Aladdin and Company Part 7

CHAPTER VII.

We make our Landing.

Had I known how cordially our neighbors would greet our return, or how many of them would view our departure with apparently sincere regret, I might have been slower in giving Jim my promise. I proceeded, however, to carry it out; but it was nearly six months before I could pull myself and my little fortune out of the place into which we had grown.

Mr. Elkins kept me well informed regarding Lattimore affairs; and the _Herald_ followed me home. Jim's letters were long typewritten communications, dictated at speed, and mailed, sometimes one a day, at other times at intervals of weeks.

"This is a sure-enough 'winter of our discontent,'" one of these letters runs, "but the scope of our operations will widen as the frost comes out of the ground. We're now confined to the psychical field. Subjectively speaking, though, the plot thickens. Captain Tolliver is in the secondary stages of real-estate dementia, and spreads the contagion daily. There's no quarantine regulation to cover the case, and Lattimore seems doomed to the acme of prosperity. This is the age of great cities, saith the Captain, and that Lattimore is not already a town of 150,000 people is one of the strangest, one of the most inexplicable things in the world, in view of the distance we are lag of the country about us, so far as development is concerned. And as our beginning has been tardy, so will our progress be rapid, even as waters long dammed up rush out to devour the plains, etc., etc.

"In this we are all agreed. We want a good, steady, natural growth--and no boom.

"When a boom recognizes itself as such, it's all over, and the stuff off. The time for letting go of a great wheel is when it starts down hill. But our wheels are all going up--even if they are all in our heads, as yet.

"You will remember the railway connection of which I spoke to you? Well, that thing has a.s.sumed, all of a sudden, a concreteness as welcome as it is unexpected. Ballard showed me a telegram yesterday from lower Broadway (the heart of Darkest N. Y.) which tends to prove that people there are ready to finance the deal. It would have amused you to see the horizontality of the coat-tails of the management of the Lattimore & Great Western, as they flaxed round getting up a directors' meeting, so as to have a real, live directorate of this great transcontinental line for the wolves of Wall Street to do business with! Things like this are what you miss by hibernating there, instead of dropping everything and applying here for your pro rata share of the gayety of nations and the concomitant scads.

"I was elected president of the road, and as soon as we get a little track, and an engine, I expect to obtain an exchange of pa.s.ses with all my fellow monopolists in North America. I at once fired back an answer to Ballard's telegram, which must have produced an impression upon the Gould and Vanderbilt interests--if they got wind of it. If the L. & G.

W. should pa.s.s the paper stage next summer, it will do a whole lot towards carrying this burg beyond the hypnotic period of development.

"The Angus Falls branch is going to build in next summer, I am confident, and that means another division headquarters and, probably, machine-shops. I'm working with some of the trilobites here to form a pool, and offer the company grounds for additional yards and a roundhouse and shops. Captain Tolliver interviewed General Lattimore about it, and got turned down.

"'He told me, suh,' reported the Captain, in a fine white pa.s.sion, 'that if any railway system desiahs to come to Lattimore, it has his puhmission! That the Injuns didn't give him any bonus when he came; and that he had to build his own houses and yahds, by gad, at his own expense, and defend 'em, too, and that if any railroad was thinkin' of comin' hyah, it was doubtless because it was good business fo' 'em to come; and that if they wanted any of his land, were willing to pay him his price, there wouldn't be any difficulty about theiah getting it. And that if there should arise any difference, which he should deeply regret, but would try to live through, the powah of eminent domain with which railways ah clothed will enable the company to get what land is necessary by legal means.

"'I could take these observations,' said the Captain, 'as nothing except a gratuitous insult to one who approached him, suh, in a spirit of pure benevolence and civic patriotism. It shows the kind of tyrants who commanded the oppressors of the South, suh! Only his gray hairs protected him, suh, only his gray hairs!'"

"It's a little hard to separate the General from the Captain, in this report of the committee on railway extensions," said my wife.

