AT nine in the evening, sharp to the second, clad in his oldest
clothes, Young Dick met Tim Hagan at the Ferry Building.
"No use headin' north," said Tim. "Winter'll come on up that way and
make the sleepin' crimpy. D'ye want to go East--that means Nevada and
the deserts."
"Any other way?" queried Young Dick. "What's the matter with south? We
can head for Los Angeles, an' Arizona, an' New Mexico--oh, an' Texas."
"How much money you got?" Tim demanded.
"What for?" Young Dick countered.
"We gotta get out quick, an' payin' our way at the start is quickest.
Me--I'm all hunkydory; but you ain't. The folks that's lookin' after
you'll raise a roar. They'll have more detectives out than you can
shake at stick at. We gotta dodge 'em, that's what."
"Then we will dodge," said Young Dick. "We'll make short jumps this way
and that for a couple of days, layin' low most of the time, paying our
way, until we can get to Tracy. Then we'll quit payin' an' beat her
south."
All of which program was carefully carried out. They eventually went
through Tracy as pay passengers, six hours after the local deputy
sheriff had given up his task of searching the trains. With an excess
of precaution Young Dick paid beyond Tracy and as far as Modesto. After
that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying, riding
blind baggage, box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought the
newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid accounts of
the kidnapping of the young heir to the Forrest millions.
Back in San Francisco the Board of Guardians offered rewards that
totaled thirty thousand dollars for the recovery of their ward. And Tim
Hagan, reading the same while they lay in the grass by some water-tank,
branded forever the mind of Young Dick with the fact that honor beyond
price was a matter of neither place nor caste and might outcrop in the
palace on the height of land or in the dwelling over a grocery down on
the flat.
"Gee!" Tim said to the general landscape. "The old man wouldn't raise a
roar if I snitched on you for that thirty thousand. It makes me scared
to think of it."
And from the fact that Tim thus openly mentioned the matter, Young Dick
concluded that there was no possibility of the policeman's son
betraying him.
Not until six weeks afterward, in Arizona, did Young Dick bring up the
subject.
"You see, Tim," he said, "I've got slathers of money. It's growing all
the time, and I ain't spending a cent of it, not so as you can
notice... though that Mrs. Summerstone is getting a cold eighteen
hundred a year out of me, with board and carriages thrown in, while you
an' I are glad to get the leavings of firemen's pails in the
round-houses. Just the same, my money's growing. What's ten per cent,
on twenty dollars?"
Tim Hagan stared at the shimmering heat-waves of the desert and tried
to solve the problem.
"What's one-tenth of twenty million?" Young Dick demanded irritably.
"Huh!--two million, of course."
"Well, five per cent's half of ten per cent. What does twenty million
earn at five per cent, for one year?"
Tim hesitated.
"Half of it, half of two million!" Young Dick cried. "At that rate I'm
a million richer every year. Get that, and hang on to it, and listen to
me. When I'm good and willing to go back--but not for years an'
years--we'll fix it up, you and I. When I say the word, you'll write to
your father. He'll jump out to where we are waiting, pick me up, and
cart me back. Then he'll collect the thirty thousand reward from my
guardians, quit the police force, and most likely start a saloon."
"Thirty thousand's a hell of a lot of money," was Tim's nonchalant way
of expressing his gratitude.
"Not to me," Young Dick minimized his generosity. "Thirty thousand goes
into a million thirty-three times, and a million's only a year's
turnover of my money."
But Tim Hagan never lived to see his father a saloon keeper. Two days
later, on a trestle, the lads were fired out of an empty box-car by a
brake-man who should have known better. The trestle spanned a dry
ravine. Young Dick looked down at the rocks seventy feet below and
demurred.
"There's room on the trestle," he said; "but what if the train starts
up?"
"It ain't goin' to start--beat it while you got time," the brakeman
insisted. "The engine's takin' water at the other side. She always
takes it here."
But for once the engine did not take water. The evidence at the inquest
developed that the engineer had found no water in the tank and started
on. Scarcely had the two boys dropped from the side-door of the
box-car, and before they had made a score of steps along the narrow way
between the train and the abyss, than the train began to move. Young
Dick, quick and sure in all his perceptions and adjustments, dropped on
the instant to hands and knees on the trestle. This gave him better
holding and more space, because he crouched beneath the overhang of the
box-cars. Tim, not so quick in perceiving and adjusting, also overcome
with Celtic rage at the brakeman, instead of dropping to hands and
knees, remained upright to flare his opinion of the brakeman, to the
brakeman, in lurid and ancestral terms.
"Get down!--drop!" Young Dick shouted.
