter, as they entered the elevator
from the outer hall; "but they don't necessarily have much office
furniture to levy on."
The room proved to be a small one at the top of the building. On the
ground-glass door was inscribed "The Interstate Irrigation Company." The
room contained a safe, a flat-top desk and a few chairs. Several maps
hung on the wall, some of them railroad advertisements, and others were
engineers' charts of ranch lands and irrigation ditches.
"It ain't pretty," said Porter critically, "but if you don't like it you
can move when you get ready. The bank is your landlord, and we don't
charge you much for it. You've doubtless got your inventory of stuff
with you, and here in the safe you'll find the accounts of these
companies, copies of public records relating to them, and so on." As
Porter talked he stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his
pockets, and puffed at a cigar, throwing his head back in an effort to
escape the smoke. He stood with one foot on a chair and pushed his hat
away from his forehead as he continued reflectively: "You're going up
against a pretty tough proposition, young man. You'll hear a hard luck
story wherever you go out here just now; people who owe your friends
money will be mighty sorry they can't pay. Many of the ranch lands your
people own will be worth something after a while. That Colorado
irrigation scheme ought to pan out in time, and I believe it will; but
you've got to nurse all these things. Make your principals let you
alone. Those fellows get in a hurry at the wrong time,--that's my
experience with Eastern investors. Tell them to go to Europe,--get rid
of them for a while, and make them give you a chance to work out their
money for them. They're not the only pebbles." A slight smile seemed to
creep over a small area about the banker's lips, but his cigar only
partly revealed it. His eyes rarely betrayed him, and the monotonous
drawl of his voice was without humorous intention.
"I'll send the combination of the safe up by the boy," he said, moving
toward the door, "and you can get a bird's-eye view of the situation
before lunch. Mr. Wheaton, our cashier, is away to-day, but he's
familiar with these matters and will be glad to help you when he gets
home. He'll be back to-night. When you get stuck call on us. And drop
down about twelve thirty and go up to the club for lunch. Take it easy;
you can't do it all in one day," he added.
"I hope I shan't be a nuisance to you," said the younger man. "I'm
going to fight it out on the best lines I know how,--if it takes several
summers."
"Well, it'll take them all right," said Porter, sententiously.
Left to himself Saxton examined his new quarters, found a feather duster
hanging in a corner and brushed the dirt from the scanty furniture. This
done, he drew a pipe from his pocket, filled it from his tobacco pouch
and sat down by the open window, through which the breeze came cool out
of the great valley; and here he could see, far over the roofs and
spires of the town, the bluffs that marked the broad bed of the tawny
Missouri. He was not as buoyant as his last words to the banker implied.
Here he was, he reflected, a man of good education, as such things go,
who had lost his patrimony in a single venture. He had been sent, partly
out of compassion, he felt, to take charge of investments that were
admitted to be almost hopelessly bad. The salary promised would provide
for him comfortably, and that was about all; anything further would
depend upon himself, the secretary of the Neponset Trust Company had
told him; it would, he felt, depend much more particularly on the making
over by benign powers of the considerable part of the earth's surface in
which his principals' money lay hidden. As his eyes wandered to one of
the office walls, the black trail of a great transcontinental railroad
caught and held his attention. On one of its northern prongs lay the
region of his first defeat.
"Three years of life are up there," he meditated, "and all my good
dollars are scattered along the right of way." Many things came back to
him vividly--how the wind used to howl around the little ranch house,
and how he rode through the snow among his dying cattle in the great
storm that had been his undoing. With his eyes still resting on the map,
he recurred to his early school days and to his four years at Harvard.
There was a burden of heartache in these recollections. Incidents of the
unconscious brutality of playmates came back to him,--the cruel candor
with which they had rejected him from sports in which proficiency, and
not mere strength or zeal, was essential. He had enjoyed at college no
experience of success in any of those ways which mark the undergraduate
for brief authority or fame. He had never been accepted for the crew nor
for the teams that represented the university on diamond or gridiron,
though he had always participated in athletics, and was possessed of
unusual strength. None of the professions had appealed to him, and he
had not heeded his father's wish that he enter the law. The elder
Saxton, who was himself a lawyer of moderate success, died before John's
graduation; he had lost his mother in his youth, and his only remaining
relative was a sister who married before he left college.
A review of these brief and discouraging annals did not hearten him; but
he fell back upon the better mood with which he had begun the morning;
he had a new chance, and he proposed to make the best of it. He put
aside his coat and hat, lighted the pipe which he had been holding in
his hand, and opened his desk. The banker had sent up the combination of
the safe, as he had promised, and Saxton began inspecting its contents
and putting his office in order.
"I'm in for a long stay," he reflected. "Watson and Terrell and those
other fellows are just about reaching Park Street, perhaps with virtuous
thoughts of having given me a job, if they haven't forgotten me. It's
probably a pleasant day in Boston, with the flowers looking their best
in the Gardens; but this is better than my Wyoming pastures, anyhow."
The books and papers began to interest him, and he was soon classifying
the properties that had fallen to his care. He was one of those
fortunate individuals who are endowed with a capacity for complete
absorption in the work at hand,--the frequent possession of persons,
who, like Saxton, enjoy immunity from visits of the alluring
will-o'-the-wisps that beguile geniuses. He was so deeply occupied that
he did not mark the flight of time and was surprised when a boy came
with a message from Porter that he was ready to go to luncheon.
