can exert over a fellow. You stand up on a hill and look at her, and
something, your dead forefathers maybe, comes up to you in waves of
influence. "Come back to your own!" says the Something, "I am waiting
for you! By me conquer!" The longer I stay in Missouri, the longer I
mean to stay. I have accepted the challenge of this great unconquered,
waiting land. It is my own country.
Sorry to have kept you so long over all this, but I thought that you
ought to know. Shall write you the out-look after the Joplin trip. I
have a notion that things will be adjusted toward the future after that.
Give my love to the fellows.
Yours, B. S.
P. S. Please express me one of those fold-up, carry-around-with-you
bath-tubs.
When Carington, in the office down on Nassau Street, had read that, all
of it, he turned over the last sheet and looked blankly at its
blankness, quoted from the first paragraph, "Had I not got a feeling of
encouragement from other experiences"; reread the entire letter, and was
still afflicted with a sense of something lacking.
"Now where the dickens did he get the encouragement?" cried Carington
fretfully. "Psha! he has not put that in at all!"
As a matter of entity and quiddity, it is well-nigh impossible to put
into a letter the little quivering lift of spirit that may come to a man
just because a girl's hair is lustrous, her eyes winey, her voice
delicious, her smile one of gay fellowship.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Carington could not.
_Chapter Five_
BOOM TIME IN THE TOWN THAT JACK BUILT
"Here we are! This is the town that jack built, this is the town the
poet wrote about!" Madeira was leaning forward from the rear seat of a
high road-cart to talk to Steering, who sat on the front seat beside the
driver. Madeira had the back seat by himself, but, leaning forward, with
both arms spraddled out behind Steering and the driver, he seemed now
and then to take possession of the front seat, too.
"Yes!" cried the driver, who, fearless, confident, glowing, was managing
her spirited horses skilfully, "at Joplin's gates, you must chant the
classic, 'Hey this, what's this?'"
"And up from the city rolls the triumphant answer, 'This is the town
that jack built!'" declaimed Steering, glancing down into the driver's
face with accordant appreciation. He felt accordant and he felt
appreciative. He had enjoyed the little railway journey from Canaan in
company with the Madeiras. He had enjoyed the night before, which he had
spent at the house of a Joplin friend of the Madeiras. He was enjoying
the ride now. The friend of the Madeiras had put good horses at
Madeira's disposal and Miss Sally Madeira could get speed out of good
horses as easily as other women get a purr out of a kitten. Even
Madeira, just behind him, crowding forward upon him, did not very much
bother Steering. It was all enjoyable.
They were on a long wide street that presented violently contrasted
activities, hard to encompass with one pair of eyes. For blocks the
buildings lined off on either side, low, flimsy and hastily
constructed--mining-camp architecture, that gave way at abrupt intervals
to tall and sightly brick-and-stone structures, built for the future
metropolis rather than for the present camp. A section of an electric
railway that was thirty-two miles long ran through the street, and the
handsomely equipped cars on it clipped past mud-encrusted mule teams
from distant hill farms, prairie schooners, and dilapidated carryalls.
The scene was tremendously, occidentally irregular, setting forth that
merciless clutch of the future upon the past that makes the present mere
transition. The town was hard pushed to catch up with its own vast
possibilities. A small place, set suddenly forward as one of the world's
great ore markets, it could not even house the mining business that had
poured in upon it, and that made of its main thoroughfare a tossing,
turbulent stream of people. Almost every building that Steering saw was
crowded to the doors with mining brokers' desks, mining brokers' desks
spilled out on the side-walk, desks could be seen at the doors of the
retail stores and desks kept banking-house doors from shutting. The
windows of the newspaper offices and of the mineral companies were
crowded with displays of ore. The hub-bub about these places was fierce,
unbearable. Young men, with their handkerchiefs in their collars,
hurried from one office to another, warm with excitement, flapping great
bunches of letters and memoranda in their hands as they hurried.
Messenger boys ran up and down the streets with telegrams. Buyers from
the Kansas smelters, smelters in Illinois, smelters up about St. Louis,
smelters in Indiana, smelters in Wales, nosed around like ferrets. Fine
young men, who were supposed to look after the interests of the big
foreign companies, sauntered out of bar-rooms, doing violence to the
supposition. Map-sellers whacked their hands with folders. Wooden booths
flung signs to the streets bigger than the booths themselves: "Mineral
Companies Promoted," "Mining and Smelting," "Mines, Options,
Leases,"--there was no end to the variations of the eternal theme of
mining. Town lots, switches of flats, and hill ridges were being swapped
and sold and leased from the curb-stone; leases were being made from
buggies and options were being granted from a horse's back.
