CHAPTER XVII
J. RUFUS SEEKS FOR PROFITABLE INVESTMENT IN
THE COUNTRY
A rattling old carryall, drawn by one knobby yellow horse and driven by a decrepit patriarch of sixty, stopped with a groan and a creak and a final rattle at the door of the weather-beaten Atlas Hotel, and a grocery “drummer,” a beardless youth with pink cheeks, jumped hastily out and rushed into the clean but bare little office, followed as hastily by a grizzled veteran of the road who sold dry-goods and notions and wore gaudy young clothes. Wallingford emerged much more slowly, as became his ponderous size. He was dressed in a green summer suit of ineffable fabric, wore green low shoes, green silk hose, a green felt hat, and a green bow tie, below which, in the bosom of his green silk negligee shirt, glowed a huge diamond. Richness and bigness were the very essence of him, and the aged driver, recognizing true worth when he saw it, gave a jerk at his dust-crusted old cap as he addressed him.
“’Tain’t no use to hurry now,” he quavered. “Them other two’ll have the good rooms.”
J. Rufus, from natural impulse, followed in immediately. There was no one behind the little counter, but the young grocery drummer, having hastily inspected the sparse entries of the preceding days, had registered himself for room two.
“There ain’t a single transient in the house, Billy,” he said, turning to the dry-goods and notion salesman, “so I’ll just put you down for number three.”
A buxom young woman came out of the adjoining dining-room, wiping her red hands and arms upon a water-spattered gingham apron.
“Three of us, Molly,” said the older salesman. “Hustle up the dinner,” and out of pure friendliness he started to chuck her under the chin, whereat she wheeled and slapped him a resounding whack and ran away laughing. This vigorous retort, being entirely expected, was passed without comment, and the two commercial travelers took off their coats to “wash up” at the tin basins in the corner. The aged driver, intercepting them to collect, came in to Wallingford, who, noting the custom, had already subscribed his name with a flourish upon the register.
“Two shillin’,” quavered the ancient one at his elbow.
Wallingford gave him twice the amount he asked for, and the old man was galvanized into instant fluttering activity. He darted out of the door with surprising agility, and returned with two pieces of Wallingford’s bright and shining luggage, which he surveyed reverently as he placed them in front of the counter. Two more pieces, equally rich, he brought, and on the third trip the proprietor’s son, a brawny boy of fifteen, clad in hickory shirt, blue overalls and plow shoes, and with his sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, helped him in with Wallingford’s big sole-leather dresser trunk.
“Gee!” said the boy to Wallingford, beaming upon this array of expensive baggage. “What do you sell?”
“White elephants, son,” replied Wallingford, so gravely that the boy took two minutes to decide that the rich stranger was “fresh.”
It was not until dinner was called that any one displayed the least interest in the register, and then the proprietor, a tall, cowboy-like man, with drooping mustaches and a weather-browned face, came in with his trousers tucked into his top boots.
“Hello, Joe! Hello, Billy!” he said, nodding to the two traveling men. “How’s business?”
“Rotten!” returned the grocery drummer.
“Fine!” asserted the dry-goods salesman. “Our house hasn’t done so much business in five years.” Sotto voce, he turned to the young drummer. “Never give it away that business is on the bum,” he said out of his years of experience.
The tall proprietor examined the impressively groomed Wallingford and his impressive luggage with some curiosity, and went behind the little counter to inspect the register.
“I’d like two rooms and a bath,” said Wallingford, as the other looked up thoughtfully.
“Two! Two?” repeated Jim Ranger, looking about the room. “Some ladies with you? Mother or sister, maybe?”
“No,” answered Wallingford, smiling. “A bedroom and sitting-room and a bath for myself.”
“Sitting-room?” repeated the proprietor. “You know, you can sit in this office till the ’leven-ten’s in every night, and then the parlor’s—” He hesitated, and, seeing the unresponsive look upon his guest’s face, he added hastily: “Oh, well, I reckon I can fix it. We can move a bed out of number five, and I’ll have the bath-tub and the water sent up as soon as you need it. This is wash-day, you know, and they’ve got the rinse water in it. I reckon you won’t want it before to-night, though.”
“No,” said J. Rufus quietly, and sighed.
Immediately after lunch, J. Rufus, inquiring again for the proprietor, was told by Molly that he was in the barn, indicating its direction with a vague wave of her thumb. Wallingford went out to the enormous red barn, its timbers as firm as those of the hotel were flimsy, its lines as rigidly perpendicular as those of the hotel were out of plumb, its doors and windows as square-angled as those of the hotel were askew. Across its wide front doors, opening upon the same wide, cracked old stone sidewalk as the hotel, was a big sign kept fresh and bright: “J. H. Ranger, Livery and Sales Stable.” Here Wallingford found the proprietor and the brawny boy in the middle of the wide barn floor, in earnest consultation over the bruised hock of a fine, big, draft horse.
“I’d like to get a good team and a driver for this afternoon,” observed Wallingford.
“You’ve come to the right place,” declared Jim Ranger heartily, and when he straightened up he no longer looked awkward and out of place, as he had in the hotel office, but seemed a graceful part of the surrounding picture. “Bob, get out that little sorrel team and hitch it up to the new buggy for the gentleman,” and as Bob sprang away with alacrity he turned to Wallingford. “They’re not much to look at, that sorrel team,” he explained, “but they can go like a couple of rats, all day, at a good, steady clip, up hill and down.”
“Fine,” said Wallingford, who was somewhat of a connoisseur in horses, and he surveyed the under-sized, lithe-limbed, rough-coated sorrels with approval as they were brought stamping out of their stalls, though, as he climbed into his place, he regretted that they were not more in keeping with the handsome buggy.
“Which way?” asked Bob, as he gathered up the reins.
“The country just outside of town, in all directions,” directed Wallingford briefly.
“All right,” said Bob with a click to the little horses, and clattering out of the door they turned to the right, away from the broad, shady street of old maples, and were almost at once in the country. For a mile or two there were gently undulating farms of rich, black loam, and these Wallingford inspected in careful turn.
“Seems to be good land about here,” he observed.
“Best in the world,” said the youngster. “Was you thinkin’ of buyin’ a farm?”
Wallingford smiled and shook his head.
“I scarcely think so,” he replied.
“’Twouldn’t do you any good if you was,” retorted Bob. “There ain’t a farm hereabouts for sale.”
To prove it, he pointed out the extent of each farm, gave the name of its owner and told how much he was worth, to all of which Wallingford listened most intently.
They had been driving to the east, but, coming to a fork in the road leading to the north, Bob took that turning without instructions, still chattering his local Bradstreet. Along this road was again rich and smiling farm land, but Wallingford, seeming throughout the drive to be eagerly searching for something, evinced a new interest when they came to a grove of slender, straight-trunked trees.
“Old man Mescott gets a hundred gallons of maple syrup out of that grove every spring,” said Bob in answer to a query. “He gets two dollars a gallon, then he stays drunk till plumb the middle of summer. Was you thinkin’ of buyin’ a maple grove?”
Wallingford looked back in thoughtful speculation, but ended by shaking his head, more to himself than to Bob.
They passed through a woods.
“Good timber land, that,” suggested Wallingford.
“Good timber land! I should say it was,” said Bob. “There’s nigh a hundred big walnut trees back in there a ways, to say nothing of all the fine oak an’ hick’ry, but old man Cass won’t touch an ax to nothing but underbrush. He says he’s goin’ to will ’em to his grandchildren, and by the time they grow up it’ll be worth their weight in money. Was you thinkin’ of buyin’ some timber land?”
Wallingford again hesitated over that question, but finally stated that he was not.
“Here’s the north road back into town,” said Bob, as they came to a cross-road, and as they gained the top of the elevation they could look down and see, a mile or so away, the little town, its gray roofs and red chimneys peeping from out its sheltering of green leaves. Just beyond the intersection the side of the hill had been cut away, and clean, loose gravel lay there in a broad mass. Wallingford had Bob halt while he inspected this.
“Good gravel bank,” he commented.
“I reckon it is,” agreed Bob. “They come clear over from Highville and from Appletown and even from Jenkins Corners to get that gravel, and Tom Kerrick dresses his whole family off of that bank. He wouldn’t sell it for any money. Was you thinkin’ of buying a gravel bank, mister?”
Instead of replying Wallingford indicated another broken hillside farther on, where shale rock had slipped loosely down, like a disintegrated slate roof, to a seeping hollow.
“Is that stone good for anything?” he asked.
“Nothing in the world,” replied Bob. “It rots right up. If you was thinkin’ of buyin’ a stone quarry now, there’s a fine one up the north road yonder.”
Wallingford laughed and shook his head.
“I wasn’t thinking of buying a stone quarry,” said he.
Bob Ranger looked shrewdly and yet half-impatiently at the big young man by his side.
“You’re thinkin’ o’ buyin’ somethin’; I know that,” he opined.
Wallingford chuckled and dropped his big, plump hand on the other’s shoulder.
“Elephant hay only,” he kindly explained; “just elephant hay for white elephants,” whereat the inquisitive Bob, mumbling something to himself about “freshness,” relapsed into hurt silence.
In this silence they passed far to the northwest of the town, and a much-gullied highway led them down toward the broader west road. Here again, as they headed straight in to Blakeville with their backs to the descending sun, were gently undulating farm lands, but about half a mile out of town they came to a wide expanse of black swamp, where cat-tails and calamus held sole possession. Before this swamp Wallingford paused in long and thoughtful contemplation.
“Who owns this?” he asked.
“Jonas Bubble,” answered Bob, recovering cheerfully from his late rebuff. “Gosh! He’s the richest man in these parts. Owns three hundred acres of this fine farmin’ land we just passed, owns the mill down yander by the railroad station, has a hide and seed and implement store up-town, and lives in the finest house anywhere around Blakeville; regular city house. That’s it, on ahead. Was you thinkin’ o’ buyin’ some swamp land?”
To this Wallingford made no reply. He was gazing backward over that useless little valley, its black waters now turned velvet crimson as they caught the slant of the reddening sun.
“Here’s Jonas Bubble’s house,” said Bob presently.
It was the first house outside of Blakeville—a big, square, pretentious-looking place, with a two-story porch in front and a quantity of scroll-sawed ornaments on eaves and gables and ridges, on windows and doors and cornices, and with bright brass lightning-rods projecting upward from every prominence. At the gate stood, bare-headed, a dark-haired and strikingly pretty girl, with a rarely olive-tinted complexion, through which, upon her oval cheeks, glowed a clear, roseate under-tint. She was fairly slender, but well rounded, too, and very graceful.
“Hello, Fannie!” called Bob, with a jerk at his flat-brimmed straw hat.
“Hello, Bob!” she replied with equal heartiness, her bright eyes, however, fixed in inquiring curiosity upon the stranger.
“That’s Jonas Bubble’s girl,” explained Bob, as they drove on. “She’s a good looker, but she won’t spoon.”
Wallingford, grinning over the fatal defect in Fannie Bubble, looked back at the girl.
“She would make a Casino chorus look like a row of Hallowe’en confectionery junk,” he admitted.
“Fannie, come right in here and get supper!” shrilled a harsh voice, and in the doorway of the Bubble homestead they saw an overly-plump figure in a green silk dress.
“Gosh!” said Bob, and hit one of the little sorrel horses a vindictive clip. “That’s Fannie’s stepmother. Jonas Bubble married his hired girl two years ago, and now they don’t hire any. She makes Fannie do the work.”
CHAPTER XVIII
WALLINGFORD SPECULATES IN THE CHEAPEST REAL
ESTATE PROCURABLE
That evening, after supper, Wallingford sat on one of the broad, cane-seated chairs in front of the Atlas Hotel, smoking a big, black cigar from his own private store, and watched the regular evening parade go by. They came, two by two, the girls of the village, up one side of Maple Street, passed the Atlas Hotel, crossed over at the corner of the livery stable, went down past the Big Store and as far as the Campbellite church, where they crossed again and began a new round; and each time they passed the Atlas Hotel they giggled, or they talked loudly, or pushed one another, or did something to enlarge themselves in the transient eye. The grocery drummer and the dry-goods salesman sat together, a little aloof from J. Rufus, and presently began saying flippant things to the girls as they passed. A wake of giggles, after each such occasion, frothed across the street at the livery-stable corner, and down toward the Campbellite church.
Molly presently slipped out of the garden gate and went down Maple Street by herself. Within twenty minutes she, too, had joined the parade, and with her was Fannie Bubble. As these passed the Atlas Hotel both the drummers got up.
“Hello, Molly,” said the grocery drummer. “I’ve been waiting for you since Hector was a pup,” and he caught her arm, while the dry-goods salesman advanced a little uncertainly.
“You ’tend to your own business, Joe Cling,” ordered Molly, jerking her arm away, but nevertheless giving an inquiring glance toward her companion. That rigid young lady, however, was looking straight ahead. She was standing just in front of Wallingford.
“Come on,” coaxed the grocery drummer; “I don’t bite. Grab hold there on the other side, Billy.”
Miss Bubble, however, was still looking so uncompromisingly straight ahead that Billy hesitated, and the willing enough Molly, seeing that the conference had “struck a snag,” took matters into her own vigorous hands again.
“You’re too fresh,” she admonished the grocery drummer. “Let go my arm, I tell you. Come on, Fannie,” and she flounced away with her companion, turning into the gate of the hotel garden. Miss Fannie cast back a curious glance, not at the grocery drummer nor the veteran dry-goods salesman, but at the quiet J. Rufus.
The discomfited transients gave short laughs of chagrin and went back to their seats, but the grocery drummer was too young to be daunted for long, and by the time another section or two of the giggling parade had passed them he was ready for a second attempt. One couple, a tall, thin girl and a short, chubby one, who had now made the circuit three times, came sweeping past again, exchanging with each other hilarious persiflage which was calculated to attract and tempt.
“Wait a minute,” said the grocery drummer to his companion.
He dashed straight across the street, and under the shadow of the big elm intercepted the long and short couple. There was a parley in which the girls two or three times started to walk away, a further parley in which they consented to stand still, a loud male guffaw mingled with a succession of shrill giggles, then suddenly the grocery salesman called:
“Come on, Billy!”
The dry-goods man half rose from his chair and hesitated.
“Come on, Billy!” again invited the grocery drummer. “We’re going down to wade in the creek.”
A particularly high-pitched set of giggles followed this tremendous joke, and Billy, his timid scruples finally overcome, went across the street, a ridiculous figure with his ancient body and his youthful clothes. Nevertheless, Wallingford felt just a trifle lonesome as he watched his traveling companions of the afternoon go sauntering down the street in company which, if silly, was at least human. While he regretted Broadway, Bob Ranger, dressed no whit different from his attire of the afternoon, except that his sleeves were rolled down, came out of the hotel and stood for an undecided moment in front of the door.
