“You always interest me, Bud; please proceed.”
“Well, you might call Franklin Mills the original man who couldn’t lose. No active business now, but he controls a couple of banks and a trust company without figuring in the picture at all, and he set his son up in a storage battery plant and is a silent factor in a dozen other flourishing contributors to the smoke nuisance. Nice chap, by the way, Shep Mills; pleasant little cuss. Franklin Mills isn’t one of the up-from-the-office-boy type nor the familiar variety of feverish business man; velvet glove stuff. Do you follow me? Only human touch I’ve discovered in this house is the billiard room, and Mills is a shark at the sport. I’ve poked the ivories with him now and then just for the fun of watching him play. His style of playing is a sort of clue to his character—cool, deliberate, never misses. One thing, though, I’ve never been able to figure out: once in a while he makes a wild shot, unnecessarily and with malice aforethought, as though to spite himself. If you’d tell Franklin Mills he’d lost his last cent he wouldn’t blink an eye, but before you got out of the room he’d have thought up a scheme for making it all back.”
“A business genius,” commented Bruce, who had missed no word of Henderson’s sketch. “I can’t say your snapshot’s very alluring.”
“Oh, I may be wrong! If you’d ask anybody else about him you’d hear that he’s a leading citizen and a cultivated gentleman, which he is! While of our city’s back-number or paralytic group, he’s far from being ripe for the mortician. One sees him around socially now and then—on occasions when our real nobility shake the moth balls from their dress suits. And that’s characteristic; he has the pride, you might say, of his long connection with the town. If it’s necessary for somebody to bunk a distinguished visitor, Frank Mills opens his door—not that he’s keen to get his name in the village sheet, but he likes for the town to make a good impression—sort of ‘I am a citizen of no mean city,’ like St. Paul or whoever the bird was that said it first. I doubt if the visitors enjoy his entertainments, but they’re probably used to being bored by the gloomy rich.”
“There are other children, perhaps? A house like that rather suggests a big family,” Bruce remarked.
“The size only indicates Frank’s pride. He’s given only two hostages to fortune. There’s Leila, the daughter. There must have been a naughty little devil in some of the Mills or Shepherd tribe away back yonder, for that girl certainly is a lively little filly. Shep, who is named for his mother’s people, never browsed in the wild-oat fields, but Leila makes up for it. Bounced from seven boarding schools—holds the champeen record there. Her mother passed hence when Leila was about fourteen, and various aunts took a hand in bringing the kid up, but all they got for their trouble was nervous prostration. Frank’s crazy about her—old stuff of doting father bullied by adorable daughter.”
“I think I get the picture,” said Bruce soberly as his thoughts caught up and played upon this summary of the history of Franklin Mills.
Glancing back at the house as Henderson drove away, Bruce was aware of the irony of his very presence in the town, sent there by the whim of a dying woman to be prepared to aid a man who in no imaginable circumstances could ever require any help it might be in his power to give. His mother had said that she had kept some track of Mills’s life; she could never have realized that he was so secure from any possibility of need. As Bruce thought of it, Henderson had not limned an attractive portrait. Only Mills’s devotion to the daughter, whom Henderson had described in terms that did not conceal his own admiration for the girl, brightened the picture.
“What can such a man do with his time in a town like this?” asked Bruce meditatively. “No active business, you say. Shooting billiards and cutting coupons hardly makes an exciting day.”
“Well,” Henderson replied, “I’ve seen him on the golf links—usually alone or with the club professional. Frank’s not one of these ha-ha boys who get together after the game with a few good sports and sneak a bottle of unlawful Scotch from the locker. Travels a bit; several times a year he beats it somewhere with Leila. Shep’s wife bores him, I think; and Shep’s not exciting; too damned nice. From all I can see, Leila’s her pop’s single big bet. Some say he’s diffident; others hold that he’s merely a selfish proposition. He’s missed a number of chances to marry again—some of the most dashing widows in our tall corn cities have made a play for him; but he follows G. Washington’s advice and keeps clear of entangling alliances.”