AGNES DELIVERS BOBBY A NOTE FROM OLD JOHN BURNIT--IN A GRAY ENVELOPE
That night, at the Traders' Club, Bobby was surprised when Mr. Trimmer
walked over to his table and dropped his pudgy trunk and his lean
limbs into a chair beside him. His yellow countenance was creased with
ingratiating wrinkles, and the smile behind his immovable mustache
became of perfectly flawless circumference as his muddy black eyes
peered at Bobby through thick spectacles. It seemed to Bobby that
there was malice in the wrinkles about those eyes, but the address of
Mr. Trimmer was most conciliatory.
"I have a fuss to pick with you, young man," he said with clumsy
joviality. "You beat me upon the purchase of that Westmarsh property.
Very shrewd, indeed, Mr. Burnit; very like your father. I suppose that
now, if I wanted to buy it from you, I'd have to pay you a pretty
advance." And he rubbed his hands as if to invite the opening of
negotiations.
"It is not for sale," said Bobby, stiffening; "but I might consider a
proposition to buy your eight acres." He offered this suggestion with
reluctance, for he had no mind to enter transactions of any sort with
Silas Trimmer. Still, he recalled to himself with a sudden yielding to
duty, business is business, and his father would probably have waved
all personal considerations aside at such a point.
"Mine _is_ for sale," offered Silas, a trifle too eagerly, Bobby
thought.
"How much?" he asked.
"A thousand dollars an acre."
"I won't pay it," declared Bobby.
"Well," replied Mr. Trimmer with a deepening of that circular smile
which Bobby now felt sure was maliciously sarcastic, "by the time it
is drained it will be worth that to any purchaser."
"Suppose we drain it," suggested Bobby, holding both his temper and
his business object remarkably well in hand. "Will you stand your
share of the cost?"
"It strikes me as an entirely unnecessary expense at present," said
Silas and smiled again.
"Then it won't be drained," snapped Bobby.
Later in the evening he caught Silas laughing at him, his shoulders
heaving and every yellow fang protruding. The next morning, keeping
earlier hours than ever before in his life, Bobby was waiting outside
Jimmy Platt's door when that gentleman started to work.
"The first thing you do," he directed, still with a memory of that
aggravating laugh, "I want you to build a cement wall straight across
the north end of my Westmarsh property."
Mr. Platt smiled and shook his head.
"Evidently you can not buy that north eight acres, and don't intend to
drain it," he commented, stroking sagely the sparse beginning of those
slow professional whiskers. "It's your affair, of course, Mr. Burnit,
but I am quite sure that spite work in engineering can not be made to
pay."
"Nevertheless," insisted Bobby, "we'll build that wall."
The previous afternoon Jimmy Platt had made a scale drawing of the
property from city surveys, and now the two went over it carefully,
discussing it in various phases for fully an hour, proving estimates
of cost and general feasibility. At the conclusion of that time Bobby,
well pleased with his own practical manner of looking into things,
telephoned to Johnson and asked for Applerod. Mr. Applerod had not yet
arrived.
"Very well," said Bobby, "when he comes have him step out and secure
suitable offices for us," and this detail despatched he went out with
his engineer to make a circuit of the property and study its drainage
possibilities.
From profiles that Platt had made they found the swamp at its upper
point to be much lower than the level of the river, which ran beyond
low hills nearly a mile away; but the river made a detour, including a
considerable fall, coming back again to within a scant half-mile of
the southern end of the tract, where it was much lower than the marsh.
Between marsh and river at the south was an immense hill, too steep
and rugged for any practical purpose, and this they scaled.
The west end of the city lay before them crowding close to the river
bank, and already its tentacles had crept around and over the hills
and on past Westmarsh tract. Young Platt looked from river to swamp,
his eyes glowing over the possibilities that lay before them.
"Mr. Burnit," he announced, after a gravity of thought which he strove
his best to make take the place of experience, "you ought to be able
to buy this hill very cheaply. Just through here we'll construct our
drainage channel, and with the excavation fill your marsh. It is one
of the neatest opportunities I have ever seen, and I want to
congratulate you upon your shrewdness in having picked out such a
splendid investment."
This, Bobby felt, was praise from Caesar, and he was correspondingly
elated.
He did not return to the study until in the afternoon. He found
Johnson livid with abhorrence of Applerod's gaudy metamorphosis. That
gentleman wore a black frock-coat, a flowered gray waistcoat,
pin-striped light trousers, shining new shoes, sported a gold-headed
cane, and on the table was the glistening new silk hat which had
reposed upon his snow-white curls. His pink face was beaming as he
rose to greet his partner.
"Mr. Burnit," said he, shaking hands with almost trembling gravity and
importance, "this day is the apex of my life, and I'm happy to have
the son of my old and revered employer as my partner."
"I hope that it may prove fortunate for both of us," replied Bobby,
repressing his smile at the acquisition of the "make-up" which
Applerod had for years aspired to wear legitimately.
Johnson, humped over the desk that had once been Bobby's father's,
snorted and looked up at the stern portrait of old John Burnit; then
he drew from the index-file which he had already placed upon the back
of that desk a gray-tinted envelope which he handed to Bobby with a
silence that was more eloquent than words. It was inscribed:
_To my Son if he is Fool Enough to Take up With Applerod's
Swamp Scheme_
Rather impatiently Bobby tore it open, and on the inside he found:
"When shrewd men persist in passing up an apparently cinch
proposition, don't even try to find out what's the matter with
it. In this six-cylinder age no really good opportunity runs
loose for twenty-four hours."
"If the governor had only arranged to leave me his advice beforehand
instead of afterward," Bobby complained to Agnes Elliston that
evening, "it might have a chance at me."
"The blow has fallen," said Agnes with mock seriousness; "but you must
remember that you brought it on yourself. You have complained to _me_
of your father's carefully-laid plans for your course in progressive
bankruptcy, and he left in my keeping a letter for you covering that
very point."
"_Not_ in a gray envelope, I hope," groaned Bobby.
"_In_ a gray envelope," she replied firmly, going across to her own
desk in the library.
"I had feared," said Bobby dismally, "that sooner or later I should
find he had left letters for me in your charge as well as in
Johnson's, but I had hoped, if that were the case, that at least they
would be in pink envelopes."
She brought to him one of the familiar-looking missives, and Bobby, as
he took it, looked speculatively at the big fireplace, in which, as it
was early fall, comfortable-looking real logs were crackling.
"Don't do it, Bobby," she warned him smiling. "Let's have the fun
together," and she sat beside him on the couch, snuggling close.
The envelope was addressed:
_To My Son Upon his Complaining that His Father's Advice
Comes too Late!_
He opened it, and together they read:
"No boy will believe green apples hurt him until he gets the
stomach-ache. Knowing you to be truly my son, I am sure that
if I gave you advice beforehand you would not believe it. This
way you will."
Bobby smiled grimly.
"I remember one painful incident of about the time I put on
knickerbockers," he mused. "Father told me to keep away from a
rat-trap that he had bought. Of course I caught my hand in it three
minutes afterward. It hurt and I howled, but he only looked at me
coldly until at last I asked him to help. He let the thing squeeze
while he asked if a rat-trap hurt. I admitted that it did. Would I
believe him next time? I acknowledged that I would, and he opened the
trap. That was all there was to it except the raw place on my hand;
but that night he came to my room after I had gone to bed, and lay
beside me and cuddled me in his arms until I went to sleep."
"Bobby," said Agnes seriously, "not one of these letters but proves
his aching love for you."
"I know it," admitted Bobby with again that grim smile. "Which only
goes to prove another thing, that I'm in for some of the severest
drubbings of my life. I wonder where the clubs are hidden."
He found one of them late that same night at the Idlers'. Clarence
Smythe, Silas Trimmer's son-in-law, drifted in toward the wee small
hours in an unusual condition of hilarity. He had a Vandyke, had Mr.
Smythe, and was one who cherished a mad passion for clothes; also, as
an utterly impossible "climber," he was as cordially hated as Bobby
was liked at the Idlers', where he had crept in "while the window was
open," as Nick Allstyne expressed it. Ordinarily he was most prim and
pretty of manner, but to-night he was on vinously familiar terms with
all the world, and, crowding himself upon Bobby's quiet whist crowd,
slapped Bobby joyously on the shoulder.
"Generous lad, Bobby!" he thickly informed Allstyne and Winthrop and
Starlett. "If you chaps have any property you've wanted to unload for
half a lifetime, here's the free-handed plunger to buy it."
"How's that?" Bobby wanted to know, guessing instantly at the
humiliating truth.
"That Westmarsh swamp belonged to Trimmer," laughed Mr. Smythe, so
bubbling with the hugeness of the joke that he could not keep his
secret; "and when Thorne, after pumping your puffy man, told my clever
father-in-law you wanted it, he promptly bought it from himself in the
name of Miles, Eddy and Company and put up the price to three hundred
an acre. Besides taking the property off his shoulders you've given
him nearly a ten-thousand-dollar advance for it. Fine business!"
"Great!" agreed blunt Jack Starlett. "Almost as good a joke as
refusing to pay a poker debt because it isn't legal."
Bobby smiled his thanks for the shot, but inside he was sick. The game
they were playing was a parting set-to, for the three others were
leaving in the morning for Stanley's hunt, but Bobby was glad when it
was over. In the big, lonely house he sat in the study for an hour
before he went to bed, looking abstractedly up at the picture of old
John Burnit and worrying over this new development. It cut him to the
quick, not so much that he had been made a fool of by "clever"
real-estate men, had been led, imbecile-like, to pay an extra hundred
dollars per acre for that swamp land, but that the advantage had gone
to Silas Trimmer.
Moreover, why had Silas put a prohibitive valuation upon that north
eight acres? Why did he want to keep it? It must be because Silas
really expected that his tract would be drained free of charge, and
that he would thus have the triumph of selling it for an approximate
six thousand dollars an acre in the form of building lots. In the face
of such a conclusion, the thought of the cement wall that he had
ordered built was a great satisfaction.
It was a remarkably open winter that followed, and outdoor operations
could thereby go on uninterrupted. In the office, the pompous
Applerod, in his frock-coat and silk hat, ground Johnson's soul to
gall dust; for he had taken to saying "_Mr._ Johnson" most formally,
and issuing directions with maddening politeness and consideration. An
arrangement had been effected with Applerod, whereby that gentleman,
for having suggested the golden opportunity, was to reap the entire
benefit of the improvement on his own twenty acres, Bobby financing
the whole deal and charging Applerod's share of it against his
account. Applerod stood thereby to gain about seventy-six thousand
dollars over and above the price he had paid for his twenty acres;
and, moreover, _Bobby had decided to call the improved tract the
Applerod Addition_! When that name began to appear in print, coupled
with flaming advertisements of Applerod's devising, there was grave
danger of the rosy-cheeked old gentleman's losing every button from
every fancy vest in his possession.
In the meantime, thoroughly in love with the vast enterprise which he
had projected, Bobby spent his time outdoors, fascinated, unable to
find any peace elsewhere than upon his Titanic labor. His evenings he
spent in such social affairs as he could not avoid; with Agnes
Elliston; with Biff Bates; in an occasional game of billiards at the
Idlers'; but his days, from early morning until the evening whistle,
he spent amid the clang of pick and shovel, the rattling of the trams,
the creaking of the crane. It was an absorbing thing to see that
enormous groove cut down through the big hill, and to watch the growth
of the great mounds which grew up out of the marsh. The ditch that
should drain off all this murky water was, of course, the first thing
to be achieved, and, from the base of the hill through which it was to
be cut, the engineer ran a tram bridge straight across the swamp to
the new retaining wall; and from this, with the aid of a huge,
long-armed crane which lifted cars bodily from the track, the soil was
dumped on either side as it was removed from the cut. By the latter
part of December the ditch had been completed and connected with the
special sewer which, by permission of the city, had been built to
carry the overflow to the river, and, the open weather still holding,
the stagnant pool which had been a blot upon the landscape for untold
ages began to flow sluggishly away, displaced by the earth from the
disappearing hill.
The city papers were teeming now with the vast energy and
public-spirited enterprise of young Robert Burnit and Oliver P.
Applerod, and there were many indications that the enterprise was to
be a most successful one. Even before they were ready to receive them,
applications were daily made for reservations in the new district, and
individual home-seekers began to take Sunday trips out to where the
big undertaking was in progress.
"You sure have got 'em going, Bobby," confessed the finally-convinced
Biff Bates after a visit of inspection. "Here's where you put the
hornet on one Silas Tight-Wad Trimmer all right, all right. But the
bones don't roll right that the side bet don't go for Johnson instead
of Applegoat. He's a shine, for me. I think he's all to the canary
color inside, but this man Johnson's some man if he only had a shell
to put it in. Me for him!"
The unexpressed friendship that had sprung up between the taciturn
bookkeeper and the loquacious ex-pugilist was both a puzzle and a
delight to Bobby, and it was one of his great joys to see them
together, they not knowing why they liked such companionship, not
having a single topic of conversation in common, but unconsciously
enjoying that vague, sympathetic man-soul they found in each other.