Chapter III: Part 3

"Brother Campbell!" answered John fervently, "I have done more than think it out. I have felt it out. I propose to live it out!"

But Doctor Campbell had kept his head amid this swirl of words, and his return was quietly forceful.

"The stage of to-day," he began, "as I know it from the newspapers and the billboards, never seemed so vulgar and damnable as it does now after your glorious idealization of it. I, as a preacher of righteousness, must judge of such an institution externally, by its effects. I have weighed the stage in the balance, John, and I have found it wanting."

This time there was something in the minister's calm tone, in the cool detachment of his point of view, that held John silent.

"Isn't it possible," the minister continued, in a kind of sweet reasonableness, "that there is something insidiously demoralizing or infectious about it? Take your own experience, John. You are a Christian man. You have been soaking yourself in the atmosphere of the stage for a couple of weeks. Examine your soul now, and answer me if you are as fine, as pure a man as you were before you went there. Are you?"

"Why, of course I am," ejaculated Hampstead impulsively.

"Think," commanded the minister, in low, compelling tones; for having controlled his emotions the better, he was just now the stronger of the two. "Are you--John?"

Hampstead opened his mouth eagerly, but the minister's repressing gesture would not let him speak. The young man was literally compelled to think, to question his own soul for a moment, and as he searched, a telltale flush came upon his cheek, and then his glance fell. There was an embarrassing moment of silence, during which this flush of mortification deepened perceptibly.

The minister was a wise man. He read the sign and asked no questions. He upbraided nothing, cackled no exultant, "I told you so."

"Let us pray, Brother John," he proposed after the interval, and knelt by his chair with a hand upon Hampstead's shoulder. The prayer was short.

"Oh, Lord," the man of God petitioned, "help us to know where the right stops and the wrong begins. Keep us back from the sin of presumption. Give thy servants wisdom to serve thy cause well and work no ill to it by over-zeal or over-confidence. Amen!"

Doctor Campbell might have been praying for himself. But John knew that this was only a part of his tact.

As the two men rose, John felt a sudden impulse to defend the stage from himself.

"It was my own fault," he urged; "the fault of my own weakness in unaccustomed surroundings. It was not the fault of the surroundings themselves, nor of any other person. Besides, it was nothing very grave."

"Deterioration of character is always grave," said the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell as he walked to the door with his caller, and the minister's tone intimated his conviction that this particular deterioration had been very grave indeed.

*CHAPTER VI*

*ON TWO FRONTS*

There was high commotion in a big front office in the top floor of a tall, gray building that stood in the days before the fire on the corner of Kearney and Market streets in the city of San Francisco. This gray structure housed the general offices of the San Francisco and El Paso Railroad Company, and that big front office contained the desk of the Freight Traffic Manager. Before this desk sat a man with a domed brow and the beak of an eagle, hair gray, eyes piercing, complexion colorless, and a mouth that closed so tightly it was discernible only as a crescent-shaped pucker above his spike-like chin. His mouth at the moment was not a pucker; it was a geyser. The name of this man was William N. Scofield, and he was obviously in a rage. He had grown up with the S.F. & E.P., his brain expanding as it expanded, his power rising as it had risen. Long ago, when the one lone clerk in its little rate department, he had made with his own hands the first of those yellow commodity tariffs that John Hampstead had scorned with objurgations. Now Scofield held in the hand which trembled with his anger the first of that upstart's own contributions to the science of tariff making--not yellow, but white, in token of the clarity it was meant to introduce.

"How did they make it? this--this botch!" he exploded, repeating his interrogation with other embellishing phrases not properly reproducible and then slamming the offending white sheets down hard upon his desk,--much harder than John had slammed the yellow ones,--this impudent, white-livered thing that was an assault upon the customs he, Scofield, had instituted and time itself had honored!

"Telegram!" he barked to his stenographer. "Robert Mitchell, Los Angeles. Insist immediate withdrawal your entire line of commodity tariffs, series J. Basis carried in our own tariffs is only one we will recognize."

Mitchell answered:

"Decline to withdraw; our tariffs issued on actual basis on which charges are assessed."

The fight was on.

Arming himself cap-a-pie with tariffs, amendments, letters, and memoranda, Mitchell two days later followed his telegram to San Francisco. Most of his resources, however, were packed behind the wide, blond brow of John Hampstead, who accompanied his chief and was more eager for the fray than Mitchell. The battle began on Monday morning about ten of the clock, and was not finished with the day. The field of action was a room of this same gray building, where Howison, General Freight Agent of the S.F. & E.P., sat at the end of a long table, flanked right and left by assistant general freight agents, rate clerks, and even general and district freight agents called in from the field, all to convince Robert Mitchell and his lone rate clerk sitting at the other end of the table that their new tariff was a hodgepodge, without practical basis or the show of reason to support it. Scofield himself did not take a seat in the battle line, but looked in occasionally, either to walk about nervously or sit just back of Howison's shoulder.

On the afternoon of the second day, the enemy Traffic Manager appeared to watch Hampstead intently for half an hour. Again and again the keen old fighter saw his allied forces attack, but invariably this self-confident, smiling young man with a ready citation, the upflashing of a yellow "special", the digging out of a letter or a telegram from his file, or occasionally even of an old freight bill issued by the S.F. & E.P. showing exactly what rate had been assessed, triumphantly repelled the assaults, until reverses began to be the order of the day.