But the opportunity had passed. On a down grade, the engine picked up
the train rapidly. Facing the moving cars, with empty air at his back
and the depth beneath, Tim tried to drop on hands and knees. But the
first twist of his shoulders brought him in contact with the car and
nearly out-balanced him. By a miracle he recovered equilibrium. But he
stood upright. The train was moving faster and faster. It was
impossible to get down.
Young Dick, kneeling and holding, watched. The train gathered way. The
cars moved more swiftly. Tim, with a cool head, his back to the fall,
his face to the passing cars, his arms by his sides, with nowhere save
under his feet a holding point, balanced and swayed. The faster the
train moved, the wider he swayed, until, exerting his will, he
controlled himself and ceased from swaying.
And all would have been well with him, had it not been for one car.
Young Dick knew it, and saw it coming. It was a "palace horse-car,"
projecting six inches wider than any car on the train. He saw Tim see
it coming. He saw Tim steel himself to meet the abrupt subtraction of
half a foot from the narrow space wherein he balanced. He saw Tim
slowly and deliberately sway out, sway out to the extremest limit, and
yet not sway out far enough. The thing was physically inevitable. An
inch more, and Tim would have escaped the car. An inch more and he
would have fallen without impact from the car. It caught him, in that
margin of an inch, and hurled him backward and side-twisting. Twice he
whirled sidewise, and two and a half times he turned over, ere he
struck on his head and neck on the rocks.
He never moved after he struck. The seventy-foot fall broke his neck
and crushed his skull. And right there Young Dick learned death--not
the ordered, decent death of civilization, wherein doctors and nurses
and hypodermics ease the stricken one into the darkness, and ceremony
and function and flowers and undertaking institutions conspire to give
a happy leave-taking and send-off to the departing shade, but sudden
death, primitive death, ugly and ungarnished, like the death of a steer
in the shambles or a fat swine stuck in the jugular.
And right there Young Dick learned more--the mischance of life and
fate; the universe hostile to man; the need to perceive and to act, to
see and know, to be sure and quick, to adjust instantly to all instant
shiftage of the balance of forces that bear upon the living. And right
there, beside the strangely crumpled and shrunken remnant of what had
been his comrade the moment before, Young Dick learned that illusion
must be discounted, and that reality never lied.
In New Mexico, Young Dick drifted into the Jingle-bob Ranch, north of
Roswell, in the Pecos Valley. He was not yet fourteen, and he was
accepted as the mascot of the ranch and made into a "sure-enough"
cowboy by cowboys who, on legal papers, legally signed names such as
Wild Horse, Willie Buck, Boomer Deacon, and High Pockets.
Here, during a stay of six months, Young Dick, soft of frame and
unbreakable, achieved a knowledge of horses and horsemanship, and of
men in the rough and raw, that became a life asset. More he learned.
There was John Chisum, owner of the Jingle-bob, the Bosque Grande, and
of other cattle ranches as far away as the Black River and beyond. John
Chisum was a cattle king who had foreseen the coming of the farmer and
adjusted from the open range to barbed wire, and who, in order to do
so, had purchased every forty acres carrying water and got for nothing
the use of the millions of acres of adjacent range that was worthless
without the water he controlled. And in the talk by the camp-fire and
chuck wagon, among forty-dollar-a-month cowboys who had not foreseen
what John Chisum foresaw, Young Dick learned precisely why and how John
Chisum had become a cattle king while a thousand of his contemporaries
worked for him on wages.
But Young Dick was no cool-head. His blood was hot. He had passion, and
fire, and male pride. Ready to cry from twenty hours in the saddle, he
learned to ignore the thousand aching creaks in his body and with the
stoic brag of silence to withstain from his blankets until the
hard-bitten punchers led the way. By the same token he straddled the
horse that was apportioned him, insisted on riding night-herd, and knew
no hint of uncertainty when it came to him to turn the flank of a
stampede with a flying slicker. He could take a chance. It was his joy
to take a chance. But at such times he never failed of due respect for
reality. He was well aware that men were soft-shelled and cracked
easily on hard rocks or under pounding hoofs. And when he rejected a
mount that tangled its legs in quick action and stumbled, it was not
because he feared to be cracked, but because, when he took a chance on
being cracked, he wanted, as he told John Chisum himself, "an even
break for his money."
It was while at the Jingle-bob, but mailed by a cattleman from Chicago,
that Young Dick wrote a letter to his guardians. Even then, so careful
was he, that the envelope was addressed to Ah Sing. Though unburdened
by his twenty millions, Young Dick never forgot them, and, fearing his
estate might be distributed among remote relatives who might possibly
inhabit New England, he warned his guardians that he was still alive
and that he would return home in several years. Also, he ordered them
to keep Mrs. Summerstone on at her regular salary.
