Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories Part 24

Cargan asked coolly; shoved his hands into his pockets, and puffed clouds from his cigar.

Different worlds of imagination revolved in the two men's minds.

Theophilus Waldron thought of the children, and of his father the governor, and of the family pride. Sudden poverty was as bad as disgrace. 'I didn't mean it that way,' he answered hurriedly. 'I'm in temporary difficulties. My house is mortgaged. I've borrowed money from my wife--and other places.'--He was too proud to add, 'This is confidential.'--'My boy's just entered college, my girl's just come out.

It isn't just the money--' a gush of emotion reddened his face--'You've got to pull me through, Cargan. It's impossible; it's out of the question for me to break now!'

But Cargan was remembering how he lost his job in the department store and couldn't pay the rent. When he was kicked out, n.o.body said it was impossible! n.o.body said it was impossible when they went into the top of a tenement! The contrast made him bitter; but it was the thought that he had never felt it to be impossible, the inescapable inferiority always forced upon him in the presence of Waldron, which roused his temper.

'Business is business, Mr. Waldron,' he said curtly. 'Ab-so-lute-ly, we won't take the risk.'

They were rattling through coal-sheds and grain-elevators at the edge of a town. Waldron got up stiffly and carefully brushed the cinders from his coat.

'This is Bloomfield, I think,' he said coldly. 'I'm meeting my family here. Mr. Cargan, there are considerations above business.' His voice failed a little. 'This is a matter of life and death.'

Cargan had heard that bluff before. 'What d' you mean?' he grunted.

Mr. Waldron was staring fixedly out of the window. 'I mean,' he faltered, 'that I may not be able to stand up under it.' And then his voice resumed its desperate certainty. 'I mean, sir, that what you propose is impossible. I mean that ab-so-lute-ly you cannot sell me out.'

He bowed and felt his way down the corridor.

'I can't, can't I!' Cargan flung after him; then jerked a sheet from the telegraph pad in the rack beside him and wrote: 'Sell out Waldron at noon to-morrow unless 5000 collateral.' 'Something'll drop for you, old boy,' he growled, addressed the telegram to his partner, and gave it to the porter.

Outside, Cargan heard a burst of merry voices and saw Waldron hurried away by two laughing girls to an automobile waiting with a trunk strapped behind it. Mrs. Waldron followed. She was a stiff woman, a little faded, quietly dressed. Her face was troubled, and when they reached the motor, she caught her husband's elbow gently as if to ask him something, but he merely nodded and turned her glance toward Cargan's window. She bowed and smiled very sweetly in his direction, and Cargan smiled sourly in return. Then the children hustled the old folks into the tonneau and they were off, just as the train started.

Cargan felt hardly used. 'A man's got to look out for himself,' he thought angrily. 'Business is business--that's the thing for him to remember. "It's impossible!" Nevertheless, in self-defense he began to calculate what it might have cost to carry the account, until the appalling magnitude of the risk shut off the discussion. 'The darned old self-confident aristocrat!' he murmured, working himself up into a fury.

'Thinks he can bluff me, but he'll find out what's impossible, believe _me_!' Then he dispelled his irritation by a c.o.c.ktail and hurried into the diner.

He snored in his berth while the train ran out farther and farther upon the great Kansas plain; slept while signs of culture disappeared one by one, and arose in the midst of an endless, unfamiliar world of gra.s.s.

When he sat down in the diner for his morning meal, the great wheel of the horizon rimmed round his little train without a notch on the perfect circle; over night the outer world had changed, but he was absorbed in fitting his choices into a sixty-cent breakfast.

The train stopped quickly and firmly, and lay dead upon the prairie.

'Eccentrics or hot-box,' said the man who jumped off the step beside him. 'Nothing much else goes wrong with an engine nowadays. What is it, Bill?'

And the conductor, looking about him to see that no more pa.s.sengers were within earshot, answered, 'Eccentrics--two hours anyway.'

Cargan flung his cigarette on the ground. 'I'll miss my connection at Hay Junction!' he protested. 'I've gotta be in Hamden this afternoon.'

'Walk then,' said the conductor stolidly. 'It's only ten miles from here straight across.'

There was no house in sight, no road, nothing but the dead train, the new land of endless shimmering prairies, and, beyond the ditch, a single horseman looking curiously at the long cars and the faces strained against the gla.s.s of the windows.

'Say, you!' Cargan called, 'can you get an auto anywhere here?'

The figure looked at him impa.s.sively, then shook its dusty head.

'Or a team?'

It shook its head again.

'Or a--horse?' Cargan hesitated. He had never ridden a horse.

A sudden gleaming idea shot across the man's solemn features. He slid off his pony and led him nearer the ditch.

'Say'--he suddenly became voluble,--'you said you wanted to get to Hamden. Well, if you'll make it five plunks, and give me your ticket, you can take this horse, an' I'll go round by train. Say--do you want to?'

Cargan was tempted. All you had to do was to stick on.

'What'll I do with my suit-case?'

'Gimme it to take for you. I guess it ain't worth more'n my horse.'

II

They helped him on, and pointed out the dim line of telephone poles which marked a road a mile beyond. He walked his horse onward, not daring to trot, struck the dusty highway, rode on over an imperceptible roll of the plains, and was alone on a vast bare earth, naked as when born from the womb of time.