"Whewee!" marvelled Steering, with a little itch of fear for the ore-mad
people, "legal forms are being put to fearful strains, are they not,
with all this heedless buying and selling?"
Madeira laughed loudly, "God bless you, legal forms! All that a man who
wants to sell has to do is to throw a plank, any little rotten plank,
across the chasm of future litigation and ten buyers will walk it with
nerves of steel." He patted Steering's shoulder. "My boy, it's this
headlong impetus that assures the success of the Canaan Company. If I
get that thing started once, all I have to do is to advertise it down
here a week. The stock will go like hot-cakes. People don't care what
they buy, just so they buy. They've got no sense of value left. Why, a
man found an outcrop of a zinc lode under his chicken-coop
yesterday--and to-day the price of chicken-coops has gone up." Madeira
patted Steering's shoulder again and laughed again, pleased at his
aptness in figuring the thing out.
"He's just exactly right," said the girl, nodding at Steering. "Over
here the average man needs a guardian to keep him out of the clutches of
the 'boodlers.' I almost hate to see this sort of excitement come into
Canaan. Father has been pretty busy all his life looking after infant
men, but from now on his plight is going to be pitiable. I saw that
yesterday afternoon, Dad, when the farmers were filing into the bank to
put their money into your hands." The girl, turning back to smile at
Madeira, was the cause of Steering's turning back, too, and he was
surprised to see a patriarchal, benign expression on Madeira's face, as
though a reflection of the girl's illusions about his character lay
warm upon him.
"Oh, I don't mind my job as nurse for the Canaanites, Pet," said Madeira
softly, and then waved one hand out toward the city and changed the
subject. "Pretty good for a lazy semi-southern State, eh, Steering?" He
nudged the girl next and added: "Before we are through with him we'll
have convinced the New Yorker that a good deal happens outside New York.
Won't we, Pet?"
"Yes, sirree," said the girl, imitating her father's manner adroitly, as
she put her horses through the crowded thoroughfare, "the United States
of America has more than one way of living the life strenuous, and
Broadway, New York, doesn't begin to be the only place where she lives
it. Look abroad, look abroad!" She was altogether fascinating as she
pointed out to Steering little typical features that he would have
missed without her humourous, boastful sallies.
As they continued on their way, Madeira and the girl bowed and smiled to
acquaintances, and once the horses were stopped at the curb to enable
Madeira to talk to some man whom he knew well. While waiting, with the
road-cart drawn up close to the curb, Steering and the girl could hear
talk all about them,--zinc and lead, jack, jack, jack! Flying chips of
conversation assailed their ears as the people scurried by; references
to old companies and their latest projects, and to new companies and new
finds; talk about the menace of the runs pinching out, and talk about
the danger of over-stocking the world's zinc markets; grumbling talk
about the wildcat exploitation going on at every corner, and envious
talk about a report that some wildcat promoter had just succeeded in
selling a face of ore that had cut blind under the drill of the buyer in
a few lamentable days; condemnatory talk about what an extremely
gold-brick country this was, and awed talk about the remarkable prices
that some of the gold bricks fetched. All the talk was frankly of
millions. The scale was gigantic. Even poor men seemed to have acquired
a familiarity with the sound of great sums that made them take
themselves as somehow richer and bigger. Voices shook with eagerness and
avidity; hands worked constantly at button-holes, or at lapels, or with
watch-guards. When acquaintances passed on the street they did not say
"how-do-you-do"; they looked at each other's bulging pockets and said,
"lemme see your rock." What Steering and the girl heard as they waited
in the road-cart was fragmentary but significant: "Scotch Company will
divide off another one hundred thousand acres, so they say--No,
sirree-bob, no more hand-jigging for me--Wouldn't take one-quarter of a
million for it, if you'd give it to me--Boston Company is bound to make
millions--Yes, that's Madeira,--Canaan Tigmores--Oh, he will mint money
out of it, no doubt in the world about that he goes in to win----"
The girl turned to Steering with pleased pride. "You see? He always
wins. People expect him to." Madeira was over at the edge of his seat,
talking earnestly to the man on the curb. Steering, beside the girl,
looking down at her, not seeing Madeira because of her, nodded
approvingly, the approval being for her honesty, her sweetness, her
vitality. Something, perhaps the near climax for her father's enterprise
at Canaan, seemed to have keyed her to a high pitch. Steering, who by
now had had opportunities to see her often, had never seen her so
beautiful, nor so quick of expression in word and look. Her voice
thrilled him; and while he was thrilling, Madeira's voice came on to
him: "You needn't hold back on that account," Madeira was saying: "God
bless you, I've got the next heir in the deal, too."