But Young Dick's feet itched. Half a year, he felt, was really more
than he should have spent at the Jingle-bob. As a boy hobo, or
road-kid, he drifted on across the United States, getting acquainted
with its peace officers, police judges, vagrancy laws, and jails. And
he learned vagrants themselves at first hand, and floating laborers and
petty criminals. Among other things, he got acquainted with farms and
farmers, and, in New York State, once picked berries for a week with a
Dutch farmer who was experimenting with one of the first silos erected
in the United States. Nothing of what he learned came to him in the
spirit of research. He had merely the human boy's curiosity about all
things, and he gained merely a huge mass of data concerning human
nature and social conditions that was to stand him in good stead in
later years, when, with the aid of the books, he digested and
classified it.
His adventures did not harm him. Even when he consorted with jail-birds
in jungle camps, and listened to their codes of conduct and
measurements of life, he was not affected. He was a traveler, and they
were alien breeds. Secure in the knowledge of his twenty millions,
there was neither need nor temptation for him to steal or rob. All
things and all places interested him, but he never found a place nor a
situation that could hold him. He wanted to see, to see more and more,
and to go on seeing.
At the end of three years, nearly sixteen, hard of body, weighing a
hundred and thirty pounds, he judged it time to go home and open the
books. So he took his first long voyage, signing on as boy on a
windjammer bound around the Horn from the Delaware Breakwater to San
Francisco. It was a hard voyage, of one hundred and eighty days, but at
the end he weighed ten pounds the more for having made it.
Mrs. Summerstone screamed when he walked in on her, and Ah Sing had to
be called from the kitchen to identify him. Mrs. Summerstone screamed a
second time. It was when she shook hands with him and lacerated her
tender skin in the fisty grip of his rope-calloused palms.
He was shy, almost embarrassed, as he greeted his guardians at the
hastily summoned meeting. But this did not prevent him from talking
straight to the point.
"It's this way," he said. "I am not a fool. I know what I want, and I
want what I want. I am alone in the world, outside of good friends like
you, of course, and I have my own ideas of the world and what I want to
do in it. I didn't come home because of a sense of duty to anybody
here. I came home because it was time, because of my sense of duty to
myself. I'm all the better from my three years of wandering about, and
now it's up to me to go on with my education--my book education, I
mean."
"The Belmont Academy," Mr. Slocum suggested. "That will fit you for the
university--"
Dick shook his head decidedly.
"And take three years to do it. So would a high school. I intend to be
in the University of California inside one year. That means work. But
my mind's like acid. It'll bite into the books. I shall hire a coach,
or half a dozen of them, and go to it. And I'll hire my coaches
myself--hire and fire them. And that means money to handle."
"A hundred a month," Mr. Crockett suggested.
Dick shook his head.
"I've taken care of myself for three years without any of my money. I
guess. I can take care of myself along with some of my money here in
San Francisco. I don't care to handle my business affairs yet, but I do
want a bank account, a respectable-sized one. I want to spend it as I
see fit, for what I see fit."
The guardians looked their dismay at one another.
"It's ridiculous, impossible," Mr. Crockett began. "You are as
unreasonable as you were before you went away."
"It's my way, I guess," Dick sighed. "The other disagreement was over
my money. It was a hundred dollars I wanted then."
"Think of our position, Dick," Mr. Davidson urged. "As your guardians,
how would it be looked upon if we gave you, a lad of sixteen, a free
hand with money."
"What's the _Freda_ worth, right now?" Dick demanded irrelevantly.
"Can sell for twenty thousand any time," Mr. Crockett answered.
"Then sell her. She's too large for me, and she's worth less every
year. I want a thirty-footer that I can handle myself for knocking
around the Bay, and that won't cost a thousand. Sell the _Freda_ and
put the money to my account. Now what you three are afraid of is that
I'll misspend my money--taking to drinking, horse-racing, and running
around with chorus girls. Here's my proposition to make you easy on
that: let it be a drawing account for the four of us. The moment any of
you decide I am misspending, that moment you can draw out the total
balance. I may as well tell you, that just as a side line I'm going to
get a business college expert to come here and cram me with the
mechanical side of the business game."
Dick did not wait for their acquiescence, but went on as from a matter
definitely settled.
"How about the horses down at Menlo?--never mind, I'll look them over
and decide what to keep. Mrs. Summerstone will stay on here in charge
of the house, because I've got too much work mapped out for myself
already. I promise you you won't regret giving me a free hand with my
directly personal affairs. And now, if you want to hear about the last
three years, I'll spin the yarn for you."
