The Riverman Part 43

"No use!" said he. "Got to make it a vacation. I'm going to run over to see how the family is."

Strangely enough, the young couple had not discussed before the question of a name. One evening at twilight, when Orde was perched at the foot of the bed, Carroll brought up the subject.

"He ought to be named for you," she began timidly. "I know that, Jack, and I'd love to have another Jack Orde in the family; but, dear, I've been thinking about father. He's a poor, forlorn old man, who doesn't get much out of life. And it would please him so--oh, more than you can imagine such a thing could please anybody!"

She looked up at him doubtfully. Orde said nothing, but walked around the bed to where the baby lay in his little cradle. He leaned over and took the infant up in his gingerly awkward fashion.

"How are you to-day, Bobby Orde?" he inquired of the blinking mite.

XXVIII

The first season of the Boom Company was most successful. Its prospects for the future were bright. The drive had been delivered to its various owners at a price below what it had cost them severally, and without the necessary attendant bother. Therefore, the loggers were only too willing to renew their contracts for another year. This did not satisfy Newmark, however.

"What we want," he told Orde, "is a charter giving us exclusive rights on the river, and authorising us to ask toll. I'm going to try and get one out of the legislature."

He departed for Lansing as soon as the a.s.sembly opened, and almost immediately became lost in one of those fierce struggles of politics not less bitter because concealed. Heinzman was already on the ground.

Newmark had the shadow of right on his side, for he applied for the charter on the basis of the river improvements already put in by his firm. Heinzman, however, possessed much political influence, a deep knowledge of the subterranean workings of plot and counterplot, and a "barrel." Although armed with an apparently incontestable legal right, Newmark soon found himself fighting on the defensive. Heinzman wanted the improvements already existing condemned and sold as a public utility to the highest bidder. He offered further guarantees as to future improvements. In addition were other and more potent arguments proffered behind closed doors. Many cases resolved themselves into a bald question of cash. Others demanded diplomacy. Jobs, fat contracts, business favours, influence were all flung out freely--bribes as absolute as though stamped with the dollar mark. Newspapers all over the State were pressed into service. These, bought up by Heinzman and his prospective partners in a lucrative business, spoke virtuously of private piracy of what are now called public utilities, the exploiting of the people's natural wealths, and all the rest of a specious reasoning the more convincing in that it was in many other cases only too true. The independent journals, uninformed of the rights of the case, either remained silent on the matter, or groped in a puzzled and undecided manner on both sides.

Against this secret but effective organisation Newmark most unexpectedly found himself pitted. He had antic.i.p.ated being absent but a week; he became involved in an affair of months.

With decision he applied himself to the problem. He took rooms at the hotel, sent for Orde, and began at once to set in motion the machinery of opposition. The refreshed resources of the company were strained to the breaking point in order to raise money for this new campaign opening before it. Orde, returning to Lansing after a trip devoted to the carrying out of Newmark's directions as to finances, was dismayed at the tangle of strategy and cross-strategy, innuendo, vague and formless cobweb forces by which he was surrounded. He could make nothing of them.

They brushed his face, he felt their influence, yet he could place his finger on no tangible and comprehensible solidity. Among these delicate and complicated cross-currents Newmark moved silent, cold, secret. He seemed to understand them, to play with them, to manipulate them as elements of the game. Above them was the hollow shock of the ostensible battle--the speeches, the loud talk in lobbies, the newspaper virtue, indignation, accusations; but the real struggle was here in the furtive ways, in whispered words delivered hastily aside, in hotel halls on the way to and from the stairs, behind closed doors of rooms without open transoms.

Orde in comic despair acknowledged that it was all "too deep for him."

Nevertheless, it was soon borne in on him that the new company was struggling for its very right to existence. It had been doing that from the first; but now, to Orde the fight, the existence, had a new importance. The company up to this point had been a scheme merely, an experiment that might win or lose. Now, with the history of a drive behind it, it had become a living ent.i.ty. Orde would have fought against its dissolution as he would have fought against a murder. Yet he had practically to stand one side, watching Newmark's slender, gray-clad, tense figure gliding here and there, more silent, more reserved, more watchful every day.