“Hello, Bob!” hailed Wallingford cordially, glad to see any face he knew. “Do you smoke?”
“Reckon I do,” said Bob. “I was thinkin’ just this minute of walkin’ down to Bud Hegler’s for some stogies.”
“Sit down and have a cigar,” offered Wallingford, producing a companion to the one he was then enjoying.
Bob took that cigar and smelled it; he measured its length, its weight, and felt its firmness.
“It ain’t got any band on it, but I reckon that’s a straight ten-center,” he opined.
“I’ll buy all you can get me of that brand for a quarter apiece,” offered Wallingford.
“So?” said Bob, looking at it doubtfully. “I reckon I’d better save this for Sunday.”
“No, smoke it now. I’ll give you another one for Sunday,” promised Wallingford, and he lit a match, whereupon Bob, biting the end off the cigar with his strong, white teeth, moistened it all over with his tongue to keep the curl of the wrapper down.
With vast gratification he sat down to enjoy that awe-inspiring cigar, and, by way of being entertaining, uttered comment upon the passing parade—frank, ingeniously told bits of personal history which would have been startling to one who had imbibed the conventional idea that all country folk are without guile. Wallingford was not so much shocked by these revelations, however, as he might have been, for he had himself been raised in a country town, though one not so small as Blakeville.
It was while Bob was in the midst of this more or less profane history that Molly and Fannie Bubble came out of the gate.
“Come here, Molly,” invited Bob; “I want to introduce you to a friend of mine. He’s going to stop here quite a long time. Mr. Wallingford—Molly; Miss Bubble—Mr. Wallingford. Come on; let’s all take a walk,” and confidently taking Molly’s arm he started up the crossing, leaving Miss Bubble to Wallingford.
“It’s a beautiful evening, isn’t it?” said Fannie, as Wallingford caught step with her.
Wallingford had to hark back. Time had been when the line of conversation which went with Miss Bubble’s opening remark had been as familiar to him as his own safety razor, but of late he had been entertaining such characters as Beauty Phillips, and conversation with the Beauty had consisted of lightning-witted search through the ends of the earth and the seas therein for extravagant hyperbole and metaphor. Harking back was so difficult that J. Rufus gave it up.
“Lovely evening,” he admitted. “I’ve just been thinking about this weather. I’ve about decided to build a factory to put it up in boxes for the Chicago Market. They’d pay any price for it there in the fall.”
Miss Fannie considered this remark in silence for a moment, and then she laughed, a quiet, silvery laugh that startled J. Rufus by its musical quality.
“I don’t see why you should laugh,” protested Wallingford gravely. “If a man can get a monopoly on weather-canning it would be even better than the sleep-factory idea I’ve been considering.”
“What was that like?” asked Fannie, interested in spite of the fact that these jokes were not at all the good old standards, which could be laughed at without the painful necessity of thought.
“Well,” Wallingford explained, “I figured on building an immense dormitory and hiring about a thousand fat hoboes to sleep for me night and day. Then I intended to take that sleep and condense it and put it up in eight-hour capsules for visitors to New York. There ought to be a fortune in that.”
Again a little silence and again that little silvery laugh which Wallingford found himself watching for.
“You’re so funny,” said Miss Fannie.
“For a long time I was divided between that and my anti-bum serum as a permanent investment,” he went on, glancing down at her as he extended himself along the line which had seemed to catch her fancy. She was looking up at him, her eyes shining, her lips half parted in an anticipatory smile, and unconsciously her hand had crept upon his arm, where it lay warm and vibrant. “You know,” he explained, “they inoculate a guinea-pig or a sheep or something with disease germs, and from this animal, somehow or other, they extract a serum which cures that disease. Well, I propose to get a herd of billy-goats boiling spifflicated, and extract from them the jag serum, and with that inoculate all the rounders on Broadway at so much per inoc. Then they can stand up in front of an onyx bar and guzzle till it oozes out of their ears, without any worse effects than a lifting pain in the right elbow.”
This time the laugh came more slowly, for here was a lot of language which, though refreshing, was tangled in knots that must be unraveled. Nevertheless, the laugh came, and at the sound of it Wallingford involuntarily pressed slightly against his side the hand that lay upon his arm. They were passing Hen Moozer’s General Merchandise Emporium and Post-Office at the time, and upon the rickety porch, its posts, benches, and even floors whittled like a huge Rosetta stone, sat a group of five young men. Just after the couple had cleared the end of the porch a series of derisive meows broke out. It was the old protest of town boy against city boy, of work clothes against “Sunday duds,” of native against alien; and again J. Rufus harked back. It only provoked a smile in him, but he felt a sudden tenseness in the hand that lay upon his arm, and he was relieved when Bob and Molly, a half block ahead of them, turned hastily down a delightfully dark and shady cross street, in the shelter of which Bob immediately slipped his arm around Molly’s waist. J. Rufus, pondering that movement and regarding it as the entirely conventional and proper one, essayed to do likewise; but Miss Fannie, discussing the unpleasant habit of her young townsmen with some indignation but more sense of humor, gently but firmly unwound J. Rufus’ arm, placed it at his side and slipped her hand within it again without the loss of a syllable.
Wallingford was surprised at himself. In the old days he would have fought out this issue and would have conquered. Now, however, something had made this bold young man of the world suddenly tame. He himself helped Miss Fannie to put him back upon grounds of friendly aloofness, and with a gasp he realized that for the first time in his life he had met a girl who had forced his entire respect. It was preposterous!
Unaccountably, however, they seemed to grow more friendly after that, and the talk drifted to J. Rufus himself, the places he had seen, the adventures he had encountered, the richness of luxury that he had sought and found, and the girl listened with breathless eagerness. They did not go back to Maple Street just now, for the Maple Street parade was only for the unattached. Instead, they followed the others down to the depot and back, and after another half-hour détour through the quiet, shady street, they found Bob and Molly waiting for them at the corner.
“Good night, Fannie,” said Molly. “I’m going in. To-morrow’s ironing day. Good night, Mr. Wallingford.”
“Good night,” returned Miss Fannie, as a matter of course, and again Wallingford harked back. He was to take Miss Fannie home. Quite naturally. Why not?
It was a long walk, but by no means too long, and when they had arrived at the big, fret-sawed house of Jonas Bubble, J. Rufus was sorry. He lingered a moment at the gate, but only a moment, for a woman’s shrill voice called:
“Is that you, Fannie? You come right in here and go to bed! Who’s that with you?”
“You’d better go right away, please,” pleaded Fannie in a flutter. “I’m not allowed to be with strangers.”
This would have been the cue for a less adroit and diplomatic caller to hurry silently back up the street, and, as a matter of fact, this entirely conventional course was all that Mrs. Bubble had looked for. She was accordingly shocked when the gate opened, and in place of Fannie coming alone, J. Rufus, in spite of the girl’s protest, walked deliberately up to the porch.
“Is Mr. Bubble at home?” he asked with great dignity.
Mrs. Bubble gasped.
“I reckon he is,” she admitted.
“I’d like to see him, if possible.”
There was another moment of silence, in which Mrs. Bubble strove to readjust herself.
“I’ll call him,” she said, and went in.
Mr. Jonas Bubble, revealed in the light of the open door, proved to be a pursy man of about fifty-five, full of importance from his square-toed shoes to his gray sideburns; he exuded importance from every vest button upon the bulge of his rotundity, and importance glistened from the very top of his bald head.
“I am J. Rufus Wallingford,” said that broad-chested young gentleman, whose impressiveness was at least equal to Mr. Bubble’s importance, and he produced a neatly-engraved card to prove the genuineness of his name. “I was introduced to your daughter at the hotel, and I came down to consult with you upon a little matter of business.”
“I usually transact business at my office,” said Mr. Bubble pompously; “nevertheless, you may come inside.”
He led the way into a queer combination of parlor, library, sitting-room and study, where he lit a big, hanging gasolene lamp, opened his old swinging top desk with a key which he carefully and pompously selected from a pompous bunch, placed a plush-covered chair for his visitor, and seated himself upon an old leather-stuffed chair in front of the desk.
“Now, sir,” said he, swinging around to Wallingford and puffing out his cheeks, “I am ready to consider whatever you may have to say.”
Mr. Wallingford’s first action was one well-calculated to inspire interest. First he drew out the desk slide at Mr. Bubble’s left; then from his inside vest pocket he produced a large flat package of greenbacks, no bill being of less than a hundred dollars’ denomination. From this pile he carefully counted out eight thousand dollars, and put the balance, which Mr. Bubble hastily estimated at about fifteen hundred, back in his pocket. This procedure having been conducted with vast and impressive silence, Mr. Wallingford cleared his throat.
“I have come to ask a great favor of you,” said he, sinking his voice to barely above a whisper. “I am a stranger here. I find, unfortunately, that there is no bank in Blakeville, and I have more money with me than I care to carry about. I learned that you are the only real man of affairs in the town, and have come to ask you if you would kindly make room for this in your private safe for a day or so.”
Mr. Bubble, rotating his thumbs slowly upon each other, considered that money in profound silence. The possessor of so much loose cash was a gentleman, a man to be respected.
“With pleasure,” said Mr. Bubble. “I don’t myself like to have so much money about me, and I’d advise you, as soon as convenient, to take it up to Millford, where I do my banking. In the meantime, I don’t blame you, Mr. Wallingford, for not wanting to carry this much money about with you, nor for hesitating to put it in Jim Ranger’s old tin safe.”
“Thank you,” said Wallingford. “I feel very much relieved.”
Mr. Bubble drew paper and pen toward him.
“I’ll write you a receipt,” he offered.
“Not at all; not at all,” protested Wallingford, having gaged Mr. Bubble very accurately. “Between gentlemen such matters are entirely superfluous. By the way, Mr. Bubble, I see you have a large swamp on your land. Do you intend to let it lie useless for ever?”
“What else can I do with it?” demanded Mr. Bubble, wondering. That swamp had always been there. Naturally, it would always be there.
“You can’t do very much with it,” admitted Wallingford. “However, it is barely possible that I might see a way to utilize it, if the price were reasonable enough. What would you take for it?”
This was an entirely different matter. Mr. Bubble pursed up his lips.
“Well, I don’t know. The land surrounding it is worth two hundred dollars an acre.”
Wallingford grinned, but only internally. He knew this to be a highly exaggerated estimate, but he let it pass without comment.
“No doubt,” he agreed; “but your swamp is worth exactly nothing per square mile; in fact, worth less than nothing. It is only a breeding-place of mosquitoes and malaria. How many acres does it cover?”
“About forty.”
“I suppose ten dollars an acre would buy it?”
“By no means,” protested Mr. Bubble. “I wouldn’t have a right of way split through my farm for four hundred dollars. Couldn’t think of it.”
It was Wallingford’s turn to be silent.
“Tell you what I’ll do,” he finally began. “I think of settling down in Blakeville. I like the town from what I’ve seen of it, and I may make some important investments here.”
Mr. Bubble nodded his head gravely. A man who carried over eight thousand dollars surplus cash in his pocket had a right to talk that way.
“The matter, of course,” continued Wallingford, “requires considerable further investigation. In the meantime, I stand ready to pay you now a hundred dollars for a thirty-day option upon forty acres of your swamp land, the hundred to apply upon a total purchase price of one thousand dollars. Moreover, I’ll make it a part of the contract that no enterprise be undertaken upon this ground without receiving your sanction.”
Mr. Bubble considered this matter in pompous silence for some little time.
“Suppose we just reduce that proposition to writing, Mr. Wallingford,” he finally suggested, and without stirring from his seat he raised his voice and called: “Fannie!”
In reply two voices approached the door, one sharp, querulous, nagging, the other, the younger and fresher voice, protesting; then the girl came in, followed closely by her stepmother. The girl looked at Wallingford brightly. He was the first young man who had bearded the lioness at Bubble Villa, and she appreciated the novelty. Mrs. Bubble, however, distinctly glared at him, though the eyes of both women roved from him to the pile of bills held down with a paper weight on Mr. Bubble’s desk. Mr. Bubble made way for his daughter.
“Write a little agreement for Mr. Wallingford and myself,” directed Mr. Bubble, and dictated it, much to the surprise of the women, for Jonas always did his own writing. They did not understand that he, also, wished to make an impression.
With a delicate flush of self-consciousness in her occupation Fannie wrote the option agreement, and later another document, acknowledging the receipt of eight thousand dollars to be held in trust. In exchange for the first paper J. Rufus gravely handed Mr. Bubble a hundred-dollar bill.
“To-morrow,” said he, “I shall drop around to see you at your office, to confer with you about my proposed enterprise.”
As Wallingford left the room, attended by the almost obsequious Bubble, he caught a lingering glance of interest, curiosity, and perhaps more, from the bright eyes of Fannie Bubble. Her stepmother, however, distinctly sniffed.
Meanwhile, Wallingford, at the gate, turned for a moment toward the distant swamp where it lay now ebony and glittering silver in the moonlight, knitted his brows in perplexity, lit another of his black cigars, and strolled back to the hotel.
What on earth should he do with that swamp, now that he had it? Something good ought to be hinged on it. Should he form a drainage company to restore it to good farming land? No. At best he could only get a hundred and fifty dollars an acre, or, say, six thousand dollars for the forty. The acreage alone was to cost him a thousand; no telling what the drainage would cost, but whatever the figure there would not be profit enough to hypothecate. And it was no part of Wallingford’s intention to do any actual work. He was through for ever with drudgery; for him was only creation.
What should he do with that swamp? As he thought of it, his mind’s eye could see only its blackness. It was, after all, only a mass of dense, sticky, black mud!
Still revolving this problem in mind, Wallingford went to his bedroom, where he had scarcely arrived when Bob Ranger followed him, his sleeves rolled up again and a pail of steaming water in each hand.
“The old man said you was to have a bath when you come in,” stated Bob. “How hot do you want it?”
“I think I’ll let it go till morning and have it cold,” replied Wallingford, chuckling.
“All right,” said Bob. “It’s your funeral and not mine. I’ll just pour this in now and it’ll get cool by morning.”
In the next room—wherein the bed had been hastily replaced by two chairs, an old horsehair lounge and a kitchen table covered with a red table-cloth—Wallingford found a huge tin bath-tub, shaped like an elongated coal scuttle, dingy white on the inside and dingy green on the outside, and battered full of dents.
“How’d you get along?” asked Bob, pausing to wipe the perspiration from his brow after he had emptied the two pails of water into the tub.
“All right,” said Wallingford with a reminiscent smile.
“Old Mrs. Bubble drive you off the place?”
“No,” replied Wallingford loftily. “I went in the house and talked a while.”
“Go on!” exclaimed Bob, the glow of admiration almost shining through his skin. “Say, you’re a peach, all right! How do you like Fannie?”
