THE ODD SPIDER BEGINS TO DIVIDE HIS FLIES WITH OTHERS AND GEORGE
BROTHERTON IS PUZZLED TWICE IN ONE NIGHT
Now it was in the year of these minor conquests when Henry Fenn and
Violet Hogan were enjoying their little Heavens that great things began
to stir in Harvey and the Wahoo Valley. In May a young gentleman in a
high hat and a suit of exquisite gray twill cut with a long frock coat,
appeared at the Hotel Sands--and took the bridal suite on the second
floor. He brought letters to the Traders' Bank and from the Bank took
letters to the smelters, and with a notebook in hand the young man in
exquisite gray twill went about for three or four days smiling affably,
and asking many questions. Then he left and in due course--that is to
say, in a fortnight--Mr. Sands called the managing officials of all the
smelters into his back room and read them a letter from a New York firm
offering to trade stock in a holding company, taking over smelters of
the class and kind in the Wahoo Valley for the stocks and bonds of the
Harvey Smelters Company. The letterhead was so awe-inspiring and the
proposition was so convincing by reason of the terror inherent in the
letterhead that the smelters went into the holding company, and
thereafter the managing officials who had been men of power and
consequence in Harvey became clerks. About the same time the coal
properties went the same way, and the cement concerns saw their finish
as individual competing concerns. The glass factories were also gobbled
up. So when the Fourth of July came and the youngest Miss Morton, under
great protest, but at her father's stern command, wrapped an American
flag about her--and sang the "Star Spangled Banner" to the Veterans of
Persifer F. Smith Post of the G.A.R. in Sands'
Park, the land of the free and the home of the brave in Harvey was
somewhat abridged.
Daniel Sands felt the abridgement more than any one else. For a
generation he had been a spider, weaving his own web for his own nest.
All his webs and filaments and wires and pipes and cables went out and
brought back things for him to dispose of. He was the center of the
universe for himself and for Harvey. He was the beginning and the end.
His bank was the first and the last word in business and in politics in
that great valley. What he spun was his; what he drew into the web was
his. When he invited the fly into his parlor, it was for the delectation
of the spider, not to be passed on to some other larger web and fatter
spider. But that day as he sat, a withered, yellow-skinned, red-eyed,
rattle-toothed, old man with a palsied head that never stopped wagging,
as he sat under his skull cap, blinking out at a fat, little world that
always had been his prey, Daniel Sands felt that he had ceased to be an
end, and had become a means.
His bank, his mines, his smelters, even his municipal utilities, all
were slipping from under his control. He could feel the pull of the rope
from the outside around his own foot. He could feel that he was not a
generator of power. He was merely a pumping station, gathering up all
the fat of the little land that once was his, and passing it out in
pipes that ran he knew not where, to go to some one else--he knew not
whom. True, his commissions came back, and his dividends came back, and
they were rich and sweet, and worth while. But--he was shocked when he
found courage to ask it--if they did not come back, what could he do?
He was part of a great web--a little filament in one obscure corner, and
he was spinning a fabric whose faintest plan he could not conceive.
This angered him, and the spider spat in vain rage. The power he loved
was gone; he was the mere shell of a spider; he was dead. Some man might
come into the bank to-morrow and take even the semblance of his power
from him. They might, indeed, shut up every mill, close every mine, lock
every factory, douse the fire in every smelter in the Wahoo Valley, and
the man who believed he had opened the mills, dug the mines, builded the
factories and lighted the smelter fires with all but his own hands,
could only rage and fume, or be polite and pretend it was his desire.
The town that he believed that he had made out of sunshine and prairie
grass, for all he could do, might be condemned as a bat roost, and the
wires and cables, that ran from his desk all over the Wahoo Valley,
might grow rusty and jangle in the prairie winds, while the pipes rotted
under the sunflowers and he could only make a wry face. Spiders must
have some instinctive constructive imagination to build their marvelous
webs; surely this old spider had an imagination that in Elizabeth's day
would have made him more than a minor poet. Yet in the beginning of the
Twentieth Century he felt himself a bound prisoner in his decaying web.
