Aladdin and Company Part 34

"If we can make it, we'll look in on you on our way back; but we don't promise. With cattle scattered over two counties of b.u.t.tes and canyons, we feel in a hurry when we get started home, after an absence sure to have been longer than we intended. Then, you know how I feel;--I wish the old town well, but I don't enjoy _every_ incident of my visits there.

"We expect to see the Cecil Barr-Smiths in New York. Cecil is the whole thing now with their companies--a sort of professional president in charge of the American properties; and Mrs. Cecil is as well known in some mighty good circles in London as she used to be in Lynhurst Park.

"I am glad to know that things are going toward the good with you.

Personally, I never expect to be a seven-figure man again, and don't care to be. I prefer to look after my few thousands of steers, laying on four hundred pounds each per year, far from the madding crowd. You know Riley's man who said that the little town of Tailholt was good enough for him? Well, that expresses my view of the 'J-Up-and-Down' Ranch as a hermitage. It'll do quite well. But these Eastern interests of Mrs. Jim are just now menacing to life in any hermitage. She has specifically stated on two or three occasions lately that this is no place to bring up a family. Think of a rough-rider like me in the wilds of New York! I can see plenty of ways of amusing myself down there, but not such peaceful ways as putting on my six-shooters and going out after timber wolves or mountain lions, or our local representative of the clan of the Hon. Maverick Brander. The future lowers dark with the mult.i.tudinous mouths of avenues of prosperity!"

This letter was a disappointment to Mr. Giddings. His special edition of the _Herald_ commemorative of the opening of our Auditorium must now be deprived of its James R. Elkins feature, so far as his being the guest of honor goes. But there will be Jim's photograph on the first page, and a half-tone reproduction of a picture of the wreck at the Elk Fork trestle.

"It is a matter of the deepest regret," said the _Herald_ this morning, "that Mr. Elkins cannot be with us on this auspicious occasion. He was the head of that most remarkable group of men who laid the foundations of Lattimore's greatness. Only one of them, Mr. Barslow, still lives in Lattimore, where he has devoted his life, since the crash of many years ago, to the reorganization of the failed concerns, and especially the Grain Belt Trust Company, and to the salving of their properties in the interests of the creditors. His present prominence grows out of the signal skill and ability with which he has done this work; and he must prove a great factor in the city's future development, as he has been in its past. Mr. Hinckley, the third member of the syndicate, now far advanced in years, is living happily with his daughter and her husband.

The fourth, Mr. Cornish, resides in Paris, where he is well known as a daring and successful financial operator. He, of all the syndicate, retired from the Lattimore enterprises rich.

"There have been years when the names of these men were not held in the respect and esteem they deserve. The town was going backward. People who had been rich were, many of them, in absolute distress for the necessaries of life. And these men, in a vague sort of way, were blamed for it. Now, however, we can begin to see the wisdom of their plans and the vastness of the scope of their combinations. Nothing but the element of time was wanting, abundantly to vindicate their judgment and sagacity. The industries they founded succeeded as soon as they were divorced from the real-estate speculation which unavoidably entered into their management at the outset. It is regrettable that their founders could not share in their success."

"Nothing but the element of time," said I to Captain Tolliver, who sat by me in the car as I read this editorial, "prevents the hot-air balloon from carrying its load over the Rockies."

"Nothing but luck," said the Captain, "evah could have beaten us. It was the Fleischmann failure, and it was nothing else. As to the great qualities of Mr. Elkins, suh, the editorial puts it too mild by fah. He was a t.i.tan, suh, a t.i.tan, and we shall not look upon his like again.