Dick Forrest had been right when he told his guardians that his mind
was acid and would bite into the books. Never was there such an
education, and he directed it himself--but not without advice. He had
learned the trick of hiring brains from his father and from John Chisum
of the Jingle-bob. He had learned to sit silent and to think while cow
men talked long about the campfire and the chuck wagon. And, by virtue
of name and place, he sought and obtained interviews with professors
and college presidents and practical men of affairs; and he listened to
their talk through many hours, scarcely speaking, rarely asking a
question, merely listening to the best they had to offer, content to
receive from several such hours one idea, one fact, that would help him
to decide what sort of an education he would go in for and how.
Then came the engaging of coaches. Never was there such an engaging and
discharging, such a hiring and firing. He was not frugal in the matter.
For one that he retained a month, or three months, he discharged a
dozen on the first day, or the first week. And invariably he paid such
dischargees a full month although their attempts to teach him might not
have consumed an hour. He did such things fairly and grandly, because
he could afford to be fair and grand.
He, who had eaten the leavings from firemen's pails in round-houses and
"scoffed" mulligan-stews at water-tanks, had learned thoroughly the
worth of money. He bought the best with the sure knowledge that it was
the cheapest. A year of high school physics and a year of high school
chemistry were necessary to enter the university. When he had crammed
his algebra and geometry, he sought out the heads of the physics and
chemistry departments in the University of California. Professor Carey
laughed at him... at the first.
"My dear boy," Professor Carey began.
Dick waited patiently till he was through. Then Dick began, and
concluded.
"I'm not a fool, Professor Carey. High school and academy students are
children. They don't know the world. They don't know what they want, or
why they want what is ladled out to them. I know the world. I know what
I want and why I want it. They do physics for an hour, twice a week,
for two terms, which, with two vacations, occupy one year. You are the
top teacher on the Pacific Coast in physics. The college year is just
ending. In the first week of your vacation, giving every minute of your
time to me, I can get the year's physics. What is that week worth to
you?"
"You couldn't buy it for a thousand dollars," Professor Carey rejoined,
thinking he had settled the matter.
"I know what your salary is--" Dick began.
"What is it?" Professor Carey demanded sharply.
"It's not a thousand a week," Dick retorted as sharply. "It's not five
hundred a week, nor two-fifty a week--" He held up his hand to stall
off interruption. "You've just told me I couldn't buy a week of your
time for a thousand dollars. I'm not going to. But I am going to buy
that week for two thousand. Heavens!--I've only got so many years to
live--"
"And you can buy years?" Professor Carey queried slyly.
"Sure. That's why I'm here. I buy three years in one, and the week from
you is part of the deal."
"But I have not accepted," Professor Carey laughed.
"If the sum is not sufficient," Dick said stiffly, "why name the sum
you consider fair."
And Professor Carey surrendered. So did Professor Barsdale, head of the
department of chemistry.
Already had Dick taken his coaches in mathematics duck hunting for
weeks in the sloughs of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. After his
bout with physics and chemistry he took his two coaches in literature
and history into the Curry County hunting region of southwestern
Oregon. He had learned the trick from his father, and he worked, and
played, lived in the open air, and did three conventional years of
adolescent education in one year without straining himself. He fished,
hunted, swam, exercised, and equipped himself for the university at the
same time. And he made no mistake. He knew that he did it because his
father's twenty millions had invested him with mastery. Money was a
tool. He did not over-rate it, nor under-rate it. He used it to buy
what he wanted.
"The weirdest form of dissipation I ever heard," said Mr. Crockett,
holding up Dick's account for the year. "Sixteen thousand for
education, all itemized, including railroad fares, porters' tips, and
shot-gun cartridges for his teachers."
"He passed the examinations just the same," quoth Mr. Slocum.
"And in a year," growled Mr. Davidson. "My daughter's boy entered
Belmont at the same time, and, if he's lucky, it will be two years yet
before he enters the university."
"Well, all I've got to say," proclaimed Mr. Crockett, "is that from now
on what that boy says in the matter of spending his money goes."
"And now I'll have a snap," Dick told his guardians. "Here I am, neck
and neck again, and years ahead of them in knowledge of the world. Why,
I know things, good and bad, big and little, about men and women and
life that sometimes I almost doubt myself that they're true. But I know
them.
"From now on, I'm not going to rush. I've caught up, and I'm going
through regular. All I have to do is to keep the speed of the classes,
and I'll be graduated when I'm twenty-one. From now on I'll need less
money for education--no more coaches, you know--and more money for a
good time."
Mr. Davidson was suspicious.
"What do you mean by a good time?"
"Oh, I'm going in for the frats, for football, hold my own, you
know--and I'm interested in gasoline engines. I'm going to build the
first ocean-going gasoline yacht in the world--"
"You'll blow yourself up," Mr. Crockett demurred. "It's a fool notion
all these cranks are rushing into over gasoline."
"I'll make myself safe," Dick answered, "and that means experimenting,
and it means money, so keep me a good drawing account--same old
way--all four of us can draw."