But no such considerations as these influenced Erastus Brainard when he founded the Underground. He was far aside from all social ambitions, and his domestic affairs took care of themselves. His business interests spread all over the city, the state, the West, even the Ear West, and this vast web must have a centre. That centre was on the lower floor of the Clifton, where he ran a bank, true, but a good many other things besides.
Brainard had come up from the southern part of the state—from "Egypt," as it is called. A darkness truly Egyptian brooded over his early history, so that if it is a fact that he was an exhorter at Methodist camp-meetings in his early twenties, proof of that fact might be sought for in vain. The first definite point in his career is this: that as a youngish man he was connected in some capacity with a cross-country railroad on the far side of Centralia. How successful he was in transporting souls no one can say; that he has been successful in transporting bodies no one will deny. He is unrivalled in his mastery of the street-car question, and his operations have lain in many scattered fields.
To claim that Brainard has a national reputation would be going too far. However, his reputation might fairly be termed inter-state. If the man were to die to-morrow, sketches of his life would appear in the papers of Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and St. Louis; and the caustic and frankly abusive paragraphs would be copied appreciatively as far as the remoter counties of Nebraska. For Brainard's success is not without the elements of public scandal. His manipulation of city councils and of state legislatures has been freely charged. Old stories of his brief incarceration in prison, or of his narrow escape from it, sometimes arise and flutter; and there are those who think that if he never has been in jail, then this is all the more reason for his being there now. His demise would indeed set the clipping-bureaus to work; but the work would not be started by the direction of his surviving family. Such is the chief to whom young George Ogden has sworn allegiance.
"I shall marry him," said a voice quite firmly; "you may make up your mind to that."
Ogden started. These words came through a door which stood ajar in the partition that separated him from the president's room; the office was splendid with bevelled glass and oxidized iron-work, yet it was as compact as high rentals compel. They were words in striking contrast to most of the talk that his pen commanded. "Make it thirty days more"; "I'll take the rest in small bills, please"; "It will be due day after to-morrow." And with these—"I shall marry him; make up your mind to that."
He knew the voice perfectly well; he had heard it a fortnight before in Floyd's office.
The door in the partition opened a foot or two wider; the bulky figure of Erastus Brainard appeared and his hard and determined face. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a close-clipped gray beard and a shaven upper lip. Two or three red veins showed prominently in his bulbous nose. He wore black broadcloth; his coat had a velvet collar, and on his shoulders there was a light fall of dandruff. He wore boots. On Sundays his boots had "tongues," and his trade was the mainstay of a German shoemaker who kept a shop behind his house, and whom, twice a year, he literally terrified into a fit.
But now his big figure clutched at the red-cherry door-jamb with a tremulous hesitancy, the hard, fierce eyes looked out appealingly from under their coarse and shaggy brows, and the proud and cruel lips opened themselves to address the young man with an order that was almost an entreaty.
"Ogden, won't you ask Mr. Fairchild to step this way?"
For a mouse had come into the place, and the elephant was in terror.