“She’s a very nice girl,” opined Wallingford.
“Yes,” agreed Bob. “She’s getting a little old, though. She was twenty her last birthday. She’ll be an old maid pretty soon, but it’s her own fault.”
Then Bob went after more water, and Wallingford, seating himself at the table with paper and pencil, plunged into a succession of rambling figures concerning Jonas Bubble’s black swamp; and he figured and puzzled far into the night, with the piquant face of Miss Fannie drifting here and there among the figures.
CHAPTER XIX
WHEREIN BLAKEVILLE HAS OPPORTUNITY TO BECOME
A GREAT ART CENTER
The next morning Wallingford requisitioned the services of Bob and the little sorrel team again, and drove out to Jonas Bubble’s swamp. Arrived there he climbed the fence, and, taking a sliver of fence rail with him, gravely prodded into the edge of the swamp in various places, hauling it up in each case dripping with viscid black mud, which he examined with the most minute care, dropping tiny drops upon the backs of clean cards and spreading them out smoothly with the tip of his finger, while he looked up into the sky inquiringly, not one gesture of his conduct lost upon the curious Bob.
When he climbed back into the buggy, Bob, finding it impossible longer to restrain his quivering curiosity, asked him:
“What’s it good for?”
“I can’t tell you just yet,” said Wallingford kindly, “but if it is what I think it is, Bob, I’ve made a great discovery, one that I am sure will not only increase my wealth but add greatly to the riches of Blakeville. Do you know where I could find Jonas Bubble at this hour?”
“Down at the mill, sure.”
“Drive down there.”
As they drove past Jonas Bubble’s house they saw Miss Fannie on the back porch, in an old wrapper, peeling potatoes, and heard the sharp voice of the second Mrs. Bubble scolding her.
“Say,” said Bob, “if that old rip was my stepmother I’d poke her head-first into that swamp back yonder.”
Wallingford shook his head.
“She’d turn it black,” he gravely objected.
“Why, it is black,” protested Bob, opening his eyes in bewilderment.
In reply to this Wallingford merely chuckled. Bob, regarding him in perplexity for a while, suddenly saw that this was a joke, and on the way to the mill he snickered a score of times. Queer chap, this Wallingford; rich, no doubt, and smart as a whip; and something mysterious about him, too!
Wallingford found Jonas Bubble in flour-sifted garments in his office, going over a dusty file of bills.
“Mr. Bubble,” said he, “I have been down to your swamp and have investigated its possibilities. I am now prepared, since I have secured the right to purchase this land, to confide to you the business search in which I have for some time been engaged, and which now, I hope, is concluded. Do you know, Mr. Bubble, the valuable deposit I think I have found in my swamp?”
“No!” ejaculated Bubble, stricken solemn by the confidential tone. “What is it?”
Wallingford took a long breath, swelling out his already broad chest, and, leaning over most impressively, tapped his compelling finger upon Jonas Bubble’s knee. Then said he, with almost tragic earnestness:
“Black Mud!”
Jonas Bubble drew back astounded, eying Wallingford with affrighted incredulity. He had thought this young man sane.
“Black—” he gasped; “black—” and then hesitated.
“Mud!” finished Wallingford for him, more impressively than before. “High and low, far and near, Mr. Bubble, I have searched for a deposit of this sort. Wherever there was a swamp I have been, but never until I came to Blakeville did I find what I believe to be the correct quality of black mud.”
“Black mud,” repeated Jonas Bubble meaninglessly, but awed in spite of himself.
“Etruscan black mud,” corrected Wallingford. “The same rare earth out of which the world famous Etruscan pottery is manufactured in the little village of Etrusca, near Milan, Italy. The smallest objects of this beautiful jet-black pottery retail in this country from ten dollars upward. With your permission I am going to express some samples of this deposit to the world-famous pottery designer, Signor Vittoreo Matteo, formerly in charge of the Etruscan Pottery, but who is now in Boston waiting with feverish impatience for me to find a suitable deposit of this rare black mud. If I have at last found it, Mr. Bubble, I wish to congratulate you and Blakeville, as well as myself, upon the acquisition of an enterprise which will not only reflect vast credit on your charming and progressive little town, but will bring it a splendid accession of wealth.”
Mr. Bubble rose from his chair and shook hands with young Wallingford in great, though pompous, emotion.
“My son,” said he, “go right ahead. Take all of it you want—that is,” he hastily corrected himself, “all you need for experimental purposes.” For, he reflected, there was no need to waste any of the rare and valuable Etruscan black mud. “I think I’ll go with you.”
“I’d be pleased to have you,” said Wallingford, as, indeed, he was.
On the way, Wallingford stopped at Hen Moozer’s General Merchandise Emporium and Post-Office, where he bought a large tin pail with a tight cover, a small tin pail and a long-handled garden trowel which he bent at right angles; and seven people walked off of Hen Moozer’s porch into the middle of the street to see the town magnate and the resplendent stranger, driven by the elated Bob Ranger, whirl down Maple Street toward Jonas Bubble’s swamp.
Arrived there, who so active in direction as Jonas Bubble?
“Bob,” he ordered, protruding his girth at least three inches beyond its normal position, “hitch those horses and jump over in the field here with us. Mr. Wallingford, you will want this sample from somewhere near the center of the swamp. Bob, back yonder beyond that clump of bushes you will find that old flatboat we had right after the big rainy season. Hunt around down there for a long pole and pole out some place near the middle. Take this shovel and dig down and get mud enough to fill these two buckets.”
Bob stood unimpressed. It was not an attractive task.
“And Bob,” added Wallingford mildly, “here’s a dollar, and I know where there’s another.”
“Sure,” said Bob with the greatest of alacrity, and he hurried back to where the old flatboat, water-soaked and nearly as black as the swamp upon which it rested, was half submerged beyond the clump of bushes. When, after infinite labor, he had pushed that clumsy craft afloat upon the bosom of the shallow swamp, Mr. Bubble was on the spot with infinite direction. He told Bob, shouting from the shore, just where to proceed and how, down to the handling of each trowelful of dripping mud, and even to the emptying of each small pailful into the large pail.
“I don’t know exactly how I’ll get this boxed for shipping,” hinted Wallingford, as Bob carried the pail laboriously back to the buggy.
“Right down at the mill,” invited Mr. Bubble with great cordiality. “I’ll have my people look after it for you.”
“That’s very kind of you,” replied Wallingford. “I’ll give you the address,” and upon the back of one of his own cards he wrote: Sig. Vittoreo Matteo, 710 Marabon Building, Boston, Mass., U. S. A., care Horace G. Daw.
That night he wrote a careful letter of explanation to Horace G. Daw.
Two weeks to wait. Oh, well, Wallingford could amuse himself by working up a local reputation. It was while he was considering this, upon the following day, that a farmer with three teeth drove up in a dilapidated spring-wagon drawn by a pair of beautiful bay horses, and stopped in front of Jim Ranger’s livery and sales stable to talk hay. Wallingford, sitting in front of the hotel in lazy meditation, walked over and examined the team with a critical eye. They were an exquisite match, perfect in every limb, with manes and tails and coats of that peculiar silken sheen belonging to perfect health and perfect care.
“Very nice team you have,” observed Wallingford.
“Finest match team anywhere,” agreed Abner Follis, plucking at his gray goatee and mouthing a straw, “an’ I make a business o’ raisin’ thoroughbreds. Cousins, they are, an’ without a blemish on ’em. An’ trot—you’d ought to see that team trot.”
“What’ll you take for them?” asked Wallingford.
The response of Abner Follis was quick and to the point. He kept a careful appraisement upon all his live stock.
“Seven hundred and fifty,” said he, naming a price that allowed ample leeway for dickering.
It was almost a disappointment to him that Wallingford produced his wallet, counted over the exact amount that had been asked, and said briefly:
“Unhitch them.”
“Well!” said Abner, slowly taking the money and throwing away his straw in petulance. It was dull and uninteresting to have a bargain concluded so quickly.
Wallingford, however, knew what he was about. Within an hour everybody in town knew of his purchase. Speculation that had been mildly active concerning him now became feverish. He was a rich nabob with money to throw away; had so much money that he would not even dicker in a horse deal—and this was the height of human recklessness in Blakeville. Wallingford, purchasing Jim Ranger’s new buggy and his best set of harness, drove to the Bubbles’, the eyed of all observers, but before he had opened the gate Mrs. Bubble was on the porch.
“Jonas ain’t at home,” she shrilled down at him.
“Yes, I know,” replied Wallingford; “but I came to see Miss Fannie.”
“She’s busy,” said Mrs. Bubble with forbidding loftiness. “She’s in the kitchen getting dinner.”
Wallingford, however, strode quite confidently up the walk, and by the time he reached the porch Miss Fannie was in the door, removing her apron.
“What a pretty turnout!” she exclaimed.
“It’s a beauty,” agreed Wallingford. “I just bought it from Abner Follis.”
She smiled.
“I bet he beat you in the bargain.”
“So long as I’m satisfied,” retorted Wallingford, smiling back at her, “I don’t see why we shouldn’t all be happy. Come on and take the first ride in it.”
She glanced at her stepmother dubiously.
“I’m very busy,” she replied; “and I’d have to change my dress.”
“You look good enough just as you are,” he insisted. “Come right on. Mrs. Bubble can finish the dinner. I’ll bet she’s a better cook, anyhow,” and he laughed cordially.
The remark was intended as a compliment, but Mrs. Bubble took distinct umbrage. This was, without doubt, a premeditated slur. Of course he knew that she had once been Mr. Bubble’s cook!
“Fannie can’t go,” she snapped.
Wallingford walked straight up to Mrs. Bubble, beaming down upon her from his overawing height; and for just one affrighted moment Fannie feared that he intended to uptilt her stepmother’s chin, or make some equally familiar demonstration. Instead, he only laughed down into that lady’s belligerent eyes.
“Yes, she can,” he insisted with large persuasiveness. “You were young once yourself, Mrs. Bubble, and not so very long ago.”
It was not what he said, but his jovial air of secret understanding, that made Mrs. Bubble flush and laugh nervously and soften.
“Oh, I reckon I can get along,” she said.
Miss Fannie, with a wondering glance at Wallingford, had already flown up-stairs, and J. Rufus set himself deliberately to be agreeable to Mrs. Bubble. When Fannie came tripping down again in an incredibly short space of time, having shaken herself out of one frock and into another with an expedition which surprised even herself, she found her stepmother actually giggling! And when the young couple drove away in the bright, shining new rig behind the handsome bays, Mrs. Bubble watched after them with something almost like wistfulness. She had been young herself, once—and not so very long ago!
Opposite the Bubble swamp Wallingford stopped for a moment.
“I hope to be a very near neighbor of yours,” said he, waving his hand out toward the wonderful deposit of genuine Etruscan black mud. “Did your father tell you about the pottery studios which may be built here?”
“Not a thing,” she confessed with a slightly jealous laugh. “Papa never tells us anything at home. We’ll hear it on the street, no doubt, as we usually do.”
“Your father is a most estimable man, but I fear he makes a grave mistake in not telling you about things,” declared Wallingford. “I believe in the value of a woman’s intuition, and if I were as closely related to you as your father I am sure I should confide all my prospects to you.”
Miss Fannie gave a little inward gasp. That serious tide in the talk, fraught with great possibilities, for which every girl longs and which every girl dreads, was already setting ashore.
“You might get fooled,” she said. “Father don’t think any woman has very much gumption, and least of all me, since—since he married again.”
“I understand,” said Wallingford gently, and drove on. “Just to show you how much differently I look at things from your father, I’m going to tell you all about the black pottery project and see what you think of it.”
Thereupon he explained to her in minute detail, a wealth of which came to him on the spur of the moment, the exact workings of the Etruscan pottery art. He painted for her, in the gray of stone and the yellow of face brick and the red of tiling, the beautiful studio buildings that were to be erected yonder facing the swamp; he showed her through cozy, cheerfully lighted apartments in those studios, where the best trained artists of Europe, under the direction of the wizard, Vittoreo Matteo, should execute ravishments of Etruscan black pottery; he showed her, as the bays pranced on, connoisseurs and collectors coming from all over the country to visit the Blakeville studios, and carrying away priceless gems of the ceramic art at incalculable prices!
The girl drank in all these details with thirsty avidity.
“It’s splendid! Perfectly grand!” she assured him with vast enthusiasm, and in her memory was stored every precious word that this genius had said; and they were stored in logical order, ready to reproduce on the slightest provocation, which was precisely the result which Wallingford had intended to produce.
It was nearing noon now, and making a détour by the railway road they drove up in front of the mill with the spanking bays just as Jonas Bubble was coming out of his office to go to dinner. Hilariously they invited him into the carriage, and in state drove him home.
Wallingford very wisely kept away from the Bubble home that afternoon and that evening, and by the next morning every woman in town had told all her men-folk about the vast Etruscan black pottery project!
CHAPTER XX
WALLINGFORD BEGINS TO UTILIZE THE WONDERFUL
ETRUSCAN BLACK MUD
Wallingford was just going in to dinner when a tall, thin-visaged young lady, who might have been nearing thirty, but insisted on all the airs and graces of twenty, came boldly up to the Atlas Hotel in search of him, and, by her right of being a public character, introduced herself. She was Miss Forsythe, principal over one other teacher in the Blakeville public school; moreover, she was president of the Women’s Culture Club!
“It is about the latter that I came to see you, Mr. Wallingford,” she said, pushing back a curl which had been carefully trained to be wayward. “The Women’s Culture Club meets this coming Saturday afternoon at the residence of Mrs. Moozer. It just happens that we are making an exhaustive study of the Italian Renaissance, and we have nothing, positively nothing, about the renaissance of Italian ceramics! I beg of you, Mr. Wallingford, I plead with you, to be our guest upon that afternoon and address us upon Etruscan Pottery.”
Wallingford required but one second to adjust himself to this new phase. This was right where he lived. He could out-pretend anybody who ever made pretensions to having a pretense. He expanded his broad chest and beamed.
He knew but little about art, being only the business man of the projected American Etruscan Black Pottery Studios, but he would be more than pleased to tell them that little. He would, in fact, be charmed!
“You don’t know how kind, how good you are, and what a treat your practical talk will be, I am sure,” gurgled Miss Forsythe, biting first her upper lip and then her lower to make them redder, and then, still gurgling, she swept away, leaving Wallingford chuckling.
Immediately after lunch he went over to the telegraph office and wired to the most exclusive establishment of its sort in New York:
Express three black pottery vases Etruscan preferred but most expensive you have one eighteen inches high and two twelve inches high am wiring fifty dollars to insure transportation send balance C. O. D.
