"What is it?" she asked him.
"The joke's on me," he laughed. "The biggest stunt I ever pulled off, and even the baa-baas satisfied. Why, Fanny," and the surprise in his face was almost ludicrous, "it turned out to be a legitimate deal, after all!"
That was the keynote of a startling new thought which came to him: that there might actually be more money in legitimate deals than in the dubious ones in which he had always engaged; and that thought he took to Europe with him. It dwelt with him in the fogs of London and the sunshine of Paris, at the roulette tables of Monte Carlo and on the canals of Venice. It was an ambition-rousing idea, and with perfect confidence in his own powers he saw himself rising to a commanding position in American financial affairs. Why, he already owned a round half million of dollars, and the mere momentum of this huge amount caused quite an alteration, not only in his mode of thought, but of life. Heretofore he had looked upon such gain as he wrested from his shady transactions as a mere medium of quick exchange, which was to be turned into pleasure and lavish display as rapidly as possible. When he secured money his only impulse had been to spend all of it and then get more; but a half million! It was a sum large enough to represent earning capacity, and his always creative mind was busy with the thought of how he might utilize its power. After all, it was only another new and expensive pleasure that he desired, the pleasure of swaying big affairs, of enrolling himself upon the roster of the pseudo-great, and to that end, during his entire European trip he devoured American newspapers wherever he could find them, seeking for means by which he could increase his fortune to one of truly commanding proportions. In the meantime he was as lavish as ever, scattering money with a prodigal hand; but now it was with a different motive. He used it freely to secure the best to be found in the way of luxury, but no longer spent it merely to get rid of it.
Mrs. Wallingford, content, viewed Europe with appreciative eyes, and no empress swathed in silk and diadem-crowned ever took more graciously to the pomp with which their royal progress was attended wherever they went. Wallingford's interest in foreign lands, however, had suddenly become a business one. Restless as ever, he moved from place to place with rapid speed, and covered in two months the ground that ordinary tourists above the financial standing of "trippers" would think they had slighted in six. Europe, as a matter of fact, did not please him at all. Its laws were too strict, and he found in nearly every country he visited, that a man, unless he happened to be an innkeeper, was expected to actually deliver value received for every coin that came into his possession! This was so vastly different from the financial and commercial system to which he had been used that he became eager to get back home, and finally, having been visited over night with the inspiration for a brilliant new enterprise, he cabled his bankers to throw open a portion of his account to Blackie Daw, and to the latter gentleman cabled instructions to buy him a good farm in the middle of the wheat belt and fit it for his residence regardless of cost. Then he started back for the land where the money grows.
The task he had set Blackie Daw was very much to that gentleman's liking. There had arisen a sudden crisis in his "business affairs," that very morning, which demanded his immediate absence, not only from his office, but from any other spot in which the authorities might be able to find him, and, relieved of his dilemma in the nick of time by Wallingford's money, he immediately put an enormous number of miles between himself and New York. A week he spent in search, and when he found the location which suited him, he set about his task of constructing a Wallingford estate in great glee. He built a big new barn, the finest in the county; he put a new front to the house, bigger than the house itself had been; he brought on load after load of fine furniture; he stocked the big cellar with beer and wines and liquors of all kinds; he piped natural gas from twelve miles away and installed a gas furnace in the cellar and a gas engine in a workshop near the barn; he had electricians wire the place from cellar to attic, including the barn and the front porch and the trees in the front yard, and had a dynamo put in to be run by the gas engine and to illuminate the entire estate; he installed both line and house telephone systems, with extension phones wherever they would be handy, and, his work finished, surveyed it with much satisfaction. With the mail carrier stopping every day, with the traction line running right past the door, and with plenty of money, he decided that J. Rufus would be able to get along, through the winter, at least.
It was in the early part of September when J. Rufus, clad according to his notions of what a gentleman farmer should look like—a rich brown velvet corduroy suit with the trousers neatly tucked into an eighteen-dollar pair of seal leather boots; a twenty-dollar broad-brimmed felt hat upon his head; a brown silk negligé shirt and a scarf of a little deeper shade in the "V" of his broad vest; an immense diamond gleaming from the scarf—arrived at the Wallingford estate in a splendid equipage drawn by a pair of sleek bays.
Marching in time to the ringing "Soldiers' Chorus" from Faust, Blackie Daw came down the walk from the wide Colonial porch, carrying in his arms the huge phonograph from which the music proceeded, and greeted the laughing new master and mistress of the house with extravagant ceremony, while three country girls, a red-cheeked one, a thin one, and a mortally ugly one, stood giggling upon the porch.
"Welcome to Wallingford Villa!" exclaimed Blackie, setting the blaring phonograph on the gate post, and, with his left hand tucked into his coat bosom, extending his right hand dramatically toward the porch. "Welcome to your ancestral estates and adoring tenantry!"
"Fine business!" approved J. Rufus, shaking hands with Mr. Daw. "Invite the band in to have a drink, Blackie."
"Hush!" admonished Mr. Daw in a hoarse stage whisper. "Not Blackie. Here, in hiding from the minions of Uncle Sam, I am Horatio Raven. Remember the name."