"It strikes me," Scofield remarked sarcastically, "that this young man has got us all pretty well buffaloed. The trouble is, Howison," he glowered, "that your Tariff Department needs cleaning out. You've got a lot of old mush heads in there."

With this warning shot into his own ranks, Scofield arose, went discontentedly out, and never once came back. Keener than any of his staff, he had already discerned that defeat was advancing down the road.

But the battle of the tariffs raged on throughout the week, and it was not until late on Saturday afternoon that John, standing in one room of the suite in the Palace Hotel charged to the name of Robert Mitchell, flung the pile of papers from his arms into the bottom of a suitcase with a swish and solid thud of satisfaction. Victory from first to last had perched upon his tawny head. He had met good men and beaten them; and he had a right to the wave of exultation that surged for a moment dizzily through his brain.

Mr. Mitchell, too, was feeling exultant and proud beyond words, as he stood in the door of John's room. His hands were deep in his pockets; his large black derby hat was pushed far back from his bulging brow. On his great landscape of a countenance was an oddly significant expression.

"Well, Jack," he began, after an interval of silence, "what about the stage?"

John started like a man surprised in a guilty act, although he had known for months that this was a question Mr. Mitchell might ask at any moment; but the decision involved seemed now so big that from day to day he had hoped the inevitable might be postponed.

"I shall be naming a new chief clerk in a couple of weeks, now that Heitmuller is to become General Agent," Mr. Mitchell went on half-musingly, and as if to forestall a hasty reply to the question he had asked. "The new man will be in line to be appointed Assistant General Freight Agent very soon, on account of the consolidations."

For a moment John saw himself as Chief Clerk, sitting in the big swivel chair at the high, roll-top desk, with all the strings of the business he knew so well how to pull lying on the table before him; with clerks, stenographers, men from other departments and that important part of the shipping public which carried its business to the general freight office, all running to him.

And from there it was only a short, easy step to the position of Assistant General Freight Agent.

Only the man who has toiled far down in the ranks of a railroad organization doing routine work at the same old desk in the same old way for half a score of years can know on what a dizzy height sits the Chief Clerk, or how far beyond that swings the lofty title of Assistant General Freight Agent.

"Your advancement would be very rapid," suggested Mr. Mitchell, flicking his flies skilfully upon the whirling eddies of the young man's thought.

John had achieved enough and glimpsed enough to see that Mitchell was right. Advancement would be rapid. Mitchell would soon go up the line himself; he could follow him. General Freight Agent, Assistant Traffic Manager, Traffic Manager, Vice-president in charge of traffic--President! with twelve thousand miles of shining steel flowing from his hand, which he might swing and whirl and crack like a whip! The prospect was dazzling in the extreme, and yet it was only for a moment that the picture kindled. In the next it was dead and sparkless as burned-out fireworks.

"You have a strong vein of traffic in your blood," the General Freight Agent began adroitly, but John broke in upon him.

"Mr. Mitchell," he said, and his utterance was grave, "I am sorry to disappoint you, but it comes too late. A year ago such a hint would have thrown me into ecstasies. To-day it leaves me cold. I have had another vision."

The face of Mitchell shaded from seriousness almost to sadness, but he was too wise to increase by argument an ardor about which, to the railroad man, there was something not easy to be understood, something, indeed, almost fanatical. Instead Mitchell asked with sober, interested friendliness:

"What is your plan, John?"

"To resign July first," John answered, for the first time definitely crossing the bridge, "to come to San Francisco and seek an engagement with some of the stock companies playing permanently here, even though I begin the search for an opening without money enough to last more than a week or two."

"Without money!" exclaimed Mr. Mitchell, in surprise.

"Yes," confessed Hampstead, flushing a little. "My salary was not very munificent, you know, and I have usually contrived to get rid of it, frequently before I got the pay check in my hands."

Mr. Mitchell's small, prudent eyes looked disfavor at a spendthrift.

"However," he suggested, "you have only yourself to think of."

"That's another point against me," confessed Hampstead. "I have some one else to look out for. My brother-in-law is an artist, you know, and he has not been very successful yet, so that I hold myself ready to help with my sister and the children if it should ever become necessary."

"That's a handicap," declared Mitchell flatly.

"I won't admit it," said John loyally. "You don't know those children. Tayna's the girl, nearly twelve now, a beauty if her nose is pugged. Such hair and eyes, and such a heart! Dick's the boy, past ten. He's had asthma always, and is about a thousand years old, some ways. But they--"

Hampstead gulped queerly.

"Those two children," he plunged on, "are dearer to me than anything in the whole wide world. You know," and his tone became still more confidential, while his eyes grew moist, "it would only be something that happened to them that would keep me from going on with my stage career."

Mitchell's respect for John was changing oddly to a fatherly feeling. He felt that he was getting acquainted with his clerk for the first time. He resolved that he would not tempt the boy, and that if it became necessary, he would help him. However, before he could express this resolve, if he had intended to express it, the telephone rang.

Hampstead answered it, stammered, faltered, replied: "I will see, sir, and call you in five minutes," hung up the 'phone and turned to confront Mitchell, with a look almost of fright upon his face.

"It's William N. Scofield," he exclaimed. "He wants me to take dinner with him at his club to-night."

A disbelieving smile appeared for a moment on the wide lips of Mitchell; then understanding broke, and his smile was swallowed up in a hearty laugh.