"Yon mustn't overdo the thing, young man," said the banker amiably, as
he closed his desk. "Don't you adopt our Western method of working all
the hours there are. I do it now because my neighbors and customers
would talk about me if I didn't, and say that I had lost my grip in my
old age."
They started up the sloping street, which was intensely hot.
"In my last job I worked twenty hours a day," said Saxton, "and lost
money in spite of it."
"You mean up in Wyoming; the Neponset people wrote me that you were a
reformed cattleman."
"Yes, I was winter-killed at the business." He assumed that Porter would
not care particularly for the details of his failure. Western men are,
he knew, much more tolerant of failure than Eastern men; but he was
relieved to hear the banker drawling on with a comment on Clarkson, its
commercial history and prospects.
At the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Clarkson Chamber of
Commerce, the local boy orator, who made a point of quoting Holy Writ in
his speeches, spoke of Clarkson as "no mean city," just as many another
orator has applied this same apt Pauline phrase to many another
metropolis. The business of Clarkson had to do with primary employments
and needs. The cattle of a thousand hills and of many rough pastures
were gathered here; and here wheat and corn from three states were
assembled. In exchange for these products, Clarkson returned to the
country all of the necessities and some of the luxuries of life. Several
important railway lines had their administrative offices here. Ores were
brought from the Rockies, from Mexico, and even from British Columbia,
to the great smelters whose smoke and fumes hung over the town. Neither
coal, wood nor iron lay near at hand, so that manufacturing was almost
unknown; but the packing-houses and smelters gave employment to many
laborers, drawn in great measure from the Slavonic races.
Varney Street cut through the town at right angles to the river,
bisecting the business district. It then gradually threw off its
commercial aspect until at last it was lined with the homes of most of
Clarkson's wealthiest citizens. An exaggerated estimate of the value of
corner lots had caused many of them to be left vacant; and weeds and
signboards exercised eminent domain between booms. North and south of
Varney Street were other thoroughfares which strove to be equally
fashionable, and here citizens had sometimes built themselves houses
that were, as they said, as good as anything in Varney Street.
Everywhere ragged edges remained; old unpainted frame buildings lingered
in blocks that otherwise contained handsome houses. Sugar-loaf cubes of
clay loomed lonesomely, with houses stranded high on their summits,
where property owners had been too poor to cut down their bits of earth
to conform to new levels. The clay banks were ugly, but they were doomed
to remain until the next high tide of prosperity.
The Clarkson Club stood at the edge of the commercial district, and its
Milwaukee brick walls rose hot and staring in the July sun as Porter and
Saxton approached.
"Here we are," said Porter, leading the way into the wide hall. "We'll
arrange about your business relations later. There's a very bad lunch
ready upstairs, and we'll go against that first."
There were only a few men in the dining-room, seated at a round table.
Porter exchanged salutations with them as he passed on to a small table
at the end of the room. Those who were of his own age called Porter,
"Billy," and he included them all in the careless nod of old
acquaintance. Porter offered Saxton the wine card, which the young man
declined with instinctive knowledge that he was expected to do so. They
took the simple table d'hote, which was, as Porter had predicted, very
bad. The banker ate little and carried the burden of the conversation.
They went from the table for an inspection of the club, and arranged
with the clerk in the office for a room on the third floor, which Mr.
Saxton was to have, so Porter told the clerk, until he didn't want it
any more.
"It's all right about the rules," he said; "if the house committee kick
about it, send them to me." They stopped in the lounging room, where the
men from the round table were now talking or looking at newspapers.
Porter introduced Saxton to all of them, stating in his humorous way,
with variations in every case, that this was a new man in town; that
victims were scarce in hard times, and that they must make the most of
him. Several of the men who shook hands with Saxton were railroad
officials, but nearly every line of business was represented. All seemed
to wear their business consciously, and Saxton was made aware of their
several employments in one way or another as he stood talking to them.
He felt that their own frankness should elicit a response on his part,
and he stated that he had come to represent the interests of "Eastern
people,"--a phrase which, in that territory, has weight and
significance. This, he thought, should be sufficiently explicit; and he
felt that his interlocutors were probably appraising him with selfish
eyes as a possible customer or client. However, they were very cordial,
and presently he found that they were chaffing one another for his
benefit, and trying to bring him within the arc of their own easy
comradeship.
"If you're going with me," said Porter at his elbow, "you'd better get a
move on you." But the whole group went out together, Porter leaving
Saxton to the others, with that confidence in human friendliness which
is peculiar to the social intercourse of men. They made him feel their
honest wish to consider him one of themselves, making a point of saying
to him, as they dropped out one by one, that they hoped to see him
often. Porter led the way back down Varney Street, smoking meditatively
and carrying his hat in his hand. He said at the bank door: "Now you
make them give you what you want at the club, and if they don't, you
want to raise the everlasting Nick. I've got a house up here on Varney
Street,--come up for dinner to-morrow night and we'll see if we can't
raise a breeze for you. It's hotter than Suez here, and you'd better
take my advice about starting in slow."
He went into the bank, leaving a trail of smoke behind him; and Saxton
took the elevator for his own office.