Not the least of J. Rufus’ smile was that inserted clause, “Etruscan preferred.” He had not the slightest idea that there was such pottery as Etruscan in the world, but his sage conclusion was that the big firm would think they had overlooked something; and his other clause, “most expensive you have,” would insure proper results. That night he wrote to Blackie Daw:
Whatever you do, don’t buy vase either twelve or eighteen inches high. Send one about nine.
Saturday morning the package came, and the excess bill was two hundred and forty-five dollars, exclusive of express charges, all of which J. Rufus cheerfully paid. He had that box delivered unopened to the residence of Mrs. Henry Moozer. That afternoon he dressed himself with consummate care, his gray frock suit and his gray bow tie, his gray waistcoat and his gray spats, by some subtle personality he threw about them, conveying delicately the idea of an ardent art amateur, but an humble one, because he felt himself insufficiently gifted to take part in actual creation.
Was Miss Forsythe there? Miss Forsythe was there, in her pink silk, with cascade after cascade of ruffled flounces to take away the appalling height and thinness of her figure. Was Mrs. Moozer there? Dimly discernible, yes, backed into a corner and no longer mistress of her own house, though ineffectually trying to assert herself above a determined leadership. Also were there Mrs. Ranger, who was trying hard to learn to dote; Mrs. Priestly, who prided herself on a marked resemblance to Madame Melba, and had a high C which shattered chandeliers; and Mrs. Hispin, whose troublesome mustache in nowise interfered with her mad passion for the collection of antiques, which, fortunately consisting of early chromos, could be purchased cheaply in the vicinity of Blakeville; and Mrs. Bubble, whose specialty was the avoidance of all subjects connected with domestic science. Many other equally earnest and cultured ladies flocked about J. Rufus, as bees around a buckwheat blossom, until the capable and masterly president, by a careful accident arranging her skirts so that one inch of silken hose was visible, tapped her little silver gavel for order.
There ensued the regular reports of committees, ponderous and grave in their frivolity; there ensued unfinished business—relating to a disputed sum of thirty-nine cents; there ensued new business—relating to a disputed flaw in the constitution; there ensued a discussion of scarcely repressed acidity upon the right of the president to interfere in committee work; and then the gurgling president—with many a reference to the great masters in Italian art, with a wide digression into the fields of ceramics in general and of Italian ceramics in particular, with a complete history of the plastic arts back to the ooze stage of geological formation—introduced the speaker of the day.
J. Rufus, accepting gracefully his prominence, bowed extravagantly three times in response to the Chautauqua salute, and addressed those nineteen assembled ladies with a charming earnestness which did vast credit to himself and to the Italian ceramic renaissance. He invented for them on the spot a history of Etruscan pottery, a process of making it, a discovery of the wonderful Etruscan under-glaze, and the eye-moistening struggles and triumphs of the great Vittoreo Matteo from obscurity as a poor little barefooted Italian shepherd boy who was caught constructing wonderful figures out of plain mud.
He regretted very much that he had been unable to secure, at such short notice, samples of the famous Etruscan pottery which this same Vittoreo Matteo had made famous, but he had secured the next best thing, and with renewed apologies to Mrs. Moozer, who had kindly consented to have a litter made upon her carpet, he would unpack the vases which had come that morning. With a fine eye for stage effect, Wallingford had had the covers of the boxes loosened, but had not had the excelsior removed. Now he had the box brought in and placed it upon the table, and then, from amid their careful wrappings, the precious vases were lifted!
“Ah!”—“How ex-quisite!”—“Bee-yewtiful!” Such was the chorus of the enraptured culture club.
Wallingford, smiling in calm triumph, was able to assure the almost fainting worshipers that these were but feeble substitutes for the exquisite creations that were shortly to be turned out in the studios that were to make Blakeville famous. Yes, he might now promise them that definitely! The matter was no longer one of conjecture. That very morning he had received an epoch-making letter from the great Vittoreo Matteo! This letter he read. It fairly exuded with tears—warm, emotional, Latin tears of joy—over the discovery of this priceless, this glorious, this beatific black mud! Already the great Vittoreo was at work upon the sample sent him, modeling a vase after one of his own famous shapes of Etrusca. It would soon be completed, he would have it fired, and then he would send it to his dear friend and successful manager, so that he might himself judge how inexpressibly more than perfect was the wonderful mud of Blakeville.
“How ex-quisite!”—“Bee-yewtiful!” chorused the culture club
Mr. Wallingford was himself transported to nearly as ecstatic heights over the prospect as the redoubtable Vittoreo Matteo, and as a memento of this auspicious day he begged to present the largest of these vases to the Women’s Culture Club, to be in the keeping of its charming president. One of the smaller vases he begged to present to the hostess of the afternoon in token of the delightful hour he had spent in that house. The other he retained to present to a very gracious matron, the hospitality of whose home he had already enjoyed, and with whose eminent husband he had already held the most pleasant business relations; whereat Mrs. Jonas Bubble fairly wriggled lest her confusion might not be seen or correctly interpreted.
Close upon the frantic applause which followed these graceful gifts, pale tea and pink wafers were served by the Misses Priestly, Hispin, Moozer and Bubble, and the function was over except for the fluttering. Inadvertently, almost apparently quite inadvertently, when he went away, J. Rufus left behind him the crumpled C. O. D. bill which he had held in his hand while talking. That night Blakeville, from center to circumference, was talking of nothing but the prices of Etruscan vases. Why, these prices were not only stupendous, they were impossible—and yet there was the receipted bill! To think that anybody would pay real money in such enormous dole for mere earthen vases! It was preposterous; it was incredible—and yet there was the bill! Visions of wealth never before grasped by the minds of the citizens of Blakeville began to loom in the immediate horizon of every man, woman and child, and over all these visions of wealth hovered the beneficent figure of J. Rufus Wallingford.
On Sunday J. Rufus, in solemn black frock-coat and shiny top hat, attended church. From church he went to the Bubble home, by the warm invitation of Jonas, for chicken dinner, and in the afternoon he took Miss Fannie driving behind the handsome bays. While she was making ready, however, he took Jonas Bubble in the rig and drove down to the swamp, where they paused in solemn, sober contemplation of that vast and beautiful expanse of Etruscan black mud. Mr. Bubble had, of course, seen the glowing letter of Vittoreo Matteo shortly after its arrival, and he was not unprepared for J. Rufus’ urgency.
“To-morrow,” said J. Rufus, as he swept his hand out over the swamp with pride of possession, “to-morrow I shall exercise my option; to-morrow I shall begin drainage operations; to-morrow I shall order plans prepared for the first wing of the Blakeville Etruscan Studios,” and he pointed out a spot facing the Bubble mansion. “Only one thing worries me. In view of the fact that we shall have a large pay-roll and handle considerable of ready cash, I regret that Blakeville has no bank. Moreover, it grates upon me that the thriving little city of my adoption must depend on a smaller town for all its banking facilities. Why don’t you start a bank, Mr. Bubble, and become its president? If you will start a subscription list to-morrow I’ll take five thousand dollars’ worth of stock myself.”
To become the president of a bank! That was an idea which had not previously presented itself to the pompous Mr. Bubble, but now that it had arrived it made his waistband uncomfortable. Well, the town needed a bank, and a bank was always profitable. His plain civic duty lay before him. President Bubble, of the Blakeville Bank; or, much better still, the Bubble Bank! Why not? He was already the most important man in the community, and his name carried the most weight. President Bubble, of the Bubble Bank! By George! It was a good idea!
Meanwhile, a clean, clear deed and title to forty acres of Jonas Bubble’s black mud was recorded in the Blake County court-house, and J. Rufus went to the city, returning with a discreet engineer, who surveyed and prodded and waded, and finally installed filtration boxes and a pumping engine; and all Blakeville came down to watch in solemn silence the monotonous jerks of the piston which lifted water from the swamp faster than it flowed in. For hours they stood, first on one foot and then on the other, watching the whir of the shining fly-wheel, the exhaust of the steam, the smoke of the stack, and the gushing of the black water through the big rubber nozzle to the stream which had heretofore merely trickled beneath the rickety wooden road culvert. It watched in awed silence the slow recession of waters, the appearance of unexpected little lakes and islands and slimy streams in the shining black bottom of that swamp.
On the very day, too, that this work was installed, there came from Vittoreo Matteo, in Boston, the Etruscan vase. Wallingford, opening it in the privacy of his own room, was intensely relieved to find that Blackie had bought one of entirely different shape and style of decoration from those he had already shown, and he sent it immediately to the house of Mrs. Hispin, where that week’s meeting of the Women’s Culture Club was being held. He followed it with his own impressive self to show them the difference between the high-grade Etruscan ware and the inferior ware he had previously exhibited. He placed the two pieces side by side for comparison. Though they had been made by the same factory, the ladies of the Women’s Culture Club one and all could see the enormous difference in the exquisiteness of the under-glaze. The Etruscan ware was infinitely superior, and just think! this beautiful vase was made from Blakeville’s own superior article of black mud!
Up in Hen Moozer’s General Merchandise Emporium and Post-Office Wallingford arranged for a show window, and from behind its dusty panes he had the eternal pyramid of fly-specked canned goods removed. In its place he constructed a semi-circular amphitheater of pale blue velvet, bought from Moozer’s own stock, and in its center he placed the priceless bit of Etruscan ware, the first splendid art object from the to-be-famous Blakeville Etruscan studios!
In the meantime, Jonas Bubble had found willing subscribers to the stock of the Bubble Bank, and already was installing an impregnable vault in his vacant brick building at the intersection of Maple Avenue and Blake Street. By this time every citizen had a new impulse of civic pride, and vast commercial expansion was planned by every business man in Blakeville. Even the women felt the contagion, and it was one of the sorrows of Miss Forsythe’s soul that her vacation arrangements had already been made for the summer, and that she should be compelled to go away even for a short time, leaving all this inspiriting progress behind her. It would be just like Mrs. Moozer to take advantage of the situation! Mrs. Moozer was vice-president of the Women’s Culture Club.
The Bubble County Bank collected its funds, took possession of its new quarters and made ready for business. Jonas Bubble, changing his attire to a frock suit for good and all, became its president. J. Rufus had also been offered an office in the bank, but he declined. A directorship had been urged upon him, but he steadfastly refused, with the same firmness that he had denied to Jonas Bubble a share in his pottery or even his drainage project. No, with his five thousand dollars’ worth of stock he felt that he was taking as great a share as a stranger might, with modesty, appropriate to himself in their municipal advancement. Let the honors go to those who had grown up with the city, and who had furnished the substantial nucleus upon which their prosperity and advancement might be based.
He intended, however, to make free use of the new banking facilities, and by way of showing the earnestness of that intention he drew from his New York bank half of the sum he had cleared on his big horse-racing “frame up,” and deposited these funds in the Bubble Bank. True enough, three days after, he withdrew nearly the entire amount by draft in favor of one Horace G. Daw, of Boston, but a week later he deposited a similar amount from his New York bank, then increased that with the amount previously withdrawn in favor of Horace G. Daw. A few days later he withdrew the entire account, replaced three-fourths of it and drew out one-half of that, and it began to be talked about all over the town that Wallingford’s enterprises were by no means confined to his Blakeville investments. He was a man of large financial affairs, which required the frequent transfer of immense sums of money. To keep up this rapid rotation of funds, Wallingford even borrowed money which Blackie Daw had obtained in the same horse-racing enterprise. Sometimes he had seventy-five thousand dollars in the Bubble Bank, and sometimes his balance was less than a thousand.
In the meantime, J. Rufus allowed no opportunities for his reputation to become stale. In the Atlas Hotel he built a model bath-room which was to revert to Jim Ranger, without money and without price, when Wallingford should leave, and over his bath-tub he installed an instantaneous heater which was the pride and delight of the village. It cost him a pretty penny, but he got tenfold advertising from it. By the time this sensation had begun to die he was able to display drawings of the quaint and pretty vine-clad Etruscan studio, and to start men to digging trenches for the foundations!
CHAPTER XXI
THE GREAT VITTOREO MATTEO, MASTER OF BLACK
MUD, ARRIVES! BRAVA! HE DEPARTS! BRAVA!
One day a tall, slender, black-haired, black-mustached and black-eyed young man, in a severely ministerial black frock suit, dropped off the train and inquired in an undoubted foreign accent for the Atlas Hotel. Even the station loungers recognized him at once as the great and long-expected artist, Signor Vittoreo Matteo, who, save in the one respect of short hair, was thoroughly satisfying to the eye and imagination. Even before the spreading of his name upon the register of the Atlas Hotel, all Blakeville knew that he had arrived.
In the hotel office he met J. Rufus. Instantly he shrieked for joy, embraced Wallingford, kissed that discomfited gentleman upon both cheeks and fell upon his neck, jabbering in most broken English his joy at meeting his dear, dear friend once more. In the privacy of Wallingford’s own room, Wallingford’s dear Italian friend threw himself upon the bed and kicked up his heels like a boy, stuffing the corner of a pillow in his mouth to suppress his shrieks of laughter.
“Ain’t I the regular buya-da-banan Dago for fair?” he demanded, without a trace of his choice Italian accent.
“Blackie,” rejoiced Wallingford, wiping his eyes, “I never met your parents, but I’ve a bet down that they came from Naples as ballast in a cattle steamer. But I’m afraid you’ll strain yourself on this. Don’t make it too strong.”
“I’ll make Salvini’s acting as tame as a jointed crockery doll,” asserted Blackie. “This deal is nuts and raisins to me; and say, J. Rufus, your sending for me was just in the nick of time. Just got a tip from a post-office friend that the federal officers were going to investigate my plant, so I’m glad to have a vacation. What’s this new stunt of yours, anyhow?”
“It’s a cinch,” declared Wallingford, “but I don’t want to scramble your mind with anything but the story of your own life.”
To his own romantic, personal history, as Vittoreo Matteo, and to the interesting fabrications about the world-famous Etruscan pottery, in the village of Etrusca, near Milan, Italy, Blackie listened most attentively.
“All right,” said he at the finish; “I get you. Now lead me forth to the merry, merry villagers.”
Behind the spanking bays which had made Fannie Bubble the envied of every girl in Blakeville, Wallingford drove Blackie forth. Already many of the faithful had gathered at the site of the Blakeville Etruscan Studios in anticipation of the great Matteo’s coming, and when the tall, black-eyed Italian jumped out of the buggy they fairly quivered with gratified curiosity. How well he looked the part! If only he had had long hair! The eyes of the world-famous Italian ceramic expert, however, were not for the assembled denizens of Blakeville; they were only for that long and eagerly desired deposit of Etruscan soil. He leaped from the buggy; he dashed through the gap in the fence; he rushed to the side of that black swamp, the edges of which had evaporated now until they were but a sticky mass, and said:
“Oh, da g-r-r-a-a-n-da mod!”
