"And Bates," continued the Colonel, "has been in, too. He came to notify me that he would quit to-night unless he got his money for last week. We didn't pay him last week, you know. I should very promptly have told him to quit had I felt authorized to do so."
"No, no; don't do that!" protested Barrifield, anxiously. "Tell him to wait till to-morrow. Tell him"—he hesitated a moment, and then added in all seriousness, "tell him we'll raise his salary."
XIX
A LETTER FROM MR. TRUMAN LIVINGSTONE OF NEW YORK TO MISS DOROTHY CASTLE OF CLEVELAND
New York, December 28, 1897.
Dear, dear Dorry: Well, Dorry, it's all over. All our hopes and dreams have come to nothing. Perny pulled down the sign in the hall this morning, and the furniture is being taken out of the rooms below to sell for whatever it will bring to pay as far as it will go on the rent. Perny said he wouldn't go into a new year with this hanging over us, nor Van Dorn, either, and I think it's just as well myself.
"You see, Dorry, it would be no use. Our plan looked well, but it was all wrong; and even if it hadn't been, it would have taken more money than we could ever have got hold of, and a long, long time besides, to get started. Of course, Frisby did it without money, but that was a good while ago, and he was first in the field. It is like a prize drawn in a lottery—the chances are against another being won by anything near the same ticket number. And then, even Frisby may not have done exactly as he said—people don't always tell things of this kind just as they happened.
"Barrifield still hopes against hope that sometime he may find some one with capital who will bring the 'Whole Family' to life. He has taken the lists and books and things away to show to such people; but I think it would be better if he did not show them, for they could not seem much of an inducement to any one with money already made and safely locked in the bank. The Colonel has gone, too, and Bates, and the last is the one bright spot in all this sad affair. He went some weeks before the Colonel— I believe I wrote you at the time. Bates was a great trial to us all—a greater trial even than I ever told you, for though I did not speak of it before, he drank to excess, and we also know now that he was unreliable in many ways. On all the advertising he placed for us he received a commission, while from the advertising he obtained for us we received no returns, for it was all taken on trial, or in some such way, and he had no contracts at all except the one of two dollars I once mentioned. That was genuine, and we got the two dollars.
"We thought, Dorry, with all of us together, we had a good combination of people for starting a paper, but I realize now that we probably had about the worst one that could be imagined. Artists and writers can make a good paper, and the 'Whole Family' was not bad, as papers go, but it takes somebody else to run it, and even Perny's ten years' business experience was worse than nothing after being mixed with about as many more years of bohemia. He says so himself now. The Colonel was as bad as the rest of us—worse, because he is older, and with him the habit of getting rich on paper has had time to grow and become fixed. He will go on chasing rainbows, I suppose, until the end of his days. Poor old chap! When I shut my eyes I can imagine him in his frayed clothes, with his white hair and his eager face, racing madly across rain-wet meadows for the imaginary pot of gold. That is what we have all been doing, Dorry, and had our combination been ever so strong and our feet ever so swift, we never should have found it.