_BY FRANCIS LYNDE_
DAVID VALLORY
BRANDED
STRANDED IN ARCADY
AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN
THE REAL MAN
THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS
THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
SCIENTIFIC SPRAGUE
THE PRICE
THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN
A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT
_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_
DAVID VALLORY
[Illustration: It had given him a glow of superecstasy to find that she
was familiar with many of the details. (Page 232)]
DAVID VALLORY
BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
ARTHUR E. BECHER
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK :::::::::: 1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published August, 1919
[Illustration]
TO
THE RIGHT REVEREND
THOMAS FRANK GAILOR
BISHOP OF TENNESSEE
MY BISHOP, ADVISER, AND FRIEND, THIS
BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY
INSCRIBED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. IN THE GREEN TREE 1
II. THE DELUGE 8
III. EBEN GRILLAGE 26
IV. AN HONORABLE DISCHARGE 40
V. GLORIANA 55
VI. THE HENCHMAN 68
VII. A REWARD OF MERIT 89
VIII. OUT OF THE PAST 103
IX. SILAS PLEGG 113
X. THE MIRY CLAY 127
XI. BRIDGE NUMBER TWO 143
XII. UNDER THE HIGH STARS 160
XIII. ALTMAN’S NERVES 173
XIV. THE MUCKER 186
XV. PLEGG’S BACK-FIRE 198
XVI. MASTER AND MAN 207
XVII. THE TAR-BARREL 220
XVIII. IN LOCO PARENTIS 237
XIX. THE ULTIMATUM 251
XX. IN THE ORE SHED 264
XXI. THE OTHER DAVID 277
XXII. AT BRIDGE THREE 293
XXIII. THE KILLER 312
XXIV. NO THOROUGHFARE 323
XXV. CATACLYSMIC 339
XXVI. THE HEART OF QOJOGO 357
XXVII. THE TERROR 370
XXVIII. REGENERATION 381
XXIX. AS IT SHOULD BE 390
DAVID VALLORY
DAVID VALLORY
I
In the Green Tree
David Vallory’s train, to make which he had precipitately thrown
down pencil and mapping-pen in the drafting room of the Government
harbor-deepening project on the Florida coast two days earlier, was an
hour late arriving at Middleboro; and in this first home-coming from
the distant assignment, the aspect of things once so familiar seemed
jarred a trifle out of focus. It was not that the June fields were less
green, or the factory suburb through which the long train was slowing
more littered and unsightly. But there was a change, and it was in a
manner depressive.
“Your home town?” inquired the traveler in the opposite half of the
Pullman section, as Vallory began to assemble his various belongings.
“Yes,” said David, adding, as if in some sort of justification: “I was
born here in Middleboro.”
The man who had occupied the upper berth looked aside reflectively,
taking in and appraising the country-town tritenesses as the open car
windows passed them in review.
“A man may be born anywhere,” he remarked; then, with the appraisive
glance directed at the fair-haired, frank-faced young man kneeling to
strap an over-filled suit case; “It’s a safe bet that you’ll not die in
Middleboro--unless you should chance to be killed in an accident.”
Vallory, soberly preoccupied, looked up from the strapping.
“Why do you say that?”
The older man smiled with a rather grim widening of the thin lips half
hidden by a cropped beard and mustaches.
“You are young, and youth is always impatient of the little horizons.
Let me make another guess. You have been away for some time, and this
is your first return. You are finding it a bit disappointing. Am I
right?”
“Not exactly disappointing,” Vallory denied.
“Well, then, different, let us say. You may not realize it yet, but
you have outgrown the home town. I know, because, years ago, I had
precisely the same experience myself. Do your people live here?”
The train had been halted in the yard by a dropped semaphore arm,
and for the moment Vallory was at the mercy of his chance traveling
companion. Yet he told himself that there was no good reason why he
should be churlish.
“Yes,” he conceded; “my father and sister live here. And I have lived
here all my life except for the four years in college, and the past two
years in Florida.”
“College--to be sure,” the inquisitor agreed half absently. “What
course, if I may ask?”
“Engineering.”
At this the bearded man exhibited a tiny fob charm made in the shape
of a simple trestle bent and extended a hand individualized by the
spatulate thumb and square-ended fingers of the artist-artisan.
“Shake!” he exclaimed, with something more than Middle-Western
informality. “I happen to be one of the same breed. Now I am quite
certain you won’t die here in--Middletown?--is that the name?--always
making an exception in favor of the untoward accident, of course.”
“Middleboro,” David corrected. Then to the repetition of the prophecy:
“You are probably right. I found that I had to leave home to get my
first job. I have been on Government work in Florida--rivers and
harbors.”
“Government work? A deep grave and a safe one. Would you mind telling
me just why you chose to bury yourself in it?”
Vallory’s smile was still good-natured. For so young a man he was
singularly free from the false dignity which so often is made to pass
for the real.
“I don’t mind in the least. I did what most college men do; took the
first reasonably decent thing that offered. It wasn’t at all what I
wanted, but my own particular line was rather dull two years ago. I
majored in railroad building.”
“Railroad building, eh? That’s my trade, too,” said the other. Then,
with an overlooking glance that was too frankly a renewal of the
appraisive summing-up to be mistaken for anything else: “You’ll go far,
my young friend--if you’re not too good.”
David Vallory’s smile broadened into a laugh.
