Mr. Schuyler Tenney had never before been afforded an opportunity of
studying a young gentleman of fashion and culture in the intimacy of
his private apartments, and he looked about Horace’s room with lively
curiosity and interest, when the two conspirators had entered the
General’s house, gone up-stairs, and shut doors behind them.
“It looks like a ninety-nine-cent store, for all the world,” was his
comment when he had examined the bric-à-brac on the walls and mantels,
“hefted” a bronze trifle or two on the table, and taken a comprehensive
survey of the furniture and hangings.
“It’s rather bare than otherwise,” said Horace, carelessly. “I got
a tolerably decent lot of traps together when I had rooms in Jermyn
Street, but I had to let most of them go when I pulled up stakes to come
home.”
“German Street? I suppose that is in Germany?”
“No--London.”
“Oh! Sold ’em because you got hard up?”
“Not at all. But this damned tariff of yours--or ours--makes it cost too
much to bring decent things over here.”
“Protection to American industry, my boy,” said Mr. Tenney, affably. “We
couldn’t get on a fortnight without it. Just think what--”
“Oh, hang it all, man! We didn’t come here to talk tariff!” Horace broke
in, with a smile which was half annoyance.
“No, that’s so,” assented Mr. Tenney, settling himself in the low,
deep-backed easy-chair, and putting the tips of his lean fingers
together. “No, we didn’t, for a fact.” He added, after a moment’s pause:
“I guess I’ll have to rig up a room like this myself, when the thing
comes off.” He smiled icily to himself at the thought.
“Meanwhile, let us talk about the ‘thing,’ as you call it. Will you have
a drink?”
“Never touch it,” said Mr. Tenney, and he looked curiously on while
Horace poured out some brandy, and then opened a bottle of soda-water to
go with it. He was particularly impressed by the little wire frame-work
stand made to hold the round-bottomed bottle, and asked its cost, and
wondered if they wouldn’t be a good thing to keep in the store.
“Now to business!” said Horace, dragging out from under a sofa the black
tin box which held the Minster papers, and throwing back its cover.
“I’ve told you pretty well what there is in here.”
Mr. Tenney took from his pocket-book the tabular statement Horace had
made of the Minster property, and smoothed it out over his pointed knee.
“It’s a very pretty table,” he said; “no bookkeeper could have done it
better. I know it by heart, but we’ll keep it here in sight while you
proceed.”
“There’s nothing for me to proceed with,” said Horace, lolling back
in his chair in turn. “I want to hear _you!_ Don’t let us waste time.
Broadly, what do you propose?”
“Broadly, what does everybody propose? To get for himself what somebody
else has got. That’s human nature. It’s every kind of nature, down to
the little chickens just hatched who start to chase the chap with the
worm in his mouth before they’ve fairly got their tails out of the
shell.”
“You ought to write a book, Schuyler,” said Horace, using this
familiar name for the first time: “‘Tenney on Dynamic Sociology’! But I
interrupted your application. What particular worm have you got in your
bill’s eye?”
“We are all worms, so the Bible says. I suppose even those scrumptious
ladies there come under that head, like we ordinary mortals.” Mr. Tenney
pointed his agreeable metaphor by touching the paper on his knee with
his joined finger-tips, and showed his small, sharpened teeth in a
momentary smile.
“I follow you,” said Horace, tentatively. “Go on!”
“That’s a heap of money that you’ve ciphered out there, on that paper.”
“Yes. True, it isn’t ours, and we’ve got nothing to do with it. But
that’s a detail. Go on!”
“A good deal of it can be ours, if you’ve got the pluck to go in with
me.”
Horace frowned. “Upon my word, Tenney,” he said, impatiently, “what do
you mean?”
“Jest what I said,” was the sententious and collected response.
The younger man laughed with an uneasy assumption of scorn. “Is it
a burglary you do me the honor to propose, or only common or garden
robbery? Ought we to manage a little murder in the thing, or what do you
say to arson? Upon my word, man, I believe that you don’t realize that
what you’ve said is an insult!”
“No, I don’t. You’re right there,” said the hardware merchant, in no
wise ruffled. “But I do realize that you come pretty near being the
dod-blamedest fool in Dearborn County.”
“Much obliged for the qualification, I’m sure,” retorted Horace, who
felt the mists of his half-simulated, half-instinctive anger fading away
before the steady breath of the other man’s purpose. “But I interrupt
you. Pray go on.”
“There ain’t no question of dishonesty about the thing, not the
slightest. I ain’t that kind of a man!” Horace permitted himself a
shadowy smile, emphasized by a subdued little sniff, which Tenney caught
and was pleased to appear to resent, “Thessaly knows me!” he said, with
an air of pride. “They ain’t a living man--nor a dead one nuther--can
put his finger on me. I’ve lived aboveboard, sir, and owe no man a red
cent, and I defy anybody to so much as whisper a word about my
character.”
“‘Tenney on Faith Justified by Works,’” commented Horace, softly,
smiling as much as he dared, but in a less aggressive manner.
“Works--yes!” said the hardware merchant, “the Minster iron-works, in
particular.” He seemed pleased with his little joke, and paused to dwell
upon it in his mind for an instant. Then he went on, sitting upright in
his chair now, and displaying a new earnestness:
“Dishonesty is wrong, and it is foolish. It gets a man disgraced, and
it gets him in jail. But commercial acumen is another thing. A smart
man can get money in a good many ways without giving anybody a chance
to call him dishonest. I have thought out several plans--some of
them strong at one point, others at another, but all pretty middlin’
good--how to feather our own nests out of this thing.”
“Well?” said Horace, interrogatively.
Mr. Tenney did not smile any more, and he had done with digressions.
“First of all,” he said, with his intent gray eyes fixed on the young
man’s face, “what guarantee have I that you won’t give me away?”
“What guarantee _can_ I give you?” replied Horace, also sitting up.
“Perhaps you are right,” said Tenney, thinking in his own swift-working
mind that it would be easy enough to take care of this poor creature
later on. “Well, then, you’ve been appointed Mrs. Minster’s lawyer in
the interest of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company--this company
here marked ‘D,’ in which the family has one hundred and seventy-five
thousand dollars.”
“I gathered as much. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what it is all
about.”
“I’m as transparent as plate-glass when I think a man is acting square
with me,” said the hardware merchant. “This is how it is. Wendover and
me got hold of a little rolling-mill and nail-works at Cadmus, down on
the Southern Tier, a few years ago. Some silly people had put up the
money for it, and there was a sort of half-crazy inventor fellow running
it. They were making ducks and drakes of the whole thing, and I saw
a chance of getting into the concern--I used to buy a good deal of
hardware from them, and knew how they stood--and I spoke to Wendover,
and so we went in.”
“That means that the other people were put out, I suppose,” commented
Horace.
“Well, no; but they kind o’ faded away like. I wouldn’t exactly say they
were put out, but after a while they didn’t seem to be able to stay in.
But never mind them. Well, Cadmus was a bad location. The iron fields
around there had pretty well petered out, and we were way off the main
line of transportation. Business was fair enough; we made a straight ten
per cent, year in and year out, because the thing was managed carefully;
but that was in spite of a lot of drawbacks. So I got a scheme in my
head to move the whole concern up here to Thessaly, and hitch it up with
the Minster iron-works. We could save one dollar a ton, or forty-five
thousand dollars in all, in the mere matter of freight alone, if we
could use up their entire output. I may tell you, I didn’t appear in the
business at all. I daresay Mrs. Minster don’t know to this day that I’m
a kind of partner of hers. It happened that Wendover used to know her
when she was a girl--they both come from down the Hudson somewhere--and
so he worked the thing with her, and we moved over from Cadmus, hook,
line, bob, and sinker, and we’re the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. Do
you see?”
“So far, yes. She and her daughters have one hundred and seventy-five
thousand dollars cash in it. What is the rest of the company like?”
“It’s stocked at four hundred thousand dollars. We put in all our plant
and machinery and business and good-will and so on at one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars, and then we furnished seventy-five thousand
dollars cash. So we hold two hundred and twenty-five shares to their one
hundred and seventy-five.”
“Who are the ‘we’?”
“Well, Pete Wendover and me are about the only people you’re liable to
meet around the premises, I guess. There are some other names on the
books, but they don’t amount to much. We can wipe them off whenever we
like.”
“I notice that this company has paid no dividends since it was formed.”
“That’s because of the expense of building. And we ain’t got what you
may call fairly to work yet. But it’s all right. There is big money in
it.”
“I daresay,” observed Horace. “But, if you will excuse the remark, I
seem to have missed that part of your statement which referred to _my_
making something out of the company.”
The hardware merchant allowed his cold eyes to twinkle for an instant.
“You’ll be taken care of,” he said, confidentially. “Don’t fret your
gizzard about _that!_”
Horace smiled. It seemed to be easier to get on with Tenney than he had
thought. “But what am I to do; that is, if I decide to do anything?” he
asked. “I confess I don’t see your scheme.”
“Why, that’s curious,” said the other, with an air of candor. “And you
lawyers have the name of being so ’cute, too!”
“I don’t suppose we see through a stone wall much farther than other
people. Our chief advantage is in being able to recognize that it is a
wall. And this one of yours seems to be as thick and opaque as most, I’m
bound to say.”
“We don’t want you to do anything, just now,” Mr. Tenney explained.
“Things may turn up in which you can be of assistance, and then we want
to count on you, that’s all.”
This was a far less lucid explanation than Horace had looked for. Tenney
had been so anxious for a confidential talk, and had hinted of such
dazzling secrets, that this was a distinct disappointment.
“What did you mean by saying that I had the whole game in my hands?”
he demanded, not dissembling his annoyance. “Thus far, you haven’t even
dealt me any cards!”
Mr. Tenney lay back in his chair again, and surveyed Horace over his
finger-tips. “There is to be a game, young man, and you’ve been put in
a position to play in it when the time comes. But I should be a
particularly simple kind of goose to tell you about it beforehand; now,
wouldn’t I?”
Thus candidly appealed to, Horace could not but admit that his
companion’s caution was defensible.
“Please yourself,” he said. “I daresay you’re right enough. I’ve got the
position, as you say. Perhaps it is through you that it came to me; I’ll
concede that, for argument’s sake. You are not a man who expects people
to act from gratitude alone. Therefore you don’t count upon my doing
things for you in this position, even though you put me there, unless
you first convince me that they will also benefit me. That is clear
enough, isn’t it? Very well; thus the matter stands. When the occasion
arises that you need me, you can tell me what it is, and what I am to
get out of it, and then we’ll talk business.”
Mr. Tenney had not lifted his eyes for a moment from his companion’s
face. Had his own countenance been one on which inner feelings were
easily reflected, it would just now have worn an expression of amused
contempt.
“Well, this much I might as well tell you straight off,” he said. “A
part of my notion, if everything goes smoothly, is to have Mrs. Minster
put you into the Thessaly Manufacturing Company as her representative
and to pay you five thousand dollars a year for it, which might be fixed
so as to stand separate from the other work you do for her. Wendover
can arrange that with her. And then I am counting now on declaring
myself up at the Minster works, and putting in my time up there; so that
your father will be needed again in the store, and it might be so that
I could double his salary, and let him have back say a half interest
in the business, and put him on his feet. I say these things _might_ be
done. I don’t say I’ve settled on them, mind!”
“And you still think it best to keep me in the dark; not to tell me what
it is I’m to do?” Horace leant forward, and asked this question eagerly.
“No-o--I’ll tell you this much. Your business will be to say ditto to
whatever me and Wendover say.”
A full minute’s pause ensued, during which Mr. Tenney gravely watched
Horace sip what remained of his drink.
“Well, what shall it be? Do you go in with us?” he asked, at last.
“I’d better think it over,” said Horace. “Give me, say, till
Monday--that’s five days. And of course, if I do say yes, it will
be understood that I am not to be bound to do anything of a shady
character.”
“Certainly; but you needn’t worry about that,” answered Tenney.
“Everything will be as straight as a die. There will be nothing but a
simple business transaction.”
“What did you mean by saying that we should take some of the Minster
money away? That had a queer sound.”
“All business consists in getting other people’s money,” said the
hardware merchant, sententiously. “Where do you suppose Steve Minster
got his millions? Did you think he minted them? Didn’t every dollar
pass through some other fellow’s pocket before it reached his? The
only difference was that when it got into his pocket it stuck there.
Everybody is looking out to get rich; and when a man succeeds, it only
means that somebody else has got poor. That’s plain common-sense!”
The conversation practically ended here. Mr. Tenney devoted some quarter
of an hour to going severally over all the papers in the Minster box,
but glancing through only those few which referred to the Thessaly
Manufacturing Company. The proceeding seemed to Horace to be irregular,
but he could not well refuse, and Tenney was not interrupted. When
he had finished his task he shook hands with Horace with a novel
cordiality, and it was not difficult to guess that the result of his
search had pleased him.
“You are sure those are all the papers Clarke left to be turned over?”
he asked. Upon being assured in the affirmative his eyes emitted a
glance which was like a flash of light, and his lip lifted in a smile of
obvious elation.
“There’s a fortune for both of us,” he said, jubilantly, as he unlocked
the door, and shook hands again.
When he had gone, Horace poured out another drink and sat down to
meditate.