Stories That End Well Part 13

Orr gave him no answer. Robbins watched his impa.s.sive face and frowned.

"He's not bad-hearted, but he's desperate. You can't appeal to a desperate man," he thought, "and the other boys are the same way.

There'll be wild work there to-night, unless that young fool has the papers with him and will give them up. You're a fool, George Robbins, to mix yourself up in it on the chance of getting a few dollars from a Kansas City paper for a telegram!"

Silently the two men looked at the nearing lights, while the wagon creaked and swayed and rattled over the road.

"We got to save the lantern to go home by," Orr remarked at last, "else I'd light up; they ain't got any more lights in the streets. But I guess we can see."

There were enough lights in the windows to reveal the wide untidiness of the street, the black, boarded windows of the empty shops, the gaps in the sidewalk, the haggard gardens, where savage winds had blown the heart out of deserted rose-trees and geraniums. In general the sky-line was low and the roofs the simplest peaks; but it was broken in a few places by three and four storied brick buildings of the florid pomp on which a raw Western town loves to lavish its money. Now they loomed, dark and silent, landmarks of vanished ambition. Robbins, who was a man of parts and education, with a fanciful turn, felt the air of defeat and desolation hanging over the town choke him like miasma. To him the dreariness was the more poignant for the half a dozen little shops that still flickered their challenge to fate in the guise of a dim coal-oil lamp in the window. There appeared to be no customers at these dismal marts; in some cases not even the shop-keeper was visible, and only the stove in the rear of the room kept a lonesome red eye on the shelves.

The sole sparks of life in the place were at the hotel. It had been built "during the boom"--a large rectangle of wood, with a cheap and gaudy piazza, all painted four shades of green, which the climate had burned and blistered and bleached into one sickly, mottled brown. Long ago the stables of the hostelry had been abandoned, but this night the stable yard was full of wagons.

The upper story of the hotel was dark, and the greater part of the lower story; but the kitchen was bright, and yellow light leaked through every c.h.i.n.k and crack in the office blinds.

"Boys have turned out well, I guess," said Robbins.

"They _better_ turn out!" said Orr.

No word was spoken by either while they unhitched their horses, led them within the sheds, and tied them among the sorry company already housed.

Robbins noted that after Orr had laid the blanket which had served them for robe on one thin back, he flung his own quilt over the other. Then they stumbled (for they were unwieldy with cold) through the yard to the hotel.

The office was full of men, gathered about the stove, talking to each other. The innkeeper sat behind his counter, affecting to busy himself with a blotted ledger. Originally he had been a stout man, but he had lost flesh of late years. He was wrinkled and flabby, and the furtive eyeshots that he cast toward the stove were anxious beyond his concealing. Any one, however, could perceive that matters of heavy import were being discussed. The miserably clad men about the stove all looked sullen. There was none of the easy-going badinage so habitual with Westerners. They exchanged glances rather than words; what words were spoken were uttered in low tones.

"Where is he?" said Orr, in the same undertone to a large man in a buffalo coat. The large man was the sheriff of the county. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the dining-room.

"What's he like?"

"Little feller with a game leg."

Orr frowned. Robbins felt uncomfortable. A gaunt man on the outskirts of the circle added: "He's powerful slick, though; you can bet your life.

That girl Susy is all won over already; and she's suspecting something, sure's shooting. I guess she's warned him there's something in the air."

"Well, if there is, I don't know it," said the sheriff.

"You never _will_ know anything about it, either," a gray-haired man added.

"That's right, Kinney," two or three spoke at once. But immediately a silence fell on them. Robbins, who felt himself an outsider, could see that the others drew closer together. Once or twice he caught sinister murmurs. He began to wish that he had not come.

"It would be no earthly use for me to chip in and try to soften them,"

he thought. "They're crazy with defeat and misery and the fool stuff campaign orators have crammed down their throats."

Just then the dining-room door opened, and Robbins was the only one of the group to turn his head. The other men gazed at the fire, and the heavy silence grew heavier.

The man who came out of the room was young, slight of figure, and he limped a little. Nevertheless, there was nothing of dejection in his bearing or his face. He was freckled to a degree, smooth-shaven, and his teeth were beautiful. He had fine eyes also, a deep blue, flashing like steel as they moved from one object to another. The eyes were keen, alert, and determined; but being set rather wide apart under his light brows, they gave the face a candid, almost artless, look, and when he smiled the deep dimple in his cheek made it as merry as a child's.

"Good evening, gentlemen," said he cheerfully. No one responded. Robbins made a gurgle in his throat, which the newcomer generously accepted for salutation, promptly approaching the fire at Robbins' elbow.

"Cold weather," said he. Two or three of the company lifted their heads and eyed the speaker. Robbins wondered were they as keenly conscious as he of the young fellow's trimly fitted clothes, what good quality that rough plaided brown stuff was, how dainty was his linen. He looked at the home people's ragged coats, he thought of the poverty that he knew, and the reflection of a sneer was on his own lips, and, somehow, a lump in his throat.

