"Here's an emigrant from the State of Georgia," Talbert said, turning to his friend, "who is bent on becoming a millionaire. He's got health and determination; all he asks for is advice. What's yours?"
"David Harum's golden rule," was the answer. "Do unto the other feller the way he'd like to do unto you, and do it fust."
They made their way past the waiters bearing their trays gleaming with straw-colored cocktails, bright with fruit, pleasantly odorous with freshly cooked meats and vegetables, on out into the street. The older men continued to explain the road to success in kindly speech, their tone and bearing at variance with the harsh gospel which they preached. Dick listened eagerly, as eagerly as he had once listened to the gospel of the evangelist at home. And as he shook hands and left them, he walked up Broadway feeling a strange elation. His hand went to his pocket for the cigar he usually smoked at this time, but, recalling himself, he put it resolutely back. He would live meagerly to-day that he might have a plethora in a golden to-morrow.
The soft May air blowing on his face recalled to him his southern home. He had been poor down there, and yet not poor in comparison with his neighbors. His father had owned hundreds of acres of miserable soil on which his tenants had planted cotton and reaped scanty crops. He recalled those tenants—sallow, ill-fed whites, shiftless blacks. Their cabins reeked with dirt and were always cluttered with children. The men were continually in debt, and while his father got from them all he could, being accounted a hard master by his neighbors, Dick knew that there was little enough that any one made. It had been a good thing when his mother had sold some of the property. Had it not been for their timber they would have known real poverty. He felt a sudden revulsion for his old home, its sordidness, its slow piling of penny upon penny with no greater outlook upon life than a new rifle or a Victrola in the best room. There was no game worthy the name to be played down there, only a monotonous round of stupid covetousness. Here the play was difficult and the stakes big.
He held his head very high that afternoon, and fairly touched the clouds when, before he went home, he was informed that he would again be sent for a short time upon the road. His first trip had brought in good results and he was to be entrusted with a better circuit and to receive a slight increase in salary. He felt grateful for the advancement, and then, recalling the advice of noontime, put this thought from him. If he were getting more money it was because the firm thought he was worth it, and that they must pay more or lose him. Therefore it was to his own interest, while serving them, to be looking for advancement. In the autumn he might seek a job with Mr. Talbert.
He was enough of a boy still to buy a box of candies to take to Hertha. Calculating that his luncheon had cost him nothing and that he would begin at once to save by smoking only one cigar a day, he spent a dollar on his gift, and with it tucked under his arm moved among the seething mass of faces, mysteriously upborne, on bodies with arms and legs, that stampeded the Brooklyn train. Once hanging to his hardly secured strap, contrary to the advice given him, he let the work of the day drop from his mind and fell into a day dream of a home of his own with Hertha as its queen. And as he thought of her, of her lightly poised head, her softly curling hair, her delicate hands, the minutes flew by and he was quite unconscious that he was standing amid a crowd of people, the women swaying on the straps to which they clung, one of them falling regularly against him at each station, the men endeavoring to read their newspapers while they balanced themselves with each recurring jolt. He was moving on as the train moved in a swift passage through time, stopping now and again at some well-marked station along the happy road of life.
As he neared his stopping place an old question came to perplex him. Who was this girl whom he so deeply loved? Ogilvie was a fine sounding name, and any one could see that she was descended from people of note. But he was curious to know something of her kin and of her early life. It was of no use to ask his mother or any of the folks at home. As he had once put it to Hertha, they were "hill billies," far removed from her progenitors. Mrs. Pickens had confessed ignorance when he had questioned her. The one person who could tell him anything he dared not question. There was something in Hertha's reserve that he was forced to respect, and yet he often wondered that any girl should be so wholly alone. She seemed to receive no mail. More than once, since she herself had first spoken of him, he had alluded to her brother, only to be met with a shy silence. He had never before known so silent a girl, or one, too, whom it was so difficult to interest. Sometimes when he recalled the Rosies and Annie-Lous at home over whom he had lorded it with the high hand of the best-known fellow in the county, he wondered that he should be so engrossed in one who was evidently indifferent to his advances. But he was keen enough to see that, like his coveted riches, the needed effort to gain her affection added to the intensity of his desire. But he did wish, as he clutched the candy to his side, that she would treat him a little better. They did not seem to be as near one another now as they had been in the winter when she was living with her Irish friend.
Nothing was solved as he ran up the stoop of Mrs. Pickens' boarding-house and put his key in the latch, but he was rewarded with a bright smile when, looking in at Hertha's open doorway, he tossed the box of candy on her bed. He was never invited over the threshold of her bedroom, though it was beyond his code of etiquette to understand why. In his mother's home the living-room contained the largest bed in the house, a massive affair with a variegated cover that every visitor was called upon to admire. But he had learned from experience that if he entered Hertha's room she shortly left it, and so, accepting her word of thanks, he went to his own quarters to make himself ready for dinner.
At eight o'clock, when Hertha was poring over a page of shorthand, vainly endeavoring to read the business letter from "Jones Brothers" to "Smith and Company," she heard a knock at her door. Opening it, she found Dick outside.
"I told them you didn't want to be disturbed," he hastened to say in answer to her look of annoyance, "but Mrs. Pickens and Miss Wood want you to come down and make a fourth at bridge."