THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE
For weeks Winn lived an aimless life without occupation, which to him
meant misery. He walked the streets to be jostled by people in a hurry,
and wished that he also was. He looked into shop windows where dummies
stood clad in beautiful garments, and wondered how Mona would look if
robed in such. He met people hurrying home from their work at night and
almost envied them. In his club he felt so ill at ease that games,
conversation, and even the raillery of Jack Nickerson bored him. He had
a pleasant home, where his aunt always thought of his comfort; he
escorted her to church with regularity; read the daily papers; called on
Ethel occasionally, to find her always the same sweet temptation. She
neither allured nor repelled, but was always the same piquant and yet
sympathetic friend, well poised and sensible, who judged all men and
spoke of them as a mixture of nobility and selfish conceit in unequal
parts, with the latter predominating. To Winn she sometimes talked as
though he were still a big boy who needed guidance, and then again as if
he were more than mortal and out of place in a bad world.
"You are discontented," she said to him one evening, "and out of your
sphere among the city men. You take right and wrong too seriously and
are like an eagle caged with jackdaws. City men are such in the main,
thinking more about the cut of their coats, the fit of their linen, and
color of their ties than of aught else. You are as unlike them as when
you came here a big boy with countryisms clinging to you and the scent
of new mown hay perfuming your impulses; you were always out of place
here, and the three months on that island has made you more so."
It was a truthful and yet somewhat flattering portrayal of Winn as he
really did seem to her, but it only added to his discontent.
"What you say may be true enough," he answered, "but what shall I do? I
can't go into an office again and be content, the taste of being my own
master on the island has spoiled me for that. I would go into some
business if only I had the capital, but I haven't; and I wouldn't ask my
aunt to loan me any, even under the existing circumstances."
"I wish I could advise you," she replied in the sympathetic tone so
easily at her command. "I certainly would if I could. But whatever you
do, don't go into the stock gambling. I respect you now, and I might not
then."
The time came when she wished that she had refrained from that
expression.
But a different trend of advice came to Winn later from Jack Nickerson.
"Why don't you open a bucket shop, my boy," said that cynic, "and make
some money? I'll back you for a few thousand to start, since you were
foolish enough to part with all Page made for you out of the Rockhaven
flurry, and it's a dead sure thing. Then again you have won quite a
little notoriety out of this Weston & Hill fiasco, and men on the street
say you have a cool, level head. I tell you, open up one of those joints
and let these smart Alecs who want to get rich quick come in and lose
their money. If you keep moping around another month you will go daft,
or fall in love with Ethel Sherman over again, which means the same. I
hear you are a frequent caller there."
"I've got to spend my time somewhere," answered Winn, rather doggedly,
"and Ethel's good company."
Jack eyed him curiously.
"How the moth will flutter around the candle," he said.
"I'm in no danger there," asserted Winn, "so don't worry. Once bit,
twice shy; and as for the bucket shop, I'll have none of it. I'd as soon
open a faro bank."
"And why not?" queried Jack. "All the world loves to gamble, and most of
them do in one way or another. Even the good people who pray can't
resist grab bags and fish ponds, and until a few ultra prudes guessed it
was gambling, they were all the rage at church fairs. Even now, in
society of the best, bridge whist and whist for prizes, afternoon and
evening, flourishes on all sides. Oh, it's gamble, my boy, go where you
will; and you might as well take a hand in it and make money."
"But a bucket shop is disreputable," replied Winn, "or has that
reputation, and on par with gambling dens in fact, though protected by
law. It is worse than those in one way, for men who go in feel forced to
put up margins to save themselves, and in the end go broke. Look at the
embezzlements that crop out almost daily, and nine out of ten traceable
to a bucket shop. The law ought to force them to put up a sign, 'All ye
who enter here will lose.'"
"You have matured rapidly since you came from the island, my boy,"
laughed Nickerson, "and now you are fit to do business. Put your new
scruples in your pocket and join the crowd. Only those who make money
are considered anybody. And how they make it matters little. Make it you
must, or walk in this world; and those who walk, get kicked."
And Winn, conscious that a bitter truth lurked in his friend's words,
went his way more disconsolate than ever.
But the memory of Rockhaven was still strong in him, and the eyes of
Mona and the heart-burst that marked their parting an ever present
memory.
And no answer had yet come to his letter.
One evening a little later, when a November storm, half rain, half
sleet, made the street miserable, Winn was pushing his way homeward when
he saw a girl, poorly clad, a thin summer wrap her only extra garment,
looking wistfully into a store window where tropical fruits tempted the
passers. He recognized her at once as the stenographer who had served
Weston & Hill.
"Why, Mamie," he said, halting, "how are you and what are you doing here
in the storm?"
"I was just wishing I could afford a basket of grapes for mother," she
answered, smiling at the sight of a friendly face, "but I can't. I've
been out of work now since the firm failed, you see."
"I've wondered what became of you," said Winn, his sympathy aroused at
once, "and how you were getting on. Where are you working now?"
"Nowhere," she answered. "I've been looking for a place for two months
and can't find one. Mother gave the firm all her money to invest, and
it's gone, and she is very ill. I am completely discouraged."
Then once more a righteous curse aimed at Weston almost escaped Winn's
lips.
"I am very sorry for you, Mamie," he said, "and I wish I could help
you."
"If you could only find me a place," she replied eagerly, catching at
the straw of hope, "I should be so grateful. We are very poor now."
"I'll do what I can for you," he said kindly, "and maybe I can help you.
I, too, was left stranded by that thief Weston;" and without another
word he stepped inside the store and, buying a good supply of fruit,
joined the girl outside.
"I am going home with you, Mamie," he said cheerfully, "and take your
mother some grapes. I've an idea of writing up a history of the Weston &
Hill swindle, and I want her story."
It was the first time he had thought of it, but it served as a ready
excuse. Then with one hand and arm loaded with bundles, and linking the
other around the shivering girl's as if she were a child, the two
started toward her home.
"We have had to move," said the girl, as she directed their way toward
the poorer quarters of the city, "and I am ashamed to take you to my
home. We have only two rooms now."
"Oh, you mustn't mind me," answered Winn, briskly. "I am a
fellow-sufferer with you now, you know."
When her home was reached in a narrow side street and up three flights
of stairs at that, poverty and a woman coughing her life away beside the
kitchen stove told the tale. Winn noticed that the supper awaiting the
girl was of bread, butter, and tea only.
"It was very kind of you to come, Mr. Hardy," said the mother, in an
almost tearful voice, when he was introduced; "and if you can find a
place for Mamie, it will help us very much."
And then she told her story.
It need not be repeated--its counterpart may be found by the score in
any city where legalized thieving like Weston's scheme ever dupes the
credulous, and is as common as the annals of simple drunks. To Winn it
was new, for he had no idea his former employer could be so vile as to
induce a poor widow to invest her all to meet inevitable loss.
And be it said here, that if the world at large could realize how many
sharks are ready to prey upon them with the tempting bait of countless
schemes, promising sure and rich returns, big interest for their money,
guarantees of all kinds (on paper), and flanked by long lists of names,
they would look at "farm-mortgage bonds," "gold-mining stocks," "oil
stocks," "cumulative gold-bearing bonds," and the whole list of traps
set for the unwary, as so many financial perils.
And be it said also, that if the securities held as collateral by half
the banks could be scrutinized, and the foundations they rested upon
understood by all the confiding depositors in these banks, a panic would
ensue that would sweep this land of credulity like a typhoon.
Winn Hardy, who by sheer good luck had saved his aunt's fortune,
listening to this poor widow's tearful recital of her woes, gnashed his
teeth at the departed J. Malcolm Weston and vowed that he would show him
up in the press.
When he bade good-by to the girl and her mother, promising to look out
for a place for the former, he stopped on his way home at a market and
paid for an ample supply of necessaries to be sent them on the morrow.
More than that, he went to Page and, telling the tale, insisted that he
give the girl a chance to earn a livelihood.
And to no one, not even his aunt, did he tell what he had done.