So he showed his blue mouth, and red eyelids in fury, and was silent
lest even his shadow should find how impotent a thing he was.
But he knew that one man knew. "How about your politics down here?"
asked the affable young man in exquisite gray twill, when he closed the
gas-works deal. And Dan'l Sands said that until recently he and Dr.
Nesbit had been cronies, but that some way the Doctor had been getting
high notions, and hadn't been around the bank lately. The young man in
the exquisite gray twill asked a few questions, catalogued the Doctor,
and then said:
"This man Van Dorn, it appears, is local attorney for all the mines and
smelters--he hasn't the reform bug, has he?"
The old spider grinned and shook his head.
"All right," said the polite young man in the exquisite gray twill, as
he picked up his gray, high hat, and flicked a speck of dust from his
exquisite gray frock coat, "I'll take matters of politics up with him."
So the spider knew that the servant had been put over the master, and
again he opened his mouth in malice, but spoke no word.
And thus it was that Judge Thomas Van Dorn formed a strong New York
connection that stood him in stead in after years. For the web that the
old spider of Market Street had been weaving all these years, was at its
strongest but a rope of sand compared with the steel links of the chain
that was wrapped about the town, with one end in the Judge's hand, but
with the chain reaching out into some distant, mysterious hawser that
moved it with a power of which even the Judge knew little or nothing.
So he was profoundly impressed, and accordingly proud, and added half an
inch to the high-knee action of his strut. He felt himself a part of the
world of affairs--and he was indeed a part. He was one of a thousand men
who, whether they knew it or not, had been bought, body and soul--though
the soul was thrown in for good measure in the Judge's case--to serve
the great, greedy spider of organized capital at whatever cost of public
welfare or of private faith. He was indeed a man of affairs--was Thomas
Van Dorn--a part of a vast business and political cabal, that knew no
party and no creed but dividends and still more dividends, impersonal,
automatic, soulless--the materialization of the spirit of commerce.
And strangely enough, just as Tom Van Dorn worshiped the power that
bought him, so the old spider, peering through the broken, rotting
meshes of what was once his web, felt the power to which it was
fastened, felt the power that moved him as a mere pawn in a game whose
direction he did not conceive; and Dan'l Sands, in spite of his silent
rage, worshiped the power like a groveling idolater.
But the worm never lacks for a bud; that also is a part of God's plan.
Thus, while the forces of egoism, the powers of capital, were
concentrating in a vast organization of socialized individualism, the
other forces and powers of society which were pointing toward a
socialized altruism, were forming also. There was the man in the
exquisite gray twill, harnessing Judge Van Dorn and Market Street to his
will; and there was Grant Adams in faded overalls, harnessing labor to
other wheels that were grinding another grist. Slowly but persistently
had Grant Adams been forming his Amalgamation of the Unions of the
valley. Slowly and awkwardly his unwieldy machinery was creaking its way
round. In spite of handicaps of opposing interests among the men of
different unions, his Wahoo Valley Labor Council was shaping itself into
an effective machine. If the shares of stock in the mills and the mines
and the smelters all ran their dividends through one great hopper, so
the units of labor in the Valley were connected with a common source of
direction. God does not plant the organizing spirit in the world for one
group; it is the common heritage of the time. So the sinister power of
organized capital loomed before Market Street with its terrible threat
of extinction for the town if the town displeased organized capital; so
also rose in the town a dread feeling of uneasiness that labor also had
power. The personification of that power was Grant Adams. And when the
young man in exquisite gray twill had become only a memory, Tom Van Dorn
squarely faced Grant Adams. Market Street was behind the Judge. The
Valley was back of Grant. For a time there was a truce, but it was not
peace. The truce was a time of waiting; waiting and arming for battle.
