The Spenders Part 3

"No, no," replied the old man, with a glance at the mother; "not _jest_ the way your pa did; you might do some different and some better; but all the same, you won't do any better'n he did any way you'll learn to live in New York. Unless you was to go broke there," he added, thoughtfully; "in that case you got the stuff in you and it'd come out; but you got too much money to go broke."

"And you'll see that I lead a decent enough life. Times have changed since my father was a young man."

"Yes; that's what your pa told me,--times had changed since I was a young man; but I could 'a' done him good if he'd 'a' listened."

"Well, we'll try it. The tide is setting that way from all over the country. Here, listen to this editorial in the _Sun_." And he read from his own paper:

"A GOOD PLACE TO MOVE TO.

"One of the most interesting evidences of the growth of New York is the news that Mr. Anson Ledrick of the Consolidated Copper Company has purchased an extensive building site on Riverside Drive and will presently improve it with a costly residence. Mr. Ledrick's decision to move his household effects to Manhattan Island is in accordance with a very marked tendency of successful Americans.

"There are those who are fond of depreciating New York; of a.s.sailing it with all sorts of cheap and sensational vituperation; of picturing it as the one great canker spot of the Western hemisphere, as irretrievably sunk in wickedness and shame. The fact remains, however, that the city, as never before, is the great national centre of wealth, culture, and distinction of every kind, and that here the citizen, successful in art, literature, or practical achievement, instinctively seeks his abiding-place.

"The restlessness of the average American millionaire while he remains outside the city limits is frequently remarked upon. And even the mighty overlords of Chicago, falling in with the prevailing fashion, have forsaken the sh.o.r.es of the great inland sea and pitched their tents with us; not to speak of the copper kings of Montana. Why is it that these interesting men, after acquiring fortune and fame elsewhere, are not content to remain upon the scene of their early triumphs? Why is it that they immediately pack their carpet-bags, take the first through train to our gates, and startle the investing public by the manner in which they bull the price of New York building lots?"

The old man listened absently.

"And probably some day I'll read of you in that same centre of culture and distinction as P. Percival Bines, a young man of obscure fam'ly, that rose by his own efforts to be the dashin' young cotillion leader and the well-known club-man, and that his pink teas fur dogs is barked about by every fashionable canine on the island."

The young man continued to read: "These men are not vain fools; they are shrewd, successful men of the world. They have surveyed New York City from a distance and have discovered that, in spite of Tammany and in spite of yellow journals, New York is a town of unequalled attractiveness. And so they come; and their coming shows us what we are. Not only millionaires; but also painters and novelists and men and women of varied distinction. The city palpitates with life and ambition and hope and promise; it attracts the great and the successful, and those who admire greatness and success. The force of natural selection is at work here as everywhere; and it is rapidly concentrating in our small island whatever is finest, most progressive, and best in the American character."

"Well, now do me a last favour before you pike off East," pleaded the old man. "Make a trip with me over the properties. See 'em once anyway, and see a little more of this country and these people. Mebbe they're better'n you think. Give me about three weeks or a month, and then, by Crimini, you can go off if you're set on it and be 'whatever is finest and best in the American character' as that feller puts it. But some day, son, you'll find out there's a whole lot of difference between a great man of wealth and a man of great wealth. Them last is gettin'

terrible common."

CHAPTER V.

Over the Hills

So the old man and the young man made the round of the Bines properties. The former nursed a forlorn little hope of exciting an interest in the concerns most vital to him; to the latter the leisurely tour in the private car was a sportive prelude to the serious business of life, as it should be lived, in the East. Considering it as such he endured it amiably, and indeed the long August days and the sharply cool nights were not without real enjoyment for him.

To feel impartially a mult.i.tude of strong, fresh wants--the imperative need to live life in all its fulness, this of itself makes the heart to sing. And, above the full complement of wants, to have been dowered by Heaven with a stanch disbelief in the unattainable,--this is a fortune rather to be chosen than a good name or great riches; since the name and riches and all things desired must come to the call of it.

Our Western-born youth of twenty-five had the wants and the sense of power inherited from a line of men eager of initiative, the product of an environment where only such could survive. Doubtless in him was the soul and body hunger of his grandfather, cramping and denying through hardship year after year, yet sustained by dreaming in the hardest times of the soft material luxuries that should some day be his.

Doubtless marked in his character, too, was the slightly relaxed tension of his father; the disposition to feast as well as the capacity to fast; to take all, feel all, do all, with an avidity greater by reason of the grinding abstinence and the later indulgence of his forbears. A sage versed in the lore of heredity as modified by environment may some day trace for us the progress across this continent of an austere Puritan, showing how the strain emerges from the wilderness at the Western ocean with a character so widely differing from the one with which he began the adventurous journey,--regarding, especially, a tolerance of the so-called good and many of the bad things of life. Until this is done we may, perhaps, consider the change to be without valid cause.

Young Bines, at all events, was the flower of a pioneer stock, and him the G.o.ds of life cherished, so that all the forces of the young land about him were as his own. Yet, though his pulses rhymed to theirs he did not perceive his relation to them: neither he nor the land was yet become introspective. So informed was he with the impetuous spirit of youth that the least manifestation of life found its answering thrill in him. And it was sufficient to feel this. There was no time barren enough of sensation to reason about it. Uncle Peter's plan for an inspection of the Bines properties had at first won him by touching his sense of duty. He antic.i.p.ated no interest or pleasure in the trip. Yet from the beginning he enjoyed it to the full. Being what he was, the constant movement pleased him, the out-of-doors life, the occasional sorties from the railroad by horse to some remote mining camp, or to a stock ranch or lumber-camp. He had been away for six years, and it pleased him to note that he was treated by the people he met with a genuine respect and liking as the son of his father. In the East he had been accustomed to a certain deference from very uncertain people because he was the son of a rich man. Here he had prestige because he was the son of Daniel Bines, organiser and man of affairs. He felt sometimes that the men at mine, mill, or ranch looked him over with misgiving, and had their cautious liking compelled only by the a.s.surance that he was indeed the son of Daniel. They left him at these times with the suspicion that this bare fact meant enough with them to carry a man of infelicitous exterior.

He was pleased, moreover, to feel a new respect for Uncle Peter. He observed that men of all degrees looked up to him, sought and relied upon his judgment; the investing capitalist whom they met not less than the mine foreman; the made man and the labourer. In the drawing-room at home he had felt so agreeably superior to the old man; now he felt his own inferiority in a new element, and began to view him with more respect. He saw him to be the shrewd man of affairs, with a thorough grasp of detail in every branch of their interests; and a deep man, as well; a little narrow, perhaps, from his manner of life, but of unfailing kindness, and with rather a young man's radicalism than an old man's conservatism; one who, in an emergency, might be relied upon to take the unexpected but effective course.

For his own part, old Peter Bines learned in the course of the trip to understand and like his grandson better. At bottom he decided the young man to be sound after all, and he began to make allowance for his geographical heresies. The boy had been sent to an Eastern college; that was clearly a mistake, putting him out of sympathy with the West; and he had never been made to work, which was another and a graver mistake, "but he'd do more'n his father ever did if 'twa'n't fur his father's money," the old man concluded. For he saw in their talks that the very Eastern experience which he derided had given the young fellow a poise and a certain readiness to grasp details in the large that his father had been a lifetime in acquiring.

For a month they loitered over the surrounding territory in the private car, gliding through fertile valleys, over bleak pa.s.ses, steaming up narrow little canons along the down-rushing streams with their cool shallow murmurs.

They would learn one day that a cross-cut was to be started on the Last Chance, or that the concentrates of the True Grit would thereafter be shipped to the Careless Creek smelter. Next they would learn that a new herd of Galloways had done finely last season on the Bitter Root ranch; that a big lot of ore was sacked at the Irish Boy, that an eighteen-inch vein had been struck in the Old Crow; that a concentrator was needed at h.e.l.landgone, and that rich gold-bearing copper and sand bearing free gold had been found over on Horseback Ridge.

Another day they would drive far into a forest of spruce and hemlock to a camp where thousands of ties were being cut and floated down to the line of the new railway.

Sometimes they spent a night in one of the smaller mining camps off the railroad, whereof facetious notes would appear in the nearest weekly paper, such as:

"The Hon. Peter Bines and his grandson, who is a chip of the old block, spent Tuesday night at Rock Rip. Young Bines played the deal from soda card to hock at Lem Tully's Turf Exchange, and showed Lem's dealer good and plenty that there's no piker strain in him."