“Thanks,” he said. “But what do you mean by ‘too good’?”
“Precisely what I say; no more and no less. You can take it from a
total stranger, can’t you? You have a good jaw, and I shouldn’t care to
get in your way if you had any reason to wish to beat me up. But your
eyes tell another story.”
Vallory had a telegram in his pocket, the brief summons which, two
days earlier, had caused him to drop pen and pencil in the Florida
office and hasten to catch the first northbound train. There was
nothing in the wording of the message to breed alarm; but the mere
fact that his father had telegraphed him to come home had awakened
disturbing qualms of anxiety. Wondering if he were still youthful
enough to advertise the disquietude so plainly that a stranger might
read the signs of it, he said:
“Well, go on; what do my eyes tell you?”
“This: that in spite of your twenty-five, six, or seven years, whatever
they may be, you are still sufficiently youthful and unspoiled to take
things at their face value. You believe good of a man or a woman until
the evil is proved, and even then you change reluctantly. You hold your
word as binding as your oath. In short, you are still generous enough
to believe that the world is much better than the muckrakers would make
it out to be. Isn’t this all true?”
“I should be sorry if I had to contradict you,” said Vallory soberly.
“At that, you are only accusing me of the common civilized humanities.
The world has been very decent to me, thus far. Doesn’t it occur to
you that a man usually finds what he looks for in life?--that, as a
general proposition, he gets just about what he is willing to give?”
The bearded man shook his head, as one too well seasoned to argue with
unvictimized youth.
“Four years in college, and two in a Government service which taught
you absolutely nothing about life as it is lived in a world of men and
women and sharply competitive business,” he scoffed gently. “Ah, well;
we’ll let it go with a word of advice--advice from a man whose name you
don’t know, and whom you will most likely never meet again. When you
come to take the plunge; the real plunge into the sure-enough puddle
of life as it is lived by most men and not a few women; don’t tie up
too hard with any man or set of men, or yet to those old-fashioned
principles which you have been taught to regard as law and Gospel.
If you do, you won’t succeed--in the only sense in which the world
measures success.”
The train was moving on again, and Vallory was not sorry. Being
healthily suspicious of cynicism in any of its forms, he was glad
that his critical section mate had not chosen to begin on him at the
dining-car breakfast, where they had first met. None the less, at the
station stop he shook hands with the volunteer prophet of evil.
“Good-by,” he said. “I’d like to hear your estimate of the next man
with whom you happen to share a Pullman section. But part of your
prediction will doubtless come true. I have definitely broken away
from the Government job, and I shall probably not stay very long in
Middleboro.”
As he left the train he glanced at his watch. It was past nine;
therefore his father would be at the bank. With only a hand-bag
for encumbrance he walked rapidly up the main street with the
well-remembered home town surroundings still making their curiously
depressive appeal.
II
The Deluge
The Middleboro Security Bank, housed in a modest two-storied brick
three squares up from the railroad station, seemed on that morning of
mornings to be a center of subdued excitement. Early in the forenoon
as it was, a number of farm teams were halted at the curb, and little
knots of country folk and townspeople obstructed the sidewalk. David
Vallory nodded good-morning to one and another in the groups as he
swung past, and was immediately conscious of a sort of hushed restraint
on the part of those who returned his greetings.
In the bank an orderly throng was inching and shuffling its way in
sober silence to the paying teller’s window. There were no signs of
panic, and any excitement that might underlie the unusual crush of
business seemed to be carefully suppressed. But Vallory saw that old
Abner Winkle, and the clerk he had called into the cage to help him,
wore anxious faces; and Winkle’s hands, the hands of a man who had
grown gray in the service of the country-town bank, were tremulous and
uncertain as he counted out the money to the waiting cheque-holders.
David made his way to the rear of the narrow lobby, to a door with a
ground-glass panel bearing the word “President” in black lettering.
He entered without knocking, but was careful to snap the catch of the
lock to prevent a possible intrusion. A tall, thinly bearded man,
prematurely white-haired, with a face that was almost effeminate in its
skin texture and the fineness of its lines, and with the near-sighted
eyes and round-shouldered stoop of a student and book lover, got rather
uncertainly out of his chair at the old-fashioned desk.
“David!” he exclaimed. “I knew you’d come, and I’m glad you are here.
Was the train late?”
“An hour or thereabouts. Didn’t you get my answer to your wire?”
The older man put his hand to his head. “Did I?” he asked half
absently. “I suppose I must have, if you sent one. I--I think I haven’t
been quite responsible since I telegraphed you. You saw what is going
on out in the bank; it has been that way since day before yesterday. I
waited as long as I dared. I knew it would be a shock to you, and I--I
didn’t want to shock you, son.”
David Vallory placed a chair for himself at the desk end and felt
mechanically for his pipe and tobacco. Disaster was plainly in the air
and he prepared himself to meet it.
“When you’re ready, Dad,” he said.
Adam Vallory sank into his chair. There was a bit of string on the desk
and he picked it up and began aimlessly to untie the knots in it.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come; I didn’t know whether you could come. It
isn’t fair to take you away from your work; but----”
“Of course, I’d come!” David broke in warmly. “I’m here to take hold
with you, and you must remember that there are two of us now. What has
gone wrong?”
Adam Vallory shook his head sadly.
“The thing that went wrong dates back to a time before you were born,
David; to the time when I allowed your grandfather, and some others, to
persuade me that I ought to make a business man of myself. That was a
mistake; a very sorry mistake. I haven’t been a good banker.”
David shook his head in honest filial deprecation. “You have been the
best and kindest of fathers to Lucille and me, and that counts for
much more than being a successful money-grabber. And you’ve earned the
love and respect of everybody worth while in Middleboro. What is the
present trouble? Are you having a run on the bank?”
“I suppose you wouldn’t call it a run, as yet. There is no special
excitement and the people are very quiet and orderly. But there have
been a great many withdrawals, and there will doubtless be more. If it
should come to a real run----”
“Let me have it all,” the son encouraged, when the pause grew
over-long. “Do you mean that the bank isn’t solvent?”
“It is not,” was the low-toned rejoinder, given without qualification.
“I have made a number of bad loans. So long as I had to deal only with
neighbors and friends, men whom I have known and trusted all my life, I
got along fairly well, though the bank has never earned much more than
the family living, as you know. But when the town began to grow and the
factories came in the conditions were changed--for me. Then Mugridge
started the Middleboro National, and that was the beginning of the end.
He took his pick of the new customers and let me have the fag ends.
The Stove Works went into bankruptcy a week ago, and that was the last
straw.”
“You were carrying Carnaby, of the Stove Works?” David asked.
“Yes; and for much more than his capitalization, or our resources,
would warrant. He has been very smooth and plausible, and I have
believed in him, as I have in others. The story of my involvement
with Carnaby leaked out, as such stories always do. As I have said,
there has been no panic; just the steady stream of withdrawals
and account-closings. It’s telling on us fast now, and the end is
practically in sight. This is no world for the idealist in business,
David.”
David Vallory was silent for a time, leaning forward with his elbows
on his knees and his chin propped in his palms. His pipe had gone out,
but he still held it clamped between his teeth. In Middleboro tradition
it was said that he favored his mother’s people, and the square-set,
firm-lipped mouth bore out the assertion. But the good gray eyes were,
not the eyes of a dreamer, perhaps, but the eyes of the son of a
dreamer; more--they were the eyes of a man who had not yet outgrown the
illusions. Adam Vallory had matured slowly; he was in his thirties when
he married. And the slow maturing process seemed to have been handed
on to the son. A stronger man than his father, this David, one would
have said; though perhaps only as athletic youth is stronger than age.
And a close observer, like the crop-bearded stranger of the Pullman
car, might have added that the strength was idealistic rather than
practical; a certain potency of endurance rather than of militancy.
“Just how bad is it--in actual figures?” the son asked, at the end of
the chin-nursing pause.
Adam Vallory closed his eyes as one wearied and stunned in the clash
and clamor of a battle too great for him.
“We can go on paying out to-day, and perhaps to-morrow. Beyond that,
there is failure for the bank; and--and beyond the failure, David,
there is a prison for me!”
The younger man straightened up quickly and there was unfeigned horror
in the good gray eyes.
“Good heavens, Dad!--you don’t mean anything like that!” he exclaimed
in a shocked voice.
“I wish I didn’t, son, but it is true. I have been weak; criminally
weak, some will say. All along I have been clinging desperately to
the hope that I could pull through; that the bad paper the bank is
holding would somehow miraculously turn into good paper. A better
business man would have faced the worst weeks ago. I didn’t. We have
gone on receiving deposits when I knew that we were, to all intents and
purposes, insolvent. That, as you know, is a penitentiary offense.”
David Vallory got upon his feet and began to pace up and down the
length of the small room, three strides and a turn. It was his maiden
projection into the jostling arena of business, and for the moment
he could only struggle hardily for standing room in it. He had
always known, in a general way, that his book-loving father was no
money-getter in any modern sense of the term, but there had always
been enough and something to spare for him and for the blind sister
whose birth had cost the mother’s life. With the healthy ambition of
the average boy and youth, he had looked forward to a time when he
should go to work for himself in some chosen field and manfully build
up the slender fortunes of the family. But now the world of youthful
anticipation had gone suddenly and hopelessly awry.
“We can’t think of giving up, Dad!” he broke out, after he had tramped
his way through to some measure of decision. “There must be something
that we can turn into money and save the bank and your good name. Can’t
you find somebody who will carry you until we can make the turn?”
Adam Vallory shook his head in patient despair.
“That ground has all been plowed long ago, son. It is now six months
or more since I began borrowing on my private resources, such as they
are. There is nothing left; not even the house we live in. I suppose I
should have told you sooner, but that was another weakness. I wished
you to have a chance to finish your college course and get your start
in the world without distractions, and that much, at least, has been
accomplished.”
Once more the younger man sought to stem the torrent of the incredible
reversals, and this time he was partly successful.
“We can still hope that it isn’t altogether as bad as you think it
is, Dad,” he said, with greater optimism than his inner conviction
warranted. “In a few minutes I’m going to pull off my coat and have a
look at things from the inside. We’re not going down without a fight;
that’s settled. Aside from this prison scare--and it’s only a scare,
you know--no Middleboro jury would ever believe for a single moment
that you meant to do a criminal act--aside from that, there are two
mighty good reasons why we mustn’t go to the dogs.”
“Lucille?” queried the father.