"The only thing that's clear about it," said I, "is that Jim is having a good deal of fun with the Captain."

This became clearer as the correspondence went on.

"Tolliver thinks," said he, in another letter, "that the Angus Falls extension can be pulled through. However, I recall that only yesterday the Captain, in private, denounced the citizens of Lattimore as beneath the contempt of gentlemen of breadth of view. 'I shall dispose of my holdin's hyah,' said he, with a stately sweep indicative of their extent, 'at any sacrifice, and depaht, cuhsin' the day I devoted myself to the redemption of such cattle.'

"But, at that particular moment, he had just failed in an attempt to sell Bill Trescott a bunch of choice outlying gold bricks, and was somewhat heated with wine. This to the haughty Southron was ample excuse for confiding to me the round, unvarnished truth about us mudsills.

"Josie and I often talk of you and your wife. I don't know what I'd do out here if it weren't for Josie. She refuses to enthuse over our 'natural, healthy growth,' which we look for; but I guess that's because she doesn't care for the things that the rest of us are striving for.

But she's the only person here with whom one can really converse. You'd be astonished to see how pretty she is in her furs, and set like a jewel in my new sleigh; but I'm becoming keenly aware of the fact."

We were afterwards told that the trilobites had shaken off their fossilhood, and that the Angus Falls extension, with the engine-house and machine-shops, had been "landed."

"This," he wrote, "means enough new families to make a noticeable increase in our population. Things will be popping here soon. Come on and help shake the popper; hurry up with your moving, or it will all be over, including the shouting."

We were not entirely dependent upon Jim's letters for Lattimore news.

Mrs. Barslow kept up a desultory correspondence with Miss Trescott, begun upon some pretext and continued upon none at all. In one of these letters Josie (for so we soon learned to call her) wrote:

"Our little town is changing so that it no longer seems familiar. Not that the change is visible. Beyond an unusual number of strangers or recent comers, there is nothing new to strike the eye. But the talk everywhere is of a new railroad and other improvements. One needs only to shut one's eyes and listen, to imagine that the town is already a real city. Mr. Elkins seems to be the center of this new civic self-esteem. The air is full of it, and I admit that I am affected by it. I have

"'A feeling, as when eager crowds await, Before a palace gate, Some wondrous pageant.'

"You are indebted to Captain Tolliver for the quotation, and to Mr.

Elkins for the idea. The Captain induced me to read the book in which I found the lines. He stigmatizes the preference given to the Northern poets--Longfellow, for instance--over Timrod as 'the crowning infamy of American letters.' He has taken the trouble to lay out a course of study for me, the object of which is to place me right in my appreciation of the literary men of the South. It includes Pollard's 'Lost Cause' and the works of W. G. Simms. I have not fully promised to follow it to the end. Timrod, however, is a treat."

That last quiet winter will always be set apart in my memory, as a time like no other. It was a sitting down on a milestone to rest. Back of us lay the busy past--busy with trivial things, it seemed to me, but full of varied activity nevertheless. A boy will desire mightily to finish a cob-house; and when it is done he will smilingly knock it about the barn floor. So I was tearing down and leaving the fabric of relationship which I had once prized so highly.

The life upon which I expected to enter promised well. In fact, to a man of medium ability, only, and no training in large affairs, it promised exceedingly well. I knew that Jim was strong, and that his old regard for me had taken new life and a firm hold upon him. But when, removed from his immediate influence, I looked the situation in the face, the future loomed so mysteriously bizarre that I shrank from it. All his skimble-skamble talk about psychology and hypnotism, and that other rambling discourse of pirate caves and buccaneering cruises, made me feel sometimes as if I were about to form a partnership with Aladdin, or the King of the Golden Mountain. If he had asked me, merely, to come to Lattimore and go into the real estate and insurance business with him, I am sure I should have had none of this mental vertigo. Yet what more had he done?