Forthwith, disregarding his cuffs, disregarding his rings, disregarding everything, he plunged both his white hands into that sticky mass and brought them up dripping-full of that precious material—the genuine, no, better than genuine, Etruscan black mud!
A cheer broke out from assembled Blakeville. This surely was artistic frenzy! This surely was the emotional temperament! This surely was the manner in which the great Italian black-pottery expert should act in the first sight of his beloved black mud!
“Da gr-r-r-r-r-a-a-n-da mod!” he repeated over and over, and drew it close to his face that he might inspect it with a near and loving eye.
One might almost have thought that he was about to kiss it, to bury his nose in it; one almost expected him to jump into that pond and wallow in it, his joy at seeing it was so complete.
It was J. Rufus Wallingford himself who, catching the contagion of this superb fervor, ran to the pail of drinking-water kept for the foundation workmen, and brought it to the great artist. J. Rufus himself poured water upon the great artist’s hands until those hands were free of their Etruscan coating, and with his own immaculate handkerchief he dried those deft and skilful fingers, while the great Italian potter looked up into the face of his business manager with almost tears in his eyes!
It was a wonderful scene, one never to be forgotten, and in the enthusiasm of that psychological moment Mrs. Moozer rushed forward. Mrs. Moozer, acting president of the Women’s Culture Club in the absence of Miss Forsythe, saw here a glorious opportunity; here was where she could “put one over” upon that all-absorptive young lady.
“My dear Mr. Wallingford, you must introduce me at once!” she exclaimed. “I can not any longer restrain my impatience.”
His own voice quavering emotions of several sorts, Wallingford introduced them, and Mrs. Moozer shook ecstatically the hand which had just caressed the dear swamp.
“And so this is the great Matteo!” she exclaimed. “Signor, as acting president of the Women’s Culture Club, I claim you for an address upon your sublime art next Saturday afternoon. Let business claim you afterward.”
“I hav’a—not da gooda Englis,” said Blackie Daw, with an indescribable gesture of the shoulders and right arm, “but whata leetle I cana say, I s’alla be amost aglad to tella da ladees.”
Never did man enjoy himself more than did Blackie Daw. Blakeville went wild over this gifted, warmly temperamental foreigner. They dined him and they listened to his soul-satisfying, broken English with vast respect, even with veneration; the women because he was an artist, and the men because he represented vast money-earning capacity. Even the far-away president of the Women’s Culture Club heard of his advent from a faithful adherent, an anti-Moozer and pro-Forsythe member, and on Saturday morning J. Rufus Wallingford received a gushing letter from that enterprising lady.
My Dear Mr. Wallingford:
I have been informed that the great event has happened, and that the superb artist has at last arrived in Blakeville; moreover, that he is to favor the Women’s Culture Club, of which I have the honor to be president, with a talk upon his delightful art. I simply can not resist presiding at that meeting, and I hope it is not uncharitable toward Mrs. Moozer that I feel it my duty to do so; consequently I shall arrive in time, I trust, to introduce him; moreover, to talk with him in his own, limpid, liquid language. I have been, for the past month, taking phonograph lessons in Italian for this moment, and I trust that it will be a pleasant surprise to him to be addressed in his native tongue.
Wallingford rushed up-stairs to where Blackie was leisurely getting ready for breakfast.
“Old scout,” he gasped, “your poor old mother in Italy is at the point of death, so be grief-stricken and hustle! Get ready for the next train out of town, you hear? Look at this!” and he thrust in front of Blackie’s eyes the fatal letter.
Blackie looked at it and comprehended its significance.
“What time does the first train leave?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but whatever time it is I’ll get you down to it,” said Wallingford. “This is warning enough for me. It’s time to close up and take my profits.”
The next east-bound train found Blackie Daw and Wallingford at the station, and just as it slowed down, Blackie, with Wallingford helping him carry his grips, was at the steps of the parlor car. He stood aside for the stream of descending passengers to step down, and had turned to address some remark to Wallingford, when he saw that gentleman’s face blanch and his jaw drop. A second later a gauzy female had descended from the car and seized upon J. Rufus. Even as she turned upon him, Blackie felt the sinking certainty that this was Miss Forsythe.
“And this is Signor Matteo, I am sure,” she gushed. “You’re not going away!”
“Yes,” interposed Wallingford, “his grandmother—I mean his mother—in Genoa is at the point of death, and he must make a hasty trip. He will return again in a month.”
“Oh, it is too bad, too bad indeed!” she exclaimed. “I sympathize with you, so deeply, Signor Matteo. Signor,...”
The dreaded moment had come, and Wallingford braced himself as Miss Forsythe, cocking her head upon one side archly, like a dear little bird, gurgled out one of her very choicest bits of phonograph Italian!
Blackie Daw never batted an eyelash. He beamed upon Miss Forsythe, he displayed his dazzling white teeth in a smile of intense gratification, he grasped Miss Forsythe’s two hands in the fervor of his enthusiasm—and, with every appearance of lively intelligence beaming from his eyes, he fired at Miss Forsythe a tumultuous stream of utterly unintelligible gibberish!
As his flow continued, to the rhythm of an occasional, warm, double handshake, Miss Forsythe’s face turned pink and then red, and when at last, upon the conductor’s signal, Blackie hastily tore himself away and clambered on board, waving his hand to the last and erupting strange syllables which had no kith or kin, Miss Forsythe turned to Wallingford, nearly crying.
“It is humiliating; it is so humiliating,” she admitted, trapped into confession by the suddenness of it all; “but, after all my weeks of preparation, I wasn’t able to understand one word of that beautiful, limpid Italian!”
CHAPTER XXII
IN WHICH J. RUFUS GIVES HIMSELF THE SURPRISE
OF HIS LIFE
Wallingford had kept his finger carefully upon the pulse of the Bubble Bank by apparently inconsequential conversations with President Bubble, and he knew its deposits and its surplus almost to the dollar. Twice now he had checked out his entire account and borrowed nearly the face of his bank stock, on short time, against his mere note of hand, replacing the amounts quickly and at the same time depositing large sums, which he almost immediately checked out again.
On the Saturday following Blackie Daw’s departure all points had been brought together: the drainage operation had been completed; walls had been built about the three springs which supplied the swamp; the foundation of the studio had been completed, and all his workmen paid off and discharged; and the surplus of the Bubble Bank had reached approximately its high-water mark.
On Sunday Wallingford, taking dinner with the Bubbles, unrolled a set of drawings, showing a beautiful Colonial residence which he proposed to build on vacant property he had that day bought, just east of Jonas Bubble’s home.
“Good!” approved Jonas with a clumsily bantering glance at his daughter, who colored deliciously. “Going to get married and settle down?”
“You never can tell,” laughed Wallingford. “Whether I do or not, however, the building of one or several houses like this would be a good investment, for the highly paid decorators and modelers which the pottery will employ will pay good rents.”
Jonas nodded gravely.
“How easily success comes to men of enterprise and far-sightedness,” he declared with hearty approbation, in which there was mixed a large amount of self-complacency; for in thus complimenting Wallingford he could not but compliment himself.
On Monday Wallingford walked into the Bubble Bank quite confidently.
“Bubble, how much is my balance?” he asked, as he had done several times before.
Mr. Bubble, smiling, turned to his books.
“Three thousand one hundred and sixty-two dollars and fifty-eight cents,” said he.
“Why, I’m a pauper!” protested Wallingford. “I never could keep track of my bank balance. Well, that isn’t enough. I’ll have to borrow some.”
“I guess we can arrange that,” said Jonas with friendly, one might almost say paternal, encouragement. “How much do you want?”
“Well, I’ll have to have about forty-five thousand dollars, all told,” replied Wallingford in an offhand manner.
He had come behind the railing, as he always did. He was leaning at the end of Mr. Bubble’s desk, his hands crossed before him. From his finger sparkled a big three-carat diamond; from his red-brown cravat—price three-fifty—sparkled another brilliant white stone fully as large; an immaculate white waistcoat was upon his broad chest; from his pocket depended a richly jeweled watch-fob. For just an instant Jonas Bubble was staggered, and then the recently imbibed idea of large operations quickly reasserted itself. Why, here before him stood a commercial Napoleon. Only a week or so before Wallingford’s bank balance had been sixty thousand dollars; at other times it had been even more, and there had been many intervals between when his balance had been less than it was now. Here was a man to whom forty-five thousand dollars meant a mere temporary convenience in conducting operations of incalculable size. Here was a man who had already done more to advance the prosperity of Blakeville than any one other—excepting, of course, himself—in its history. Here was a man predestined by fate to enormous wealth, and, moreover, one who might be linked to Mr. Bubble, he hoped and believed, by ties even stronger than mere business associations.
“Pretty good sum, Wallingford,” said he. “We have the money, though, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t arrange it. Thirty-day note, I suppose?”
“Oh, anything you like,” said Wallingford carelessly. “Fifteen days will do just as well, but I suppose you’d rather have the interest for thirty,” and he laughed pleasantly.
“Yes, indeed,” Jonas replied, echoing the laugh. “You’re just in the nick of time, though, Wallingford. A month from now we wouldn’t have so much. I’m making arrangements not to have idle capital on hand.”
“Idle money always yells at me to put it back into circulation,” said Wallingford, looking about the desk. “Where are your note blanks?”
“Er—right here,” replied Mr. Bubble, drawing the pad from a drawer. “By the way, Wallingford, of course we’ll have to arrange the little matter of securities, and perhaps I’d better see the directors about a loan of this size.”
“Oh, certainly,” agreed Wallingford. “As for security, I’ll just turn over to you my bank stock and a holding on the Etruscan property.”
For one fleeting instant it flashed across Mr. Bubble’s mind that he had sold this very property to Wallingford for the sum of one thousand dollars; but a small patch of stony ground which had been worth absolutely nothing before the finding of gold in it had been known to become worth a million in a day, as Wallingford had once observed when looking across the great swamp, and now the mine he had sold to Wallingford for a song was worth almost any sum that might be named. Hen Moozer, when consulted, was of that opinion; Jim Ranger was of that opinion; Bud Hegler was of that opinion; the other directors were of that opinion; every one in Blakeville was of that opinion; so Wallingford got his forty-five thousand dollars, and the Bubble Bank held in return a mortgage on Wallingford’s bank stock, and on forty acres of genuine Etruscan black mud.
“By the way, Mr. Bubble,” said Wallingford, tucking the bills of exchange into his pocket, “I’m going to take a little run into New York to-day. Would you mind putting the plans for my new house into the hands of the two contractors here for them to figure on?”
“With pleasure. Hope you have a good trip, my boy.”
Well, it was all over, but he was not quite so well satisfied as he had been over the consummation of certain other dubious deals. Heretofore he had hugely enjoyed the matching of his sharp wits against duller ones, had been contemptuous of the people he out-manœuvered, had chuckled in huge content over his triumphs; but in this case there was an obstacle to his perfect enjoyment, and that obstacle was Fannie Bubble. He was rather impatient about it.
He started early for the train, instructing Bob Ranger to be there to drive back the bays, and drove around by way of Jonas Bubble’s house. As he was about to hitch his horses the door opened, and Fannie, dressed for the afternoon, but hatless, came flying out, her head bent and her hands back over it. She was crying, and was closely pursued by Mrs. Bubble, who brandished a feather duster, held by the feather end. Wallingford ran to open the gate as Fannie approached it, closing it and latching it in time to stop her stepmother.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“She’s a lazy, good-for-nothing, frivolous huzzy!” declared Mrs. Bubble in hot wrath.
“I’ve been looking for just that kind,” asserted Wallingford. “She’ll do for me. Fannie, get into the buggy. I came down to take you for a ride to the depot.”
“If she goes away from this house she don’t come back till she gets down on her knees and begs my forgiveness!” shrieked the woman.
“If she does that I’ll have her sent to a bugitorium,” declared Wallingford. “She don’t need to come back here. I’ll take care of her myself. You’ll go with me, won’t you, Fannie?”
“Anywhere,” she said brokenly.
“Then come on.”
Turning, he helped her into the buggy and they drove away, followed by the invectives of Mrs. Bubble. The girl was in a tumult of emotion, her whole little world clattering down about her ears. Bit by bit her story came out. It was sordid enough and trivial enough, but to her it was very real. That afternoon she had planned to go to the country for ferns with a few girls, and they were to meet at the house of one of her friends at one o’clock. Her stepmother had known about it three days in advance, and had given her consent. When the time came, however, she had suddenly insisted that Fannie stop to wash the dishes, which would have made her a half-hour late. There followed protest, argument, flat order and as flat refusal—then the handle of the feather duster. It was not an unusual occurrence for her stepmother to slap her, Fannie admitted in her bitterness. Her father, pompous enough outside, was as wax in the hands of his termagant second wife, and, though his sympathies were secretly with the girl, he never dared protect her.
They had driven straight out the west road in the excitement, but Wallingford, remembering in time his train schedule, made the straightest détour possible to the depot. He had barely time to buy his tickets when the train came in, and he hurried Fannie into the parlor car, her head still in a whirl and her confusion heightened by the sudden appreciation of the fact that she had no hat. The stop at Blakeville was but a brief one, and as the train moved away Fannie looked out of the window and saw upon the platform of the little depot, as if these people were a part of another world entirely, the station agent, the old driver of the dilapidated ’bus, Bob Ranger and others equally a part of her past life, all looking at her in open-mouthed astonishment. Turning, as the last familiar outpost of the town slipped by, she timidly reached out her hand and laid it in that of Wallingford.
The touch of that warm hand laid on his electrified Wallingford. Many women had loved him, or thought they did, and he had held them in more or less contempt for it. He had regarded them as an amusement, as toys to be picked up and discarded at will; but this, somehow, was different. A sudden and startling resolve came to him, an idea so novel that he smiled over it musingly for some little time before he mentioned it.
“By George!” he exclaimed by and by; “I’m going to marry you!”
“Indeed!” she exclaimed in mock surprise, and laughed happily. “The way you said it sounded so funny.”
She was perfectly content.
CHAPTER XXIII
WALLINGFORD GIVES HIMSELF STILL ANOTHER
STUPENDOUS SURPRISE
Mrs. Wallingford, gowned and hatted and jeweled as Fannie Bubble had never been, and had never expected to be, tried the luxurious life that J. Rufus affected and found that she liked it. She was happy from day’s end to day’s end. Her husband was the most wonderful man in the world, flawless, perfect. Immediately upon their arrival in the city he had driven in hot haste for a license, and they were married before they left the court-house. Then he had wired the news to Jonas Bubble.
“We start on our honeymoon at once,” he had added, and named their hotel.
By the time they had been shown to the expensive suite which Wallingford had engaged, a reply of earnest congratulation had come back from Jonas Bubble. The next day had begun the delights of shopping, of automobile rides, of the races, the roof gardens, the endless round of cafés. This world was so different, so much brighter and better, so much more pleasant in every way than the world of Blakeville, that she never cared to go back there—she was ashamed to confess it to herself—even to see her father!