During the year of the truce, Nathan Perry was busy. Nathan Perry saw
the power that was organizing about him and the Independent mine among
the employers in the district, and intuitively he felt the
resistlessness of the power. But he did not shrink. He advised his
owners to join the combination as a business proposition. But his advice
was a dead fly fed to the old spider's senile vanity. For Daniel Sands
had been able to dictate as a part of his acceptance of the proposition,
this one concession: That the Independent mine be kept out of the
agreement. Nathan Perry suspected this. But most of his owners were game
men, and they decided not even to apply for admission to the
organization. They found that the young man's management of the mine was
paying well; that the labor problem was working satisfactorily; that the
safety devices, while expensive, produced a feeling of good-will among
the men that was worth more even in dividends than the interest on the
money.
But after he had warned his employers of the wrath to come, Nathan Perry
did not spend much time in unavailing regret at their decision. He was,
upon the whole, glad they had made it. And having a serious problem in
philology to work out--namely, to discover whether Esperanto, Chinese or
Dutch is the natural language of man, through study of the
conversational tendencies of Daniel Kyle Perry, the young superintendent
of the Independent mine gave serious thought to that problem.
Then, of course, there was that other problem that bothered Nathan
Perry, and being an engineer with a degree of B. S., it annoyed him to
discover that the problem wouldn't come out straight. Briefly and
popularly stated, it is this: If you have a boiler capacity of 200
pounds per square inch and love a girl 200 pounds to the square inch,
and then the Doctor in his black bag brings one fat, sweaty, wrinkled
baby, and you see the girl in a new and sweeter light than ever before,
see her in a thousand ways rising above her former stature to a
wonderful womanhood beyond even your dreams--how are you going to get
more capacity out of that boiler without breaking it, when the load
calls for four hundred pounds? Now these problems puzzled the young man,
living at that time in his eight-room house with a bath, and he sat up
nights to work them. And some times there were two heads at work on the
sums, and once in a while three heads, but the third head talked a
various language, whose mild and healing sympathy stole the puzzle from
the problem and began chewing on it before they were aware. So Nathan
put the troubles of the mine on the hook whereon he hung his coat at
night, and if he felt uneasy at the trend of the day's events, his
uneasiness did not come to him at home. He had heard it whispered
about--once by the men and once in a directors' meeting--that the clash
with Grant Adams was about to come. If Nathan had any serious wish in
relation to the future, it was the ardent hope that the clash would come
and come soon.
For the toll of death in the Wahoo Valley was cruel and inexorable. The
mines, the factories, the railroads, the smelters, all were death traps,
and the maimed, blind and helpless were cast out of the great industrial
hopper like chaff. Every little neighborhood had its cripple. From the
mines came the blind--whose sight was taken from them by cheap powder;
from the railroad yards came the maimed--the handless, armless, legless
men who, in their daily tasks had been crushed by inferior car
couplings; the smelters sent out their sick, whom the fumes had
poisoned, and sometimes there would come out a charred trunk that had
gone into the great molten vats a man. The factories took hands and
forearms, and sometimes when an accident of unusual horror occurred in
the Valley, it would seem like a place of mourning. The burden of all
this bloodshed and death was upon the laborers. And more than that,--the
burden of the widows and orphans also was upon labor. Capital charged
off the broken machinery, the damaged buildings, the worn-out equipment
to profit and loss with an easy conscience, while the broken men all
over the Valley, the damaged laborers, the worn-out workers, who were
thrown to the scrap heap in maturity, were charged to labor. And labor
paid this bill, chiefly because capital was too greedy to provide safe
machinery, or sanitary shops, or adequate tools!
Nathan Perry, first miner, then pit-boss and finally superintendent, and
always member of Local Miners' Union No. 10, knew what the men were
vaguely beginning to see and think. When some man who had been to court
to collect damages for a killed or crippled friend, some man who had
heard the Judge talk of the assumed risk of labor, some man who had
heard lawyers split hairs to cheat working men of what common sense and
common justice said was theirs, when some such man cried out in hatred
and agony against society, Nathan Perry tried to counsel patience, tried
to curb the malice. But in his heart Nathan Perry knew that if he had
suffered the wrongs that such a man suffered, he too would be full of
wrath and class hatred.