"He wants to offer you a position," Mitchell said, when his exultant cachinnations had ceased. "Look out that he doesn't win you. Scofield is a very persuasive man. He nearly got me once. Besides, he has more to offer you than I have."

Hampstead pressed his hand to his brow. Under his tawny thatch ideas were in a whirl.

"What shall I do?" he asked rather helplessly.

"Stay over," commanded Mitchell unhesitatingly. "Ring up and tell him you'll be there."

"But there's no use, anyway," replied John suddenly, getting back to the main point. "My mind's made up."

"No man's mind is made up when he's going to take dinner on the proposition with William N. Scofield," answered Mitchell oracularly.

"And you?" asked Hampstead, suddenly aware how good a man at heart was Robert Mitchell, and quite unaware that he had seized that gentleman's pudgy right hand and was wringing it in a manner most embarrassing to Mitchell himself. "You--"

But the telephone was tingling impatiently.

"Mr. Scofield wants to know," began a voice.

"Yes, yes, I'll be happy to," interrupted John, not knowing just what tone or form one should take in expressing the necessary amenities to the secretary of a great man.

"Very well. His car will call for you at six-thirty," responded the voice.

But before John could pick up the thread of his unfinished sentence to Mr. Mitchell, a knock sounded at the door, at first soft and cushioned, as if from a gloved hand, then louder and more determined, and repeated with quick impatience.

"Come in," called Mitchell.

The knob turned, and the door swung wide, leaving the panel of white to frame the picture of a woman. She was young, of medium height and appealing roundness, clad from head to foot in a traveling dress of dark green, with a small hat of a shade to match, the chief adornment of which was a red hawk's feather slanting backward at a jaunty angle. A veil enveloped both hat brim and face but was not thick enough to dim the sparkle of bright eyes or the pink flush of dimpled cheeks, much less to conceal two rows of gleaming teeth from between which, after a moment's pause for sensation, burst a ringing cadence of laughter.

"Miss Bessie!" exclaimed John excitedly.

"The very first guess!" declared that young lady, advancing and yielding the doorframe to another figure which filled it so much more completely as to sufficiently explain a more deliberate arrival.

"Mollie!" ejaculated Mitchell, who by this time had turned toward the door. "What in thunder?"

But the General Freight Agent's lines of communication were just then temporarily disconnected by an assault upon his features conducted by Miss Bessie in person. During this interval, Mrs. Mitchell stood placidly surveying the room, and as she took in its air of preparation for immediate departure, a tantalizing smile spread itself on her expansive features.

"Is this an accident or a calamity?" demanded Mitchell, playfully thrusting Bessie aside and advancing to greet his wife.

"Both!" declared that lady, submitting her lips with more of formality than enthusiasm, after which, feeling that sufficient time had elapsed to make an explanation of her sudden appearance not undignified, she proceeded:

"Just one of my whims, Bob! Next week was the spring vacation; no school, and the poor child was pale from overstudy and so anxious about her examinations (Bessie shot a look at Hampstead), that I just made up my mind I'd bring her up here and let her get a good bite of fog and a breath from the Golden Gate."

"Fine idea!" declared Mitchell. "Fine! Now that you've had it," he chuckled, "we'll start home. I'm leaving at eight."

"You are not!" proclaimed Mrs. Mitchell flatly. "You will stay right here for at least three days and do nothing but devote yourself to your child. And to her mother!" she subjoined, as if that were an afterthought; all with a toss of her chin, which, by way of emphasis, held its advanced position for a moment after the speech was done.

"And the business of the company?" Mitchell suggested, with a solicitous air.

"It can wait on me," averred Mrs. Mitchell decisively, taking a turn up and down the room and surveying once more the signs of confusion and of hasty packing. "Many's the time I've waited on it. You can stay, too, John," she said, turning to Hampstead. "I want you to take Bessie to a lot of places Robert and I have been and won't care to visit this time."

"Robert!" and while her eyes turned toward the windows, two of which opened on a view of Market Street, the new commander began a redisposition of forces, "I rather like this suite. Bessie and I will take the corner room. You can take this room and Mr. Hampstead can move across the hall, or anywhere else they can put him."

As an act of possession, Mrs. Mitchell walked to the dresser, took off her hat, stabbed the two pins into it emphatically, and tossed it upon the bed, where it bloomed like a flower-garden in the midst of a desert of papers while she, still standing before the mirror, bestowed a few comfortable pats upon her hair.

"John," Mitchell said jovially, "I know orders from headquarters when I get 'em. You were going to stay over, anyway; but use your own judgment about obeying the instructions you have just received."

"Never had such agreeable instructions in my life," declared Hampstead, turning to Mrs. Mitchell with an elaborately stagy bow, and the natural quotation from Hamlet which leaped to his lips:

"'_I shall in all my best obey you, madam._'"

"See that you do," said that lady, not half liking the bow and shooting a glance at Hampstead less cordial than austere. "And by the way," she added, "see that you don't let that stage nonsense carry you much further, young man," with which remark Mrs. Mitchell turned abruptly and gave Hampstead a most complete view of a broad and uncompromising back.

In Mrs. Mitchell's mind a man had much better be a section hand on the Great Southwestern than a fixed star on the drama's milky way.

"By the way, mother," remarked Mr. Mitchell, with the air of one who makes an important revelation, "John is just going out to dine with William N. Scofield."