Blackie Daw, still keeping out of the way of federal officers who knew exactly where to find him, met J. Rufus on the street a week after his arrival, and, learning from him of his marriage to Fannie, came around to Wallingford’s hotel to “look her over.” Fannie marveled at Signor Matteo’s rapid advance in English, especially his quick mastery of the vernacular, but she found him very amusing.
“You win,” declared Blackie with emphasis, when he and Wallingford had retired to a cozy little corner in the bar café. Fannie had inspired in him the awed respect that men of his stamp always render to good women. “You certainly got the original prize package. You and I are awful skunks, Jim.”
“She makes me feel that way, too, now and then,” admitted Wallingford. “I’d be ashamed of myself for marrying her if I hadn’t taken her from such a dog’s life.”
“She seems to enjoy this one,” said Blackie. “You’re spending as much money on her as you used to on Beauty Phillips.”
“Just about,” agreed Wallingford. “However, papa-in-law is paying for the honeymoon.”
“Does he know it?” asked Blackie.
Wallingford chuckled.
“Not yet,” he admitted. “I’d like to see him when he finds it out.”
Blackie also grinned.
“That little Blakeville episode was the happiest period of my life,” he declared. “By the way, J. Rufus, what was your game down there? I never understood.”
“As simple as a night-shirt,” explained Wallingford. “I merely hunted through the postal guide for the richest little town I could find that had no bank. Then I went there and had one started so I could borrow its money.”
Blackie nodded comprehendingly.
“Then you bought a piece of property and raised it to a fictitious value to cover the loan,” he added. “Great stunt; but it seems to me they can get you for it. If they catch you up in one lie they can prove the whole thing to have been a frame-up. Suppose they find out?”
Wallingford swelled up with righteous indignation.
“Vittoreo Matteo,” he charged, “you are a rascally scoundrel! I met you in New York and you imposed upon me with a miserable pack of lies. I have investigated and I find that there is no Etrusca, near Milan, Italy, no Etruscan black pottery, no Vittoreo Matteo. You induced me to waste a lot of money in locating and developing a black mud-swamp. When you had gained my full confidence you came to me in Blakeville with a cock-and-bull story that your mother was dying in Genoa, and on the strength of that borrowed a large sum of money from me. You are gone—I don’t know where. I shall have to make a clean breast of this matter to Jonas Bubble, and tell him that if I can not pay that note when it falls due he will have to foreclose. You heartless villain! Waiter, ice us another bottle of that ninety-three.”
When Wallingford returned to his wife he found her very thoughtful.
“When are we going to Blakeville, Jim?” she asked.
He studied her curiously for a moment. She would have to know him some time or other. He had hoped to put it off while they were leading this unruffled existence, but now that the test had come he might as well have it over with.
“I’m not going back,” he declared. “I’m through with Blakeville. Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she admitted, pondering it slowly. “I could be happy here always, or, if not here, wherever you are. But your business back there, Jim?”
He chuckled.
“I have no business there,” he told her. “My business is concluded. I borrowed forty-five thousand dollars on that forty acres of sticky mud, and I think I’ll just let the bank foreclose.”
She looked at him a moment, dry-eyed and dry-lipped.
“You’re joking,” she protested, in a low voice.
“Not at all,” he seriously assured her.
They looked at each other steadily for some moments, and gradually Wallingford saw beneath those eyes a spirit that he might conquer, but, having conquered, would always regret.
“It’s—it’s a swindle!” she gasped, as the true situation began to dawn upon her. “You don’t mean, Jim, that you are a swindler!”
“No, I wouldn’t call it that,” he objected, considering the matter carefully. “It is only rather a shrewd deal in the game of business. The law can’t touch me for it unless they should chase down Vittoreo Matteo and find him to be a fraud, and prove that I knew it!”
She was thoughtful a long time, following the intricate pattern of the rug in their sitting-room with the toe of her neatly-shod foot. She was perfectly calm, and he drew a sharp breath of relief. He had expected a scene when this revelation should come; he was more than pleased to find that she was not of the class which makes scenes. Presently she looked up.
“Have you thought of what light this puts me in at home? Have you thought how I should be regarded in the only world I have ever known? Why, there are a thousand people back in Blakeville who know me, and even if I were never to meet one of them again—Jim, it mustn’t be! You must not destroy my self-respect for ever. Have you spent any of that money?”
“Well, no,” he reluctantly replied. “I have plenty of money besides that.”
“Good!” said she with a gasp of relief. “Write father that, as you will be unable to carry out your projects, you are sending him the money to take up that note.”
Wallingford was silent a long time. Wonderful the influence this girl had over him. He was amazed at himself.
“I can’t remember when I ever gave up any money,” he finally said, with an attempt at lightness; “but, Fannie, I think I’ll do it just this once—for you—as a wedding present.”
“You’ll do it right away, won’t you?”
“Right this minute.”
He walked over and stooped down to kiss her. She held up her lips submissively, but they were cold, and there was no answering pressure in them. Silently he took his hat and started down-stairs.
“By the way,” he said, turning at the door, “I’m going to make your father a present of that bay team.”
He scarcely understood himself as he dictated to the public stenographer a letter to Jonas Bubble, so far different from the one he had planned to write. It was not like him to do this utterly foolish thing, and yet, somehow, he felt that he could not do otherwise. When he came back up-stairs again, the letter written and a check inclosed in it and the whole mailed, he found her in the same chair, but now she was crying. He approached her hesitantly and stood looking down at her for a long, long time. It was, perhaps, but one minute, but it seemed much longer. Now was the supreme test, the moment that should influence all their future lives, and he dreaded to dissolve that uncertainty.
He knelt beside her and put his arm about her. Still crying, she turned to him, threw both arms around his neck and buried her head on his shoulder—and as she cried she pressed him more tightly to her!
CHAPTER XXIV
CASTING ABOUT FOR A STRAIGHT BUSINESS, PATENT
MEDICINE PROVIDES THE ANSWER
That was a glorious honeymoon! They traveled from one gay summer resort to another, and when Fannie expressed the first hint of fatigue, Wallingford, who had grown to worship her, promptly provided her with complete and unique rest, by taking her to some one of the smaller inland cities of the type which he loved, installing her in a comfortable hotel, and living, for a week or so, a quiet, lazy existence consisting largely of mere eating and sleeping, and just enough exercise to keep in good health. In all this time there was not one jarring thought, one troubled moment, nor one hint of a shadow. J. Rufus took his wife into all sorts of unique experiences, full of life and color and novelty, having a huge pride in her constant wonder and surprise.
It happened, while upon one of these resting sojourns, that they one night paused on the edge of a crowd which stood gaping at a patent medicine faker. Suddenly recognizing an old acquaintance in the picturesque orator with the sombrero and the shoulder-length gray hair, Wallingford drew closer.
Standing behind the “doctor,” upon the seat of his carriage where the yellow light of a gasolene torch flared full upon it, was a gaudy, life-size anatomical chart, and with this as bait for his moths he was extolling the virtues of Quagg’s Peerless Sciatacata.
“Here, my friends,” he declared, unfolding one of the many hinged flaps of the gory chart, “you bee-hold the intimate relation of the stomach with all the inn-ternal organs, and above all with the blood, which, pumped by the heart through these abb-sorbing membranes, takes up that priceless tonic, Doctor Quagg’s Peerless Sciatacata. This, acting dii-rectly upon the red corpuscles of the vital fluid, stimm-ulates the circulation and carries its germ-destroying properties to every atom of the human frame, casting off imm-purities, clean-sing the syst-em, bringing ee-lasticity to the footsteps, hope to the heart, the ruddy glow of bounding health to pale cheeks, and the sparkle of new life to tired and jaded eyes!”
Wallingford turned to his wife with a chuckle,
“Just stand here a minute, Fannie,” said he. “I must wade in and speak to the old scout. We stopped a week at the same hotel over in New Jersey and got as chummy as two cell-mates.”
Fannie smiled doubtfully in response, and watched her husband with a slight trace of concern as he forced his way through the crowd and up to the wheel of the carriage.
“How are you, Doctor?” said he, holding up his plump palm. “Where are you stopping?”
The doctor’s wink at J. Rufus was scarcely perceptible to that large young gentleman himself, much less to the bystanders, as with professional gravity he reached down for a hearty handshake.
“Benson House. Come around and see me to-morrow morning.” Then, with added gravity and in a louder voice: “I scarcely knew you, friend, you are so changed. How many bottles of the Sciatacata was it you took?”
“Four,” replied J. Rufus clearly, with not even a twinkle in his eye.
“Only four bottles,” declaimed Doctor Quagg. “My friends, this is one of my most marvelous cures. When I met this gentleman in Columbus, Ohio, he was a living skeleton, having suffered for years from sciatic rheumatism. He bought from me one night at my carriage, just as he is standing now, six bottles of the Peerless Sciatacata. He took but four bottles, and look at him to-day!”
With one accord they looked. There was some slight tittering among them at first, but the dignity and gravity with which the towering J. Rufus, hale and hearty and in the pink of condition, withstood that inspection, checked all inclination to levity. Moreover, he was entirely too prosperous-looking to be a “capper.”
“I owe you my life, Doctor,” said Wallingford gratefully. “I never travel without those other two bottles of the Sciatacata,” and with the air of a debt of honor paid, he pressed back through the crowd to the sidewalk.
His wife was laughing, yet confused.
“I don’t see how you can make yourself so conspicuous,” she protested in a low voice.
“Why not?” he laughed. “We public characters must boost one another.”
“And the price,” they heard the doctor declaiming, “is only one dollar per bottle, or six for five dollars, guar-an-teed not only to drive sciatic rheumatism from the sys-tem, but to cure the most ob-stin-ate cases of ague, Bright’s disease, cat-a-lepsy, coughs, colds, cholera, dys-pepsia, ery-sip-e-las, fever and chills, gas-tritis”—
“And so on down to X Y Z, etc.,” commented Wallingford as they walked away.
His wife looked up at him curiously.
“Jim, did you honestly take four bottles of that medicine?” she wanted to know.
“Take it?” he repeated in amazement. “Certainly not! It isn’t meant for wise people to take. It wouldn’t do them any good.”
“It wouldn’t do anybody any good,” she decided with a trace of contempt.
“Guess again,” he advised her. “That dope has cured a million people that had nothing the matter with ’em.”
At the Hotel Deriche in the adjoining block they turned into the huge, garishly decorated dining-room for their after-theater supper. They had been in the town only two days, but the head waiter already knew to come eagerly to meet them, to show them to the best table in the room, and to assign them the best waiter; also the head waiter himself remained to take the order, to suggest a delicate, new dish and to name over, at Wallingford’s solicitation, the choice wines in the cellar that were not upon the wine-list.
This little formality over, Wallingford looked about him complacently. A pale gentleman with a jet-black beard bowed to him from across the room.
“Doctor Lazzier,” observed Wallingford to his wife. “Most agreeable chap and has plenty of money.”
He bent aside a little to see past his wife’s hat, and exchanged a suave salutation with a bald-headed young man who was with two ladies and who wore a dove-gray silk bow with his evening clothes.
“Young Corbin,” explained Wallingford, “of the Corbin and Paley department store. He had about two dollars a week spending money till his father died, and now he and young Paley are turning social flip-flaps at the rate of twenty a minute. He belongs to the Mark family and he’s great pals with me. Looks good for him, don’t it?”
“Jim,” she said in earnest reproval, “you mustn’t talk that way.”
“Of course I’m only joking,” he returned. “You know I promised you I’d stick to the straight and narrow. I’ll keep my word. Nothing but straight business for me hereafter.”
He, too, was quite serious about it, and yet he smiled as he thought of young Corbin. Another man, of a party just being shown to a table, nodded to him, and Mrs. Wallingford looked up at her husband with admiration.
“Honestly, how do you do it?” she inquired. “We have only been here a little over forty-eight hours, and yet you have already picked up a host of nice friends.”
“I patronize only the best saloons,” he replied with a grin; then, more seriously: “This is a mighty rich little city, Fannie. I could organize a stock company here, within a week, for anything from a burglar’s trust to a church consolidation.”
“It’s a pretty place,” she admitted. “I like it very much from what I have seen of it.”
He chuckled.
“Looks like a spending town,” he returned; “and where they spend a wad they’re crazy to make one. Give me one of these inland society towns for the loose, long green. New York’s no place to start an honest business,” and again he chuckled. “By the way, Fannie,” he added after a pause, “what do you think of my going into the patent medicine line?”
“How do you mean?” she inquired, frowning.
“Oh, on a big scale,” he replied. “Advertise it big, manufacture it big.”
She studied it over in musing silence.
“I don’t mind what you do so long as it is honest,” she finally said.
“Good. I’ll hunt up Quagg to-morrow and spring it on him.”
“You don’t mean that dreadful quack medicine he’s selling on the street, do you?” she protested.
“Why not? I don’t know that it’s worthless, and I do know that Quagg has sold it on street corners for twenty years from coast to coast. He goes back to the same towns over and over, and people buy who always bought before. Looks like a good thing to me. Quagg was a regular doctor when he was a kid; had a real diploma and all that, but no practice and no patience. Joke. Giggle.”
The oysters came on now, and they talked of other things, but while they were upon the meat Doctor Lazzier, having finished, came across to shake hands with his friend of a day, and was graciously charmed to meet Mrs. Wallingford.
“Sit down,” invited J. Rufus. “Won’t you try a glass of this? It’s very fair,” and he raised a practised eyebrow to the waiter.
The doctor delicately pushed down the edge of the ice-wet napkin until he could see the label, and he gave an involuntary smile of satisfaction as he recognized the vintage. The head waiter had timed the exact second to take that bottle out of the ice-pail, had wrapped the wet napkin about it and almost reverently filled glasses. Occasionally he came over and felt up inside the hollow on the bottom of the bottle.
“Delighted,” confessed the doctor, and sat down quite comfortably.
“You may smoke if you like, Doctor,” offered Mrs. Wallingford, smiling. “I don’t seem to feel that a man is comfortable unless he is smoking.”
“To tell the truth, he isn’t,” agreed the doctor with a laugh, and accepting a choice cigar from Wallingford he lit it.
The waiter came with an extra glass and filled for all three of them.
“By the way, Doctor,” said Wallingford, watching the pouring of the wine with a host’s anxiety, “I think of going into the patent medicine business on a large scale, and I believe I shall have to have you on the board of directors.”
“Couldn’t think of it!” objected the doctor hastily. “You know, professional ethics—” and he shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s so,” admitted Wallingford. “We can’t have you on the board, but we can have you for a silent stock-holder.”
“Open to the same objection,” declared the doctor, with another dubious shrug, as he took up his glass.
