I
The town of Wakefield was--is--suffering from growing pains--from
ingrowing pains, according to its rival, Gatesville.
Wakefield has long been guilty of trying to add a cubit to its stature
by taking thought. Established, like thousands of other pools left in
the prairies by that tidal wave of humanity sweeping westward in the
middle of the last century, it passed its tenth thousand with a rush;
then something happened.
For decades the decennial census dismally tolled the same knell of
fifteen thousand in round numbers. The annual censuses but echoed the
reverberations. A few more cases of measles one year, and the population
lapsed a little below the mark; an easy winter, and it slipped a little
above. No mandragora of bad times or bad health ever quite brought it so
low as fourteen thousand. No fever of prosperity ever sent the
temperature quite so high as sixteen thousand.
The iteration got on people's nerves till a commercial association was
formed under the name of the Wide-a-Wakefield Club, with a motto of
"Boom or Bust." Many individuals accomplished the latter, but the town
still failed of the former. The chief activity of the club was in the
line of decoying manufacturers over into Macedonia by various bribes.
Its first capture was a cutlery company in another city. Though
apparently prosperous, it had fallen foul of the times, and its
president adroitly allowed the Wide-a-Wakefield Club to learn that, if a
building of sufficient size were offered rent free for a term of years,
the cutlery company might be induced to move to Wakefield and conduct
its business there, employing at least a hundred laborers, year in, year
out.
There was not in all Wakefield a citizen too dull to see the individual
and collective advantage of this hundred increase. It meant money
in the pocket of every doctor, lawyer, merchant, clothier,
boarding-house-keeper, saloon-keeper, soda-water-vender--whom not?
Every establishment in town would profit, from the sanatorium to the
"pantatorium"--as the institution for the replenishment of trousers was
elegantly styled.
Commercial fervor rose to such heights in Wakefield that in no time at
all enough money was subscribed to build a convenient factory and to
purchase as many of the shares of cutlery stock as the amiable president
cared to print. In due season the manufacture of tableware and penknives
began, and the pride of the town was set aglow by the trade-mark
stamped on every article issued from the cutlery factory. It was an
ingenious emblem--a glorious Cupid in a sash marked "Wakefield,"
stabbing a miserable Cupid in a sash marked "Sheffield."
It was Sheffield that survived. In fact, the stupid English city
probably never heard of the Wakefield Cutlery Company. Nor did Wakefield
hear of it long. For the emery dust soon ceased to glisten in the air
and the steel died of a distemper.
It was a very real shock to Wakefield, and many a boy that had been
meant for college went into his father's store instead, and many a girl
who had planned to go East to be polished stayed at home and polished
her mother's plates and pans, because the family funds had been invested
in the steel-engravings of the cutlery stock certificates. They were
very handsome engravings.
Hope languished in Wakefield until a company from Kenosha consented to
transport its entire industry thither if it could receive a building
rent free. It was proffered, and it accepted, the cutlery works. For a
season the neighboring streets were acrid with the aroma of the
passionate pickles that were bottled there. And then its briny deeps
ceased to swim with knobby condiments. A tin-foil company abode awhile,
and yet again a tamale-canning corporation, which in its turn sailed on
to the Sargasso Sea of missing industries.
Other factory buildings in Wakefield fared likewise. They were but
lodging-houses for transient failures. The population swung with the
tide, but always at anchor. The lift which the census received from an
artificial-flower company, employing seventy-five hands, was canceled by
the demise of a more redolent pork-packing concern of equal pay-roll.
People missed it when the wind blew from the west.
But Wakefield hoped on. One day the executive committee of the
Wide-a-Wakefield Club, having nothing else to do, met in executive
session. There were various propositions to consider. All of them were
written on letter-heads of the highest school of commercial art, and all
of them promised to endow Wakefield with some epoch-making advantage,
provided merely that Wakefield furnish a building rent free, tax free,
water free, and subscribe to a certain amount of stock.
The club regarded these glittering baits with that cold and clammy gaze
with which an aged trout of many-scarred gills peruses some newfangled
spoon.
But if these letters were tabled with suspicion because they offered too
much for too little, what hospitality could be expected for a letter
which offered still more for still less? The chairman of the committee
was Ansel K. Pettibone, whose sign-board announced him as a "practical
house-painter and paper-hanger." He read this letter, head-lines and
all: