TWO OLD FRIENDS SEEK WAYNE
Joe, swollen with pride at having received a telegram, hurried from the
mine to the station with the grime of the pit on his face and his lamp
still flaring in his cap. He grinned cheerfully at Walsh and Wingfield
as they stepped from the train, the worse for a hot afternoon in a day
coach. Wingfield surveyed the town with his habitual austerity as they
consulted on the platform. His linen had suffered on the journey and he
was conscious of the fact; Walsh, blowing hard, mopped his head freely.
The heat of August was trying and no trifling business could have
brought these gentlemen to Denbeigh.
“We came to see Mr. Craighill; we want to do it privately. Can you fix
it?”
“Sure I can!”
“Understand,” said Wingfield, “that we don’t want to interfere with him
or embarrass him in any way. He doesn’t expect us.”
Joe commended them to the ’bus driver and, conscious of the dignity
conferred upon himself by their arrival, hurried off.
They passed a colliery a little way from the station and the visitors
turned in the rumbling omnibus to look at the blackened walls of the
roaring breaker. And they saw, driving his mule team soberly into the
colliery yard, a man whose figure at once arrested their attention.
Wayne Craighill, bronzed, bearded, clad in jumper and overalls, a cap
on the back of his head, had finished his day’s work, and was returning
his team to the colliery stables. The pilgrims stared in silence; then
they turned toward each other slowly. Wingfield’s face, as usual,
expressed no emotion; Walsh grunted “Um” and craned his neck to get
a last view of the disappearing teamster through the rear door of
the ’bus. His thin lips smiled a trifle; the appearance of Mr. Wayne
Craighill as a driver of mules seemed not to have displeased Walsh.
Wingfield read the advertisements in the panels over the windows and
said nothing. Life, he resolved afresh, is an interesting business.
In the hotel lavatory he made the acquaintance of that dark scroll of
our democracy, the roller-towel. He was afraid not to use it, he told
Walsh, for fear of being thought haughty; but he promised to report
the matter to a Philadelphia friend of his who was a distinguished
sanitarian. Joe, honouring the occasion with a white collar, was
cooling his heels in the office when they came out from their supper,
which had been suffered gloomily by Wingfield, whom the waitress had
taken for the advance agent of a circus billed for early appearance in
Denbeigh. This idea delighted him, and he confided to her that he had
no tickets with him, but that she should not go unprovided for; he was
only the monkey trainer, he confessed.
There was a little park about the court-house, and thither Joe led
them and discreetly disappeared. Wayne rose from a bench and greeted
them. He had donned for the occasion the suit in which he had made
the journey from home, and it hung loosely upon him. He was in good
spirits and greeted them cordially, with much chaffing of Wingfield
for his temerity in venturing so far from his beaten trails. In a few
minutes Wingfield strolled away; it was Walsh, then, who had business
with him, and Wayne settled himself to listen as the old fellow plunged
characteristically to the heart of his errand.
“The Colonel’s in bad shape. Things haven’t improved as he expected;
some of the people who helped him out last fall won’t carry him any
longer. And he’s sick, too. He’s a good deal broken, the Colonel is.
I’ve been trying to help him--spending an hour a day at the office for
a week or two.”
“I like that! I suppose he sent for you.”
“Don’t get hot, son; it makes no difference if he did. You want to cut
out any feeling you have against your father--it ain’t like you--it
never was like you. He’s your father; his blood’s in you, and he’s
clear down now.”
Wayne listened in dogged silence as Walsh went into the details of
Roger Craighill’s affairs. Much might yet be saved, Walsh held, if this
new crisis could be bridged. Wayne chafed under Walsh’s recital; he
would not help the old fellow with any expressions of sympathy; but
Walsh had expected to address an unsympathetic ear, and he told his
story to the end.
“What I want you to do is to go home and give the old man a lift. I
ain’t going to argue it with you. Wingfield and I start back at ten
o’clock. If you do anything it will have to be done at once. You can
come back here afterward if you want to. It ain’t been a bad place for
you. Think it over.”
He lighted a cigar, glanced at the clock tower, and walked away to find
Wingfield, to whom Joe was disclosing the marvels of his native city.
Wayne sat gloomily pondering what Walsh had said. Walsh’s own
magnanimity in having gone to his father’s assistance had impressed
him. The old hostility toward his father had lost its edge through
successive defeats; but what struck Wayne to-night was the fact that
a higher law of compensation than any within his grasp had taken the
blade from his hands. He wondered whether it were possible that the
ledger of life is self-balancing--whether in our own efforts to bring
its accounts into agreement we can do more than confuse the items and
blot the leaf. And so he turned it over and over in his mind, sitting
there on the park bench, with the street sounds of the town drifting in
upon him.
* * * * *
Jean crossed the park on her way to the post-office. Wayne sat erect as
he recognized her tall figure in the path. The light of an electric
lamp swinging among the trees fell full upon her, but her fine, proud
carriage, the lifted head were unmistakable. His lips parted to call
her; but she passed on unconscious of his nearness, and her step on the
cement walk died away. His feeling of superstitious belief in her as an
instrument of fate quickened, giving way to the remembrance of her own
high courage, her simple belief in right for right’s sake, her faith
that good may somehow come to all. He knew well enough what she would
say if he put this new question to her. He sighed and struck his hands
together, and went to tell Walsh that he would go back with him.
* * * * *
Wingfield’s story that Wayne had been visiting a friend on a Western
ranch served admirably to explain his absence during the summer, and
it accounted also for his rugged appearance. Both friends found the
man they journeyed with to Pittsburg not the man they had known of
old--quieter, more subdued, more given to wide-eyed dreaming.
Walsh had planned various moves in the expectation that Wayne would not
refuse him; a brief interview at the Hercules National Bank; a visit
to the safety vault where Wayne kept his securities; the transfer of a
bundle of these chosen by Walsh to the bank, and the principal business
was done. Wayne went a step beyond Walsh’s expectations by taking
up his father’s notes aggregating two hundred thousand dollars in
several other institutions, and gave his own notes to which he pledged
collateral from his own strong box.
“Is that all?” asked Wayne, when Walsh had carried him down to the
mercantile company for a smoke and talk. “I’m going back to my job;
Joe’s sitting on it for me till I come.”
“No, that isn’t all; not quite. I want you to go up and see the
Colonel. I want you to tell him what you’ve done.”
Wayne fidgeted in his chair.
“Look here, Tom; this is rubbing it in! You think what we’ve done will
tide him over. If it does, all right; I’m not going up there to ask his
blessing. The thought of the house makes me sick.”
“Um! I want you to go up there. Things ain’t right there. The Colonel
ain’t well; he hasn’t been himself since old Gregory died there----”
“I shouldn’t think he would be,” snapped Wayne. “He wasn’t square with
the old man. I wish you hadn’t spoken of that.”
“Um! And the little woman up there’s troubled. She ain’t happy. It
would help them both a lot if you would see them. You can go after
dinner to-night, and then back to the mines for you if you’re happier
up there. But I wish you would come home now and take your desk in
here. You see I had a new one put in for you last spring when I thought
it was all fixed; that’s the key, and there’s your desk. When you want
to go to work you’ll find the key hanging here.”
Walsh rolled a fat cigar in his mouth and pointed his stubby forefinger
at the key suspended from his desk lamp by a piece of twine. Sentiment
in Walsh was a new manifestation, and he wore it rather shamefacedly.
He went to the outer window of his glass pilot-house and surveyed the
scene below.
“You there!” he bellowed.
The loading of a dray had been interrupted by a sparring-match between
two porters. Walsh’s wrath descended upon them furiously. He returned
to Wayne, mopping his brow and lighted a cigar to compose himself.
“I guess that’s all I got to say to you. You go up and see the Colonel.
Tell him what you’ve done for him; do it any way you please, and do it
now. I guess you ain’t been in a manicure shop lately, have you, son?”
Wayne laughed and held out his scarred hands for inspection.
“Um! I guess that’ll take the foolishness out of you. Now clear out o’
here! Can’t you see I got to sign this mail? And don’t you come back
any more till you’re ready to go to work!”
He rolled his chair in to his desk with much puffing and hid himself in
a great cloud of smoke as he grabbed his pen.