If in the throngs on the streets there were often marked contrasts, Keith was too exhilarated to remark it--at least, at first. If women with worn faces and garments unduly thin in the frosty air, carrying large bundles in their pinched hands, hurried by as though hungry, not only for food, but for time in which to earn food; if sad-eyed men with hollow cheeks, sunken chests, and threadbare clothes shambled eagerly along, he failed to note them in his first keen enjoyment of the pageant. Old clothes meant nothing where he came from; they might be the badge of perilous enterprise and well-paid industry, and food and fire were at least common to all.
Keith, indeed, moved about almost in a trance, absorbing and enjoying the sights. It was Humanity in flood; Life at full tide.
Many a woman and not a few men turned to take a second look at the tanned, eager face and straight, supple figure, as, with smiling, yet keen eyes, he stalked along with the free, swinging gait caught on the mountains, so different from the quick, short steps of the city man. Beggars, and some who from their look and apparel might not have been beggars, applied to him so often that he said to one of them, a fairly well-dressed man with a nose of a slightly red tinge:
"Well, I must have a very benevolent face or a very credulous one!"
"You have," said the man, with brazen frankness, pocketing the half-dollar given him on his tale of a picked pocket and a remittance that had gone wrong.
Keith laughed and passed on.
Meantime, Keith was making some discoveries. He did not at first call on Norman Wentworth. He had a feeling that it might appear as if he were using his friendship for a commercial purpose. He presented his business letters. His letters, however, failed to have the weight he had expected. The persons whom he had met down in New Leeds, during their brief visits there, were, somehow, very different when met in New York. Some whom he called on were civil enough to him; but as soon as he broached his business they froze up. The suggestion that he had coal-property to sell sent them down to zero. Their eyes would glint with a shrewd light and their faces harden into ice. One or two told him plainly that they had no money to embark in "wild-cat schemes."
Mr. Creamer of Creamer, Crustback & Company, Capitalists, a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a strongly cut nose and chin and keen, gray eyes, that, through long habitude, weighed chances with an infallible appraisement, to whom Keith had a letter from an acquaintance, one of those casual letters that mean anything or nothing, informed him frankly that he had "neither time nor inclination to discuss enterprises, ninety-nine out of every hundred of which were frauds, and the hundredth generally a failure."
"This is not a fraud," said Keith, hotly, rising. "I do not indorse frauds, sir." He began to draw on his gloves. "If I cannot satisfy any reasonable man of the fact I state, I am willing to fail. I ought to fail." With a bow, he turned to the door.
Something in Keith's assurance went further with the shrewd-eyed capitalist than his politeness had done. He shot a swift glance as he was retiring toward the door.