“Yes; she is one of the reasons, and a pretty stout one. Life is always
going to be hard enough for the little sister, without adding poverty
and a sorrow that she can neither help nor hinder.”
“Quite true; and the other reason?”
David Vallory had sat down again, and a boyish flush came to darken the
healthy brown which was the gift of a more or less athletic youth.
“I didn’t intend to tell you--not just yet,” he demurred; “at least,
not until I had shown you that I could make good on my own, and prove
that you haven’t been throwing your money away on me. I--I’ve found the
girl, Dad.”
The older man leaned back in his chair and the tired eyes were closed.
“That is natural, and was to be expected,” he acquiesced. “You have
been very moderate, David. Many another young fellow would have found,
not one girl, but a round dozen, before reaching your age.”
David Vallory’s laugh matched the absurdity of the “round dozen.”
“Nothing like that; I’m not built that way, I guess,” he returned.
“There is only one girl, and though I hadn’t realized it until lately,
I think I discovered her to be that one while I was still wearing
knickerbockers.”
Adam Vallory nodded as one who understood.
“I have often wondered if it might not turn out that way,” he said;
“wondered and been just a trifle--no, I won’t say it. Judith is a good
girl, and she will doubtless make you a warm-hearted, loyal wife.”
“Judith?” said David, and now his flush was darker.
“Yes. You thought you were mighty secret about it, but I knew it,
all along; knew that you were corresponding with her while you were
at college, and missed you every time you spent an evening at the
Fallons’. It’s all right, son. I haven’t a word to say.”
“But--but--you’re tremendously mistaken, Dad!” the younger man
protested earnestly. “There has never been anything serious between
Judith and me. We were just good chums together in school, and----”
“Hold on a minute, son,” said Adam Vallory gently. “We have no money,
but we still have a few traditions. One of them is that no man of the
Vallory name has ever put the burden of proof on a woman, so far as
the records show. You admit that you wrote to Judith while you were in
college, and all Middleboro knows that you were always going about with
her in your vacations. Haven’t you been writing back and forth while
you were in Florida?”
“Oh, yes; now and then, of course. But----”
“You are trying to tell me that I have guessed wrong. Before you go
any farther, let me say this: your relations with Judith may have meant
nothing to you; but how about Judith herself? She is warm-blooded,
ardent, and much more mature than you are, in spite of the difference
in your ages. Be very sure that you don’t owe her something, David--the
biggest debt that a woman can ever hold against a man. Now go on and
tell me as much as you care to about the other girl--the real one.”
David was still showing the marks of disturbance, but he went on
manfully.
“There isn’t so very much to tell. I’ve--well, I’ve just found her,
that’s all. I met her last winter at Palm Beach. She was down there
with a bunch of New York people who go there every year. Raglan, my
chief on the Government job, knew her and some of her New York friends.
He began to introduce me, but she laughed and said, ‘Mr. Vallory and I
were rocked in the same cradle--in Old Middleboro,’ and that settled
it.”
The beaten man in the desk chair roused himself to say: “Then you did
know her as a child? She belongs here?”
“Not now. She is a citizen of a very much larger world.”
“Do I know her, or her people?--but of course I must.”
“You do. You have held her on your knee and told her fairy tales many a
time, while I stood by and listened. Doesn’t that place her for you?”
Adam Vallory shook his head with a smile that was reminiscent of
pleasanter things than the navigating of stormy seas in a sinking
business craft.
“I have held many little girls on my knee to tell them fairy stories,
David. That is another reason why I should never have been a banker; I
love children--and fairy tales--far too well.”
“You would never guess,” said David, with all the fatuousness of the
new-born lover. “Yet you and her father were schoolboys together.”
Adam Vallory roused himself again. “Not Eben Grillage?” he said.
“Yes; she is Mr. Grillage’s daughter; the brown-eyed little Vinnie we
used to know; though they all call her ‘Miss Virginia’ now.”
Again the upcast of reminiscence came to make the unsuccessful banker
forget for the moment the rotten business craft that was sinking
beneath him.
“Eben Grillage,” he mused. “He was, and is, everything that I am not.
He was a born leader, even as a boy. Success, or what most people value
as success, has been his for the taking. You have seen him, David? Is
he growing old, as I am?”
“You are old only in hard work; work that doesn’t appeal to you,” the
son said loyally. Then: “I have met Mr. Grillage only once, and--well,
I guess he didn’t have much time to throw away on an apprentice
engineer who was just then trying his prettiest to get a chance to talk
over old times with his daughter. I remember he asked about you.”
“That was in Florida?”
“Yes. I chased over to Palm Beach as often as I could during the
short season, but it didn’t do me much good. There were too many
other fellows ahead of me. It was on one of these trips that I met
Mr. Grillage. He had run down from some place in Georgia, where his
company was building a dam, to spend a week-end with his daughter. The
most that he said to me was in the nature of a good-humored ‘josh’ for
burying myself in a Government job.”
Adam Vallory nodded.
“You don’t remember Vinnie’s mother, of course; she died while you were
still only a little lad. She was what we, in my younger days, used to
call a belle; a most attractive woman, and as true and good as she was
beautiful. Eben Grillage had none of the qualities that such women are
supposed to care for--save one; he was big enough and strong enough to
reach out and take what he wanted. He idolized his wife; and the love
which was hers while she lived has been carried along to his daughter.”