This town at this moment is vegetating fo' the want of some fo'ceful Elkins to put life into it. The trilobites, as he so well dubbed them, ah in control again. What's this Auditorium we've built? A good thing fo' the city, cehtainly, a ve'y good thing: but see the difficulty, the humiliatin' difficulty we had, in gettin' togethah the paltry and trivial hundred and fifty thousand dolla's! Why in that elder day, in such a cause, we'd have called a meetin' in that old office of Elkins & Barslow's, and made it up out of ouah own funds in fifteen minutes. It's the so't of cattle we've got hyah as citizens that's handicappin' us; but in spite of this, suh, ouah unsuhpa.s.sed strategical position is winnin' fo' us. We ah just now on the eve of great developments, Barslow, great developments! All my holdin's ah withdrawn from mahket until fu'theh notice. Foh, as we ah so much behind the surroundin'

country in growth, we must soon take a great leap fo'wahd. We ah past the boom stage, I thank G.o.d, and what we ah now goin' to get is a rathah brisk but entiahly healthy growth. A good, healthy growth, Barslow, and no boom!"

The disposition to moralize comes on with advancing middle age, and I could not help philosophizing on this perennial optimism of the Captain's. He had used these very words when, so long ago, we had begun our "cruise." The financial cycle was complete. The world had pa.s.sed from hope to intoxication, from intoxication to panic, from panic to the depths, from this depression, ascending the long slope of gradual recovery, to the uplands of hope once more. Now, as twenty years ago, this feeling covered the whole world, was most p.r.o.nounced in the newer and more progressive lands, and was voiced by Captain Tolliver, the grizzled swashbuckler of the land market. In it I recognized the ripple on the sands heralding the approach of another wave of speculation, which must roll sh.o.r.eward in splendor and might, and, like its predecessors, must spend itself in thunderous ruin.

I often think of what General Lattimore was accustomed to say about these matters, and how Josie echoed his words as to the evil of fortunes coming to those who never earned them. Some time, I hope, we shall grow wise enough to--

I humbly beg your pardon, Madam, and thank you. That charming gesture of impatience was the one thing needful to admonish me that lectures are dull, and that the time has come to write _finis_. The rest of the story? Cornish--Jim--Josie--Antonia? Oh, this p.r.o.neness of the business man to talk shop! Left to myself, I should have allowed their history to remain to the end of time, unresolved as to entanglements, and them unhealed as to bruises, bodily and sentimental. And, yet, those were the things which most filled our minds in the dark days after we missed connection with the Pendleton special.

In the first spasm of the crisis I was more concerned for Jim's safety than with the long-feared monetary cataclysm. _That_ was upon us in such power as to make us helpless; but Jim, wounded and prostrated as he was, his very life in danger, was a concrete subject of anxiety and a comfortingly promising object of care.

"If we can keep this from a.s.suming the character of true pneumonia,"

said Dr. Aylesbury, "there's no reason why he shouldn't recover."

He had been unconscious and then delirious from the time when he and I had been picked up there by the railroad-dump, until we were well on our way home on Kittrick's relief-train. At last he looked about him, and his eyes rested on Corcoran.

"h.e.l.lo, Jack!" said he weakly; and as his glance took in Ole, he smiled and said: "A h.e.l.lufa notion, you tank, do you? Ole, where's Schwartz?"

Ole twisted and squirmed, but found no words.

"We couldn't find Schwartz," said Kittrick. "He was so cold, he went right down with the cab."

"I see," said Jim. "It was bitter cold!"

He said no more. I wondered at this, and almost blamed him, even in his stricken state, for not feeling the peculiar poignancy of our regret for the loss of Schwartz. And then, his face being turned away, I peeped over to see if he slept, and saw where his tears had dropped silently on the piled-up cushions of his couch.

Mrs. Trescott came several times a day to inquire as to Mr. Elkins's welfare; but Josie not at all. Antonia's carriage stopped often at the door; and somebody stood always at the telephone, answering the stream of questions. But when, on that third evening, it became known that the last "battle in the west" had gone against us, that all our great Round Table was dissolved, and that Jim's was a sinking and not a rising sun, public interest suddenly fell off. And the poor fellow whose word but yesterday might have stood against the world, now lay there fighting for very life, and few so poor to do him reverence. I had been so proud of his splendid and dominant strength that this, I think, was the thing that brought the bitterness of failure most keenly home to me. I could not feel satisfied with Josie. There were good reasons why she might have refused to choose between Jim and the man who had ruined him, while there was danger of her choice itself becoming the occasion of war between them. But that was over now, and Cornish was victorious.

