TURKEY RUN
A week before Christmas Mrs. William Holton gave a sleigh-ride and skating-party for a niece from Memphis, and Phil was invited. She mentioned the matter to her father, and asked him what she should do about it.
He had come back from Indianapolis in good spirits, and told her that the affairs of the traction company had been adjusted and that he hoped there would be no more trouble. He seemed infinitely relieved by the outcome, and his satisfaction expressed itself to her observing eyes in many ways. The confidence reposed in him by his old friend, the counsel of the Desbrosses Trust & Guaranty Company, had not only pleased him, but the success that had attended his efforts to adjust the traction company's difficulties without resorting to the courts had strengthened his waning self-confidence. He even appeared in a new suit of clothes, and with his beard cut shorter than he usually wore it,—changes that evoked the raillery in which Phil liked to indulge herself. He was promised the care of certain other Western interests of the Trust Company, and he had been offered a partnership in Indianapolis by one of the best lawyers in the state.
"Things are looking up, Phil. If another year had gone by in the old way, I should have been ready for the scrap heap. But I miss the cooking our poverty introduced me to; and I shan't have any more time for fooling with excursions into Picardy with the Gray Knight. By the way, I found some strange manuscript on my desk at the office to-day. If you've take up the literary life you'll have to be careful how you leave your vestigia in lawyers' offices. It was page eighteen of something that I took the liberty of reading, and I thirsted for more."
She had not told him about "The Dogs of Main Street," wishing to wait until she could put the magazine containing it into his hands. Under the stimulus of the acceptance of her sketch she had been scratching vigorously in her spare moments. Having begun with dogs she meditated an attack upon man, and the incriminating page she had left behind in her father's office was a part of a story she was writing based upon an incident that had occurred at a reunion of Captain Wilson's regiment that fall in Montgomery. A man who had been drummed out of the regiment for cowardice suddenly reappeared among his old comrades with an explanation that restored him to honored fellowship. Phil had elaborated the real incident as Captain Wilson described it, and invested it with the element of "suspense," which she had read somewhere was essential to the short story.
Phil was living just now in a state of exaltation. She began a notebook after the manner of Hawthorne's, and was astonished at the ease with which she filled its pages. Now that her interest was aroused she saw "material" everywhere. The high school had given her German and French, and having heard her father say that the French were the great masters of fiction, she addressed herself to Balzac and Hugo. The personalities of favorite contemporaneous writers interested her tremendously, and she sought old files of literary periodicals that she might inform herself as to their methods of work. She kept Lamb and Stevenson on the stand by her bed and read them religiously every night. There had never been any fun like this! Her enjoyment of this secret inner life was so satisfying that she wished no one might ever know of it. She wrote and rewrote sentences and paragraphs, thrust them away into the drawers of the long table in her room to mellow—she had got this phrase from Nan,—and then dug them out in despair that they seemed so lifeless. She planned no end of books and confidently set down titles for these unborn masterpieces. Nan and Rose marked the change in her. At times she sat with her chin in her hand staring into vacancy. The two women speculated about this and wondered whether her young soul was not in the throes of a first love affair.
Now that fortune smiled upon her father Phil's happiness marked new attitudes, with no cloud to darken the misty-blue horizons of her dreams. She meant to be very good to her father. And as to his marrying Nan, she was giving much time to plots for furthering their romance.
"Fred Holton was looking for you the other day. I suppose you haven't seen him."
"Yes; he came to Indianapolis and saw me at the hotel. I remember that he was at your party, but I don't recall how you got acquainted with him?"
Phil laughed.