A CONFERENCE AT THE ALLEQUIPPA
On their return to the Allequippa Club Walsh and Wingfield sought a
quiet corner of the smoking-room and sat down to take account of their
adventures, Walsh with a steaming hot whiskey before him, Wingfield
with his usual glass of koumiss, which he sipped sparingly. They were
silent until Walsh’s cigar had begun to burn satisfactorily. It was he
that spoke first.
“That little Estabrook mare has good wind; I never tried her in the
snow before. There’s zip in her legs, all right.”
“It was a good idea of yours, the sleigh-ride. I wish I had your knack
of telling a horse from a goat. The beasts they always sell me wouldn’t
make good glue.”
“Um.”
A proper interval was necessary to set the mare apart from other
subjects, and they played with their glasses.
“She’s a little brittle--‘Fragile; handle with care,’” remarked Walsh
presently.
Wingfield blinked behind his glasses.
“That mare--oh, no, I see!”
“That woman up there. She’s like glass--bright, tolerably transparent,
and easily smashed.”
“I don’t know about her being so transparent. It seems to me she’s
pretty clever--a little subtle, maybe. She doesn’t seem to have been
anybody in particular, yet she landed the Colonel with an artificial
fly.”
Walsh shook his head.
“You’re in wrong. _She_ didn’t land the Colonel. She couldn’t have done
it. She wouldn’t have had the nerve. An older hand played the line and
made the cast; but she was the pretty fly, all right.”
“Well, of course I didn’t know,” replied Wingfield humbly, wondering
again at the ramifications of Walsh’s knowledge.
“Should you say she had the come-hither in her eye?”
Wingfield had spoken lightly, but he was rebuked by the unmistakable
displeasure in Walsh’s face. The old fellow shrugged his shoulders but
when he spoke there was kindness in his tone.
“She’s kind o’ pathetic to me. There’s nothing hard in her. As I said,
she’s like glass, and when that kind break it’s just get the broom and
sweep out the pieces, that’s all. But I don’t like to hear the tinkle
of broken glass. There ain’t much satisfaction in seeing human nature
topple and fall off the shelf--men or women. The strong ones, the heavy
pottery, can drop hard and roll some; clay’s coarser; but these weak
ones--it makes you sick.”
Walsh was silent for a moment, then, seeing that he had checked
Wingfield, he asked:
“How did the situation up there strike you?”
“It was proper enough--quite beautiful and domestic. I don’t suppose
Wayne ever spent a whole evening at home before in his life. How do you
explain the other woman--a sort of chaperone rung in to improve the
looks of things?”
“It doesn’t make any difference how she got there; that ain’t our
business; but I felt better when I saw her there. She’s a good girl;
she’s all right.”
Walsh’s omniscience would have annoyed Wingfield if he had not so
greatly admired it. It seemed that Walsh not only possessed much
information as to the private affairs of the Craighill family but that
his knowledge covered also the casual stranger within the Craighill
gates.
“Who’s the girl?” he ventured carelessly; and Walsh’s “Um” seemed for a
moment to have been interposed as a rebuff. But Walsh stirred his glass
slowly and replied:
“It certainly beats hell how things come around. That girl’s
grandfather is one of these old fellows that ought to have been rich
if he’d had any sense. He owned a lot of coal land around here years
ago but he swindled himself out of it in one way or another. He got
cleaned out down here and moved up into the anthracite country where
he never did any good. He’s got a claim against the Colonel on account
of a coal-mining company that the Colonel took over and merged with a
lot of other small concerns about ten years ago. He and the Colonel
were old friends, and Gregory, this Morley girl’s grandfather, thought
the Colonel so great and good that he wouldn’t do even a blind and
deaf and dumb beggar in a horse trade. The facts were that the Colonel,
being smooth on negotiation and an impressive party to send out to
make deals, was ‘used’ right along by the fellows he was in with. The
Colonel didn’t know he was doing the other fellow half the time--it was
so easy and his associates told him what to do. Gregory was practically
the sole owner of the Sand Creek property; he had worked it himself
and failed to make any money, and the Colonel offered to take it into
the combination just as a favour to an old friend. They wiped out the
old Gregory company--took over the stocks and bonds--but the Colonel
made a personal agreement with the old man, as a sort of sop, that
at the end of ten years, if coal should be mined in the property, he
should be paid a royalty. There was no contract--he wrote a letter
about it. Well, they’re working Gregory’s property all right--found a
lower vein, and it’s fine coking coal, which they mine economically
through the old workings. The Colonel is only a figurehead now in the
new corporation--his name looks good when they want anything done
at Harrisburg--see? And the real powers in the company can’t hear
Gregory--don’t know anything about the Colonel’s promises--say the
agreement was made without authority--and there you are.”
Walsh breathed heavily and lighted a fresh cigar.
“If it was a personal agreement, of course it’s no good if the Colonel
won’t see it! But we don’t expect the Colonel to do that sort of
thing--the soul of honour and all that!”
“The soul of punk and piffle!” grunted Walsh. “Mr. Wingfield, it’s
worth remembering that we’re all human beings--poor, damned, stumbling
sinners, even you and me. The Colonel’s a good man; he means well, but
he hasn’t any more influence with that corporation than the waiter who
pours soup in this club. In all these corporations Craighill’s in, they
don’t pay any attention to him except when they’ve got something that
he can do, like appearing before investigating committees and that sort
of thing. He hardly remembers that he ever knew Gregory, and his lawyer
has interpreted that agreement to mean coal mined on the property as it
existed when it was taken over--which doesn’t touch the lower vein. Do
you get the idea?”
“Didn’t the Colonel know about the lower vein? And didn’t Gregory know?”
“I doubt if Gregory knew--he dates back to the time when anybody with a
pick and coal scuttle could go into bituminous around here. He’d been a
preacher or a school-teacher or something like that, and really didn’t
know mine-run from Easter eggs.”
“So it’s not a business proposition strictly, but a matter of personal
morals--which is far more interesting. Thank you for the information.
The Colonel interests me deeply; he presents rare psychological
problems. This incident confirms one of my impressions concerning
him--that he’s not an acute person, and that he might even go far
wrong--through his vanity and conceit--and be utterly unconscious of
it.”
“Um.”
“And the girl?”
“Oh, the girl’s down here studying art. Mrs. Blair seems to have taken
her up. Just how Mrs. Craighill got hold of her I don’t know, but it
isn’t important. I could see it in Mrs. Craighill’s eye that she was
glad the girl was there. The girl and her grandfather were down to
see me the other day about the old man’s claim, but I couldn’t give
him any encouragement. An old chump like that oughtn’t to have any. I
don’t pose as a philanthropist, Mr. Wingfield, and it wouldn’t be loyal
to the Colonel, considering the long years I spent with him, to give
comfort to his enemies.”
Walsh lifted his head virtuously and lost himself in a prodigious
cloud of smoke. Wingfield, watching for a reappearance of the heavy,
inscrutable face, could have sworn that he saw a smile curl the old
man’s thin lips.
“Oh, of course! You have always been loyal to the Colonel. Nobody would
question that.”
“I couldn’t do anything for Gregory, the poor old ass, but I gave the
girl a tip to-night to tell him to go ahead.”
Wingfield, with his elbow on the table, stroked his beard. Walsh was
really the most interesting person he knew.
“Well, she’s a pretty girl, and I don’t blame you,” he remarked,
leadingly.
“All girls are pretty,” growled Walsh. “But she seemed sensible and she
has fine teeth. By the way, I’m going to take the madam out driving
to-morrow. I made a date with her to-night. You see, the Colonel won’t
be home until the next morning and--well, you don’t get a snow like
this every winter--no-siree!”
Walsh poked the lemon peel in the bottom of his glass with a spoon
while his announcement sank into Wingfield’s consciousness.
“I must say that you have your nerve! Have you ever appeared in public
with any woman since you came to town?”
“Nope; but it is time I was beginning. I like Mrs. Craighill; she’s the
wife of my old employer and I’m an old man and she’s a young woman. If
I can’t take her driving behind the best roadster in Pennsylvania I
should like to know why! Besides, if she’s driving with me she ain’t in
any mischief. I guess I’m safe!”
Their eyes met; it was perfectly clear to Wingfield that Walsh had
asked Mrs. Craighill to drive with him merely to occupy her time and to
impart to her a sense, thus delicately conveyed, of his espionage.
“She’s not stupid; she knew why I asked her to go,” said Walsh, chewing
his bit of lemon peel. “It made her hot. I was afraid for a minute that
she would blow up; but she didn’t dare. She’s afraid of me.”
Wingfield was trying a new medicated biscuit, which the Club kept for
his benefit, and Walsh took one and ate it slowly. He seemed unusually
well pleased with himself.
“What do you think Wayne will do to us?” asked Wingfield.
“Nothing; he’ll not say a word. The joke’s on him, and when he takes a
second thought he’ll be much obliged to us.”
“It was rather raw--our doing it. That Morley girl _is_ pretty, isn’t
she--something really noble about her?”
“Um! Too bad the art microbe’s in her system. She’s too good for that,”
and having disposed of Miss Morley’s ambitions, Walsh rose and shook
the trousers down on his fat legs and declared that it was time to
go to bed. Wingfield lingered at the table speculating, over a fresh
bottle of koumiss, as to the means by which Walsh had learned that Mrs.
Craighill had abandoned the Boston trip.
Above, in his own room, Walsh re-read the telegram which had brought
this information, re-read it several times, in fact, and then tore it
into many pieces which he flung into his grate fire.