Mr. Bingle

by George Barr McCutcheon

He presented himself, with his battered valise, at the door of Thomas Bingle's apartment—and was given a warm, even hearty reception!

And it was on that day—at that very hour, so to speak—that Thomas Bingle became a fabulously rich man without the slightest effort or intention on his part.

Mr. Hooper one day recalled to mind the postal-card will. If his memory served him right there was something jocose and undignified about it—something that would not look well in the public prints. He visited the offices of his lawyers, recovered the amazing instrument, and forthwith set about to make a new will, bereft of certain grewsome stipulations but quite as sweeping in purpose as the other had been. In fact, he left his fortune—as he had done before—to his beloved nephew, Thomas Singleton Bingle, with three precautionary bequests to his son and daughters, providing against the contests that were sure to follow. He bequeathed the sum of one thousand dollars to each of his children, and he signed his name once more as Joseph H. Hooper—for the first time in fourteen years.

His wanderings as a tramp—in his own account of himself he used the word "tramp" with a shocking lack of pride—led him inevitably into the far Northwest. Men were doing things up there. The country fairly seethed with the activity of live, virile men who were taking the first staunch grip upon the tricky wheel of fortune and were turning it to their own account. Every man was building; no man complained of conditions, for conditions were so new and so ready to hand that he who found fault was merely lessening his own chance to secure his share of the vast resources that spread before him, welcoming the greedy fingers of him who courted the future and shunned the past. All men lived in the present out there in the great stretches, and all men were strong and eager.

Joseph Hooper caught the fever that infected the West. He shook off the fetters that bound him to a far from enchanted East, and began to squirm with the first tickling sensations of an ambition that had never really made itself felt, even in the old days of successful achievement among men who were content to tread the beaten and commonplace highway toward riches. The spirit of the West gripped him in its great, enveloping hands, picked him out of the slough and set him down again, plump upon his two feet, high and dry, prodding him violently all the while with a spur that would not permit him to stop or to take a step backward, with the natural result that he moved forward—slowly, dazedly at first, and then with a mighty rush.

He had one advantage over most of the men who were being driven helter-skelter by the grateful lash of the West: he was a trained money-getter. Back of him were generations of shrewd business men, while dormant in his own being was the half-stunned thing called natural ability. The simple shrewdness of Joseph Hooper, combined with a certain hitherto unconfessed lack of respect for the Golden Rule, to say nothing of a vain-glorious desire to kick the world that had kicked him, soon produced opportunities that paved the way for his rehabilitation.

Without a dollar to his name, with nothing in the shape of resources save a self-sufficient nerve and an infinite eastern contempt for these struggling westerners, he began to promote things!

The field was fresh and fertile. Inside of two years he reaped a half-dozen harvests—and replanted as he went along! First, he promoted a street railway in a place called Mockawock; then it became necessary for some one to establish reasons for the existence of such a thing as a car-line in a town that could be traversed on foot, from one end to the other, in less than eight minutes; so he began to promote the organisation of a wagon factory at one extreme and a pickle works at the other, possessing the far-sightedness to put them so far away from each other that if one wanted to go to the pickle works from the wagon factory, or vice versa, he would have to go by trolley unless he possessed the hardiness of an ox and was not dismayed by the vastness of the city limits. For like all towns in the great Northwest, Mockawock had its limits and they were wide enough to make New York or Chicago appear cramped by comparison. One could walk for hours in a straight line south from the public square in Mockawock and still not be "out in the country," figuratively speaking, although he might not see a house or a human being—unless he turned his head—after the first ten minutes. He could also walk west or north in the same futile effort to get out of the "city" into the "country," but he could not walk east for more than two city blocks. Mockawock happened to be situated on the shores of Lake Superior and not even the most boastful citizen would have contended that the city limits reached far in that direction.

And, having successfully promoted such enterprises in Mockawock as would tend to convince the citizens that some day the city limits would have to be extended, he very wisely took the gains acquired in the sale of options, the disposal of franchises, the surrender of equities, and all such, and slipped away to the vast forests in the north, where he bought timber-land by the section.

Another town required stirring up by this time, so he descended upon it, backed by the reputation gained at Mockawock and, before the citizens could say Jack Robinson, he had skilfully promoted a number of enterprises, including a belt railroad, an electric lighting plant, and a new evening newspaper, all of which fairly set the town by the ears and made him one of the most important figures in the upper Lake region.