Sometimes, of course, men rose from the pit. Foremen became managers,
managers became superintendents, superintendents became owners, owners
became rich, and society replied--"Look, it is easy for a man to rise."
Once at lunch time, sitting in the shaft house, Nathan Perry with his
hands in his dinner bucket said something of the kind, when Tom
Williams, the little Welsh miner, who was a disciple and friend of Grant
Adams, cried:
"Yes--that's true. It is easy for a man to rise. It was easy for a slave
to escape from the South--comparatively easy. But is it easy for the
class to rise? Was it easy for the slaves to be free? That is the
problem--the problem of lifting a whole class--as your class has been
lifted, young fellow, in the last century. Why, over in Wales a century
ago, a mere tradesman's son like you--was--was nobody. The middle
classes had nothing--that is, nothing much. They have risen. They rule
the world now. This century must see the rise of the laboring class; not
here and there as a man who gets out of our class and then sneers at us,
and pretends he was with us by accident--but we must rise as a class,
boy--don't you see?"
And so, working in the mine, with the men, Nathan Perry completed his
education. He learned--had it ground into him by the hard master of
daily toil--that while bread and butter is an individual problem that no
laborer may neglect except at his peril, the larger problems of the
conditions under which men labor--their hours of service, their factory
surroundings, their shop rights to work, their relation to accidents and
to the common diseases peculiar to any trade--those are not individual
problems. They are class problems and must be solved--in so far as labor
can solve them alone, not by individual struggle but by class struggle.
So Nathan Perry came up out of the mines a believer in the union, and
the closed shop. He felt that those who would make the class problem an
individual problem, were only retarding the day of settlement, only
hindering progress.
Rumor said that the truce in the Wahoo Valley was near an end. Nathan
Perry did not shrink from it. But Market Street was uneasy. It seemed to
be watching an approaching cyclone. When men knew that the owners were
ready to stop the organization of unions, the cloud of unrest seemed to
hover over them. But the clouds dissolved in rumor. Then they gathered
again, and it was said that Grant Adams was to be gagged, his Sunday
meetings abolished or that he was to be banished from the Valley. Again
the clouds dissolved. Nothing happened. But the cloud was forever on the
horizon, and Market Street was afraid. For Market Street--as a
street--was chiefly interested in selling goods. It had, of course,
vague yearnings for social justice--yearnings about as distinct as the
desire to know if the moon was inhabited. But as a street, Market Street
was with Mrs. Herdicker--it never talked against the cash drawer. Market
Street, the world over, is interested in things as they are. The
_statuo quo_ is God and _laissez faire_ is its profit! So
Market Street murmured, and buzzed--and then Market Street also
organized to worship the god of things as they are.
But Mr. Brotherton of the Brotherton Book & Stationery Company held
aloof from the Merchants' Protective Association. Mr. Brotherton at odd
times, at first by way of diversion, and then as a matter of education
for his growing business, had been glancing at the contents of his
wares. Particularly had he been interested in the magazines. Moreover,
he was talking. And because it helped him to sell goods to talk about
them, he kept on talking.
About this time he affected flowing negligee bow ties, and let his thin,
light hair go fluffy and he wrapped rather casually it seemed, about his
elephantine bulk, a variety of loose, baggy garb, which looked like a
circus tent. But he was a born salesman--was Mr. Brotherton. He
plastered literature over Harvey in carload lots.
One day while Mr. Brotherton was wrapping up "Little Women" and a
"Little Colonel" book and "Children of the Abbey" that Dr. Nesbit was
buying for Lila Van Dorn, the Doctor piped, "Well, George, they say
you're getting to be a regular anarchist--the way you're talking about
conditions in the Valley?"
"Not for a minute," answered Mr. Brotherton. "Why, man, all I said was
that if the old spider kept making the men use that cheap powder that
blows their eyes out and their hands off, and their legs off, they ought
to unionize and strike. And if it was my job to handle that powder I'd
tie the old devil on a blast and blow him into hamburger." Mr.
Brotherton's rising emotions reddened his forehead under his thin hair,
and pulled at his wind. He shook a weary head and leaned on a show case.
"But I say, stand by the boys. Maybe it will make a year of bad times or
maybe two; but what of that? It'll make better times in the end."
"All right, George--go in. I glory in your spunk!" chirped the Doctor as
he put Lila's package under his arm. "Let me tell you something," he
added, "I've got a bill I'm going to push in the next legislature that
will knock a hole in that doctrine of the assumed risk of labor, you can
drive a horse through. It makes the owners pay for the accidents of a
trade, instead of hiding behind that theory, that a man assumes those
risks when he takes a job."
The Doctor put his head to one side, cocked one eye and cried: "How
would that go?"
"Now you're shoutin', Doc. Bust a machine, and the company pays for it.
Bust a man, the man pays for it or his wife and children or his friends
or the county. That's not fair. A man's as much of a part of the cost of
production as a machine!"
The Doctor toddled out, clicking his cane and whistling a merry tune and
left Mr. Brotherton enjoying his maiden meditations upon the injustices
of this world. In the midst of his meditations he found that he had been
listening for five minutes to Captain Morton. The Captain was expounding
some passing dream about his Household Horse. Apparently the motor car,
which was multiplying rapidly in Harvey, had impressed him. He was
telling Mr. Brotherton that his Household Horse, if harnessed to the
motor car, would save much of the power wasted by the chains. He was
dreaming of the distant day when motor cars would be used in sufficient
numbers to make it profitable for the Captain to equip them with his
power saving device.
But Mr. Brotherton cut into the Captain's musings with: "You tell the
girls to wash the cat for I'm coming out to-night."
"Girls?--huh--girls?" replied the Captain as he looked over his
spectacles at Mr. Brotherton. "'Y gory, man, what's the matter with
me--eh? I'm staying out there on Elm Street yet--what say?" And he went
out smiling.
When the Captain entered the house, he found Emma getting supper, Martha
setting the table and Ruth, with a candy box before her at the piano,
going over her everlasting "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ahs" from "C to C" as Emma
called it.
Emma took her father's hat, put it away and said: "Well, father--what's
the news?"
"Well," replied the Captain, with some show of deliberation, "a friend
of mine down town told me to tell you girls to wash the cat for he'll be
along here about eight o'clock."
"Mr. Brotherton," scoffed Ruth. "It's up to you two," she cried gayly in
the midst of her eternal journey from "C" to "C." "He never wears his
Odd Fellows' pin unless he's been singing at an Odd Fellows' funeral, so
that lets me out to-night."
"Well," sighed Emma, "I don't know that I want him even if he has on his
Shriner's pin. I just believe I'll go to bed. The way I feel to-night
I'm so sick of children I believe I wouldn't marry the best man on
earth."
"Oh, well, of course, Emma," suggested the handsome Miss Morton, "if you
feel that way about it why, I--"
"Now Martha--" cried the elder sister, "can't you let me alone and get
out of here? I tell you, the superintendent and the principal and the
janitor and the dratted Calvin kid all broke loose to-day and I'm liable
to run out doors and begin to jump and down in the street and scream if
you start on me."
But after supper the three Misses Morton went upstairs, and did what
they could to wipe away the cares of a long and weary day. They put on
their second best dresses--all but Emma, who put on her best, saying she
had nothing else that wasn't full of chalk and worry. At seven
forty-five, they had the parlor illuminated. As for the pictures and
bric-a-brac--to-wit, a hammered brass flower pot near the grate, and
sitting on an onyx stand a picture of Richard Harding Davis, the
contribution of the eldest Miss Morton's callow youth, also a brass
smoking set on a mission table, the contribution of the youngest Miss
Morton from her first choir money--as for the pictures and bric-a-brac,
they were dusted until they glistened, and the trap was all set, waiting
for the prey.
They heard the gate click and the youngest Miss Morton said quickly:
"Well, if he's an Odd Fellow, I guess I'll take him. But," she sighed,
"I'll bet a cooky he's an Elk and Martha gets him."
The Captain went to the door and brought in the victim to as sweet and
demure a trio of surprised young women and as patient a cat, as ever sat
beside a rat hole. After he had greeted the girls--it was Ruth who took
his coat, and Martha his hat, but Emma who held his hand a second the
longest, after she spied the Shriner's pin--Mr. Brotherton picked up the
cat.
"Well, Epaminondas," he puffed as he stroked the animal and put it to
his cheek, "did they take his dear little kitties away from him--the
horrid things."
This was Mr. Brotherton's standard joke. Ruth said she never felt the
meeting was really opened until he had teased them about Epaminondas'
pretended kittens.
For the first hour the talk ranged with obvious punctility over a
variety of subjects--but never once did Mr. Brotherton approach the
subject of politics, which would hold the Captain for a night session.
Instead, Mr. Brotherton spun literary tales from the shop. Then the
Captain broke in and enlivened the company with a description of Tom Van
Dorn's new automobile, and went into such details as to cams and cogs
and levers and other mechanical fittings that every one yawned and the
cat stretched himself, and the Captain incidentally told the company
that he had got Van Dorn's permission to try the Household Horse on the
old machine before it went in on the trade.
Then Ruth rose. "Why, Ruth, dear," said Emma sweetly, "where are you
going?"
"Just to get a drink, dear," replied Ruth.
But it took her all night to finish drinking and she did not return.
Martha rose, began straightening up the littered music on the piano, and
being near the door, slipped out. By this time the Captain was doing
most of the talking. Chiefly, he was telling what he thought the
sprocket needed to make it work upon an automobile. At the hall door of
the dining room two heads appeared, and though the door creaked about
the time the clock struck the half hour, Mr. Brotherton did not see the
heads. They were behind him, and four arms began making signs at the
Captain. He looked at them, puzzled and anxious for a minute or two.
They were peremptorily beckoning him out. Finally, it came to him, and
he said to the girls: "Oh, yes--all right." This broke at the wrong time
into something Mr. Brotherton was saying. He looked up astonished and
the Captain, abashed, smiled and after shuffling his feet, backed up to
the base burner and hummed the tune about the land that was fairer than
day. Emma and Mr. Brotherton began talking. Presently, the Captain
picked up the spitting cat by the scruff of the neck and held him a
moment under his chin. "Well, Emmy," he cut in, interrupting her story
of how Miss Carhart had told the principal if "he ever told of her
engagement before school was out in June, she'd just die," with:
"I suppose there'll be plenty of potatoes for the hash?"
And not waiting for answer, he marched to the kitchen with the cat, and
in due time, they heard the "Sweet Bye and Bye" going up the back
stairs, and then the thump, thump of the Captain's shoes on the floor
above them.
The eldest Miss Morton, in her best silk dress, with her mother's cameo
brooch at her throat, and with the full, maidenly ripeness of
twenty-nine years upon her brow, with her hair demurely parted on said
brow, where there was the faintest hint of a wrinkle coming--which Miss
Morton attributed to a person she called "the dratted Calvin kid,"--the
eldest Miss Morton, hair, cameo, silk dress, wrinkle, the dratted Calvin
kid and all, did or did not look like a siren, according to the point of
view of the spectator. If he was seeking the voluptuous curves of the
early spring of youth--no: but if he was seeking those quieter and more
restful lines that follow a maiden with a true and tender heart, who is
a good cook and who sweeps under the sofa, yes.
Mr. Brotherton did not know exactly what he desired. He had been coming
to the Morton home on various errands since the girls were little tots.