Gradually the fear grew upon me that we had rated Josie's womanhood higher than she herself held it, and that Cornish was to win her also.

He had that magnetism which so attracted her as a girl, but that I had believed incapable of holding her as a woman. And now he had wealth, and Jim was poor, and the whole world stood with its back to us, and Josie held aloof. I was afraid he would speak of it, every time he tried to talk.

That night when the evening papers came out with all their plenitude of bad news (for we had pleased Watson by dying on the evening papers'

time), it was a dark moment for us. Jim lay silent and unmoving, as if all his ebullient energy had gone forever. The physician omitted the dressing of his wound, because, he said, he feared the patient was not strong enough to bear it: and this, as well as the strange semi-stupor of the sufferer, frightened me. Jim had said little, and most of his words had been of the trivial things of the sick-room. Only once did he refer to the great affairs in which we had been for so long engrossed.

"What day is this?" he asked.

"Friday," said I, "the twenty-first."

"By this time," said he feebly, "we must be pretty well shot to rags."

"Never mind about that," said I, holding his hands in mine. "Never mind, Jim!"

"Some of those gophers," said he, after a while, "used to learn to ...

rub their noses ... in the dirt ... and always stick their heads up--outside the snare!"

"Yes," said I, "I remember. Go to sleep, old man!"

I thought him delirious, and he knew and resented it; being evidently convinced that he had just made a wise remark. It touched me to hear him, even in his extremity, return to those boyhood days when we trapped and hunted and fished together. He saw my pitying look.

"I'm all right," said he; but he said no more.

The nurse came in, and told me that Mrs. Barslow wished to see me in the library. I went down, and found Josie and Alice together.

"I got a letter from--from Mr. Cornish," said she, "telling me that he was returning from Chicago to-night, and was coming to see me. I ran over, because--and told mamma to say that I couldn't see him."

"See him by all means," said I with some bitterness. "You should make it a point to see him. Mr. Cornish is a success. He alone of us all has shown real greatness."

And it dawned upon me, as I said it, what Jim had meant by his reference to the gopher which learns to stick its head up "outside the snare."

"I want to ask you," said Josie, "is it all true--what was in the paper to-night about all of you, Mr. Hinckley and yourself, and--all of you having failed?"

"It is only a part of the truth," I replied. "We are ruined absolutely."

She said nothing by way of condolence, and uttered no expressions of regret or sympathy. She was apparently in a state of suppressed excitement, and started at sounds and movements.

"Is Mr. Elkins very ill?" said she at length.

"So ill," said Alice, "that unless he rallies soon, we shall look for the worst."

No more at this than at the other ill news did Josie express any regret or concern. She sat with her fingers clasped together, gazing before her at the fire in the grate, as if making some deep and abstruse calculation. But when the door-bell rang, she started and listened attentively, as the servant went to the door, and then returned to us.

"A gentleman, Mr. Cornish, to see Miss Trescott," said the maid. "And he says he must see her for a moment."

"Alice," said Josie, under her breath, "you go, please! Say to him that I cannot see him--now! Oh, why did he follow me here?"

"Josie," said Alice dramatically, "you don't mean to say that you are afraid of this man! Are you?"

"No, no!" said the girl doubtfully and distressfully; "but it's so hard to say 'No' to him! If you only knew all, Alice, you wouldn't blame me--and you'd go!"

"If you're so far gone--under his influence," said Alice, "that you can't trust yourself to say 'No,' Josephine Trescott, go, in Heaven's name, and say 'Yes,' and be the wife of a millionaire--and a traitor and scoundrel!"