Mrs. Mitchell turned quickly, and her dark eyes shot a meaningful glance at her husband, while the line of her lower lip first grew full and then protruded. A squeeze of that lip at the moment, Hampstead reflected, would extract something at least as sour as very sour lemon juice.

"Scofield is after him," bragged Mitchell.

"Well, see that he doesn't get him," his wife commanded sternly, and then shifting her somber glance until it rested on John with a look that was near to menace, inquired acridly:

"Young man, you wouldn't be disloyal? You wouldn't sell yourself?" In the second interrogatory her voice had passed from acridity to bitterness, while the eyes bored implacably, till Hampstead at first wriggled, then grew resentful and replied crisply, standing very straight:

"No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself!"

"That's right," exclaimed Bessie, stepping impulsively toward John's side. "Do not let her browbeat you. I am sorry to say, Mr. Hampstead, that mother is inclined to be somewhat dictatorial. You see what she does to poor papa!"

"And you see what you do to poor me," exclaimed that worthy lady, turning on her daughter with surprise and injury in her glance and tone,--"dragging me almost out of bed last night to make this foolish trip up here with you. Next week, of all weeks, too, when I wanted to do so many other things."

"Ho! ho!" broke in Mitchell, "so that's the way of it. This trip up here is a scheme of yours," and he turned accusingly upon his daughter, but Bessie smiled and curtseyed, entirely unabashed. "Well, then, I don't guess we'll stay," teased Mitchell. "And I don't suppose you knew a thing about Hampstead's being here. That was all an accident."

"It was not," flashed Bessie. "I did. I haven't seen dear old John for a year. I could go in and have delightful tete-a-tetes with him when he was a stenographer, but out in the Rate Department there are forty prying eyes and men with ears as long as jack-rabbits. He hasn't taken me to a circus or anything for nobody knows how long. You shall give him money for theater tickets, for dinners, for auto rides, for everything nice for three whole days."

Bessie was standing directly in front of her father, her eyes looking up into his, and her two hands patting his generous jowls, as her speech was concluded.

John listened rapturously. This was the old Bessie talking. She had entered the room looking a year older, a year prettier since that day when he wrote the Phroso invitations for her, and had taken on so easily the lacquer and dignity of dresses and of years that he was beginning to feel in awe of her. This speech was a great relief.

Besides, in the whirl of the hour before she came, he had found himself strangely wanting to take counsel with Bessie. The Mitchells had made of him for all these years a convenient caretaker of their daughter. Bessie had made of him a playfellow with whom she took the same liberties as with any other of her father's possessions. This attitude on her part had created the only atmosphere in which Hampstead could have been at ease with her. It had permitted his soul to bask when she was by, but it had done no more. But now, he somehow wanted to confide in Bessie,--not to take her advice for he wasn't going to take anybody's advice; all advice was against him,--but to tell her what he was going to do, because he believed she would listen appreciatingly, if not sympathetically. He felt he needed at least the added support of a neutral mind. He had rejected Mr. Mitchell's proposal, but the glitter of it flashed occasionally. And now he was going to face the resourceful, the ingratiating, the dominating William N. Scofield, and he felt like a man who goes alone to meet his temptation on the mountain top.

*CHAPTER VII*

*THE HIGH BID*

For an hour and a half at dinner, and for another hour sunk in the depths of a great leather chair in the lounging room of the Pacific Union Club, William N. Scofield had searched the soul of Hampstead, who had not only been led to talk rapturously of his stage ambition but to reveal the metes and bounds of his interest in and knowledge upon many subjects.

"Gad, but you know a lot," ejaculated Scofield, with unfeigned amazement. "Where'd you get it all?"

"I have read a good deal," confessed John, trying to appear much more modest than in his heart he felt; for it was a part of Scofield's whim or of his campaign to flatter him enormously, and he had succeeded.

But for a time now, the Traffic Manager was silent, puffing meditatively at his cigar and staring at the ceiling through loafing rings of smoke in which, as if they were floating letters, he seemed to read the transcript of his thought,--the thought that if, beside employing this enormously able young man, he could also enlist in behalf of the railroad as an institution his capacity for fanatical devotion to an ideal, the prize was one worth bidding high for, high enough to win!

"People like you, Hampstead," Scofield broke out presently, and in his most ingratiating vein. "We all felt that down at the office. You did a difficult thing without making an enemy of one of us. Therefore what your personality can do interests me even more than what you know."

The railroad man interrupted his speech to shoot an exploratory glance from under veiling lids and went on calculatingly:

"The railroad business is going to change. Now we tell the Railroad Commission what to do. The time is coming when it will tell us what to do, and we will do it. But the public attitude toward the railroad has also got to change." Scofield's tone had taken on new emphasis.

"You would make the type of executive that could change it! The successful transportation man of the future has got to be a sort of ambassador of the railroad to the people, and the man who best serves the people tributary to his road will best serve his stockholders."

"Do you know who gave me that point?" the Traffic Manager asked, turning from the vision he was contemplating in the clouds of smoke over his head and looking sharply at Hampstead.

"Naturally not," admitted the younger man.

"Bob Mitchell," said Scofield, and paused while his thin lips coaxed persistently at the cigar which appeared to have gone out. "Bob Mitchell! And I reviled him for his sagacity, told him he was an altruistic fool. But after a while I saw he was right. Then I tried to get him for us, but I didn't succeed. He wasn't as sensible as I hope you will be. Besides, I am going to offer you more than I offered him."

More than he offered Mitchell! There was a sudden jolt somewhere in John's breast, and he wet a dry, parched lip, but did not speak.

"Yes," breathed Scofield softly, almost as if he had been interrupted. "I am going to offer you more. Hampstead!" and the voice was raised quickly, "I want you to be our General Freight Agent!"

If Scofield had leaned over and kissed him, John would not have been more surprised, nor have known less what to say.

"General Freight Agent!" he croaked hoarsely.

"Yes," affirmed the other coolly, almost icily, while he flicked the ashes from his cigar and enjoyed the sensation his proposal had produced.

"At my age?" stumbled John, still groping, but trying to see himself in the position.

"Why, yes," reassured Scofield suavely. "You tell me you're past twenty-five. Paul Morton was Assistant General Freight Agent of the Burlington at twenty-one. Look where he is to-day--in the cabinet of the President of the United States. The salary," Scofield added casually, by way of finally clinching the argument, "will be twelve thousand a year."

Hampstead's lips silently formed the words--twelve thousand! But he did not utter them. They dazed him. They rushed him headlong. They made rejection impossible. No man had a right to throw away such a fortune as that. One thousand dollars a month! He felt himself yielding, helplessly, irresistibly.

And then, suddenly as the photographer's bomb lights up every lineament of every face in the darkened room, for one single moment Hampstead saw things clearly and in their true proportions. This Schofield was not a man. He was a grinning devil, with horns and a barb on his tail. He was tempting, trapping, buying him. He would not be bought. "_No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself,_" he had said, not, however, meaning at all what that lady meant.

Leaning back stubbornly, his fist smiting heavy blows upon the cushioned arm of the chair, John muttered through clenched teeth:

"No! No! No--I'll never do it. No, Mr. Scofield, I cannot accept your offer. I thank you for it; but I cannot accept it. The stage is to be the place of my achievement. Why, why, Mr. Scofield, the wonderfully flattering offer you have made to me to-night has come because of the training incident to the cultivation of a stage ambition. If it can bring me so much with so little devotion, is it not reasonable to suppose that it will bring me more--very much more? I will not be so disloyal to that which has been so generous with me."

Scofield's countenance had suddenly and impressively changed. It became a mask of stone, a sphinx-like thing, the brow a knot, the nose a beak, the mouth a stitched scar. The beady gleam of the eyes from beneath drawn lids was sinister. This fanatical young fool was escaping him, and Scofield did not like any one to escape him.

But the young man refused to be swerved by frowns.

"Not to manage railroads," he declared enthusiastically, "but to mould human character is to be my life-work; to depict the virtues and the vices, the weaknesses and the strengths of life, to make men laugh and love and--forget."

Scofield's eyes twinkled, and his mouth became less a scar, but John thought this was a very fine phrase really, and he rushed along:

"Life looks like a tangle, like a mess--drudgeries, disappointments, injustices--the wrong man prospering--the wrong girl suffering! The drama composes life. It grabs out a few people and follows them, compressing into the action of two hours the eventualities of a lifetime and shortening perspectives till men can see the consequences of their acts, whether for good or for ill. The stage teaches the doctrine of the conservation of moral energy--and of immoral energy--that sustained effort, conserved effort is never cheated; it gets its goal at last."

"Say!" broke in Scofield; but John would not be denied what he felt was a final smashing generalization.

"To figure the tariff on human conduct, to grade and classify the acts of life, to quote the rates on happiness and misery in trainload lots. That's what I'm going to do," he concluded, with a glow upon his face.

But by this time a smile of cynic pity had appeared upon the face of the railroad man.

"Hampstead," he exclaimed sharply, with a mimic shudder and a shrug of relief as if he had just escaped something, "you're not an actor. You're a preacher!"

John gasped.

"You're a moralist," asserted Scofield accusingly, "a puritanical, Sunday-school, twaddling moralist. I have misjudged you. I wouldn't want you around at all."

With a look akin to disgust upon his face, the railroad man made a motion with his fingers in the air as if ridding them of something sticky, and arose, not abruptly but decisively, making clear that the interview had proved disappointingly unprofitable and was therefore at an end.

John also arose, bewildered by the sudden change in Scofield's attitude--a change which he resented, and also the ground of it. He a preacher? The idea was ridiculous.

Besides, it makes an astonishing difference when one has been stubbornly refusing an offer to have the offer coolly and decisively withdrawn. Something subtly psychological made him want the offer back. The door of opportunity had been closed behind him with a snap so vicious that he wanted to turn and kick it open.

But the thin, talon-like hand of Scofield was hooking the young man's rather flaccid palm for a moment.

"Remember what I tell you," he barked out in parting. "You're not an actor. You're not a railroad man. You're a preacher!"

The last word was flung bitingly, like an epithet.

John, feeling uncomfortable, walked out and along one side of Union Square, casting a momentary wondering eye on the stabbing, twin towers of the Hotel St. Francis, many windowed and many-lighted; then turned on down Geary into Market and along that wide and cobbled thoroughfare to the doors of the old Palace Hotel. By the time he was in bed, he realized that Scofield had shaken him terribly. His decision was all to make over again.

However, Bessie would be there for three days to help him, and with this thought he felt comforted.

* * * * *

"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the following Tuesday. Bessie also sighed.

