Chapter I: Salaam

Have you, average American reader, ever paused in the midst of your journey by the Rapid Transit Line through the jostling crowd of humanity to the somber terminus of Life, paused long enough to consider what startling vicissitudes attend some brief human experiences? Do you realize that men now living remember Chicago as a hamlet of a dozen shops and dwellings located, or more properly sunken, in quagmire? Are you aware that men who are still pursuing the phantom Hope, by active efforts in practical everyday occupations, remember it many years before Long John Wentworth was dreamed of, or Phil Armour had seen the light of an Illinois day?

Yet such is the case, and though I, Thomas Hardman, Jr., can lay claim to no such venerable years in my own right, some strange and not altogether untoward circumstances in my life have brought about these reflections in my mind with startling force.

I am a native of Chicago, and my school life from the time that I entered the primary department of the public school until I finished the curriculum prescribed by the University of Chicago, was all encompassed by a matter of a few blocks of the city, including my home, which was with my paternal uncle. Fortune I had none; but educational privileges second to none. My observation has taught me that such advantages, coupled with the knowledge that these advantages and the resulting mental and moral stamina are to constitute the sole equipment for the struggle in the world, are in themselves an independent fortune to any young man deserving of success.

It is true that the atmosphere of school life is apt to develop the ideal faculties unduly, and has a tendency to exalt our ideas of life and exaggerate our own importance in the world, and induce in the young and imaginative student that state of mind denominated “walking on air.” But if, when the valedictorian has made his bow, thrilled the hearts of his fond friends and relatives by his eloquence, been the recipient of flowers and compliments to his heart’s content, and as the finished product of a great and grand institution, succeeds in alighting from his airy perch on _terra firma_, plain and simple, without breaking his neck, there is yet hope for him that he is made of the tough genuine fiber of the type of manhood known in polite language as the successful variety.

So having in my own person proven the correctness of these theories, and run the educational gauntlet and found myself still alive, I determined to make the best of it, though I found myself growing cynical in my views of life and almost ready at times to give up in despair.

While in the confessional I may as well make a clean breast of it, and own that to add to my despair and intensify my melancholy reflections on the unequal gifts of life, I was madly in love. Yes, even in the practical city of the young West, there was at least one young man completely given over to the pleasing yet painful, the poetical yet contradictory and deliciously bitter-sweet sense of yearning and pining, and hoping and fearing, that marks the condition of the hopelessly distraught lover. Not that the adored one did not reciprocate the feelings of her inamorata, for she had long since yielded her affections to my soft persuasions, and we had framed our own philosophy of life into which love was to enter so largely as to exclude all disagreeable minor themes; and as we were schoolmates and classmates, I knew beyond a peradventure that in all social and intellectual acquirements as well as gifts, I was her peer. Beyond this no troublesome questions of inequality had intruded, believing as we did with Charles Dickens that “there is no disparity in marriage so great as unsuitableness in thought and feeling.” Our interests from childhood had been on the same horizon; the same form of religious belief was ours. The same social status had been thus far given no hint of the chasm that was to open between us. What was the Griffin that stood in our path to happiness? Ah! the only disparity in our lives was the disparity in the number of paltry dollars we possessed.

Lena Upton was the child of wealthy parents, while I was the almost penniless ward of an indulgent but impecunious uncle. Lena’s ancestors had settled upon a section of swamp land adjoining a like tract owned by my ancestors. Her family acres were not one whit less productive of frog-spawn, mosquitoes, and miasma than were those of my progenitors. The city was as densely populous on the tract that should have been my patrimony as on that which made Lena’s father a multi-millionaire. But strange to say, all this divergence of results was brought about by a trifling superiority of liver on the part of Lena’s grandfather over that of mine, or perhaps the whiskey and quinine that he employed as a remedial agent was a _bona fide_ brand, while my worthy grandsire was a victim of the spurious article. Be that as it may, my grandfather died of malarial fever at a critical time in the history of his possessions and a slight flaw in the title was examined with a lens of high magnifying power, by the sharks of the law, till it appeared as a blotch on the land large enough to obscure and alienate it.