Plover swung up before him with melancholy cries. A soft haze rose from the plains. They grew more vast, more endless. In the north, a white cloud-ma.s.s piled itself up and up until it seemed as if it might topple over upon the flat world beneath. He had never before looked at the country except as real estate, never seen the plains, and a curious new sense of the bigness of the earth oppressed him. He felt very small and very mean. The humiliation of his spirits was a novel feeling and an unpleasant one; he tried to hum it away:--

'Just wait till I strike Broadway And watch me with the girls, For I'm the man that invented it-- The hair that always curls.'

His harsh voice in the stillness was ridiculous,--even to him,--but when he stopped singing, the silence flowed over him as a stream that had been held back. The sky was enormous; he was only a speck on the vast floor. As he plodded on and on and on through the dust, he began to grow dizzy from the glare and the heat. He could not collect his thoughts for business. A curious sense of weakened ident.i.ty perplexed him, and his head was full of drifting pictures--Waldron's face among them. That face lingered. He saw him looking vaguely out of the car window--saying that he couldn't stand up under it--that it was 'impossible.' He wondered if it was a bluff, after all. The face faded away leaving a dull pity behind it, a struggling remorse. Cargan shifted uneasily in his saddle, and tried to think of business. But instead of business queer childish ideas began floating in and out of his mind, accompanied by words remembered from Sundays in his boyhood. He was alone with G.o.d. G.o.d saw into his heart. A little nervous shiver ran over him, and when he checked it with a laugh there followed a wave of superst.i.tious emotion.

A low wave of the prairies had hidden from him a little house and barn standing crudely new against the sky in the distance. Tiny figures were moving behind the buildings, and a dust-cloud rose from the highway in front. Cargan suddenly became conscious of his appearance--his serge suit, his straw hat, his awkward seat in the saddle. The loneliness of the plains had shaken his usual self-a.s.surance.

'Maybe they'll think I stole this horse. Guess I'll go round,' he said aloud. He jerked his steed from the road into the gra.s.s, and urged him into a trot. Instantly he found himself beaten and jolted like a ship in a tempest. He lost a stirrup, he slipped sidewise on the saddle; then in a panicky fright he began to shout and saw at the bit. Frightened by the voice and the thunder of hoofs, a chaparral c.o.c.k darted from beneath the horse's nose. It was enough to make the beast swerve, then toss his head, and in a panic madder than his rider's, break into a run and dash unrestrainably onward. Cargan, numb with fright, leaned over his neck and wound his hands in the mane. The speed sickened him. The flat earth swung beneath, the sky swam dizzily. He dared not pull on the reins; he could only hold on grimly and shut his eyes. Once he slipped, and, screaming, saw for an instant a blur of gra.s.s before he could pull himself back to safety. And then the speed increased, the sweaty shoulders labored beneath him, and his senses whirled.

He did not note how far they ran; but at last came a slower motion, a gallop, and then a trot. Weak from exhaustion, he was b.u.mped from the saddle, and found himself clutching and kicking with both arms around his horse's neck. Flinging himself outward, he rolled over on the soft ground, and lay groaning on the prairie. The well-trained horse stopped and began to graze; he too was quivering with fatigue, but his fright was over. The sun was burning near the zenith. The world again was empty, and this time there was no road.

Cargan was lost.

When he recovered a little, he caught the horse, and, too shaken to mount him, limped on, leading him by the bridle, in what direction he did not know. Pangs of hunger and faintness a.s.sailed him. The awful loneliness chilled him through in spite of the blaze of heat and light.

He remembered stories of men who had wandered on the prairie, round and round in an endless circle, until they had gone crazy and blown out their brains. A profound pity for himself stirred him. Never had he so felt the need of humanity, of human aid. He would have given a hundred dollars to be walking up Main Street, with the boys calling to him from Rooney's cigar store, and the world where it was yesterday.

Just in front a little calf stumbled to its feet and ran toward them, mooing piteously. It, too, was lost. Cargan stroked its nostrils, and a sympathy for all suffering things flowed through his heart. He thought with a shudder of Waldron, pacing somewhere like himself, alone, lost, helpless, his pride gone. In his awakened imagination, he saw him wandering nearer and nearer the fatal act. 'He'll shoot himself. I ought to done something,' he whispered, with a sudden rush of unfamiliar emotion; and all the sentiment in his nature heaved and struggled to the light.

A cow lowed somewhere beyond them; his horse p.r.i.c.ked up his ears, and the calf ambled off in the direction of the sound. Cargan limped after hurriedly, leading his horse. A hundred yards brought them to the edge of a slight bowl in the plains, with a little moisture around which pewees were flying, and his heart leaped to see beside it a tiny house of unpainted boards. Wires stretched from one window, along the depression which led westward, until they disappeared in the endless horizon; and, as he paused to survey, a sharp bell rang.

'h.e.l.lo, is that Annie?' came faintly across the silence.

He looked at his watch, and saw that it was only eleven. 'I'll talk to Casey about Waldron,' he said guiltily. Relief for his escape, and still more the hush of that enormous plain, the solemnity of the great and shining sky, filled him with high and n.o.ble thoughts.

'Say, is Hamden near here?' he asked of a slim woman in a gingham dress who appeared at the door.

She nodded.

'And say, can I use your telephone?'

She hesitated, looking him over, then motioned him incuriously to the stool behind the pine table. Solitude seemed to have made her unready of speech. He called Cargan & Casey, then waited, fidgeting. Silence invaded the little kitchen. The clock ticked in a hush; the chickens droned in whispers; the woman herself worked over the stove with slow fingers, moving the kettles gently. Cargan & Casey were 'busy.' He fumed for an instant, then gave his own home number.