They had clambered down from the parapet below the Cliff House and sat watching the seals at play upon the rocks a stone's throw out from beneath their feet. Their position marked the southern portal of the famous Golden Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was running. Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of Marin County and beyond those the rugged greens and blues of the mountains, spiked in the center by the peak of Tamalpais.

Before their faces, the ocean, in swells and scoops of ever grayer gray, ran out to catch the horizon as it fell, illumined in its lower reaches by the sun, which was sinking into the haze above the waters like a lustrous orange ball.

Southward, beyond the green head of Golden Gate Park, the yellow gray of the sand dunes and the blue gray of the sea met in a lingering, playful kiss that swept back and forth in a long shimmering line which ran on sinuously, growing fainter and fainter, till lost in the shadow of the distant cliffs.

The hour was five o'clock. At eight that night John was to leave for Los Angeles. His vacation--the only vacation of his hard-driven life--was to end, and an epoch in his existence was also nearing its end. The past was clear as the land behind him; the future was an area of tossing uncertainty. Nothing appeared,--no track, no wake, no sail, no sun even. Only far over, beyond the curve of the horizon, was a kind of strange, unearthly glow, and on this his eye was set.

For three days his soul had ebbed and flowed like that lip of foam upon the beach, now stealing far up on the land,--for him the backward track; now turning and running far out to sea,--for him the way of adventure and advance.

But now the ultimate decision was to be made. Bessie saw it rising like a tide upon that face which once had seemed not to fit, a rapt look which snuggled in the hills and hollows and then began to harden like setting concrete. No one would call that face homely now. Interesting, most likely, would have been the word.

The gray eyes burned brighter, the lips grew tighter. The chin advanced, moved out to sea a little, as it were.

"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly, though a look of pain momentarily touched her whitening lips. "I shall despise you if you do not."

"The decision is made," John replied solemnly, "and you, Bessie, have helped to make it."

Bessie did not reply; she only looked.

Silence fell between them. Silence, too, was in the heavens; the sun, the waves, the restless wind for the moment appeared to stand still. All nature had paused respectfully. A man, young, inexperienced, but potential, had cast the horoscope of life beyond the power of gods or men to intervene,--and with it had cast some other horoscopes as well.

Hampstead felt the spell his act of will had wrapped about them, but he felt also the substance of his resolution framing like granite in his soul and making him strong with a new kind of strength.

But soon the sun was descending again, the clouds were drifting once more, and a gust of wind nipped sharply, causing the skirts of John's overcoat to flap lustily. Bessie twitched her fur collar closer about the neck, and thrust both hands deep into the pockets of her gray ulster. Hampstead passed his own hand through the curve of the girl's elbow, gripped her forearm possessively, selfishly, absently, and drew her toward him.

Indeed Bessie was closer to him than she had ever been before; and yet she had never felt so far away.

"Oh, but it's great to have a woman by you in a crisis," John chuckled happily.

Bessie looked up startled. John had called her woman. But she recovered from the start,--he had also called her _a_ woman.

"Come to understand each other pretty well, haven't we?" John observed, still looking oceanward, but giving the arm of Bessie what was intended for a meaningful squeeze.

"Not at all," sighed Bessie, also still looking oceanward.

Hampstead, his thoughts bowling rapidly forward, continued motionless until a white-winged, curious-eyed gull sailed between his line of vision and the water. Then, as if abruptly conscious that Bessie's answer was not what it should have been, he turned, and at the same time boldly swung her body round till they stood facing each other. Bessie met this gaze unblinkingly for a moment, with her face set and sober; then something in John's mystified glance touched her keen sense of humor, and she laughed,--her old, roguish laugh,--and flirted the stupid in the face with the end of her boa.

"You great big egoist!" she smiled. "There, that's the first chance I've had to use that word. I only learned the difference between it and another last week."

"Indeed!" retorted Hampstead. "And when did you learn the difference between me and the other word?"

"Well, I'm not sure that there is a difference," she sparred. "Being polite, I just concede it."

"Oh," he chuckled. "But," and he was serious again, "you say we don't understand each other?"

"Nonsense; I was only joking. I do understand you; you great, big, egoistical egotist! You are just now absolutely self-centered--and all, all ambition! And I am secretly--secretly, you understand--proud of you!"

"And you," said Hampstead, drawing her close again, "are just the truest, most understanding friend a man ever, ever had. You know, Bessie, a fellow can talk to you just like a sister,--a pretty little sister!" he subjoined, when Bessie looked less pleased than he thought she should.

"You've changed a lot, too, in a year," he conceded, studying her face critically. "When you came into the hotel that night, you struck fear into my heart, and then kind of made it flutter. I said to myself, 'She's gone--the old Bessie, that could be played with. But here's a young woman, a handsome young woman, taking her place.'"

"Did you say that?" asked Bessie happily.

"An exceedingly beautiful woman," went on John, as if stimulated by the interruption. "By George, a very corker of a woman--look at those eyes, those lips, those dimples. Same old dimples, girl!" he laughed emotionally. "And I said, 'Now, here's a woman, a ripe, wonderful woman, to be made love to--'"

"John!"

There was in Bessie's sudden exclamation the surcharged sense of all the proprieties which their relationship involved.

"Oh, don't be alarmed," exclaimed Hampstead, suddenly very earnest and respectful. "I am not leading up to anything. I do not misunderstand the nature of your goodness to me. I am not presuming anything. I am only telling you what I said to myself."