The fight endured through most of the first half of the session. When finally it became evident to Heinzman that Newmark would win, he made the issue of toll rates the ditch of his last resistance, trying to force legal charges so low as to eat up the profits. At the last, however, the bill pa.s.sed the board. The company had its charter.

At what price only Newmark could have told. He had fought with the tense earnestness of the nervous temperament that fights to win without count of the cost. The firm was established, but it was as heavily in debt as its credit would stand. Newmark himself, though as calm and reserved and precise as ever, seemed to have turned gray, and one of his eyelids had acquired a slight nervous twitch which persisted for some months. He took his seat at the desk, however, as calmly as ever. In three days the scandalised howls of bribery and corruption had given place in the newspapers to some other sensation.

"Joe," said Orde to his partner, "how about all this talk? Is there really anything in it? You haven't gone in for that business, have you?"

Newmark stretched his arms wearily.

"Press bought up," he replied. "I know for a fact that old Stanford got five hundred dollars from some of the Heinzman interests. I could have swung him back for an extra hundred, but it wasn't worth while. They howl bribery at us to distract attention from their own performances."

With this evasive reply Orde contented himself. Whether it satisfied him or whether he was loath to pursue the subject further it would be impossible to say.

"It's cost us plenty, anyway," he said, after a moment. "The proposition's got a load on it. It will take us a long time to get out of debt. The river driving won't pay quite so big as we thought it would," he concluded, with a rueful little laugh.

"It will pay plenty well enough," replied Newmark decidedly, "and it gives us a vantage point to work from. You don't suppose we are going to quit at river driving, do you? We want to look around for some timber of our own; there's where the big money is. And perhaps we can buy a schooner or two and go into the carrying trade--the country's alive with opportunity. Newmark and Orde means something to these fellows now. We can have anything we want, if we just reach out for it."

His thin figure, ordinarily slightly askew, had straightened; his steel-gray, impersonal eyes had lit up behind the bowed gla.s.ses and were seeing things beyond the wall at which they gazed. Orde looked up at him with a sudden admiration.

"You're the brains of this concern," said he.

"We'll get on," replied Newmark, the fire dying from his eyes.

XXIX

In the course of the next eight years Newmark and Orde floated high on that flood of apparent prosperity that attends a business well conceived and pa.s.sably well managed. The Boom and Driving Company made money, of course, for with the margin of fifty per cent or thereabouts necessitated by the temporary value of the improvements, good years could hardly fail to bring good returns. This, it will be remembered, was a stock company. With the profits from that business the two men embarked on a separate copartnership. They made money at this, too, but the burden of debt necessitated by new ventures, constantly weighted by the heavy interest demanded at that time, kept affairs on the ragged edge.

In addition, both Orde and Newmark were more inclined to extension of interests than to "playing safe." The a.s.sets gained in one venture were promptly pledged to another. The ramifications of debt, property, mortgages, and expectations overlapped each other in a cobweb of interests.

Orde lived at ease in a new house of some size surrounded by grounds.

He kept two servants: a blooded team of horses drew the successor to the original buckboard. Newmark owned a sail yacht of five or six tons, in which, quite solitary, he took his only pleasure. Both were considered men of substance and property, as indeed they were. Only, they risked dollars to gain thousands. A succession of bad years, a panic-contraction of money markets, any one of a dozen possible, though not probable, contingencies would render it difficult to meet the obligations which constantly came due, and which Newmark kept busy devising ways and means of meeting. If things went well--and it may be remarked that legitimately they should--Newmark and Orde would some day be rated among the millionaire firms. If things went ill, bankruptcy could not be avoided. There was no middle ground. Nor were Orde and his partner unique in this; practically every firm then developing or exploiting the natural resources of the country found itself in the same case.

