5

Uncle Arthur lived in Chicago, out on the West Side. It was a long ride—first by suburban train into the city, then by cable-car through miles upon miles of gray wooden tenements and dingy gray-brick tenements. You breathed in odours of refuse and smoke and coal-gas all the way.

Uncle Arthur was as thin as McGibbon, but wholly without the little gleam in the eyes that advertised the proprietor of the Gleaner as an eager and perhaps dangerous man. Uncle Arthur was a man of method who had worked through long years into a methodical but fairly substantial prosperity.

His thin nose was long, and prominent. His brow was deeply furrowed. His gaze was critical. He believed firmly that life is a disciplinary training for some more important period of existence after death. He didn't smoke or drink. Nor would he keep in his employ those who indulged in such practices. He was an officer of several organisations aiming at civic and social reform.

Uncle Arthur laid a pedantic stress, in all business matters, on what he called 'putting the thing right end to.' It was not unnatural, therefore, that he should receive a distinctly unfavourable impression when Henry began, with a foolish little gesture and a great deal of fumbling at his moustache, slouching in his chair, by saying 'There's a little chance come up—oh, nothing much, of course—for me to make a little money, sort of on the side—and you see I'll be twenty-one in November; so it's just a matter of three or four months, anyway—and I was figuring—oh, just talking the thing over——'

His voice trailed off into a mumble.

'If you would take your hand away from your mouth, Henry,' said his uncle sharply, 'perhaps I could make out what you're trying to say.'

Henry sat up with a jerk.

'Why, you see, Uncle Arthur, there's a fellow bought the old Sunbury Gleaner and he's awfully smart—got his training in New York—and he's brought the paper already—why, it ain't eight months!—to where he's right on the point of turning his corner. You see, a thousand dollars now may easily be worth ten thousand in a few years. The Voice is a rotten paper. Nobody reads the darned thing. And I can't work for old Boice, anyhow. He drives me crazy. If he'd just give me half a chance to do the kind of thing I can do best once in a while; but this——'

'Henry, are you asking me to advance you a thousand dollars of your principal?'

'Why—well, yes, if——'

'Most certainly not!'

'But, you see, it's so close to November seventh, anyway, that I thought——'

'You thought that on your twenty-first birthday I would at once close out the investments I have made with the money your mother left and hand you the principal in cash?'

Henry stared at him, his thoughts for the moment frozen stiff. In Uncle Arthur's obstructionist attitude, so suddenly revealed, lay the promise of a new, wholly undreamed-of disappointment. It was crushing. Then, almost in the same second, it was stimulating. Henry's eyes blazed.

'You mean to say——' he began, shouting.

'I mean to say that I haven't the slightest intention of letting you squander the money your mother so painfully—'

'That's my money!'

'But I'm your uncle and your guardian——'

'You needn't think you're going to keep that one minute after November seventh!'

'I will use my judgment. I won't be dictated to by a boy who——'

'But you gotta!'

'I have not got to!'

'I won't stand for——'

'Henry, I won't have such talk here. I think you had better go.'

Henry, with a good deal of mumbling, went. He was bewildered. And the little storm of indignant anger had shaken him. He returned, during the ride back past the tenements on the jerky cable-car, through streets that swarmed with noisy, ragged children and frowsy adults and all the smells, to depression. McGibbon said that Uncle Arthur's threat to hold the money after the seventh of November was a distinct point.

'In these matters, unfortunately, where a relative or family friend has for years had charge of money belonging to others, little temptations are bound to come up. Now, your uncle may be the most scrupulously honest of men, but——'

'He has a bad eye,' Henry put in.

'I don't doubt it. Calverly, let me tell you—never forget this—a man who hesitates for one instant to account freely, fully for money is never to be trusted.'

'But what can I do?'

'Do? Everything! Just what I'm doing with Charlie Waterhouse, for one thing—insist on a full statement.'

'They framed a letter—or McGibbon framed it—demanding an accounting, 'in order that further legal measures may not become necessary.' McGibbon said he would send it early in the morning, registered, and with a special-delivery stamp. 'Later, they decided to add emphasis by means of a telegram demanding immediate consideration of the letter.

Late that night, when Humphrey came upstairs into a pitch-dark living-room and switched on the light, he discovered a pale youth sitting stiffly on a window-seat wide-awake, eyes staring nervously, hands clasped.

'Well, what on earth?' said he, in mild surprise.

'Oh, Hump, I've wondered what you'd think—leaving you in the lurch with all that work!

Humphrey threw out a lean hand.

'I can manage. Get some help from one of the students. And Gertie Wombast is usually available—— Oh, say; how about the old man? Did you tell him what's what?'

Henry's burning eyes stared out of that white face. Suddenly—so suddenly that Humphrey himself started—he sprang up, cried out; 'No! No! No!' and rushed into his bedroom, slamming the door after him.

Humphrey looked soberly at the door, shook his head, filled his pipe.

That 'No! No! No!' still rang in his ears It was a cry of pain.

Humphrey had suffered; but he had never known a turbulence of the sort that every now and then seemed to tear Henry to pieces.

'Must be fierce,' he thought. 'But it works up as well as down. Runs to extremes. Creative faculty, I suppose. Well, he's got it—that's all. And he's only a kid. Thing to do's to stand by and try to steady him up a little when he comes out of it.'

And the philosophical Humphrey went to bed.