"Too cold weather for folks to travel unless they're wanted bad!" said the gray-haired man on the edge of the company. There was a thrill of some strong feeling in his deep voice.

"It does seem that way," agreed the young man with undiminished vivacity. "I am glad to get to a shelter. By the way, I hear this is a dry town. Will some of you gentlemen have something with me?" He had pulled out a flask and was flashing his brilliant smile at Robbins.

"No, thank you, I don't drink," said Robbins; but he felt his throat itching at the sight.

"We'll drink your licker after we've finished our business with you,"

the gray man struck in. He was old Captain Sparks, who had been very bitter since his eldest son went crazy with overwork and sunstroke and killed himself. The other men laughed. They looked at each other; they looked with goading hate in their dull eyes at the stranger; and they laughed.

"Here, Johnny," said the young man, taking no notice, "run up to twenty-five and fetch me the bag there, the black one. If we are to drink to our business, I want you all to join. You are all interested, I take it? And get some gla.s.ses while you are about it."

The boy whom he addressed, the landlord's son, a lad of twelve, had been busy staring at the stranger ever since he entered the room. He ran away, but as he ran could not restrain himself from flinging one or two glances back over his shoulder.

"Don't you smoke, either?" said the stranger to Robbins, his hand to his breast pocket.

"Only a pipe," answered Robbins. He wished that he didn't feel an absurd, morbid sympathy for the poor fool's pluck sneaking into his consciousness.

"What are we waiting for?" The captain whispered it to a mild-eyed, short-bearded man next him; but the captain's whisper carried far. "Aw, give him rope!" suggested the mild-eyed man; "maybe he ain't so sandy's he seems."

Not seeming to recognize any chill in his reception, the young stranger approached the stove. No one moved to admit him to the inner circle; this, also, he did not seem to observe. "This whole country looks as if you had been having hard times," he continued. His voice had full, rich, magnetic notes, but its unfamiliar intonations jarred on his hearers; they knew them to belong to the East, and they hated the East. "It's pretty sad to ride through miles and miles of farming country and see the burned fence-posts that caught fire from the cinders, just lying where they fell, and the smoke not coming out of one farm-house chimney in six. It looks as if the farmers out this way had simply given up the fight."

"You've hit it," said the mild-eyed man; "they have. Some of them have moved away and some of them have killed themselves, after they've lost their stock on chattel mortgages and lost their land to the improvement company. There ought to be lots of ghosts on those abandoned farms and in those houses where the fences are down. This country is full of ghosts. We ain't much better than ghosts ourselves."

"It was the three dry years, I suppose."

"That and the mortgage sharks and the Shylocks from the East," old Captain Sparks interrupted in a venomous tone; "what pickings the drought left they got."

"Pretty rough!" said the stranger, declining the combat again. "There's one man I want to meet here; his name is Russell--Doctor Russell."

The mild-eyed man explained that his name was Russell; the other men looked puzzled and suspicious. "What's his little game?" whispered the captain. "It won't go, whatever it is," said the man next him. Robbins heard question and answer distinctly; but the young fellow near him did not wince. "Are you the one that wrote to Fairport, Doctor Russell? I guess you must be."

"Yes, I wrote to Fairport," said Russell.

"Well, I hope you liked the barrel we sent, and the boxes. They were going to send them to another place, but your letter decided us. That's my church, you know, which sent them. And, for that matter, it was your letter first turned my father's attention to investing in your part of the country. Oh, tell me, where did that tea go? My mother _would_ send her best London mixture--"

"Was it your mother?" Robbins spoke. With a red face and a flash of his eyes at the sullen group about him, he withdrew his chair, making a clear pa.s.sage to the stove. "I'd like to thank her, then, and her son for her; that tea and that quince jam--whose was the quince jam?"

"I rather think my mother put that in, too."

"Well, it almost cured my wife; it was better than medicine, that and the tea, for, not to mention that we couldn't get any medicine, it put heart into her as medicine couldn't. I wonder was it your mother, or who was it put in that volume of college songs? _I_ got that. You wouldn't think it, but I'm a university man--Harvard--"

The young fellow caught his hand and gripped it hard. "Harvard? So am I--Martin Wallace, '92."

"My name is George Robbins, and I'm a good deal farther back; and, as you can see, I'm down on my luck. But there's no need going into my hard-luck story; it's like a lot of our stories here. You see where we are--hardly shoes to our feet; not because we have been shiftless or idle, or have wronged anybody; yet the cutthroats and thieves in the penitentiary have had better fare and suffered less with cold and hunger than we have. And it's not that we are fools, either; we're not uneducated. There are at least three other college men in our community; there's Doc Russell--"

"I _am_," drawled Russell; "much good it's done me; but I won honors at the University of Iowa."

"I didn't win any honors, but I went to the State University--was graduated there before I went to Harvard. But--you aren't Teddy Russell, Teddy Russell of the Glee Club and the football eleven?"

"Yes, I am Teddy Russell."