"Oh-ho," said the girl, who also heard, "we are taking you for granted,
aren't we?" Steering only smiled at her again. He had fallen into the
habit of smiling at her, and some prescience seemed to urge him to
exercise the habit while he could.
Madeira was turning from the man on the curb: "All right, I'll allot you
one thousand shares, eh? Good-day.--Pet, you'd better drive on out to
Chitwood, lickety-split."
Miss Madeira put the whip to her horses, and they left the Joplin
streets behind them, and sped out a gritty white road that crossed a
lean sweep of prairie. Ahead of them Steering could see presently a sort
of settlement; wooden sheds, wide and low; hoister shafts, tall and
slim, on stilts; scaffolding; pipes; chimneys; tramways; surface
railways. His eyes leaped from moundlike piles of tailings, the powdery
crush spit out by the concentrating mills, to boulder-like heaps of
rocks that had been wheeled away to save the teeth of the mills, and his
ears turned distraught from the groaning clank of unwieldy iron tubs,
swinging up through skeleton shafts, to the sputtering plunk-plunk of
drill engines and the booming roar of machinery.
"Hard to keep up with, eh? God bless us, it certainly _is_ hard to keep
up with!" cried Madeira. "Drive into the enclosure there at the
Howdy-do, Pet, Throcker will be expecting us. I telephoned him. Yes,
sir, this is the place to see what zinc means." Madeira was leaning
forward again, one arm about his daughter and the other arm fathering
Steering. "This is the place to understand what can be done by seeing
what has been done." He seemed to want to fire Steering with the idea
that just such another astounding development could be wrought out down
there in the Canaan Tigmores, and though Steering was aware that he
would soon be at a crisis where he would need an austere strength of
judgment, uncoloured by enthusiasm of any kind, he could not help
responding to the aura of enthusiasm into which he was entering. The
great plant of the Howdy-do mine disseminated enthusiasm in shaking
vibrations. Milled enthusiasm stood about in cars, ready for the
smelters. Enthusiasm roared and whirred from the concentrating mill
where wheels were turning and bands were slipping; where a tub,
ore-laden, was jerking and clanking through the hoister shaft; where men
on an upper platform were shovelling the dump from the tub into great
crusher rolls; where the rolls were grinding and pounding, and the water
was fashing and gurgling down the jigs. The whirr of it all, the whizz
and bang of it, the whole effect of it all, was, to any man interested
in the development of ore, a great forward impetus that swung him far
out, limp and dizzy.
"Waiting for you, Mr. Madeira!" cried a man, who fairly shone with
enthusiasm, and whose voice tinkled gladly as he came across to the
hitching rail where Miss Madeira had stopped her horses. "Mighty glad to
see you, Miss Sally--Mr. Steering, glad to meet you, sir. Here you,
Mike! come and look after these horses. Miss Sally, I'm a-going to have
to take you round to the tool-house for some covers, please ma'am." The
accommodating and friendly mine-boss of the Howdy-do led Madeira's party
to a shed opposite his mill and there outfitted them with rubber coats
and caps, talking to them all the while in that tinkling voice, with the
glad note singing in it.
"God bless my soul, Throcker, how much did the last blast bring down?"
Madeira turned to Steering before Throcker could reply. "Whenever a
miner's voice shakes and sings like that, his last blast has meant a
heap."
"You are right, sir!" cried Throcker, "we opened up a face yesterday
that,--well, it's going to take us weeks to handle even the loose ore
we've brought down, sir. Come this way, Miss Sally, please ma'am."
Steering began to wish that the mine-boss were not so happy. It had an
electric effect upon him. And he began to wish that he himself were not
so happy. He dreaded developments that would surely be change.
"Well, Throcker, my boy, my ledge of Cherokee runs up here from the
Canaan Tigmores, d'you know that?" said Madeira. He put his thumbs in
his pockets and rocked upon the balls of his feet with a springing,
tip-toe movement, as Throcker stopped them in front of a shaft out of
whose cavernous depths a cage was swinging toward them. From Madeira's
manner you might have inferred that the Cherokee had a Madeira permit to
"run up here."
In the cage it was necessary for Steering to extend his arm behind Miss
Madeira, as there were no sides between the great cables at the four
corners. It was not a very large cage and the number on it crowded it,
so that the girl rested lightly on Steering's arm. He could think of no
place so deep down that he would not be well satisfied to journey to it
like that.
But there came a jolt and a jar, the cage settled upon the stope, and
the journey was over. Throcker led the way through a thick underground
gloom. Great masses of crush-rock slid under foot, there was a black
drip from ceiling and walls, and the excavation was filled with the
hollow boom of the water-and air-pumps. With lights flaring uncertainly,
they followed the mine-boss out upon a rocky crag that gave upon a deep
abyss, faintly illuminated by the flicker of the lamps of the working
force below and by torches set in the wall. There was an upward slope in
the formation of the ledge from the bottom of the cavern to the spur
upon which they stood, but it was made by irregular juttings with ugly,
saw-tooth projections. Unless they were very near the edge they could
not follow the dim outline of the slope at all. Throcker in his
eagerness to point out the ore, shining like specks of gold all up and
down the slope, worked dangerously near the edge, but he was accustomed
and recovered his balance easily when a piece of his support crumbled
away under his feet. Steering, who was agile and athletic, had no
difficulty in keeping up with the miner, but Madeira had to be watchful.
The miner would not let Miss Madeira come far out on the crag, though he
let the men follow him, calling warnings to them as they came.
"From where you stand, Miss Sally," Throcker turned toward the girl who
waited below the summit of the crag, "from where you stand up to here,
the loose ore is worth about sixty-five thousand dollars!"
The girl looked up at them responsively. Standing there under the
strange flickering light of her torch, with the black folds of the
rubber coat swathing her, her face, with its fine eyes, was cut out for
Steering sharp as a cameo.
"I am delighted for your sake, Mr. Throcker," she called gaily, but with
a little uneasiness in her voice. "Father, please be careful."
"Sixty-five thousand dollars! Why, Lord love you, Throcker, a hundred
thousand, if one." Madeira, taking charge of the probabilities in the
case, moved toward the edge to support his estimate by measuring with
his eye the distance down the crag.
"Father, please be careful. Watch him, Mr. Steering,--O-h-h-h!" A
woman's cry of horror rang though the tunnelled walls as Madeira's great
frame toppled on the edge of the crag, and disappeared.
Throwing out his right arm protectingly, as though in answer to the girl
below, Steering had been able to knot the sinewy fingers of one hand
about Madeira's collar as the latter fell. The force of the fall brought
Steering to his knees, then flat out across the ledge, to get all the
purchase power he could. Madeira's weight was terrific, even after
Steering had brought his other hand into requisition; and though
Throcker sprang to the rescue, Throcker was a weak man and the best aid
that he could render was to assume a small share of Madeira's weight by
getting down flat upon the ledge, after Steering's fashion. In the black
hole below the miners saw what had happened and two burly men began to
clamber up the treacherous slope.
"Gently, boys, gently," warned Throcker, as the men came on; he and
Steering could feel the rock upon which they lay vibrate; there was a
rending and splitting going on all through the ledge. "Can you hold on a
minute alone, sir?" gasped Throcker suddenly. "I have a bad heart and
it's going back on me,"--he fell weakly beside Steering.
"Yes, I can hold on alone." Steering's face was in the loose crush, and
his lips were cut by the rock when he opened them, so he stopped trying
to talk.
"Get back, Mr. Throcker--let me get my hands down and help Mr.
Steering." It was the girl's voice, and the girl was beside Steering,
quiet and capable.
