“Gosh!” shouted Jack, while the large m’sieur grinned triumphantly, “it’s the Scarlet Ibis!”
Three months later, on a day in November, a tall young man in good clothes, with a clean face and a hat, swung along a street up-town in New York City. The setting and the costume were changed, yet a person who might have met the bare-headed, gray-shirted, earth-streaked woodsman and his guide in the Canadian forest in August might still have known this correct city character as Jack Vance. The freedom of the woods had not yet left his buoyant heels, nor the breeziness of the hills his physiognomy; by these signs he was the same. But his mind was working harder than it had on that morning when he and Josef had found the large m’sieur fishing by Profanity Pool; his eyes were absent-minded and intense; if one might have listened to his thoughts as his long pace lifted them and him over the pavement, it might be that some such sentence as this would have come to the light:
“Now how in thunder am I to tell if that’s interstate commerce or if it isn’t?” Jack was thinking.
With the same whole-heartedness that he had put into his fishing, into his woodcraft, the boy had now flung himself into the study of the law at that hot-house for starting the delicate green sprouts which are to grow into trees of justice, the Harvard Law School. He was in New York for what he would have described as a “bat” of some days, yet his work fermented in his brain in his holiday. He was finding law, as one mostly finds things done with all one’s might, a joy and delight. Yet for all the fun of it he was badly puzzled just now, and anxious as well as eager. After exhausting the sources of information he needed more light.
“If I only knew a man who had a practical hold on it,” his mind went on, throwing out tentacles to search for help, “an older man—a clever man, a man who—” he stopped short; a brain tentacle had touched something in the dimness. Why had there come to him in a flash the familiar atmosphere of the woods, of fishing, of Josef and the little river and—in a flash again he had arrived. “Profanity Pool! The large m’sieur—Mr. Bradlee! He said he was a railroad man—he said I was to call him up and lunch with him; he said if ever he could help me about anything he’d do it—by the sign of the Scarlet Ibis. Ginger! I’m glad I thought of him. The very chap!”
He dashed into a drug-store and rushed to the telephone-booth. Here he was—Bradlee—W. R. H.—that was the man. Wall Street—yes. And he took down the receiver and gave a number. It was a bit roundabout getting Mr. Bradlee. It seemed that the approach to him was guarded by an army of clerks and secretaries.
“He must think he’s mighty precious,” Jack complained to himself.
One must send a name—“Mr. Vance,” Jack said simply. So that when at last a voice out of the long wire was speaking, the words “Yes—this is Mr. Bradlee,” came with impersonal iciness. But Jack was not given to being snubbed; his theory of the friendliness of mankind prevented that, along with other discomforts. “Oh, hello, Mr. Bradlee,” he threw back eagerly. “I hope I’m not butting into business. This is Jack Vance.”
“Who?” The chilly tone was a bit impatient.