“Any one can see that,” said David, laughing. “Virginia is the apple
of his eye. Have you kept in touch with him at all since he left
Middleboro?”
“Only at long intervals.”
“They say he is rich, and rapidly growing richer. He has made the
Grillage Engineering Company; built it from the ground up; and there
isn’t any undertaking too big for him to tackle and carry through. If
he wasn’t Virginia’s father, I’d strike him for a job--after we get
things straightened out here for you.”
“He would do well by you, for old times’ sake, I don’t doubt. To me,
Eben Grillage has never been the hard man that others seem to find
him; he is still the loyal friend of the boyhood days--our boyhood.
Different as we were, or perhaps just because of that difference, we
were like brothers. Why should the fact that he is Vinnie’s father make
you hold back?”
“I don’t know that I could explain it, even to you, Dad. But, somehow,
I should feel handcapped. Virginia has a mighty keen, sharp-edged
little mind of her own. I have a notion that she wouldn’t think much of
a fellow that her father was nursing along by hand.”
“Perhaps you are right. But tell me more about her.”
“I wish there were more to tell. I have met her a few times, and she
has been mighty sweet to me--for the sake of the kiddie days here in
Middleboro, as she occasionally took care to remind me. I’m not in her
set, you know; not even in the outer edges of it. Besides, as I have
said, she has a string of fellows as long as your arm. It’s only a
pipe-dream for me, as yet, and I’m going to forget all about it now,
until after we’ve staved off this trouble of yours. Will you turn me
loose among the money papers and securities? I’d like to make a few
figures for myself.”
With this for a beginning, David Vallory’s first day in the home town
resolved itself into a grind of hard work. Through what was left of the
forenoon, and straight on to three o’clock--welcome hour when the bank
doors were shut upon the public, and the tired old paying teller and
his assistant had an opportunity to balance their cash--the young man
probed steadily, sometimes with his father at his elbow, but oftener
alone.
What he discovered sobered him at first, and later evoked symptoms
of a panicky nature. The Middleboro Security, a one-man bank in all
that the term implies, was--unless some of the bad paper could be
redeemed--plainly insolvent; and, what was much worse, the insolvent
condition was of long standing. The failure of the Carnaby Stove Works
had been merely the tiring spark to set off the explosion. Without
immediate help; help that must run into the tens of thousands; the bank
must close its doors.
Though the June afternoon was not oppressively warm, David Vallory
found himself sweating profusely when the final column of figures had
been added. In the quiet of the semi-darkened bank, where Winkle and
the three clerks were still striving silently for their balances after
the strenuous business day, a menacing shadow fell. It was not only
ruin; it was ruin with disgrace. David was far from holding his father
responsible in any moral sense, this though it was apparent that the
present state of affairs had been long threatened. That it had not
reached a climax sooner was due chiefly to the fact that for many years
the country-town bank had done business only with honest customers.
David was not blind to his father’s one amiable weakness. It was known
far and wide that Adam Vallory could never say “No” to a sufficiently
importunate borrower; also, that he judged all men by his own upright
standards.
David Vallory got up from the table-desk at which he had been working
and slowly struggled into his coat. Grown man as he was, this was his
first rude collision with life in its commercial aspect, and he rose
from the preliminary grapple with a belittling feeling of inadequacy;
as if, as a boy, he had been rudely buffeted into the gutter by a
man. But the feeling did not becloud the clearly defined conclusion
at which he had arrived. He did not--could not--minify the impending
consequences. The bank examiner would come, and at his coming the
pitiless mill of publicity would begin to grind. There would be
exposure and a criminal prosecution. Those who knew Adam Vallory, the
man, would refuse to believe that he had consciously committed a crime;
but to the wider world he would figure merely as another addition to
the ranks of those who gamble with other people’s money; a banker who
had taken the desperate chance involved in going on and receiving
deposits when there was no reasonable hope of repaying the depositors.
The old-fashioned clock on the wall was striking four as the volunteer
checker of accounts gathered up the slips of scratch paper which he
had covered with figures and passed out to the small room at the rear
of the working space. The gray-faced man bending dejectedly over his
desk and waiting had no illusions. “Well, son?” he said, as David came
in.
The young man dropped heavily into a chair and sat for some moments
staring at the slips of scratch paper.
“This morning when you told me where we stood you didn’t make it any
worse than it really is,” he announced soberly. “Winkle gave me his
figures just now--the withdrawals for to-day. If they come after us
to-morrow as they have to-day, we shan’t be able to last until three
o’clock. I’ve gone over everything in the vault with a fine-tooth comb;
we need something like a hundred thousand dollars more than we have in
sight.”
Adam Vallory’s gaze was fixed upon the dust-covered steamship
lithograph hanging above his desk, but he saw the picture only with the
outward eye.
“A hundred thousand,” he repeated slowly. “David, it might as well be
a million. There is no use. I shall telegraph to the bank examiner
to-night, and we won’t open the bank doors in the morning.”
III
Eben Grillage
At his father’s definite acknowledgment of defeat David Vallory rose
and thrust the penciled sheets into his pocket, crumpling them absently
into a wad.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” he admitted. “I’m too young and too
raw; how raw I never realized until to-day. Just the same, everything
in me rises up to yell for an endurance fight. Call it stubbornness or
anything you like, but I’d rather be knocked out than squeezed out.
