“God knows I would like him to live to be a hundred, Aunt Serepta—so let’s not talk of his dying.”
CHAPTER XI
OLD OLIVER DISAPPEARS
Shortly before three o’clock on the afternoon of June 23rd; old Oliver Baxter stepped into the bank at the corner of Clay and Pershing streets and drew out thirty-five hundred dollars in currency. He gave no reason to the teller or to the cashier for the withdrawal of so large an amount in cash. He asked for a thousand in twenty dollar bills, the balance in fifties and hundreds. Receiving and pocketing the money, he strode out of the bank and turned his steps homeward.
His balance at the bank was a fairly large one. Moreover, he owned considerable stock in the institution. The Baxter Hardware Company was no longer an insignificant concern dealing in tools, tinware, nails; it was an “establishment.” You could buy plows there; reapers, binders and mowers; furnaces and boilers, ice boxes and washing-machines; pots, kettles and cauldrons; stoves, ranges and brass-headed tacks; cutlery, crockery and stout hemp rope; step-ladders, wheel-barrows and glass door-knobs; log-chains, dog-chains and fly-wheel belts; coffee-mills, pepper-pots and bathroom scales; currycombs, skillets and housemaid’s mops.
The staff consisted of three clerks and a book-keeper, and, now that farm machinery was included in the stock, an “annex” in the shape of a long corrugated-iron shed reached out from the rear of the store and took up all the available space between the Baxter Block and Stufflebean’s Laundry on the north. People were right when they said that young Oliver would fall into a very snug little fortune—and a thriving, well-established business besides—when his father died.
Oliver October, ten or fifteen minutes late for supper that evening, found his father in a surprisingly amiable frame of mind. He was quite jovial, more like himself than he had been at any time since his son’s arrival. He joked about old Silas and Joseph, teased Oliver about the extremely pretty Indianapolis girl who had come the week before to visit the Lansings, and exchanged pleasant jibes with Mrs. Grimes at the supper table, but said nothing about the money he had withdrawn from the bank.
It was a hot, still night, and there was a moon. On the front porch after supper he brought up the subject of draining the swamp. He said that he had given the matter a great deal of thought and was more or less convinced that Oliver’s plan was a good one. Mrs. Grimes triumphantly reminded Oliver that she had said, three weeks ago, that all he had to do was to give the family mule plenty of rope and he would quit balking in time—and hadn’t it turned out just as she said it would? She left father and son seated on the porch and went off to spend the night with an old friend whose husband was not expected to live till morning.
Mr. Baxter’s good humor did not endure. He revived a dispute they had had in the store earlier in the day—a one-sided quarrel, by the way, which his son had terminated by rushing out of the place with the words “Oh, hell!” flung back over his shoulder. The old man had that day offered him an interest in the business if he would remain in Rumley and take full charge of the store. Oliver was grateful, he was touched, but he declined the offer, saying he had a profession in which he wanted to make good; staying in Rumley would mean the end of all his hopes and ambitions. Mr. Baxter flew into a rage and his son, white with mortification, left the store, with that single, unguarded exclamation his only outward sign of revolt.
Mr. Baxter’s reversion to the subject came when Oliver, looking at his watch, announced that he must be running along, as he was due over at the Sages to say good-by to Jane and her father.