“How was it when you left, Fitz?” I asked in an undertone.
“Looked pretty ugly. I shouldn’t wonder if the stock opened at 60 in the morning.”
“Have you covered your shorts yet?” I continued in a whisper.
“Not yet.” Here Fitz leaned over and said to me behind his hand: “Not a word of all this now to the Colonel. Only worry him, and he can’t do any good.”
“By the by, Colonel”—here Fitz straightened up, and with a tone in his voice as if what he really wanted to talk about was now on the end of his tongue said: “is Aunt Nancy coming for Christmas? Chad thinks she is.”
The Colonel, who had noticed the confidential aside, did not reply for a moment. Then he remarked, with a light trace of impatience in his voice:
“If you have unloaded all the caares of yo’ office, Fitz, I will answer yo’ question, but I cannot soil the dear lady’s name by bringin’ it into any conversation in which that man has a part. There are some subjects no gentleman should discuss; Mr. Klutchem’s affairs is one of them. I have already expressed my opinion of him both to the Major and to Chad and I have promised them both that that scoundrel’s name shall never again pass my lips. Oblige me by never mentionin’ it. Forgive me, Fitz. There’s my hand. You know I love you too well for you to think that I say this in anythin’ but kindness. Let me put a little mo’ whiskey in that toddy, Fitz—it lacks color. So—that’s better. Aunt Nancy did you ask about, my dear Fitz?—of co’se, she’s comin’. And, Major,—did I tell you”—here the Colonel turned to me—“that she’s going to bring a servant with her this time? The dear woman is gettin’ too old to travel alone, and since Chad has been with me she has felt the need of some one to wait upon her. She has passed some weeks or mo’ in Richmond, she writes, and has greatly enjoyed the change. Make no engagement for Christmas, either one of you. That loveliest of women, suh, will grace our boa’d, and it is her special wish that both of you be present.”
Fitz crushed the sugar in his glass, remarked that there was not the slightest doubt of his being present, winked at me appreciatingly over the edge of the tumbler, rubbed his paunch slowly with one hand, and with eyes upcast took another sip of the mixture.
The Virginian to Fitz was a never-ending well of pleasure. The Colonel’s generosity, his almost Quixotic sense of honor, his loyalty to his friends, his tenderness over Chad and his reverence and love for that dear Aunt—who had furnished him really with all the ready money he had spent for years, and who was at the moment caring for the old place at Cartersville while the Colonel was in New York endeavoring to float, through Fitz, the bonds of the Cartersville & Warrentown Railroad—excited not only Fitz’s admiration and love, but afforded the broker the pleasantest of contrasts to the life he led in the Street, a contrast so delightful that Fitz seldom missed at least an evening’s salutation with him. That not a shovel of earth had yet been dug on the line of the Colonel’s Railroad, and that the whole enterprise was one of those schemes well nigh impossible to finance, made no difference to Fitz. He never lost an opportunity to work off the securities whenever there was the slightest opening. The bonds, of course, had not been issued; they had never been printed, in fact. These details would come later,—whenever the capitalist or syndicate should begin to look into the enterprise in earnest.
Up to the moment when this whirl had caught the Street—an event which Klutchem acting for his friends had helped—Fitz had never quite given up the hope that somehow, or in some way, or by some hook or crook, some deluded capitalist, with more money than brains, would lose both by purchasing these same “Garden Spots” as the securities of the Colonel’s proposed road were familiarly called in the Street. That but one single inquiry had thus far ever been made, and that no one of his or anybody else’s customers had ever given them more than a hasty dismissal, had never discouraged Fitz.