Some of the bad paper can be made good if we retain an up-to-date
lawyer and put the pressure on as if we meant it. In the savings
department we can gain time by insisting upon the sixty days’ notice of
withdrawal that the law allows. It’s tough to have to go down without
mixing it up a little with the enemy, Dad!”
“I know,” was the colorless reply. “But the fight has all been taken
out of me, David. You mustn’t think that I’ve been sitting here in my
chair and letting things take their course without making a struggle.
It hasn’t been anything like that. I’ve turned and twisted every way;
have borrowed to my limit and then tried to borrow more. I’ve even gone
practically on my knees to Mugridge, of the new Middleboro National. He
was as cold as a fish; told me that I ought to push my collections.”
“Have you consulted a lawyer?”
“Not specifically. Young Oswald has known about how things were going,
and he has advised me--as a friend. He would make a legal fight for us
if I’d let him.”
“Bert Oswald is going to make himself the rarest combination on
earth--or at least he was heading that way when he came out of the law
school.”
“A combination?”
“Yes, a man who will be stubbornly honorable and upright in spite of
his profession.” David Vallory was prone to magnify his own profession
to the detriment of some others, and in the engineering school he had
imbibed the technical man’s suspicion of those who draw up contracts
and specifications only to leave loopholes of escape. “I don’t believe
he would ever take a rascal’s retainer,” he went on, adding: “Why
don’t you employ him?”
It was Adam Vallory’s turn to show embarrassment.
“Bert has been coming to the house rather oftener than his boyhood
friendship with you would seem to warrant,” he returned half
reluctantly. “This morning you gave me your reason for not wishing to
take service under Eben Grillage. Can’t you imagine that I may have a
somewhat similar reason for not wishing to involve young Oswald in this
sorry business of ours?”
This was a new surprise for David. “Lucille?” he queried.
Adam Vallory nodded. “It can come to nothing, of course. Lucille,
herself, would be the first to insist that one with her affliction has
no right to become a wife and mother. Yet it has been a great comfort
to her to have Oswald dropping in at odd moments, or for an evening.
He understands her thoroughly, shares her keen love for music, and all
that. He has even taught her to play chess and to do a number of things
that we have never thought she was able to attempt. For her sake we
mustn’t drag him into this mess of ours, David.”
This hesitantly given explanation opened a new field of dismay for
David Vallory. As it seemed, there was a separate and distinct disaster
reaching out for each member of the little family of three persons;
the grim threat hanging over his father, the indefinite postponement
of his own embryo love affair, and now this portentous problem of
Lucille’s happiness. His love for the blind sister was deep and tender,
as it should have been, and at the moment his own affair shrank to
inconsequence, as it was constrained to when he realized how heavily
the blow would fall upon one who had been sheltered and protected in
every way.
“You have fully made up your mind to wire for the examiner to-night?”
he asked, after another interval filled with blind gropings for a
helpful suggestion.
Adam Vallory looked away toward the window and through it to the empty
country-town street beyond.
“There is no use in prolonging the agony, David. The day of reckoning
has come, and a few hours one way or another can make no possible
difference. I shall have to face the music in the end; we shall all
three have to face it, more is the pity. If there were the slenderest
chance of escape----”
The interruption, voices in the adjoining banking room, gruff tones
raised emphatically, and Winkle’s more moderate ones parroting excuses
and explanations came over the half-height partition of the rear
office. It culminated now in an abrupt opening of the door of privacy.
The intruder, whom Winkle had apparently been trying to bar out, was
a big man with a clean-shaven face in which each feature seemed to
have been massively exaggerated to make it harmonize with the gigantic
figure; a great Roman beak of a nose; a hard-bitted mouth buttressed by
a jaw over which the heavy cheeks hung like the dewlaps of a bulldog;
strong teeth clamping the blackest of cigars; shrewd eyes that glared
from beneath penthouse brows; in short, a man who, in the Stone Age,
would have acquired the most commodious of the caves and swung the
heaviest of the clubs.
“Adam--you old snipe!” was the giant’s explosive greeting, and his
hand-grip fairly lifted the slighter man out of his chair. “Nice kind
of a welcome your watch-dog cashier out there was trying to hand
me: said you were busy and couldn’t be interrupted! How are you,
David, boy”--and now it came David’s turn to wince under the vigorous
hand-grasp; at least, until he could summon his athletic training and
do a little bone crushing on his own account.
Adam Vallory, sunk fathoms deep in the pool of despair but a moment
before, made a generous effort to rise to the hospitable requirements.
“You took us completely unawares, Eben; I didn’t dream you were
anywhere within a day’s journey of old Middleboro. And Winkle’s
eyesight must be getting bad if he didn’t recognize you. Sit down, if
you can find a chair big enough to hold you. It’s a pleasure to see
your face again; you don’t give me the chance any too often. Now tell
us what good wind has blown you back to Middleboro.”
The big man seated himself, and the chair, though it was the stoutest
one in the room, whined its protest.
“Business, Adam; always business. We have an order in with your
two-by-four equipment factory here for a lot of scrapes and dump-cars,
and at the last minute Judson wired that he couldn’t deliver on time. I
didn’t happen to have anybody to send, so I came down here to read the
riot act to Tom Judson. He’ll ship now; I’ve just been out to see him.”
Then to David: “Young man, how soon can I get a train back to Chicago?”
David looked up the required information. The next through train would
leave at four minutes past nine o’clock. The visitor glanced at a
watch big enough and thick enough to have been used as a missile.
“That gives us about four hours, Adam,” he rumbled, “and we ought to be
able to pull up a good lot of the arrears in that length of time. Shut
up your desk and call it a day. We’ll trot over to the hotel and be
boys together for a little while. David will stay here and wind up the
odds and ends of the day’s business for you.”
Adam Vallory was opening his mouth to protest hospitably against the
hotel, but his son broke in ahead of him.
“That’s right, Mr. Grillage; I’m mighty glad you can have a little
time with Dad,” he interposed quickly. “We were speaking of you this
morning, and I was telling Dad that I had met you for a few minutes one
day last winder in Florida. Take him away with you, and I’ll stay and
close the bank.”
“Good boy!” was the gruff rejoinder. “By and by, when you get around
to it, you may make a sleeper reservation for me on that nine o’clock
train. Wire for it, and bring the answer over to the hotel. No,
Adam”--to the host who was trying to make himself the entertainer
instead of the entertained--“no, you’re not going to take me home with
you, this time. I want you all to myself. We’ll go to the St. Nicholas
and make old Vignaux give us one of his Frenchy dinners in a private
room. Get your hat and come along.”
Left to himself, David Vallory checked over the day’s transactions
with Winkle, telegraphed for the big man’s berth in the Chicago
sleeping-car, and then walked out to the tree-shaded suburb on the hill
to eat his dinner with the sister whom he had not yet seen. To his
great satisfaction he found young Herbert Oswald at the house, and the
presence of the young lawyer, who was easily persuaded to make a third
at the family dinner-table, pushed the disaster explanations, or such
of them as might have to be made to the blind girl, a little farther
into the future.
Though David forced himself to talk at the table-for-three,
his cheerful attempts to keep the conversation in some safe
middle-of-the-road channel did not obscure for him the sentimental
situation developing under his eyes. Lucille, whose delicate, rose-leaf
beauty was a direct inheritance from her father, was more animated than
David had ever seen her, and it was doubly hard to realize that the
softly lighted eyes, lifted shyly now and again in Oswald’s direction,
were sightless. And as for the clean-cut, eager-faced young attorney,
there was small effort at concealment on his part.
David Vallory left the house after dinner with a heavy heart. He had
known Oswald all his life, and liked him. He was well assured that
the young lawyer would stand by and be a very tower of strength to
the family in the storm which was about to burst. But the outcome of
it all would be a swift conflagration in the sentimental field, and
a heart-breaking awakening for the blind sister, who was obviously
in love with Oswald without at all realizing it. On the half-mile
walk to the St. Nicholas David Vallory told himself in many and
sternly emphatic repetitions that something must be done to avert the
triple-headed calamity; though what the “something” should be was
entirely beyond his powers of imagination.
It was past eight o’clock when he reached the town’s one hotel and
found a quiet corner in the small office-lobby where he could smoke and
wait for the two who were bringing up the boyhood arrears in a private
room above-stairs. When the waiting interval ended, it was only the
burly guest-host who appeared, coming down from the private-dining-room
suite alone. Catching sight of David, he crossed the lobby, cast his
big body heavily into a chair, and lighted a cigar, the end of which
was already chewed into shapelessness.
“You have sent Dad home?” inquired the son, after he had delivered the
telegram assuring one Eben Grillage of a reserved space in the Chicago
sleeping-car.
“No!”--disgustedly. “Some crazy farmer broke in on us a few minutes ago
and insisted on taking your father over to the bank. Said he had an
option on a piece of land, and was obliged to get his money to-night to
make good on it.”
David winced. He knew perfectly well that the excuse given had been
only an excuse; that the intruding farmer was merely one of the badly
frightened depositors in the Middleboro Security who was afraid to wait
for another day. He was wondering how much or how little his father had
told Grillage of the threatened disaster when the big man went on.
“There is something the matter with your father, David. All evening
he’s been acting like a man with a clot on his brain. Hasn’t been sick,
has he?”
This was one question that the son could answer without reservations:
“No; he hasn’t been side.”
“Humph! Then it’s business. How long have you been home, and how much
do you know about his banking affairs?”
“I’ve been here only one day, but I know all there is to know, I
guess,” said David, looking down at the worn pattern of the linoleum on
the lobby floor.
The head of the Grillage Engineering Company twisted himself in his
chair and bored into the young man at his side with the masterful eyes.
“Huh! Been here only one day, and yet you know it all. That means that
he’s up against it. I knew it; it was bound to come sooner or later.
Anywhere else but in Middleboro he would have gone on the rocks years
ago; I’ve always told him that. Shake it loose, young man, and give me
the facts.”
David hesitated in some manly fashion. If his father had not seen fit
to confide in the tried friend of his youth, it was not for the son to
take matters into his own hands.
“I don’t know that I have a right to do that, Mr. Grillage,” he began.
“I----”
“See here!” was the explosive interruption; “if you knew me a little
better, you wouldn’t make a break like that. When I ask a man to loosen
up, he loosens, and that’s all there is to it. Dump it out--all of it.”
David, untried enough to feel that any sharing of the dreadful thing
would be a relief, hesitated no longer. The secret would be published
broadcast in a day or two at most, so nothing mattered much. In a few
words he told the story of the threatening catastrophe, exaggerating
nothing, minimizing nothing. Eben Grillage heard him through without
interrupting, shifting the chewed cigar from one corner of his mouth to
the other as he listened. But at the end of the story he was scowling
ferociously.
“Your father is still the same kind of a tender-hearted fool that he
has always been!” he rapped out. “Sat through an hour-and-a-half dinner
with me--dammit!--and never once opened his head about this bog hole
he’s mired in!” Then he dragged out the biscuit-like watch. “We’ve
got barely fifteen minutes, young man. You go and get Judson, the
scrapers-and-dump-car man, on the ’phone, while I do a bit of figuring.
Jump for it!”
David Vallory obeyed blindly, with his brain in a whirl. It took
several of the hastening minutes to locate Judson at his home in the
northern suburb, and when the telephone connection was finally made,
the hotel porter was calling the Chicago train and Eben Grillage
was at the desk, paying his bill and growling out orders about his
hand-baggage. A moment later David had handed the telephone receiver to
the big-bodied man and was listening mechanically to the audible half
of the conversation which began with shot-like directness.
“Yes, this is Grillage.... No, I don’t want to talk about the shipment;
I want to know where you do your banking.... With the Middleboro
National, you say? Well, this time you’ll do it through my bank--the
Middleboro Security. Get that? Attach your draft to bill of lading and
give it to Adam Vallory. Otherwise you don’t get your money. That’s
all. Good-night.”
“Train time, Mr. Grillage,” interrupted the hotel clerk, in his most
deferential tone.
“That’s all right; you hold that ’bus until I get ready!” snapped
the departing guest. Then, thrusting a slip of paper into David’s
hand: “Take that to your father, with my love. And a word to you, my
boy”--this in a rumbling aside: “After this ’phone talk of mine gets
handed about, your father will have all the credit he needs; but just
the same, if you’ve got the level head that you seem to have, you’ll
stand by and wind this bank business up, once for all. Your father’s
too damned good to be a banker in any such wicked world as the one
we’re living in. Dig up a good lawyer, push the crooked borrowers to
a settlement, and see if you can’t screw enough out of it to square up
and leave your father and sister a little something to live on. When
it’s done, you let me know by wire, and I’ll give you a job where you
can make good if you’ve got it in you. That’s all I’ve got to say. Tell
your father good-by for me; I shan’t have time to stop at the bank.”
It was not until after the crazy omnibus had rattled away, bearing the
St. Nicholas’s departing guest in galloping haste for the train, that
David Vallory ventured to glance at the slip of paper which had been
shoved into his hand. For an instant the figures on it dazzled him and
he had a rush of blood to the brain that made the electric lights in
the hotel lobby coruscate and take on many-colored halos.
The slip of paper was Eben Grillage’s personal cheque on a Chicago bank
for the round sum of one hundred thousand dollars.
IV
An Honorable Discharge
David Vallory lost little time in crossing the square from the St.
Nicholas to the bank corner; in point of fact, he was boyish enough to
run. In the bank he found his father relocking the vault after having
given the frightened farmer his money.
“Is your heart-action still pretty good, Dad?” he asked. “No high blood
pressure, or anything like that, is there?”
“No, David. If I were as sound in mind as I am in body----”
But David would not let him finish. “Take a look at this and tell the
blues to go hang,” he laughed, fishing the cheque of salvation out of
an inner pocket.
Adam Vallory held the strip of paper up to the electric vault light,
saw the figures and the signature, and dropped back into a chair,
shaken and tremulous.
“David!” he gasped reproachfully. “Did you tell him?”
“I did. Because it was evident that you hadn’t told him, I tried my
best to dodge; but it was no manner of use. When Mr. Eben Grillage goes
after a thing, he is not to be denied. He nearly bit my head off when
he saw that I was trying to keep something from him. He said I was to
give you that piece of paper with his love; that was after he’d ordered
me to call Tom Judson on the ’phone for him and had told Judson that
the Middleboro Security was his bank, and that he must draw through you
for the money to pay for the shipment of scrapers and dump-cars. He
said it so that the people standing around in the hotel lobby couldn’t
help hearing and knowing that he is backing you. Isn’t that just about
the finest thing you ever heard of?”
Adam Vallory was shaking his head dubiously.
“It is too fine, David; the obligation, even from an old friend like
Eben.... It’s crushing. But we must consider it as a loan, no matter
how he regards it. Yet I don’t see how we shall ever be able to pay it
back.”
The young man had perched himself upon the bookkeeper’s high stool, and
he had his answer ready.
“You’ve been doing all the scrapping, thus far, Dad, but now you must
let me take my whirl at it. We’ll let the old ship go decently and
honorably ashore, and then climb out and save the pieces. We’ll pay Mr.
Grillage back all we can rake and scrape out of the wreck; and beyond
that----”
“Well?--beyond that, what, son?”
“It sounds rather stagy, but I’m going to say it. Beyond what money
payment we may be able to make, we shall owe Mr. Grillage a debt of
gratitude that will be canceled only when we are both under the sod.
That is about the way it strikes me. I don’t care what people say
about his business methods and the way he rides rough-shod over his
competitors; that doesn’t cut any figure in his relations with you. He
has done this thing for you, individually, and I don’t come even into
the outer edges of it; just the same, he has laid an obligation upon me
that I shall never live long enough to forget.”