He tasted the wine; he took another sip, then another—slow, careful sips, so that no drop of it should hasten by his palate unappreciated. Wallingford did not disturb him in that operation. He had a large appreciation himself of the good things of this world, and the proper way to do them homage.
The doctor took a larger sip, and allowed the delicate liquid to flow gently over his tongue. Wallingford was really a splendid fellow!
“What sort of patent medicine are you going to manufacture?” asked the doctor by way of courtesy, but still “listening” to the taste of the wine.
Wallingford laughed.
“I haven’t just decided as yet,” he announced. “The medicine is only an incident. What we’re going to invest in is advertising.”
“I see,” replied the doctor, laughing in turn.
“Advertising is a great speculation,” went on Wallingford, with a reminiscent smile. “Take Hawkins’ Bitters, for instance; nine per cent. cheap whisky flavored with coffee and licorice, and the balance pure water. Hawkins had closed a fifty-thousand-dollar advertising contract before he was quite sure whether he was going to sell patent medicine or shoe polish. The first thing he decided on was the name, and he had to do that in a hurry to get his advertising placed. Hawkins’ Bitters was familiar to ten million people before a bottle of it had been made. It was only last summer that Hawkins sold out his business for a cool two million and went to Europe.”
“His decoction is terrible stuff,” commented the doctor, more in sorrow than in anger; “but it certainly has a remarkable sale.”
“I should say it has!” agreed Wallingford. “The drug-stores sell it to temperance people by the case, and in the dry states you’ll find every back yard littered with empty Hawkins’ Bitters bottles.”
A half-dozen entertaining stories of the kind Wallingford told his guest, and by the time he was through Doctor Lazzier began himself to have large visions of enormous profits to be made in the patent medicine business. Somehow, the very waistcoat of young J. Rufus seemed, in its breadth and gorgeousness, a guarantee of enormous profits, no matter what business he discussed. But the doctor’s very last remark was upon the sacredness of medical ethics! When he was gone there was a conspicuous silence between Wallingford and his wife for a few minutes, and then she asked:
“Jim, are you actually going to start a patent medicine company?”
“Certainly I am,” he replied.
“And will Doctor Lazzier take stock in it?”
“He certainly will,” he assured her. “I figure him for from ten to twenty-five thousand.”
CHAPTER XXV
IN WHICH WALLINGFORD ORGANIZES THE DOCTOR
QUAGG PEERLESS SCIATACATA COMPANY
At the Benson House J. Rufus found Doctor Quagg with a leg propped up on a chair, and himself in a state of profound profanity.
“What’s the matter, Doc?” asked Wallingford.
“Sciatic rheumatism!” howled the martyr. “It’s gettin’ worse every year. Every time I go on the street for a night I know I’m goin’ to suffer. That’s why I keep it up so late and spiel myself hoarse in the neck. I jumped into town just yesterday and got a reader from these city hall pirates. They charged me twenty-five iron men for my license for the week. I go out and make one pitch, and that’s all I get for my twenty-five.”
“Sciatic rheumatism’s a tough dose,” commiserated Wallingford. “Why don’t you take five or six bottles of the Peerless Sciatacata?”
The answer to this was a storm of fervid expletives which needed no diagram. Wallingford, chuckling, sat down and gloated over the doctor’s misery, lighting a big, fat cigar to gloat at better ease. He offered a cigar to Quagg.
“I daresn’t smoke,” swore that invalid.
“And I suppose you daresn’t drink, either,” observed Wallingford. “Well, that doesn’t stop me, you know.”
Wearily the doctor indicated a push-button.
“You’ll have to ring for a boy yourself,” said he.
When the boy came Wallingford ordered a highball.
“And what’s yours, sir?” asked the boy, turning to the doctor.
“Lithia, you bullet-headed nigger!” roared the doctor with a twinge of pain in his leg. “That’s twice to-day I’ve had to tell you I can’t drink anything but lithia. Get out!”
The boy “got,” grinning.
“Seriously, though, old man,” said Wallingford, judging that the doctor had been aggravated long enough, “your condition must be very bad for business, and I’ve come to make you a proposition to go into the manufacture of the Peerless on a large scale.”
The doctor sat in silence for a moment, shaking his head despondently.
“You can’t get spielers,” he declared. “I’ve tried it. Once I made up a lot of the Sciatacata and sent out three men; picked the best I could find that had made good with street-corner pitches in other lines, and their sales weren’t half what mine would be; moreover, they got drunk on the job, didn’t pay for their goods, and were a nuisance any way you took ’em.”
Wallingford laughed.
“I didn’t mean that we should manufacture the priceless remedy for street fakers to handle,” he explained. “I propose to start a big factory to supply drug-stores through the jobbing trade, to spend a hundred thousand dollars in advertising right off the bat, give you stock in the company for the use of your formula, and a big salary to superintend the manufacture. That will do away with your exposure to the night air, stop the increase of your sciatica, and make you more money. Why, Doc, just to begin with we’ll give you ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock.”
It took Doctor Quagg some time to recover from the shock of that much money.
“I’ve heard of such things,” said he gratefully, “but I never supposed it could happen to me.”
“You don’t need to put up a cent,” went on Wallingford. “And I don’t need to put up a cent. We’ll use other people’s money.”
“Where are you going to get your share?” asked the doctor suspiciously. “Are you going to have a salary, too?”
“No,” said Wallingford. “We’ll pay you thirty-five dollars to start with as superintendent of the manufacturing department, but I won’t ask for a salary; I’ll take a royalty of one cent a bottle as manager of the company. I’ll take five thousand dollars’ worth of stock for my services in promotion, and then for selling the stock I’ll take twenty-five per cent. of the par value for all I place, but will take it out in stock at the market rate. We’ll organize for half a million and begin selling stock at fifty cents on the dollar, and I’ll guarantee to raise for us one hundred and twenty-five thousand net cash—twenty-five thousand for manufacturing and one hundred thousand for advertising.”
The doctor drew a long breath.
“If you can do that you’re a wonder,” he declared; “but it don’t seem to me you’re taking enough for yourself. You’re giving me ten thousand dollars and you’re only taking five; you’re giving me thirty-five dollars a week and you’re only taking a cent a bottle. It seems to me the job of organizing and building up such a company is worth as much as the Sciatacata.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” protested J. Rufus modestly. “I’ll get along all right. I’m satisfied. We’ll organize the company to-day.”
“You can’t get all that money together in a day!” exclaimed the doctor in amazement.
“Oh, no; I don’t expect to try it. I’ll put up all the money necessary. We want five directors, and we have three of them now, you and my wife and I. Do you know anybody around the hotel that would serve?”
The doctor snorted contemptuously.
“Nobody that’s got any money or responsibility,” he asserted.
“They don’t need to have any money, and we don’t want them to have any responsibility,” protested Wallingford. “Anybody of voting age will do for us just now.”
“Well,” said the doctor reflectively, “the night clerk’s a pretty good fellow, and the head dining-room girl here has always been mighty nice to me. She’s some relation to the proprietor and she’s been here for five years.”
“Good,” said Wallingford. “I’ll telephone out for a lawyer.”
There was no telephone in the room, but down-stairs Wallingford found a pay ’phone and selected a lawyer at random from the telephone directory. Within two hours Wallingford and his wife, Doctor Quagg, Albert Blesser and Carrie Schwam had gravely applied for a charter of incorporation under the laws of the state, for The Doctor Quagg Peerless Sciatacata Company, with a capital stock of one thousand dollars, fully paid in. As he signed his name the doctor laughed like a school-boy.
“Now,” said he, “I’m going to get my hair cut.”
Wallingford stopped him in positive fright.
“Don’t you dare do it!” he protested.
“Is that hair necessary to the business?” asked the doctor, crestfallen.
“Absolutely,” declared Wallingford. “Why, man, that back curtain of yours is ten per cent. dividends.”
“Then I’ll wear it,” agreed the doctor resignedly; “but I hate to. You know I’ve honed for years to quit this batting around the country, and just ached to wear short hair and a derby hat like a white man.”
Wallingford looked at the weather-bronzed face and shook his head.
“What a pity that would be!” he declared. “However, Doc, your wanderings cease from this minute, and your salary begins from to-day.”
“Fine,” breathed the doctor. “I say, Wallingford, then suppose you order me about three gross of bottles and some fresh labels. I’ll get the drugs myself and start in making a supply of the Sciatacata.”
“You just nurse your leg,” advised Wallingford. “Why, man, when we start manufacturing the Peerless it will be in vats holding a hundred gallons, and will be bottled by machinery that will fill, cork and label a hundred bottles a minute. You’re to superintend mixing; that’s your job.”
It took many days, days of irksome loafing for the doctor, before they had their final incorporation papers. Immediately they elected themselves as directors, made Quagg president, Wallingford secretary and Albert Blesser treasurer, and voted for an increase of capitalization to one-half million dollars. They gave Quagg his hundred shares and Wallingford his fifty; they voted Quagg his salary and Wallingford his royalty; also they voted Wallingford an honorarium of twenty-five per cent., payable in stock, for disposing of such of the treasury shares as they needed issued, and immediately Wallingford, who had spent the interim in cultivating acquaintances, began to secure investors.
He sold more than mere stock, however. He sold Doctor Quagg’s hair and sombrero; he sold glowing word pictures of immense profits, and he sold the success of all other patent medicine companies; he sold his own imposing height and broad chest, his own jovial smile and twinkling eye, his own prosperous grooming and good feeding—and those who bought felt themselves blessed.
First of all, he sold fifty thousand dollars’ worth for twenty-five thousand to young Corbin, whereupon Mr. Blesser, as per instructions, resigned from the treasurership and directorate in favor of Mr. Corbin. Wallingford got fifteen thousand dollars from Doctor Lazzier, and ten from young Paley, and with fifty thousand dollars in the treasury sent for an advertising man and gave out a hundred-thousand-dollar contract.
“For the first half of this campaign,” he explained to the advertising man, “I want this one ad spread everywhere: ‘Laugh at That Woozy Feeling.’ This is to cover the top half of the space in good, plain, bold letters. In place of leaving the bottom blank for kids to scribble reasons of their own why you should laugh at that woozy feeling, we’ll put gray shadow-figures there—grandpa and grandma and pa and ma and Albert and Henry and Susan and Grace and little Willie, all laughing fit to kill. And say, have it a real laugh. Have it the sort of a laugh that’ll make anybody that looks at it want to be happy. Of course, later, I want you to cover up the bottom half of that advertisement with: ‘Use Doctor Quagg’s Peerless Sciatacata,’ or something like that, but I’ll furnish you the copy for that when the time comes. It will be printed right over the laughing faces.”
“It should make a very good ad,” commented the agent with enthusiasm, writing out the instructions Wallingford gave him, and willing to approve of anything for that size contract.
Wallingford went home to his wife, filled with a virtuous glow.
“You know, there’s something I like about this straight business, Fannie,” said he. “It gives a fellow a sort of clean feeling. I’m going to build up a million-dollar business and make everybody concerned in it rich, including myself. Already I’ve placed one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stock, have fifty thousand dollars cash in the treasury, and fifty-five thousand dollars’ worth of stock for myself.”
She looked puzzled.
“I thought you were to get only twenty-five per cent. for selling the stock.”
He chuckled; shoulders, chest and throat, eyes and lips and chin, he chuckled.
“Twenty-five per cent. of the par value,” said he, “payable in stock at the market price.”
“I don’t see the difference,” she protested. “I’m sure I thought it was to be straight twenty-five per cent., and I’m sure all the members of the company thought so.”
He patiently explained it to her.
“Don’t you see, if I sell one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stock, I get the same as twenty-five thousand dollars for it, and with that buy fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stock? Of course I get it at the same price as others—fifty per cent.”
“Did they understand you’d get fifty thousand instead of twenty-five thousand?” she asked.
He chuckled again.
“If they didn’t they will,” he admitted.
She pondered over that thoughtfully for a while.
“Is that straight business?” she inquired.
“Of course it’s straight business or I wouldn’t be doing it. It is perfectly legitimate. You just don’t understand.”
“No,” she confessed, “I guess I don’t; only I thought it was just twenty-five per cent.”
“It is twenty-five per cent.,” he insisted, and then he gave it up. “You’d better quit thinking,” he advised. “It’ll put wrinkles in your brow, and I’m the one that has the wrinkles scheduled. I’ve just contracted for one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of advertising, and I’ve got to go out to sell enough stock to bring in the cash. Also, I’ve rented a factory, and to-morrow I’m going to let out contracts for bottling machinery, vats and fixtures. I’ve already ordered the office furniture. You ought to see it. It’s swell. I’m having some lithographed stationery made, too, embossed in four colors, with a picture of Doctor Quagg in the corner.”
“How much stock has the doctor?” she asked.
“Ten thousand.”
“Is that all he’s going to have?” she wanted to know.
“Why, certainly, that’s all he’s going to have. I made the bargain with him and he’s satisfied.”
“Ten thousand dollars’ worth out of a half-million-dollar corporation? Why, Jim, for his medicine, upon which the whole business is built, he only gets—how much is that of all of it?”
“One fiftieth, or two per cent.,” he told her.
“Two per cent.!” she gasped. “Is that straight business, Jim?”
“Of course it’s straight business,” he assured her. “Of course,” and he smiled, “Doc didn’t stop to figure that he only gets two per cent. of the profits of the concern. He figures that he’s to draw dividends on the large hunk of ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock, and he’s satisfied. Why aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” she replied slowly, still with the vague feeling that something was wrong. “Really, Jim, it don’t seem to me that straight business is any more fair than crooked business.”
Wallingford was hugely disappointed.
“And that’s all the appreciation I get for confining myself to the straight and narrow!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that, Jim,” she said, with instant contrition. “You don’t know how glad I am that now, since we’re married, you have settled down to honorable things; and you’ll make a fortune, I know you will.”
“You bet I will,” he agreed. “In the meantime I have to go out and dig up seventy-five thousand dollars more of other people’s money to put into this concern; which will give me another seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of stock! Straight business pays, Fannie!”
CHAPTER XXVI
DOCTOR QUAGG PROVES THAT STRAIGHT BUSINESS IS A
DELUSION AND A SNARE
Within a short time Wallingford had the satisfaction of seeing bill-boards covered with his big sign ordering the public to “Laugh at That Woozy Feeling,” but not yet telling them how to do it, and he heard people idly wondering what the answer to that advertisement was going to be. Some of them resented having puzzles of the sort thrust in front of their eyes, others welcomed it as a cheerful diversion. Wallingford smiled at both sorts. He knew they would remember, and firmly link together the mystery and the solution. Cards bearing the same mandate stared down at every street-car rider, and newspaper readers found it impossible to evade the same command. All this advertising, for the appearance of which Wallingford had waited, helped him to sell the stock to pay for itself, and, in the meantime, he was busy putting into his new factory a bottling plant, second in its facility if not its capacity, to none in the country. He installed magnificent offices and for the doctor prepared an impressive private apartment, this latter being a cross between an alchemist’s laboratory and a fortune-teller’s oriental salon; but alas and alack! the first day the doctor walked into his new office he had his hair close-cropped and wore a derby, with such monstrous effect that even Wallingford, inured as he was to most surprises, recoiled in horror!
