Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel

by Thomas William Lawson

Bob in his enthusiasm had completely lost sight of the fact that he was indorsing a project that but a moment previously he had pronounced insane, and with a start I realised what this sudden transformation betokened. Inevitably, if the project he outlined were carried out, Bob and the beautiful Southern girl would be thrown into close association with each other, and further acquaintance could only deepen the startling influence Beulah Sands had already won over my ordinarily sane and cool-headed comrade. As I looked at my friend, burning with an ardour as unaccustomed as it was impulsive, I felt a tug at my heartstrings at thought of the sudden cross-roading of his life’s highway. But I, too, was filled with the glamour of this girl’s wondrous beauty, and her terrible predicament appealed to me almost as strongly as it had to Bob. So, although I knew it would be fatal to any chance of his weighing the matter by common sense, I burst out:

“Bob, I don’t blame you for falling in with the girl’s plans. If I were in your shoes, I should too.”

Tears came to Bob’s eyes as he grabbed my hand and said:

“Jim, how can I ever repay you for all the good things you have done for me—how can I!”

It was no time to give way to emotional outbursts, and while Bob was getting his grip on himself, I went on:

“Come along down to earth now, Bob; let us look at this thing squarely. You and I, with our position in the market, can do lots of things to help run that sixty thousand to higher figures, but six months is a short time and a million or two a world of money.”

“She knows that,” he said, “and the time is much shorter and the road to go much longer than you figure,” he replied. “This girl is as high-tensioned as the E string on a Stradivarius, and she declares she will have no charity tips or unusual favours from us or any one else. But let us not talk about that now or we’ll get discouraged. Let’s do as she says and trust to God for the outcome. Are you willing, Jim, to take her into the office as a sort of confidential secretary? If you will, I’ll take charge of her account, and together we will do all that two men can for her and her father.”

Chapter II.

The following week saw Miss Sands, of Virginia, private secretary to the head of Randolph & Randolph, established in a little office between mine and Bob’s. She had not been there a day before we knew she was a worker. She spent the hours going over reports and analysing financial statements, showing a sagacity extraordinary in so young a person. She explained her knowledge of figures by the hand-work she had done for the judge, all of whose accounts she had kept. Bob and I saw that she was bent on smothering her memory in that antidote for all ills of heart and soul—work. Her office life was simplicity itself. She spoke to no one except Bob, save in connection with such business matters of the firm’s as I might send her by one of the clerks to attend to. To the others in the banking-house she was just an unconventional young literary woman whose high social connections had gained her this opportunity of getting at the secrets of finance, from actual experience, for use in forthcoming novels. It had got abroad that she was the writer of great distinction who, under a nom de plume, had recently made quite a dent in the world’s literary shell—a suggestion that I rightly guessed was one of Bob’s delicate ways of smoothing out her path. I had tried in every way to make things easy for her, but it was impossible for me to draw her out in talk, and finally I gave it up. Had it not been that every time I passed her office door I was compelled by the fascination which I had first felt, and which, instead of diminishing, had increased with her reticence, to look in at the quiet figure with the downcast eyes, working away at her desk as though her life depended on never missing a second, I should not have known she was in the building. My wife, at my suggestion, had tried to induce her to visit us; in fact, after I let her into just enough of Beulah Sands’s story so that she could see things on a true slant, she had decided to try to bring her to our house to live. But though the girl was sweetly gentle in her appreciation of Kate’s thoughtful attentions, in her simple way she made us both feel that our efforts would be for naught, that her position must be the same as that of any other clerk in the office. We both finally left her to herself. Bob explained to me, some three weeks after she came to the office, that she received no visitors at her home, a hotel on a quiet uptown street, and that even he had never had permission to call upon her there.

But from the day she came to occupy her desk in our office, Bob was a changed man, whether for better or for worse neither Kate nor I could decide. His old bounding elasticity was gone, and with it his rollicking laugh. He was now a man where before he had been a boy, a man with a burden. Even if I had not heard Beulah Sands’s story, I should have guessed that Bob was staggering under a strange load. While before, from the close of the Stock Exchange until its opening the next morning, he was, as Kate was fond of putting it, always ready to fill in for anything from chaperon to nurse, always open for any lark we planned, from a Bohemian dinner to the opera, now weeks went by without our seeing him at our house. In the office it used to be a saying that outside gong-strikes, Bob Brownley did not know he was in the stock business. Formerly every clerk knew when Bob came or went, for it was with a rush, a shout, a laugh, and a bang of doors; and on the floor of the Stock Exchange no man played so many pranks, or filled his orders with so much jolly good-nature and hilarious boisterousness. But from the day the Virginian girl crossed his path, Bob Brownley was a man who was thinking, thinking, thinking all the time. It was only with an effort that he would keep his eyes on whomever he was talking with long enough to take in what was said, and if the saying occupied much time it would be apparent to the talker that Bob was off in the clouds. All his friends and associates remarked the change, but I alone, except perhaps Kate, had any idea of the cause. I knew that two million dollars and the coming New Year were hurdling like kangaroos over Bob’s mental rails and ditches, though I did not know it from anything he told me, for after that talk on the upper deck of the Tribesman he had shut up like a clam.