Or, it might be:

"Poker stacks continue to have a downward tendency. They were sold last week as low as eighty chips for a dollar; It is sad to see this n.o.ble game dragging along in the lower levels of prosperity, and we take as a favourable omen the appearance of Uncle Peter Bines and his grandson the other night. The prices went to par in a minute. Young Bines gave signs of becoming as delicately intuitional in the matter of concealed values as his father, the lamented Daniel J."

Again it was:

"Uncle Peter Bines reports from over Kettle Creek way that the sagebrush whiskey they take a man's two bits for there would gnaw holes in limestone. Peter is likelier to find a ledge of dollar bills than he is good whiskey this far off the main trail. The late Daniel J. could have told him as much, and Daniel J.'s boy, who accompanies Uncle Peter, will know it hereafter."

The young man felt wholesomely insignificant at these and other signs that he was taken on sufferance as a son and a grandson.

He was content that it should be so. Indeed there was little wherewith he was not content. That he was habitually preoccupied, even when there was most movement about them, early became apparent to Uncle Peter.

That he was constantly cheerful proved the matter of his musings to be pleasant. That he was p.r.o.ner than most youths to serious meditation Uncle Peter did not believe. Therefore he attributed the moods of abstraction to some matter probably connected with his project of removing the family East. It was not permitted Uncle Peter to know, nor was his own youth recent enough for him to suspect, the truth. And the mystery stayed inviolate until a day came and went that laid it bare even to the old man's eyes.

They awoke one morning to find the car on a siding at the One Girl mine. Coupled to it was another car from an Eastern road that their train had taken on sometime in the night. Percival noted the car with interest as he paced beside the track in the cool clear air before breakfast. The curtains were drawn, and the only signs of life to be observed were at the kitchen end, where the white-clad cook could be seen astir. Grant, porter on the Bines car, told him the other car had been taken on at Kaslo Junction, and that it belonged to Rulon Shepler, the New York financier, who was aboard with a party of friends.

As Percival and Uncle Peter left their car for the shaft-house after breakfast, the occupants of the other car were bestirring themselves.

From one of the open windows a low but impa.s.sioned voice was exhausting the current idioms of d.a.m.nation in sweeping dispraise of all land-areas north and west of Fifty-ninth Street, New York.

Uncle Peter smiled grimly. Percival flushed, for the hidden protestant had uttered what were his own sentiments a month before.

Reaching the shaft-house they chatted with Pangburn, the superintendent, and then went to the store-room to don blouses and overalls for a descent into the mine.

For an hour they stayed underground, traversing the various levels and drifts, while Pangburn explained the later developments of the vein and showed them where the new stoping had been begun.

CHAPTER VI.

A Meeting and a Clashing

As they stepped from the cage at the surface Percival became aware of a group of strangers between him and the open door of the shaft-house,--people displaying in dress and manner the unmistakable stamp of New York. For part of a minute, while the pupils of his eyes were contracting to the light, he saw them but vaguely. Then, as his sight cleared, he beheld foremost in the group, beaming upon him with an expression of pleased and surprised recognition, the girl whose face and voice had for nearly half a year peopled his lover's solitude with fair visions and made its silence to be all melody.

Had the encounter been antic.i.p.ated his composure would perhaps have failed him. Not a few of his waking dreams had sketched this, their second meeting, and any one of the ways it had pleased him to plan it would a.s.suredly have found him nervously embarra.s.sed. But so wildly improbable was this reality that not the daringest of his imagined happenings had approached it. His thoughts for the moment had been not of her; then, all at once, she stood before him in the flesh, and he was cool, almost unmoved. He suspected at once that her father was the trim, fastidiously dressed man who looked as if he had been abducted from a morning stroll down the avenue to his club; that the plump, ruddy, high-bred woman, surveying the West disapprovingly through a lorgnon, would be her mother. Shepler he knew by sight, with his big head, ma.s.sive shoulders, and curiously short, tapering body. Some other men and a woman were scanning the hoisting machinery with superior looks.

The girl, before starting toward him, had waited hardly longer than it took him to eye the group. And then came an awkward two seconds upon her whose tact in avoiding the awkward was reputed to be more than common.

With her hand extended she had uttered, "Why, Mr.--" before it flashed upon her that she did not know the name of the young man she was greeting.

The "Mister" was threatening to prolong itself into an "r" of excruciating length and disgraceful finality, an "r" that is terminated neatly by no one but hardened hotel-clerks. Then a miner saved the day.

"Mr. Bines," he said, coming up hurriedly behind Percival with several specimens of ore, "you forgot these."