From that moment the doctor became a hard one to manage. His first protest was against the Benson House, the old-fashioned, moderate-rate hotel which he had always patronized and had always recommended wherever he went. Thereafter he changed boarding-houses and family hotels about every two weeks; but he never had his hair cut after the once. The big mixing vats that Wallingford installed he grew to hate. He was used to mixing his Sciatacata in a hotel water-pitcher and filling it into bottles with a tin funnel; and to mix up a hundred gallons at a time of that precious compound seemed a cold, commercial proposition which was so much a sacrilege that he went out and “painted the town,” winding up in a fight with a cigar-store Indian. He left such a train of fireworks in his wake that Wallingford heard of it for weeks afterward.
To J. Rufus the affair was a good joke, but to the other gentlemen of the company, Corbin, Paley and Doctor Lazzier and the others who had social reputations to maintain as well as business interests to guard, the affair was tragic, not merely because one of their number had become intoxicated, but that it should be this particular one, and that he should make himself so conspicuous! The doctor repeated his escapade within a week. This time he took a notion to “circulate” in a cab, and as he got more mellow, insisted upon sitting up with the driver, where he whooped sonorously every time they turned a corner. This time he finished in the hands of the police, and Wallingford was called upon at three o’clock in the morning to bail him out. Friends of Corbin and Paley and the other exclusives whom Wallingford had selected as his stock-holders began to drop in on them with pleasant little remarks about their business associate. The doctor had been bragging widely about his connection with them!
His crowning effort came when he continued his celebration of one night through the next day, and drove around to make a few party calls. He appeared like a specter of disgrace in Corbin’s private office with:
“Hello, old pal, come out and have a drink!” and gave Corbin a hearty slap on the back.
Corbin gave a helpless glance across at the three prim young ladies on the other side of his open screen. Back of him a solemn-visaged old bookkeeper, who was both a deacon and Sunday-school superintendent, looked on in shocked amazement.
“Couldn’t begin to think of it, Doctor,” protested Corbin nervously, pulling at his lavender cravat, while the perspiration broke out upon his bald spot. “I must attend to business, you know.”
“Never mind the business!” insisted the doctor. “Wait till our Sciatacata factory is shipping in car-loads, partner, and you can afford to give this junk-shop away.”
Paley, happening in to speak to Corbin, created a diversion welcome to Corbin but unwelcome to himself, for the doctor immediately pounced upon Paley and insisted upon taking him out to get a drink, and the only way that narrow-framed young man could get rid of him was to go along. He rode around in the cab with him for a while, and tried to dissuade him from calling upon Doctor Lazzier and the other stock-holders, but Quagg was obdurate. To wind up the evening’s performance he appeared on a prominent street corner about nine o’clock, in a carriage with the gasolene torch and the life-size anatomical chart, and began selling the Peerless Sciatacata, calling upon the names of Wallingford, Lazzier, Corbin and Paley—his “partners”—as guarantees of his sincerity and standing, and as sureties of the excellence of the priceless compound.
Wallingford heard about him quickly, for the picturesque Quagg had become a public joy and all the down-town crowd knew well about him. Wallingford went down to the corner with the intention of putting a stop to the exhibition, but, as he looked at the doctor, whose hair now dropped beneath his sombrero to nearly its old-time length, a new thought struck him and he went quietly away. The next day Corbin withdrew from the treasurership and Paley from the directorate, and every one of the directors who had taken the places of the original incorporators did likewise. Intimate relationship with the doctor was productive of too much publicity for peaceful enjoyment.
It was just at this time that the agent of the advertising concern began to bother Wallingford for “copy” on the last half of his contract. Wallingford, to placate him, finished paying for the contract and took the cash discount, but held the agent off two or three days in the matter of the “copy.” He was not quite satisfied about the wording of the advertisement. He sat up late one night devising the most concise and striking form in which to present the merits of Doctor Quagg’s Peerless Sciatacata, and in the morning he went down to the office prepared to mail the result of his labor. He found upon his desk this note from the restless Doctor Quagg:
Spring’s here. I never stayed in one place so long in my life. You can have my salary and you can have my ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock. I don’t want it. My hair’s out good and long again and I’ve gone back on the road to sell the Sciatacata.
Yours truly,
Quagg.
It was the last straw, and the stock-holders’ meeting which Wallingford hastily called wore the greenish pallor peculiar to landlubbers in their first sea storm.
“We don’t need Quagg,” Wallingford protested. “Our contract with him covers any rights he has in the title of the medicine, and the mere fact that he is not with us does not need to prevent our going ahead.”
“Have you the formula for his preparation?” asked Doctor Lazzier quietly.
“Oh, no,” replied Wallingford carelessly. “I don’t see that that need stop us.”
“Why not?” protested young Corbin. “Our whole business is built upon that formula.”
Wallingford smiled.
“We simply must stick to the Sciatacata,” resumed Wallingford. “We have all this fine stationery printed, with the full name of the Peerless dope; we have elaborate booklets and circulars about it, and the first delivery of ten thousand labels is here. There will be no trouble in getting up another Peerless Sciatacata which will at least be harmless, but I think that we can do even better than that. I think that Doctor Lazzier can furnish us a good, handy, cheap prescription for sciatic rheumatism.”
“Certainly not,” protested Doctor Lazzier with vast professional indignation; but he nevertheless winked at Wallingford.
“Never mind,” said Wallingford to Corbin; “I’ll get the formula all right.”
“For my part I’m willing to sell my stock at ten per cent.,” said Corbin with infinite disgust. He was thinking at that very moment of a gaudy “function” he was to attend that night, one marking quite an advance in his social climb, and he almost dreaded to go. “I don’t like to lose money, but, in this case, I’d really rather. This is a dreadful experience.”
The rest of them agreed with young Corbin in attitude, if not in words, and it was with considerable sadness that they dispersed, after having decided, somewhat reluctantly, that Wallingford should go ahead with the Sciatacata. Pursuing this plan Wallingford sent away the copy for the bottom half of the great woozy-feeling advertisement.
The following afternoon, however, came the death-blow, in the shape of a most hilarious article in the local papers. In a neighboring city Doctor Quagg had gone out to sell the Peerless Sciatacata, had been caught in a drizzle of spring rain and had been sent, raving angry, to the hospital with a most severe case of sciatic rheumatism. The joke of it was too good. The local papers, as a mere kindly matter of news information, published a list of the stock-holders of the Doctor Quagg Peerless Sciatacata Company.
Wallingford, with that item before him, sat and chuckled till the tears quivered on his eyelashes; but, even in the midst of his appreciation of the fun in the case, he wired to the agent of the advertising company to cancel his previous letter of instructions, and to secure him at least a week’s grace before forfeiture of the contract; then he proceeded quietly to telephone the stock-holders. He found great difficulty in getting the use of his line, however, for the stock-holders were already calling him up, frantically, tearfully, broken-heartedly. They were all ruined through their connection with the Sciatacata!
“I’ll tell you, Fannie,” said he at dinner, after pondering over a new thought which would keep obtruding itself into his mind, “this thing of training a straight business down to weight is no merry quip. It’s more trouble and risk than my favorite game of promoting for revenue only.”
“You keep right on at it, Jim,” she insisted. “You’ll find there is ever so much more satisfaction in it in the end.”
He was moody all through dinner. They had tickets for the theater that night and they went, but here, too, Wallingford was distrait, and he could not have remembered one incident of the play until during the last act, when his brow suddenly cleared. When they went back to the hotel he led his wife into the dining-room, and, excusing himself for a moment, went to the telegraph desk and sent a telegram to Horace G. Daw, of Boston.
CHAPTER XXVII
IN WHICH YOU ARE TOLD HOW TO LAUGH AT THAT
WOOZY FEELING
Two days later Wallingford called a conclave of the stock-holders to meet one Hamilton G. Dorcas, of Boston, who had come to consider taking over the property of the Doctor Quagg Peerless Sciatacata Company. Quite hopefully Doctor Lazzier, young Corbin, young Paley and the others attended that meeting for the disposal of the concern which had already eaten up one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in good cash; but when they began talking with Mr. Dorcas they were not quite so extravagantly hopeful. Mr. H. G. Dorcas was a tall, thin, black-haired, black-eyed and black-mustached young man in ministerial clothing, who looked astonishingly like Horace G. Daw, if any one of them had previously known that young gentleman.
“I have been through your factory,” said Mr. Dorcas in a businesslike manner, “and all I find here of any value to me is your second-hand bottling machinery and vats and your second-hand office furniture. For those I am prepared to pay you a reasonable second-hand price; say, about fifteen thousand dollars.”
It was young Corbin who put up the loudest protest.
“Why, man, such an offer is preposterous! Besides the twenty-five thousand invested in the machinery, fixtures and other expenses, we have spent exactly a hundred thousand dollars in advertising.”
Mr. Dorcas shrugged his shoulders.
“What good will that do me?” he retorted. “It’s wasted.”
Deep silence followed. The stock-holders knew that a hundred thousand had actually been paid out for advertising which, of course, was now of no value whatever. Only Wallingford knew that, the contract not being completed, part of it could be rebated, though only a small part, but he was not saying anything. Temptation had caught up with Wallingford, had wrestled with him and overthrown him!
“Yes,” admitted young Paley with a long, long sigh, “all that advertising money is wasted.”
Young Corbin was figuring.
“Mr. Dorcas,” said he, “if you will increase your offer by two thousand dollars I am inclined to accept it and get out of this muddle once and for all.”
Mr. Dorcas himself figured very carefully.
“It is stretching a point with you,” said he, “but I’ll give it to you. Understand, though, that is the last cent.”
“I am not in favor of it,” declared Wallingford, thereby putting himself upon the proper side for future reference. “It leaves us with a net cash loss of one hundred and eight thousand dollars. I’m in favor of rigging up some other patent medicine and going right ahead with the business. A slight assessment on our stock, or an agreement to purchase pro rata, among ourselves, a small amount of the treasury stock in order to raise about twenty-five thousand dollars more, will put us in shape to go ahead.”
If he intended to encourage them he had gone the wrong way about it. They recoiled as one man from that thought. Young Corbin jumped to his feet.
“You may count me out,” he declared.
“Doctor Lazzier,” pleaded Wallingford, “you are in favor of this course?”
“By no means,” said he. “A lot of my friends are ‘on,’ and some of my patients are laughing at me. I can’t afford it. Take this man’s offer. Wait just a minute.” He rose to his feet. “I’ll make that a formal motion,” and he did so.
With no dissenting voice, except Wallingford’s, that motion was carried through, and Wallingford spread it upon the minute-books at once. Also a committee was appointed formally to close the business with Mr. Dorcas, and to transfer to that gentleman, at once, all the properties, rights and good-will of the company.
“Gentlemen, I am very sorry,” said Wallingford, much crestfallen in appearance. “I still protest against giving up, but I blame myself for coaxing you into this unfortunate affair.”
“Don’t mention it,” protested Doctor Lazzier, shaking hands. “You meant to do us a favor.”
They all agreed with the doctor, and young Corbin felt especially sorry for Wallingford’s contrition.
Immediately after the dispersal of the meeting Mr. Wallingford and “Mr. Dorcas” shook hands ecstatically.
“Blackie, you’re handier than a hollow cane in Drytown,” exulted Wallingford. “Here’s where I clean up. I own over one third of this stock. I have invested only one cheap thousand dollars over and above my expenses since I got here, and I’ll get a third of this seventeen thousand right back again, so the company, up to date—and I own it all—stands me just a little less than what’s left of my winnings on that noble little horse, Whipsaw. Just wait a minute till I send this off to the advertising company,” and he wrote rapidly a lengthy telegram.
After he sent away the telegram he remained at his desk a few moments, sketching on one of the proofs of a newspaper “ad” and filling in the lower part.
“Here,” said he to Blackie, “is the complete advertisement.”
Blackie picked up the proof sheet and glanced over it in evident approval. Taken altogether, it read:
LAUGH AT
THAT WOOZY FEELING
DRINK GINGEREE!
IT PUTS THE GINGER IN YOU
TEN CENTS AT ALL SODA FOUNTAINS
“Within a week,” exulted Wallingford, “everybody in the middle states will know all about Gingeree. Before that time I’ll have Gingeree invented, and the Gingeree Company organized for half a million dollars. I’ll put in the plant and the advertising at one hundred and fifty thousand, sell about twenty-five thousand dollars of treasury stock to start the business, then sell my hundred and fifty thousand and get out.”
“You’ll have to go out of town to sell your stock,” observed Blackie.
“Out of town!” repeated Wallingford. “I should say not! With the good introduction I have here? Not any. I’ll sell stock to Doctor Lazzier and young Corbin and young Paley and the rest of the bunch.”
Blackie looked at his friend in gasping awe.
“Great guns!” he exploded. “J. Rufus, if you have nerve enough even to figure on that stunt, I believe you can pull it off!”
The door of the office opened and Mrs. Wallingford came in.
“Blackie Daw!” she exclaimed. “And so you are in town and mixed up in Jim’s affairs! Jim Wallingford, now I know you are not conducting a straight business!”
Blackie only grinned, but Mr. Wallingford was hurt.
“You’re mistaken, Fannie,” said he. “You sit right down there, and I’ll explain.”
He did so. When Wallingford rejoined her in their rooms that evening she had had time to think it all over. She had found no arguments to combat Wallingford’s statement of the case. She could not find words to overturn his words, and yet there was a flaw some place that she could not put her finger upon. Knowing this, then, and condoning it, was she not a part sharer in his guilt? Yes, and no. For a solid hour she searched her heart and she could find but one satisfactory answer. No matter what he had done in the past or might do in the future, she knew that she loved him, and whatever path his feet might tread, she knew that she would walk along with him. She had thought at first that she might guide his footsteps into better ways, but now she feared! She knew, too, that in remaining with him she must take him as he was.
And so, when he came to her, she was ready with her customary kiss, in which there was no lack of warmth; nor was there in her eyes any troubled look. He was delighted to find her in this mood.
“I guess you’ve thought it all over, Fannie,” said he, “and can see that at least this one business deal is a dead straight game, just as any good business man would play it.”
“Yes,” she reluctantly admitted. “I am afraid that business, even straight business, is sometimes conducted along such lines.”
But down in her heart of hearts she knew better.
Transcriber’s Note:
Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters’ errors; otherwise every effort has been made to remain true to the author’s words and intent.