He had seen Emma in her first millinery store hat. He had bought Martha
her first sled; he had got Ruth her last doll. But he shook his head. He
liked them all. And then, as though to puzzle him more, he had noticed
that for two or three years, he had never got more than two consecutive
evenings with any of them--or with all of them. The mystery of their
conduct baffled him. He sometimes wondered indignantly why they worked
him in shifts? Sometimes he had Ruth twice; sometimes Emma and Martha in
succession--sometimes Martha twice. He like them all. But he could not
understand what system they followed in disposing of him. So as he sat
and toyed with his Shriner's pin and listened to the tales of a tepid
schoolmistress' romance that Emma told, he wondered if after all--for a
man of his tastes, she wasn't really the flower of the flock.
"You know, George," she was old enough for that, and at rare times when
they were alone she called him George, "I'm working up a kind of sorrow
for Judge Van Dorn--or pity or something. When I taught little Lila he
was always sending her candy and little trinkets. Now Lila is in the
grade above me, and do you know the Judge has taken to walking by the
schoolhouse at recess, just to see her, and walking along at noon and at
night to get a word with her. He has put up a swing and a teeter-totter
board on the girls' playgrounds. This morning I saw him standing, gazing
after her, and he was as sad a figure as I ever saw. He caught me
looking at him and smiled and said:
"'Fine girl, Emma,' and walked away."
"Lord, Emma," said Mr. Brotherton, as he brought his big, baseball hands
down on his fat knees. "I don't blame him. Don't you just think children
are about the nicest things in this world?"
Emma was silent. She had expressed other sentiments too recently. Still
she smiled. And he went on:
"Oh, wow!--they're mighty fine to have around."
But Mr. Brotherton was restless after that, and when the clock was
striking ten he was in the hall. He left as he had gone for a dozen
years. And the young woman stood watching him through the glass of the
door, a big, strong, handsome man--who strode down the walk with
clicking heels of pride, and she turned away sadly and hurried upstairs.
"Martha," she asked, as she took down her hair, "was it ordained in the
beginning of the world that all school teachers would have to take
widowers?"
And without hearing the answer, she put out the light.
Mr. Brotherton, stalking--not altogether unconsciously down the walk,
turned into the street and as he went down the hill, he was aware that a
boy was overtaking him. He let the boy catch up with him. "Oh, Mr.
Brotherton," cried the boy, "I've been looking for you!"
"Well, here I am; what's the trouble?"
"Grant sent me," returned the boy, "to ask you if he could see you at
eight o'clock to-morrow morning at the store?"
Brotherton looked the boy over and exclaimed:
"Grant?" and then, "Oh--why, Kenyon, I didn't know you. You are
certainly that human bean-stalk, son. Let's take a look at you. Well,
say--" Mr. Brotherton stopped and backed up and paused for dramatic
effect. Then he exploded: "Say, boy, if I had you in an olive wood
frame, I could get $2.75 or $3.00 for you as Narcissus or a boy Adonis!
You surely are the angel child!"
The boy's great black eyes shone up at the man with something wistful
and dream-like in them that only his large, sensitive mouth seemed to
comprehend. For the rest of the child's face was boy--boy in early
adolescence. The boy answered simply:
"Grant said to tell you that he expects the break to-morrow and is
anxious to see you."
Mr. Brotherton looked at the boy again--the eyes haunted the man--he
could not place them, yet they were familiar to him.
"Where you been, kid?" he asked. "I thought you were in Boston,
studying."
"It's vacation, sir," answered Kenyon.
Brotherton pulled the lad up under the next corner electric lamp and
again gazed at him. Then Mr. Brotherton remembered where he had seen the
eyes. The second Mrs. Van Dorn had them. This bothered the man.
The eyes of the boy that flashed so brightly into Mr. Brotherton's eyes,
certainly puzzled him and startled him. But not so much as the news the
boy carried. For then Mr. Brotherton knew that Market Street would be
buzzing in the morning and that the cyclone clouds that were lowering,
soon would break into storm.