"Oh, you?" said Steering. He had known all these seconds that he was
doing this for her, but the strain that he was on had somehow pulled him
beyond the comprehension of her as actual; for the last ten seconds she
had been rather a big abstraction, a high principle of his soul, a good
desire in his heart. To see her there before him was to see abstraction,
principle, desire becoming adequately incarnate. "No, you mustn't try to
reach down here,--your arms aren't long enough,--the commotion on the
edge here is dangerous,--if you will just put something, your
handkerchief, under my face where the sharp little rocks are at it,--ah,
you should not have done _that_!"--she had slipped her hands beneath his
face, and the touch of her fingers was like velvet as she worked away
the sticking, stinging bits of ore and rock that worried him. He had not
known how chief a part in his sensation of discomfort those bits had
played until he could bury his face in the relief of her soft hands. As
a matter of fact, with those bits out of his cheeks,--and his face in
her hands,--he felt no great discomfort at all. If it had not been for
her shivering sigh of relief he would have been sorry when the miners
drew Madeira up. Madeira had not spoken, and he was purple as they
carried him to a place of safety some distance back on the ledge.
"He is just the sort of man physically who ought not to be subjected to
choking experiences," said Steering. One of the miners had brought
water, and Steering and Miss Madeira were reviving Madeira with it.
Madeira did not seem to be unconscious, but his senses were obtunded,
and it was some minutes before he could sit up.
"God bless my soul! God bless my soul!" he said, at last, and shivered.
Then he turned to Steering: "My boy, you know how to hold on. I believe
you've got as much stick-to-it-iveness as I have." It was his supremest
form of acknowledgment, and, in making it, he made, too, an impression
upon Steering that he resented the circumstances that compelled him to
make it.
They got back to the upper air presently, followed by a cheer from the
mine force below. The miners had watched Steering perform one of those
supernatural feats of strength and endurance that an onlooker can never
explain afterward. Usually the performer knows that the thing was a
matter of motive and will, not muscle.
Up in the daylight again, Madeira was quickly himself again. He resumed
charge of affairs in his comprehensive way, and though the mine-boss,
frightened and remorseful, was limp now, all his enthusiasm gone,
Madeira's welled up again strong within him. They went back to their
horses without loss of time, and, waving adieux to Throcker and some of
his men who had gathered about, they were soon journeying back down the
white road toward Joplin. Miss Madeira's hands were in bad condition for
driving, Steering thought, but she had taken the reins just the same.
"We are all dilapidated for the matter of that," she said. "Father is as
grey-faced as a rat, your cheeks are all cut and pricked--my hands don't
count."
Twilight was coming on and a full moon was rising. The great sweep of
flat stretched out about them in a mesh of soft light. The ride back
was gay, and when they stopped at the house of the Joplin man, who was
their host, all three were still in nervously high spirits. A negro
servant came out for the horses, and Steering helped Miss Madeira to
alight. The girl had drawn off her driving gauntlets, and the ungloved
hand that she gave him was scratched and scarred across its brown back.
"Isn't that shameful,--and you did it for me!" mourned Steering.
"Oh, if I could have done more!" she cried breathlessly, "if I could do
more,--as much as you have done for me! If I have not thanked you, you
know,"--what she was saying was fragmentary and confused, but her eyes
were shining sweetly upon him,--"it's because I can't. You must
understand that. I never can talk when I am busy feeling. How are your
shoulders?"
"I don't know that I have any," replied Steering, with wretched
prevarication.
"Come on, Honey, come on." Madeira was at the stone steps of the Joplin
house, and the girl took his arm and climbed the steps with him. At the
top Madeira turned back to Steering, who was a step behind. "Well, old
man, let's have it out now, before we go in and get mixed up with these
strangers. What about those shares? Coming in with us, I reckon?" It was
like Madeira to select a position of advantage like that, a higher place
from which he could look down and dominate, with his daughter beside
him, and it was like him to select a moment like that, a moment when the
three were close, on the very summit of their friendship and sympathy.
"We are to be all together on that deal, aren't we?"
Though the girl, her arm linked through her father's, was waiting for
his answer, and though Steering saw that she expected his acquiescence
as the right and natural thing, her influence upon him, despite that,
was all for the rejection of Madeira's proposition. She looked so young,
so straight, so honest, that, as an influence, she was ranged against
Madeira, even though, in her ignorance, she imagined herself to be in
harmony with him. Steering, looking at her first and Madeira next, knew
that she really fashioned his answer, that it was really all because of
her that his words came, swiftly, earnestly: