Chapter IV: Part 4

"Certainly," said the salesman, wondering no more; and when he had led the way to the boiler-room, and had seen his customer thrust the hand-bag well back among the coals in the furnace, he thought it a worthy precaution and one which, if generally practiced, would considerably accelerate the clothing trade.

All traces of the deck-hand Gavitt, and of the Sonneschein planter-customer having been thus obliterated, there remained only the paying of his bill and the summoning of a cab. Oddly enough, the cab, when it came, proved to be a four-wheeler driven by a little, wizen-faced man whose thin, high-pitched voice was singularly familiar.

"The Hotel Chouteau?--yis, sorr. Will you plaze hand me thim grips? I can't lave me harrses."

The driver's excuse instantly tied the knot of recognition, and the man who had just cremated his former identities swore softly.

"Beg your pardon, sorr; was ye spakin' to me?"

"No; I was merely remarking that the world isn't as big as it might be."

"Faith, then, it's full big enough for a man wid a wife and sivin childer hangin' to um. Get in, sorr, and I'll have you at the Chouteau in t'ree shakes av a dead lamb's tail."

The little cabman was better than his word, but on the short drive to the hotel he found time to work out a small problem, not entirely to his satisfaction, but to at least a partial conclusion.

"'Tis the divil's own self he is, and there's nothing left av him but thim eyes and that scar on his forrud, and his manner of spakin'. But thim I'd swear to if I'd live to be as old as Father M'Guinness--rest his sowl."

XIV

PHILISTIA

All things considered, it was the Griswold of the college-graduate days--the days of the slender patrimony which had capitalized the literary beginning--who presented himself at the counter of the Hotel Chouteau at half-past nine o'clock on the evening of the _Belle Julie's_ arrival at St. Louis, wrote his name in the guest-book, and permitted an attentive bell-boy to relieve him of his two suit-cases.

The clerk, a rotund little man with a promising bald spot and a permanent smile, had appraised his latest guest in the moment of book-signing, and the result was a small triumph for the Olive Street furnishing house. Next to the genuinely tailor-made stands the quality of verisimilitude; and the keynote of the clerk's greeting was respectful affability.

"Glad to have you with us, Mr. Griswold. Would you like a room, or a suite?"

Griswold was sufficiently human to roll the long-submerged courtesy prefix as a sweet morsel under his tongue. With a day to spare he might have clinched the clerk's respect by taking a suite; the more luxurious, the better. But St. Louis, with at least two men in it who would sweep the corners in their search for him, was only a place to put behind him. So he said: "Neither; if I have time to get my supper and catch a train. Have you a railway guide?"

"There is one in the writing-room. But possibly I can tell you what you wish to know. Which way are you going?"

Without stopping to think of the critical happenings which had intervened since the forming of the impulsive resolution fixing his destination, Griswold named the chosen field for the hazard of fresh fortunes, and its direction.

"North; to a town in Minnesota called Wahaska. Do you happen to know the place?"

"I know it very well, indeed; southern Minnesota is my old stamping-ground. Are you acquainted in Wahaska?--but I know you are not, or you wouldn't pronounce it 'Wayhaska'."

"You are quite right; I know next to nothing about the town. But I have been given the impression that it is a quiet little place out of the beaten track, where a man might spend a summer without having to share it with a lot of other city runaways of his kind."

The clerk smiled and shook his head.

"You might have done that a few years ago, but there's a fine lake, you know, and some New Orleans people have built a resort house. I understand it does a pretty fair business in the season."

Having assured himself that the New Orleans leaf in his book of experience was safely turned and securely pasted down, Griswold was nettled to find that the mere mention of the name sent creeping little chills of apprehension trickling up and down his spine. But innate stubbornness scoffed at the warning; derided and craved further details.

"How large a place is it?"

"Oh, four or five thousand, I should say; possibly more: big enough and busy enough so that a hundred-room resort house doesn't make it a souvenir town. It's a nice little city; modern, progressive, and business-like; trolleys, electric lights, and some manufacturing. Good people, too. _Front!_ Check the gentleman's grips and show him the café. I'm sorry we can't give you dinner, but the dining-room closes at nine."

"Plenty of time, is there?" Griswold asked.

"Oh, yes; didn't I tell you? Your train leaves the Terminal at eleven-thirty; but you can get into the sleeper any time after eight o'clock."

The guest had crossed the lobby to the café, and the clerk was still dallying with the memories stirred up by the mention of his boyhood home, when a little man with weak eyes and a face that out-caricatured all the caricatures of the Irish, sidled up to the registry desk. The round-bodied clerk knew him and spoke in terms of accommodation.

"What is it, Patsy?"

"The young gentleman ye was spakin' to: is he gone?"

"He is in the café, getting his supper. What did you want of him?"

The weak-eyed little man was running a slow finger down the list of names on the guest-book, blinking as if the writing or the glare of the lights on the page dazzled him.

"I drove him, and he did be overpaying me, I think. What was ye saying his name would be?"

"It's right there, under your finger: Kenneth Griswold, New York."

"Um. And I wondher, now, where does he be living, whin he's at home?"

"I don't know; New York, I suppose, since he registers from there."

"And does he be staying here f'r awhile?"

"No; he is on his way to Minnesota."

"Um." A long pause followed in which the cabman appeared to be counting the coins in his pocket by the sense of touch. Then: "Would yez be writing that down for me on a bit av paper, Misther Edwards?--his name, and the name av the place where he does be going, I mane?"

"So you can write to him and refund the over-payment after you've been to confession?" laughed the clerk. Nevertheless, he wrote the name and address on a card for the petitioner.

"Thank ye, sorr; thank ye kindly. Whin a man has a wife and sivin childer hangin' to um--" but here the singsong voice of the porter calling the Burlington westbound silenced all other sounds and the clerk heard no more.

Seated at a well-appointed table in the Chouteau café, Griswold had ample time to overtake himself in the race reconstructive, and for the moment the point of view became frankly Philistine. The luxurious hotel, with its air of invincible respectability; the snowy napery, the cut glass, the shaded lights, the deferential service; all these appealed irresistibly to the epicurean in him. It was as if he had come suddenly to his own again after an undeserved season of deprivation, and the effect of it was to push the hardships and perils of the preceding weeks and months into a far-away past.

He ordered his supper deliberately, and while he waited for its serving, imagination cleared the stage and set the scenes for the drama of the future. That future, with all its opportunities for the realizing of ideals, was now safely assured. He could go whither he pleased and do what seemed right in his own eyes, and there was none to say him nay.

It was good to be able to pick and choose in a whole worldful of possibilities, and he gave himself a broad credit mark for persevering in the resolution which held him steadfastly to the modest, workaday plan struck out in the beginning. Apart from Miss Farnham's recognition of him on the _Belle Julie_--a recognition which, he persuaded himself, would never carry over from Gavitt the deck-hand to Griswold the student and benefactor of his kind--there was nothing to fear; no reason why he should not make Wahaska his workshop.

In this minor city of the clerk's describing he would find the environment most favorable for a re-writing of his book and for a renewal of his studies. Here, too, he might hope to become by unostentatious degrees the beneficent god-in-the-car of his worthier ambition, raising the fallen, succoring the helpless, and fighting the battles of the oppressed.

Farther along, when she should have quite forgotten the _Belle Julie's_ deck-hand, he would meet Miss Farnham on an equal social footing; and the conclusion of the whole matter should be a triumphant demonstration to her by their refutable logic of good deeds and a life well-lived that in his case, at least, the end justified the means.

Just here, however, there was an unresolved discord in the imaginative theme. It was struck by the reflection that since he could never take her fully into his confidence her approval would always lack the seal of completeness. She knew the masquerading deck-hand, and what he had done; and she would know Griswold the benefactor, and what he meant to do. But until she could link the two together, there could be no demonstration. Though he should build the bastion of good deeds mountain high, it could never figure as a bastion to her unless she might come to know what it was designed to defend.

Having a sensitive ear for the imaginative harmonies, the unresolved discord annoyed him. The effort to eliminate it brought him face to face with a blunt demand, a query that was almost psychic in its clear-cut distinctness. Why did these forecastings of the future always lead him up to the closed door of this young woman's approval and leave him there?

For one whose experience had all been bought on a rising market, Griswold was singularly heart-whole and normal in his attitude toward women. Beautiful women he had met before, among them a few who had lent themselves facilely to the idealizing process; but in each instance it was the artistic temperament, and not the heart, that was touched and inspired. Was Charlotte Farnham going to prove the exception? Since he could ask the question calmly and with no perceptible quickening of the pulses, he concluded that she was not. Nevertheless----

The train of reflective thought was broken abruptly by the seating of two other supper guests at his table; a big-framed man in the grizzled fifties, and a young woman who looked as if she might have stepped the moment before out of the fitting-rooms of the most famous of Parisian dressmakers.

Griswold's supper was served, and for a time he made shift to ignore the couple at the other end of the table. Then an overheard word, the name of the town which he had chosen as his future abiding place, made him suddenly observant.

It was the young woman who had named Wahaska, and he saw now that his first impression had been at fault; she was not overdressed. Also he saw that she was piquantly pretty; a bravura type, slightly suggesting the Rialto at its best, perhaps, but equally suggestive of sophistication, travel, and a serene disregard of chaperonage.

The young woman's companion was undeniably her father. Gray, heavy-browed, and with a face that was a life-mask of crude strength and elemental shrewdness, the man had bequeathed no single feature to the alertly beautiful daughter; yet the resemblance was unmistakable. Griswold did not listen designedly, but he could not help overhearing much of the talk at the other end of the table. From it he gathered that the young woman was lately returned from some Florida winter resort; that her father had met her by appointment in St. Louis; and that the two were going on together; perhaps to Wahaska, since that was the place-name oftenest on the lips of the daughter.

Griswold was only moderately interested. The deliberately ordered supper, enticing in anticipation, had fallen short of the zestful promise in the fact. It came to him with a little shock that at least one part of him, the civilized appetite, had become debased by the plunge into the deck-hand depths, and he fought the suggestion fiercely. It was an article in his creed that environment is always subjective, and when one opens the door to an exception a host of ominous shapes may be ready to crowd in. He was fighting off the evil shapes while he listened; otherwise his interest might have been more acute.

It was at this point that the apex of Philistine contentment was passed and the reaction set in. He had been spending strength and vitality recklessly and the accounting was at hand. The descent began when he took himself sharply to task for the high-priced supper. What right had he to order costly food that he could not eat when the price of this single meal would feed a family for a week?

After that, nothing that the obsequious and attentive waiter could bring proved tempting enough to recall the vanished appetite. Never having known what it was to be sick, Griswold disregarded the warning, drank a cup of strong coffee, and went out to the lobby to get a cigar, leaving his table companions in the midst of their meal. To his surprise and chagrin the carefully selected "perfecto" made him dizzy and faint, bringing a disquieting recurrence of the vertigo which had seized him while he was searching for his negro treasure-bearer on the levee.

"I've had an overdose of excitement, I guess," he said to himself, flinging the cigar away. "The best thing for me to do is to go down to the train and get to bed."

He went about it listlessly, with a curious buzzing in his ears and a certain dimness of sight which was quite disconcerting; and when a cab was summoned he was glad enough to let a respectfully sympathetic porter lend him a shoulder to the sidewalk.

The drive in the open air was sufficiently tonic to help him through the details of ticket-buying and embarkation; and afterward sleep came so quickly that he did not know when the Pullman porter drew the curtains to adjust the screen in the window at his feet, though he did awake drowsily later on at the sound of voices in the aisle, awoke to realize vaguely that his two table companions of the Hotel Chouteau café were to be his fellow travellers in the Pullman.

The train was made up ready to leave, and the locomotive was filling the great train-shed with stertorous hissings, when a red-faced man slipped through the gates to saunter over to the Pullman and to peck inquisitively at the porter.

"Much of a load to-night, George?"

"No, sah; mighty light: four young ladies goin' up to de school in Faribault, Mistah Grierson and his daughter, and a gentleman from de Chouteau."

"A gentleman from the Chouteau? When did he come down?"

The porter knew the calling of the red-faced man only by intuition; but Griswold's tip was warming in his pocket and he lied at random and on general principles.

"Been heah all de evenin'; come down right early afte' suppeh, and went to baid like he was sick or tarr'd or somethin'."

"What sort of a looking man is he?"

"Little, smooth-faced, narr'-chisted gentleman; look like he might be----"

But the train was moving out and the red-faced man had turned away. Whereupon the porter broke his simile in the midst, picked up his carpet-covered step, and climbed aboard.

XV

THE GOTHS AND VANDALS

In the day of its beginnings, Wahaska was a minor trading-post on the north-western frontier, and an outfitting station for the hunters and trappers of the upper Mississippi and Minnesota lake region.

Later, it became the market town of a wheat-growing district, and a foundation of modest prosperity was laid by well-to-do farmers gravitating to their county seat to give their children the benefit of a graded school. Later still came the passing of the wheat, a re-peopling of the farms by a fresh influx of home-seekers from the Old World, and the birth, in Wahaska and elsewhere, of the industrial era.

Jasper Grierson was a product of the wheat-growing period. The son of one of the earliest of the New-York-State homesteaders in the wheat belt, he came of age in the year of the Civil War draft, and was unpatriotic enough, some said, to dodge conscription, or the chance of it, by throwing up his hostler's job in a Wahaska livery stable and vanishing into the dim limbo of the Farther West. Also, tradition added that he was well-spared by most; that he was ill-spared, indeed, by only one, and that one a woman.

After the westward vanishing, Wahaska saw him no more until he returned in his vigorous prime, a veteran soldier of fortune upon whom the goddess had poured a golden shower out of some cornucopia of the Colorado mines. Although rumor, occasionally naming him during the years of absence, had never mentioned a wife, he was accompanied by a daughter, a dark-eyed, red-lipped young woman, a rather striking beauty of a type unfamiliar to Wahaska and owing nothing, it would seem, to the grim, gray-wolf Jasper.

With the return to his birthplace, Jasper Grierson began a campaign, the planning of which had tided him over many an obstacle in the road to fortune. It had given him the keenest thrill of joy of which a frankly sordid nature is capable to descend upon his native town rich enough to buy and sell any round dozen of the well-to-do farmers; and when he had looked about him he settled down to the attainment of his heart's desire, which was to have the casting vote in the business affairs of the community which had once known him as a helper in a livery stable.

Losing sight of the irresistible energy and momentum of wealth as wealth, men said that fortune favored him from the outset. It was only a half-truth, but it sufficed to account for what was really a campaign of conquest. Grierson's touch was Midas-like, turning all things to gold; and even in Wahaska there were Mammon worshippers enough to hail him as a public benefactor whose wealth and enterprise would shortly make of the overgrown village a town, and of the town a thriving city.

Since the time was ripe, Wahaska did presently burst its swaddling-bands. Commercial enterprise is sheep-like; where one leads, others will follow; and the mere following breeds success, if only by the sheer impetus of the massed forward movement. Jasper Grierson was the man of the hour, but the price paid for leadership by the led is apt to be high. When Wahaska became a city, with a charter and a bonded debt, electric lights, water-works, and a trolley system, Grierson's interest predominated in every considerable business venture in it, save and excepting the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works.

He was the president of one bank, and the principal stockholder in the other, which was practically an allied institution; he was the sole owner of the grain elevator, the saw- and planing-mills, the box factory, and a dozen smaller industries in which his name did not appear. Also, it was his money, or rather his skill as a promoter, which had transformed the Wahaska & Pineboro Railroad from a logging switch, built to serve the saw-mill, into an important and independent connecting link in the great lake region system.

In each of these commercial or industrial chariots the returned native sat in the driver's seat; and those who remembered him as a loutish young farmhand overlooked the educative results of continued success and marvelled at his gifts, wondering how and where he had acquired them.

While the father was thus gratifying a purely Gothic lust for conquest, the daughter figured, in at least one small circle, as a beautiful young Vandal, with a passion for overturning all the well-settled traditions. At first her attitude toward Wahaska and the Wahaskans had been serenely tolerant; the tolerance of the barbarian who neither understands, nor sympathizes with, the homely virtues and the customs which have grown out of them. Then resentment awoke, and with it a soaring ambition to reconstruct the social fabric of the countrified town upon a model of her own devising.

In this charitable undertaking she was aided and abetted by her father, who indulgently paid the bills. At her instigation he built an imposing red brick mansion on the sloping shore of Lake Minnedaska, named it--or suffered her to name it--"Mereside," had an artist of parts up from Chicago to design the decorations and superintend the furnishings, had a landscape gardener from Philadelphia to lay out the grounds, and, when all was in readiness, gave a house-warming to which the invitations were in some sense mandatory, since by that time he had a finger in nearly every commercial and industrial pie in Wahaska.