Immediately after the granting of the charter to drive the river the partners had offered them an opportunity of acquiring about thirty million feet of timber remaining from Morrison and Daly's original holdings. That firm was very anxious to begin development on a large scale of its Beeson Lake properties in the Saginaw waters. Daly proposed to Orde that he take over the remnant, and having confidence in the young man's abilities, agreed to let him have it on long-time notes.

After several consultations with Newmark, Orde finally completed the purchase. Below the booms they erected a mill, the machinery for which they had also bought of Daly, at Redding. The following winter Orde spent in the woods. By spring he had banked, ready to drive, about six million feet.

For some years these two sorts of activity gave the partners about all they could attend to. As soon as the drive had pa.s.sed Redding, Orde left it in charge of one of his foremen while he divided his time between the booms and the mill. Late in the year his woods trips began, the tours of inspection, of surveying for new roads, the inevitable preparation for the long winter campaigns in the forest. As soon as the spring thaws began, once more the drive demanded his attention. And in marketing the lumber, manipulating the firm's financial affairs, collecting its dues, paying its bills, making its purchases, and keeping oiled the intricate bearing points of its office machinery, Newmark was busy--and invaluable.

At the end of the fifth year the opportunity came, through a combination of a bad debt and a man's death, to get possession of two lake schooners. Orde at once suggested the contract for a steam barge.

Towing was then in its infancy. The bulk of lake traffic was by means of individual sailing ships--a method uncertain as to time. Orde thought that a steam barge could be built powerful enough not only to carry its own hold and deck loads, but to tow after it the two schooners. In this manner the crews could be reduced, and an approximate date of delivery could be guaranteed. Newmark agreed with him. Thus the firm, in accordance with his prophecy, went into the carrying trade, for the vessels more than sufficed for its own needs. The freighting of lumber added much to the income, and the carrying of machinery and other heavy freight on the return trip grew every year.

But by far the most important acquisition was that of the northern peninsula timber. Most operators called the white pine along and back from the river inexhaustible. Orde did not believe this. He saw the time, not far distant, when the world would be compelled to look elsewhere for its lumber supply, and he turned his eyes to the almost unknown North. After a long investigation through agents, and a month's land-looking on his own account, he located and purchased three hundred million feet. This was to be paid for, as usual, mostly by the firm's notes secured by its other property. It would become available only in the future, but Orde believed, as indeed the event justified, this future would prove to be not so distant as most people supposed.

As these interests widened, Orde became more and more immersed in them.

He was forced to be away all of every day, and more than the bulk of every year. Nevertheless, his home life did not suffer for it.

To Carroll he was always the same big, hearty, whole-souled boy she had first learned to love. She had all his confidence. If this did not extend into business affairs, it was because Orde had always tried to get away from them when at home. At first Carroll had attempted to keep in the current of her husband's activities, but as the latter broadened in scope and became more complex, she perceived that their explanation wearied him. She grew out of the habit of asking him about them. Soon their rapid advance had carried them quite beyond her horizon. To her, also, as to most women, the word "business" connoted nothing but a turmoil and a mystery.

In all other things they were to each other what they had been from the first. No more children had come to them. Bobby, however; had turned out a st.u.r.dy, honest little fellow, with more than a streak of his mother's charm and intuition. His future was the subject of all Orde's plans.

"I want to give him all the chance there is," he explained to Carroll.

"A boy ought to start where his father left off, and not have to do the same thing all over again. But being a rich man's son isn't much of a job."

"Why don't you let him continue your business?" smiled Carroll, secretly amused at the idea of the small person before them ever doing anything.

"By the time Bobby's grown up this business will all be closed out,"

replied Orde seriously.

He continued to look at his minute son with puckered brow, until Carroll smoothed out the wrinkles with the tips of her fingers.

"Of course, having only a few minutes to decide," she mocked, "perhaps we'd better make up our minds right now to have him a street-car driver."

"Yes!" agreed Bobby unexpectedly, and with emphasis.

Three years after this conversation, which would have made Bobby just eight, Orde came back before six of a summer evening, his face alight with satisfaction.