"Oh," murmured Bessie noncommittally, though she shivered for a moment as if a gust of wind had come again. Hampstead, feeling this, drew her still closer and hunched his broad shoulder to shelter her more, as he explained further:

"But it was I, you know, and there was nothing for me to do but to fly. I was for jumping out the window. And then you suddenly made that wonderful speech about going to the circus with dear old John, and your mother let it out that you wanted me to run around with you here, and I saw that toward me you were the same old Bessie; that for a few days we could be once more just friendly, only two finer friends, because we're both grown up now."

"Yes," Bessie sighed, almost contentedly. "I did want you, John. A girl gets tired of society, of clubs and dances and things, even in High. You know, I get weary of the sight of these slim, pompadoured boys sometimes. I just wanted somehow to feel the arm of a real man, to hear him talk, even if he does nothing but talk about himself, and until this minute in three days has not confessed that I have dimples, and--and a heart."

"Slow, about some things, am I not?" confessed John. "Awfully, awfully slow!"

"I will agree with you," said Bessie, with a mournfulness that literally compelled him to perceive that she was some way disappointed in him.

"But," he inquired reproachfully, "aside from my usefulness as a social escort and a sort of masculine tonic, you do admire me a little, don't you?"

"Oh, yes," she answered frankly. "I admire you a lot."

"But you're disappointed about something?"

"Apprehension is the better word," she confessed soberly.

"Apprehension? Of what?" John was looking at her almost accusingly. Bessie avoided his glance. She could not tell him what she feared nor why she feared it.

"You think I'll fail?" John demanded.

"No," disclaimed Bessie seriously. "I think you will succeed!"

"You think so?" and Hampstead's face lighted brilliantly. "Oh, God bless you for that!" and again he shook her, this time tenderly and drew her closer till her breast was touching his, and she leaned her head far back to look up into his face.

"Yes," she breathed softly, "I think so!"

"And you do not think me silly for turning my back upon solid realities to follow my ideal?"

"No! No!" and she shook her head emphatically, "I honor you for it, John. You have inspired me, John, and thrilled me. I used to think--how good you are! Now I think--how noble you are! You have made my feeling for you one of worshipfulness almost."

The look in her face did express that, and Hampstead noticed it now.

"Ah," he murmured, pressing her arms against her sides, "you dear, impressionable little girl!"

Quite thoughtless of how unnecessarily close he was drawing Bessie, either to shelter her from the wind or for the purpose of conversation, or especially in the fulfillment of his duty to his charge as guide and protector, John was finding a pleasurable sensation in this position of intimacy, and was indeed, just upon the threshold of one very great discovery when he made another, perhaps equally surprising, but vastly less important. Looking into the upturned eyes, which after the canons of Delsarte, he was thinking expressed "devotion" perfectly, a shadow was seen to project itself downward from the upper lids across the iris, as if a storm were gathering on a placid lake. John watched the shadow curiously as it deepened, until it became clear that a mist was congealing in those swimming violet depths.

"Why, Bessie," he exclaimed, amazed, "you are going to cry!"

On the instant two tears trickled from the dark lashes and gleamed for a moment like solitaire diamonds in the setting of two ruby spots that had gathered unaccountably upon her upturned cheeks.

"You are crying," he charged straightly.

Bessie's expression never changed, but her smooth, round chin nodded a trembling and unabashed assent. A sudden impulse seized John. The position of his arms shifted.

"Bessie!" he murmured feelingly, "I am going to kiss you!"

Bessie did not appear half as surprised at this announcement as Hampstead at himself for making it.

"May I?" he persisted.

The expression of devotion in Bessie's swimming orbs remained unstartled, her pose unaltered. Only her lips moved while she breathed a single word: "Yes."

Instantly their ruby and velvet softness yielded to the pressure of John's, planted as tenderly and chastely as was his thought of her,--for that other discovery that he was on the verge of making had been fended off by the coming of the tear.

*CHAPTER VIII*

*JOHN MAKES UP*

That night, according to programme, John went back to Los Angeles; and a few weeks later, also according to programme, he was again in San Francisco, no longer a railroad man, but--in his thought--an actor.

Now calling oneself an actor and being one are quite different; but it took an experience to prove this to John. Even the opportunity for this experience was itself hard to get. It was days before he even saw a theatrical manager, weeks before he met one personally, and a month before he got his first engagement.

When he talked of the drama to actors the way he had talked of it to the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell, they did not comprehend him; when he talked to them as he had to Scofield, they smiled cynically; when he admitted to one manager that he was without professional experience, the admission drew a sneer which froze the stream of hope in his breast.

John thereafter told no other manager this, but learned instead the value of a "front", and inserted in the professional columns of the _San Francisco Dramatic Review_ a card which read:

+------------------+
| |
| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |
| HEAVY |
| AT LIBERTY |
| |
+------------------+

"Heavy" in theatrical parlance means the villain. Modestly confessing himself not quite equal to "leads", though in his heart John scorned to believe his own confession, he had announced himself as a "heavy."

This card appeared for three succeeding weeks, but on the fourth week there was a significant change. It read:

+-----------------------------------+
| |
| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |
| HEAVY |
| With the People's Stock Company |
| |
+-----------------------------------+

The People's Stock Company was new, a "ten-twenty-thirty" organization, got together in a day for a season of doubtful length, in a huge barn of a house that once had been the home of bucket-of-blood melodramas, but for a long time had been given over to cobwebs and prize fights. The promoters had little money. They spent most of it on new paint and gorgeous, twelve-sheet posters. Everything was cheap and gaudy, but the cheapest thing was the company--and the least gaudy.

The opening play was a blood-spiller with thrills guaranteed; the scene was laid in Cuba at a period just preceding the Spanish-American War. Hampstead's part was a Spanish colonel, Delaro by name. Delaro was no ordinary double-dyed villain. He was triple-dyed at the least, and would kick up all the deviltry in the piece from the beginning to the end; he would steal the fair Yankee maiden who had strayed ashore from her father's yacht; he would imprison her in an out-of-the-way fortress; court her, taunt her, threaten her--and then when the audience was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement and the last throb of pity for her impending fate at the hands of this fiend in yellow uniform and brass buttons, the galloping of horses would herald the appearance of Lieutenant Bangster, U.S.N., lover of the maiden and hero of the play. (The Navy on horseback!) A pitched battle would result, pistols, rifles, cannon would be fired, the fortifications would be blown away, and Old Glory go fluttering up the staff to the thundering applause of the gods of the gallery.

Delaro was an enormous opportunity; but it was also an enormous responsibility. John went into rehearsal haunted by fear that the carefully guarded secret of his inexperience would be discovered, knowing that instant humiliation and discharge would follow. He had trudged, hoped, brazened, starved, prayed to get this part. He must not lose it, and he must make good. The sweat of desperation oozed daily from his pores.

Halson, the stage manager, was a tall, tubercular person, with a husk in his throat and a cloudy eye. This eye seemed always to John to be cloudier still when turned on him. On the fourth day of rehearsal, these clouded looks broke out in lightning.

"Stop that preaching!" Halson commanded impatiently. "You are intoning those speeches like a parrot in a pulpit. Colonel Delaro is not a bishop. He is a villain--a damned, detestable, outrageous villain! Play it faster; read those speeches more naturally. My God, you must have been playing-- By the way, Hampstead, what were you playing last?"

The shot was a bull's-eye. John felt himself suddenly a monstrous fraud and had a sickening sense of predestined failure. In his soul he suddenly saw the truth. Acting was not bluffing. Acting was an art! The poorest, dullest of these people, bad as they appeared to be, knew how to read their lines more naturally than he. He was not an actor. He never had been an actor. He was only a recitationist.

"What were you playing last, I say?" bullied Halson, as if suddenly suspicious.

But John had rallied. "If I don't get the experience, how will I ever become an actor," was what he said to himself.

"My last season was in Shakespeare," was what he observed to Halson, with deliberate dignity.

"Oh," exclaimed the stage manager, much relieved. "That explains it. I was beginning to think somebody had sawed off a blooming amateur on me."

John had not deemed it prudential to add that this season in Shakespeare lasted one whole evening and consisted of some slices from the Merchant of Venice presented in the parlor of the Hotel Green in Pasadena; and the scorn with which Halson had immediately pronounced the word "amateur" sent a shiver to Hampstead's marrow, while he congratulated himself on his discretion. Nevertheless, he suffered this day many interruptions and much kindergarten coaching from Halson and felt himself humiliated by certain overt glances from the cast.

"The boobs!" thought John. "The pin-heads! They don't know half as much as I do. They never taught a Y.M.C.A. class in public speaking; they never gave a lesson in elocution in all their lives, and here they are staring at me, because I have a little trouble mastering the mere mechanics of stage delivery. It's simple. I'll have it by to-morrow."

But at the end of the rehearsal, John felt weak. Instead of leaving the theater, he slipped behind a curtain into one of the boxes and sank down in the gloom to be alone and think. But he was not so much alone as he thought. A voice came up out of the shadows in the orchestra circle. It was the voice of Neumeyer, the 'angel' of the enterprise, who was even more inexperienced in things dramatic than his "heavy" man.

"How do you think it'll go?" Neumeyer had asked anxiously.

"Oh, it'll go all right," barked the whiskey-throat of Halson. "It'll go. All that's worrying me is this blamed fool Hampstead. How in time I sawed him off on myself is more than I can tell. However, I've engaged a new heavy for next week."

John groped dumbly out into the day. But in the sunshine his spirits rallied. "They can't take this part away from me," he exulted and then croaked resolutely: "I'll show 'em; I'll show 'em yet. They're bound to like me when they see my finished work."

And that was what he kept saying to himself up to the very night of the first performance. But that significant occasion brought him face to face with another problem,--his make-up.

The matter of costume was simple. It had been rented for a week from Goldstein's. It was fearsomely contrived. The trousers were red. Varnished oilcloth leggings, made to slip on over his shoes, were relied upon to give the effect of top boots. The coat was of yellow, with spiked tails, with huge, leaf-like chevrons, with rows of large, superfluous buttons, and coils on coils of cord of gold.

But make-up could not be hired from a costumer and put on like a mask. It was a matter of experience, of individuality, and of skill upon the part of the actor. All John knew of make-up he had read in the books and learned from those experimental daubs in which his features had been presented in his own barn-storming productions. The make-up of Ursus had been almost entirely a matter of excess of hair, acquired by a beard and a wig rented for the occasion. This, therefore, was really to be his first professional make-up, and Hampstead was blissfully determined that it should be a stunning achievement.

In order that he might have plenty of time for experiment, the heavy man entered the dressing rooms at six o'clock, almost an hour and a half before any other actor felt it necessary to appear, and went gravely about his important task.