Great was my wrath and towering my impotent rage when I learned that this trifling circumstance was regarded by Lena’s parents as an impassable barrier between us. And while a schoolboy and schoolgirl friendship between us was smiled upon as quite the correct thing, the knowledge that an engagement existed between Lena and myself was the signal for an explosion of wrath against me, and, from being an innocent, agreeable, and suitable companion for Lena Upton, I became at a bound, in the sight of her parents, a dangerous charmer and cold-blooded fortune hunter, who would contaminate Lena’s morals by my presence, and if allowed to carry out my plotting programme, would make complete shipwreck of her happiness.

This was what I gathered to be the sum and substance of the politely worded interview with which Mr. Upton favored me. In my ignorance of worldly wisdom, I made my plea of an unsullied life, undying lofty Platonic affection for Lena, and ventured to quote from Scripture that a good name was rather to be chosen than great riches.

But to my surprise, for Mr. Upton is a very prominent worker in the ---- Street Baptist church, he ignored all these arguments, as not applying to this case in the least, though certainly very true in a general sense.

I was sanguine that with my splendid health, and with such an all-impelling motive, I could, in a few years, achieve wealth, and as for position socially, was not mine already on an equal footing with hers?

He shook his head incredulously at my first proposition, and as to the second, he said, “You think so now, my boy, but you will speedily find your mistake.”

I was forced to own that the tropical warmth of my pleadings was powerless against his glacial coldness, and I soon found myself reduced to the dire extremity of asking leave to see Lena for five minutes, to say good-by, which was grudgingly granted, on my promising on my sacred honor not to make any effort to communicate in any way with her clandestinely. Lena’s distress at parting--strange contradiction--was all that I could desire. She agreed that we must keep sacredly the promise I had made, not to see her again, but with a woman’s unerring instinct in such matters, fixed upon the only possible source of comfort in the situation, by assuring me that she could and would wait. For she said, “I am sure something will yet happen to bring us back to each other.”

So with all the tenderness of an ardent nature toward Lena, and all the bitterness, I fear, of a somewhat resentful one toward her parents, I was forced to a parting that was fully understood and believed by her parents to be a final one, but brightened by her loving assurance that time could not change her feelings toward me.

I resolved then and there that I would rest neither day nor night till I had secured a situation in the city where I might begin to climb, even if it were from the lowest round. I naturally turned first to those with whom I had been on terms of friendship socially, among the business men of my acquaintance. I found to my disgust that there were no vacancies here and I imagined that I was dismissed a trifle superciliously by the men whom I had called friends.

I haunted the streets and business houses like a ghost and I soon came to resemble one as compared to my former self. I was compelled to plead guilty to the charge of inexperience, which seemed to be considered an unpardonable one in the eyes of many, while I was politely dismissed to wander on again with a somewhat dazed and perplexed inner questioning as to how I was to gain experience without opportunity. I began to envy the very bootblacks who had a settled calling and with every boot they polished were gaining what lacked. I, too, was gaining experience, but it was of that painful kind that turns to wormwood the spirit of benevolence that sweetens human intercourse. I saw young men, whom I knew to have enjoyed not a tithe of the advantages which I had not only enjoyed but improved, holding positions of trust and profit because they had a friend at court; and others who had enjoyed equal advantages with me, but had despised them and had merely drifted through the prescribed course, studying to evade rather than master the task of to-day, heedless and ambitionless of to-morrow, succeeding without an effort on their part to a partnership in a lucrative business with their fathers or other near relatives.

All these things, with my failure to find work, preyed as a moral gangrene on my happiness, I found myself harboring wild thoughts of ending it all by a plunge in the waters of the harbor.

My uncle, ever kindly solicitous for my welfare, at last seeing my desperate state of mind and knowing my straightened circumstances better than I, at last came to my rescue with a suggestion which was the means of changing the whole drift of my life into new channels. Knowing my partiality for chemistry, mineralogy, and kindred studies, he suggested a trip to Leadville, then beginning to create quite a sensation by its great mineral wealth, with a view of utilizing my technical knowledge of minerals primarily in investigating the worth of that one of the various groups of mines known as The Little Pittsburg in which my uncle and I each owned some shares, which we had bought for a song of a disgusted eastern gold seeker on his way home from Colorado a year or two before. Afterward, he said, “You may be able to qualify yourself by practical experience as a mining expert and do a thriving business.”

I was in just the reckless frame of mind to act on such a suggestion, and adding his slender resources to mine, my uncle gave me a hearty handshake and “God bless you, my boy,” and saw me on board a train with a ticket for Leadville.