And then, young Vreeland wearily explored those ashes of life—the “papers in the case” of the defunct.
The unwelcome discovery of many evidences of his father’s shame and the revealing of all that secret life which had sent his patient mother to the shadowy bourne of heartbroken wives, was somewhat mitigated by the discovery of a paid-up policy of ten thousand dollars in the great “Acqueduct Life Insurance of New York City.”
There was, as usual, some strings and filaments hanging out loosely knotted up, and it had been a labor of months, involving a correspondence of some acerbity, for him to obtain letters of administration, close up his father’s “estate,” and depart to Gotham to receive a check for seven thousand dollars in full settlement of the claim.
On the road over from Spokane, Mr. Harold Vreeland had carefully counted all his ships. He had even gone over all his own abortive attempts at opening any useful career, and so, on this summer evening, he gloomily felt how poorly prepared he was to fight the battle of life against the keen competition and increasing pressure of his peers in New York City.
“If I had only my father’s profession, I would have a chance to get in among these fellows, and I would soon have my share of the gate money,” he growled.
“But to take a place in the line of mere drudges, to sink down into the death in life of a hall room and a cheap boarding-house. Once planted there, I am there forever. And I have not a friend in the whole world!”
His mental harvest had only been one of husks, and he keenly felt the absence of any definite calling pour accrocher.
Suddenly his eye caught the gleam of a sunset upon a dozen drifting, glittering white sails on the river.
They all seemed to float on serenely, borne along upon the broad tide, with no visible man’s hand to guide.
“I will drift a while,” he murmured. “I have a few thousand dollars. Something will surely turn up. If it does not,” he resolutely said, “then, I will turn it up myself.”