To begin with, there was the Post's story itself. As he hurried through it very early in the morning, the young man was struck again and again with the delicacy of the phrasing. And gradually it came to him that the young men of the Post had made very special efforts to avoid hurting the feelings of their old associate and friend the Doc. This little discovery had touched him unbelievably. And it was only part with other kindness that came to him to soften that first long day of his acknowledged sonship. Probably the sympathy extended to him from various sources was not really so abundant, but to him, having looked for nothing, it was simply overwhelming. All day, it seemed to him, his door-bell and telephone rang, all day unexpected people of all sorts and conditions stopped him on the street—only to tell him, in many ways and sometimes without saying a word about it, that they were sorry.
The very first of them to come was Charles Gardiner West, stopping on his way to the office, troubled, concerned, truly sympathetic, to express, in a beautiful and perfect way, his lasting interest in his one-time assistant. Not far behind him had come Mr. Hickok, the director who looked like James E. Winter, who had often chatted with the assistant editor in times gone by, and who spoke confidently of the day when he would come back to the Post. Beverley Byrd had come, too, manly and friendly; Plonny Neal, ill at ease for once in his life; Evan Montague, of the Post, had asked to be allowed to make the arrangements for the funeral; Buck Klinker had actually made those arrangements. Better than most of these, perhaps, were the young men of the Mercury, raw, embarrassed, genuine young men, who, stopping him on the street, did not seem to know why they stopped him, who, lacking West's verbal felicity, could do nothing but take his hand, hot with the fear that they might be betrayed into expressing any feeling, and stammer out: "Doc, if you want anything—why dammit, Doc—you call on me, hear?"
Best of all had been Buck Klinker—Buck, who had made him physically, who had dragged him into contact with life over his own protests, who had given him the first editorial he ever wrote that was worth reading—Buck, the first real friend he had ever had. It was to Buck that he had telephoned an hour after his father's death, for he needed help of a practical sort at once, and his one-time trainer was the man of all men to give it to him. Buck had come, constrained and silent; he was obviously awed by the Doc's sudden emergence into stunning notoriety. To be Surface's son was, to him, like being the son of Iscariot and Lucrezia Borgia. On the other hand, he was aware that, of Klinkers and Queeds, a Surface might proudly say: "There are no such people." So he had greeted his friend stiffly as Mr. Surface, and was amazed at the agitation with which that usually impassive young man had put a hand upon his shoulder and said: "I'm the same Doc always to you, Buck, only now I'm Doc Surface instead of Doc Queed." After that everything had been all right. Buck had answered very much after the fashion of the young men of the Mercury, and then rushed off to arrange for the interment, and also to find for Doc Surface lodgings somewhere which heavily undercut Mrs. Paynter's modest prices.
The sudden discovery that he was not alone in the world, that he had friends in it, real friends who believed in him and whom nothing could ever take away, shook the young man to the depths of his being. Was not this compensation for everything? Never had he imagined that people could be so kind; never had he dreamed that people's kindness could mean so much to him. In the light of this new knowledge, it seemed to him that the last scales fell from his eyes ... Were not these friendships, after all, the best work of a man's life? Did he place a higher value even on his book itself, which, it seemed, he might never finish now?
And now there returned to him something that the dead old Colonel had told him long ago, and to-day he saw it for truth. However his father had wronged him, he would always have this, at least, to bless his memory for. For it was his father who had called him to live in this city where dwelt, as the strong voice that was now still had said, the kindest and sweetest people in the world.
Henry G. Surface died at half-past two o'clock on the afternoon of March 24. At one o'clock that night, while the Post's startling story was yet in process of the making, his son stood at the mantel in Surface's sitting-room, and looked over the wreck that his hands had made. That his father's treasures were hidden somewhere here he had hardly entertained a doubt. Yet he had pulled the place all to pieces without finding a trace of them.
The once pretty sitting-room looked, indeed, as if a tornado had struck it. The fireplace was a litter of broken brick and mortar; half the floor was ripped up and the boards flung back anyhow; table drawers and bookcases had been ransacked, and looked it; books rifled in vain were heaped in disorderly hummocks wherever there was room for them; everywhere a vandal hand had been, leaving behind a train of devastation and ruin.
And it had all been fruitless. He had been working without pause since half-past six o'clock, and not the smallest clue had rewarded him.
It was one of those interludes when early spring demonstrates that she could play August convincingly had she a mind to. The night was stifling. That the windows had to be shut tight, to deaden the noise of loosening brick and ripping board, made matters so much the worse. Surface was stripped to the waist, and it needed no second glance at him, as he stood now, to see that he was physically competent. There was no one-sided over-development here; Klinker's exercises, it will be remembered, were for all parts of the body. Shoulders stalwart, but not too broad, rounded beautifully into the upper arm; the chest swelled like a full sail; many a woman in that town had a larger waist. Never he moved but muscle flowed and rippled under the shining skin; he raised his right hand to scratch his left ear, and the hard blue biceps leaped out like a live thing. In fact, it had been some months since the young man had first entertained the suspicion that he could administer that thrashing to Mr. Pat whenever he felt inclined. Only it happened that he and Mr. Pat had become pretty good friends now, and it was the proof-reader's boast that he had never once made a bull in "Mr. Queed's copy" since the day of the famous fleas.