As to the boom, I had, as yet, not a particle of objective confidence in it; but, subconsciously, I felt, as did the town "doomed to prosperity,"

a sense of impending events. In spite of some presentiments and doubts, it was, on the whole, with high hopes that we, on an aguish spring day, reached Lattimore with our stuff (as the Scriptures term it), and knew that, for weal or woe, it was our home.

Jim was again at the station to meet us, and seemed delighted at our arrival. I thought I saw some sort of absent-mindedness or absorbedness in his manner, so that he seemed hardly like himself. Josie was there with him, and while she and Alice were greeting each other, I saw Jim scanning the little crowd at the station as if for some other arrival.

At last, his eye told me that whatever it was for which he was looking, he had found it; and I followed his glance. It rested on the last person to alight from the train--a tall, sinewy, soldierly-built youngish man, who wore an overcoat of black, falling away in front, so as to reveal a black frock coat tightly b.u.t.toned up and a snowy shirt-front with a glittering gem sparkling from the center of it. On his head was a shining silk hat--a thing so rare in that community as to be noticeable, and to stamp the wearer as an outsider. His beard was clipped close, and at the chin ran out into a p.r.o.nounced Vand.y.k.e point. His mustaches were black, heavy, and waxed. His whole external appearance betokened wealth, and he exuded mystery. He had not taken two steps from the car before the people on the platform were standing on tiptoe to see him.

"Bus to the Centropolis?" queried the driver of the omnibus.

The stranger looked at the conveyance, filled as it was with a load of traveling men and casuals; and, frowning darkly, turned to the negro who accompanied him, saying, "Haven't you any carriage here, Pearson?"

"Yes, sah," responded the servant, pointing to a closed vehicle. "Right hyah, sah."

My wife stood looking, with a little amused smile, at the picturesque group, so out of the ordinary at the time and place. Miss Trescott was gazing intently at the stranger, and at the moment when he spoke she clutched my wife's arm so tightly as to startle her. I heard Alice make some inquiry as to the cause of her agitation, and as I looked at her, I could see in the one glance her face, gone suddenly white as death, and the dark visage of the tall stranger. And it seemed to me as if I had seen the same thing before.

Then, the negro pointing the way to the closed carriage, the group separated to left and right, the stranger pa.s.sed through to the carriage, and the picture, and with it my odd mental impression, dissolved. The negro lifted two or three heavy bags to the coachman, gave the transfer man some baggage-checks, and the equipage moved away toward the hotel. All this took place in a moment, during which the usual transactions on the platform were suspended. The conductor failed to give the usual signal for the departure of the train. The engineer leaned from the cab and gazed.

Jim's eye rested on the stranger and his servant for an instant only; but during that time he seemed to take an observation, come to a conclusion, and dismiss the whole matter.

"Here, John," said he to the drayman, "take these trunks to the Centropolis. We'd like 'em this week, too. None of that old trick of yours of dumping 'em in the crick, you know!"

"They'll be up there in five minutes all right, Mr. Elkins," said John, grinning at Jim's allusion to some accident, the knowledge of which appeared to be confined to himself and Mr. Elkins, and to const.i.tute a bond of sympathy between them. Jim turned to us with redoubled heartiness, all his absent-mindedness gone.

"I'll drive you to the hotel," said Jim. "You'll--"

"Miss Trescott is ill--" said Alice.

"Not at all," said Josie; "it has pa.s.sed entirely! Only, when you have taken Mr. and Mrs. Barslow to the hotel, will you please take me home?

Our little supper-party--I don't feel quite equal to it, if you will excuse me!"

CHAPTER VIII.

A Welcome to Wall Street and Us.

"Welcome!" intoned Captain Tolliver, with his hat in his hand, bowing low to Mrs. Barslow. "Welcome, Madam and suh, in the capacity of Lattimoreans! That we shall be the bettah fo' yo' residence among us the' can be no doubt. That you will be prospahed beyond yo' wildest dreams I believe equally cehtain. Welcome!"