CHAPTER III—Mr. Babcock's Last Card
As the feat of riding thirty horses around a circus hippodrome calls for the highest strength and skill, so the task of guiding the complicated affairs of Bigelow & Company through the difficulties that threatened them demanded sound character and experience. For a time the Bigelow ventures had shown a persistent upward tendency, and the head of the firm had then made an imposing figure, but a fair-weather man was hardly adequate now. Kentucky Coal had slumped alarmingly; New Freighters had perhaps been overrated; and booming suburban real estate was discovering unexpected inertia where abnormal growth had been gambled on. But the most disturbing element was the lumber fight. That Higginson & Company could not only hold out until the meeting, but could actually get the better of the Trust, had not been foreseen. Questions would be asked at this meeting: there might even be some tension. And so it was that Mr. Bigelow was not joking much nowadays. And so it was that Mr. Babcock took his grip from behind the door and went to Wauchung.
The air blew keen from the West as Mr. Babcock walked swiftly out toward the Wauchung bridge. It was a crisp, invigorating breeze, with the strength of the lake in it, and a faint odour of pine. Men grow rugged and hardy in this region, whether they follow blaze-marks or mariner's compass. No malaria oozes from the dry white sand; the children rather draw from it the sap that makes the pine tree tall and sound. If you had strayed into the forest in the earlier time of reckless cutting; if you had stood under the tight green roof on a scented rug of needles, finer than ever came from India, and listened to the song of the shanty-boy as he struck his peavey into a bleeding trunk, could you have wondered at the lilt in his melody, at the vigour, even the harshness in his voice? Stand near a mill-race and watch the “boys” racing down, each balanced on a single careening log, and you will have a glimpse of the sort of men G. Hyde Bigelow & Company were fighting.
Mr. Babcock passed the last straggling buildings of Wauchung's main street and found himself in full view of the bridge, the river and the lumber-yards. The sight did not please him, apparently, for he paused with knit brows to take it in. Beyond, showing here and there, lay the harbour, glistening in the cool light—and beyond the harbour the bald dunes and the lake.
The sky was blue, frayed here and there into ends of white clouds—the glorious northern sky, matched only in the air of Naples or Touraine. But Mr. Babcock was not looking at the sky. His soul was tuned to lower things—to lumber, for instance, heaps of it, piles of it, rows of it, stretched for hundreds of yards along the river, and across the peninsula, and along the edge of the harbour. The mills were silent; the watchmen were not to be seen; the only sign of life was the smoke curling from the funnels of the Number One, where Robbie MacGregor was dozing on the engine-room bench and hourly growing fatter. Six million feet of lumber greeted the eye of the man from Chicago, as he looked—and looked. It was new lumber, bought by experts, every stick of it such as would command a good price when the owners should throw it on the market, as they certainly would sooner or later. He shook his head and hurried on.
He found Halloran at the office and shook hands cordially. Crosman heard the name, looked blank, recollected himself, and slipped out.
“Well, you've got a great lot of lumber here, Mr. Halloran,” Babcock began softly, glancing out the window.
“Yes—a good deal.”
“How much can you keep in the yards here?”