After the house-warming, which was a social event quite without precedent in Wahaskan annals, Miss Grierson's leadership was tacitly acknowledged by a majority of the ex-farmers' wives and daughters, though they still discussed her with more or less frankness in the sewing-circles and at neighborhood tea-drinkings. Crystallized into accusation, there was little to be urged against her save that she was pretty and rich, and that her leaning toward modernity was sometimes a little startling. But being human, the missionary seamstresses and the tea-drinkers made the most of these drawbacks, whetting criticism to a cutting edge now and then with curious speculations about Margery's mother, and wondering why Jasper Grierson or the daughter never mentioned her.

Meanwhile, the big house on the lake front continued to set the social pace. Afternoon teas began to supersede the sewing-circles; not a few of the imitators attained to the formal dignity of visiting cards with "Wednesdays" or "Thursdays" appearing in neat script in the lower left-hand corner; and in some of the more advanced households the principal meal of the day drifted from its noontide anchorage to unwonted moorings among the evening hours--greatly to the distress of the men, for whom even hot weather was no longer an excuse for appearing in shirt-sleeves.

For these innovations Miss Grierson was indirectly, though not less intentionally, responsible; and her satisfaction was in just proportion to the results attained. But in spite of these successes there were still obstacles to be surmounted. From the first there had been a perverse minority refusing stubbornly to bow the head in the house of--Grierson. The Farnhams were of it, and the Raymers, with a following of a few of the families called "old" as age is reckoned in the Middle West. The men of this minority were slow to admit the omnipotence of Jasper Grierson's money, and the women were still slower to accept Miss Grierson on terms of social equality.

At the house-warming this minority had been represented only by variously worded regrets. At a reception, given to mark the closing of Mereside, socially, on the eve of Miss Margery's departure for the winter in Florida, the regrets were still polite and still unanimous. Miss Margery laughed defiantly and set her white teeth on a determined resolution to reduce this inner citadel of conservatism at all costs. Accordingly, she opened the campaign on the morning after the reception; began it at the breakfast-table when she was pouring her father's coffee.

"You know everybody, and everybody's business, poppa: who is the treasurer of St. John's?" she inquired.

"How should I know?" grumbled the magnate, whose familiarity with church affairs was limited to certain writings of a legal nature concerning the Presbyterian house of worship upon which he held a mortgage.

"You ought to know," asserted Miss Margery, with some asperity. "Isn't it Mr. Edward Raymer?"

Jasper Grierson frowned thoughtfully into space. "Why, yes; come to think of it, I guess he is the man. Anyway, he's one of their--what do you call 'em--trustees?"

"Wardens," corrected Margery.

"Yes, that's it; I knew it was something connected with a penitentiary. What do you want of him?"

"Nothing much of him: but I want a check for five hundred dollars payable to his order."

Jasper Grierson's laugh was suggestive of the noise made by a rusty door-hinge. The tilting of the golden cornucopia had made him a ruthless money-grubber, but he never questioned his daughter's demands.

"Going in for the real old simon-pure, blue-ribbon brand of respectability this time, ain't you Madgie?" he chuckled; but he wrote the check on the spot.

Two hours later, Miss Grierson's cutter, driven by herself, paraded in Main Street to the delight of any eye æsthetic. The clean-limbed, high-bred Kentuckian, the steel-shod, tulip-bodied vehicle, and the faultlessly arrayed young woman tucked in among the costly fur lap robes were three parts of a harmonious whole; and more than one pair of eyes looked, and turned to look again; with envy if they were young eyes and feminine; with frank admiration if they were any age and masculine. For Miss Grierson, panoplied for conquest, was the latest reincarnation of the woman who has been turning men's heads and quickening the blood in their veins since that antediluvian morning when the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair.

Miss Margery drove daily in good weather, but on this crisp January morning her outing had an objective other than the spectacular. When the clean-limbed Kentuckian had measured the length of Main Street, he was sent on across the railroad tracks into the industrial half of the town, and was finally halted in front of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works.

Raymer was at his desk when the smart equipage drew up before the office door; and a moment later he was at the curb, bareheaded, offering to help the daughter of men out of the robe wrappings.

"Perhaps I'd better not get out," she said. "Duke doesn't stand well. Can I see Mr. Edward Raymer for a minute or two?"

Raymer bowed and blushed a little. He knew her so well, by eye-intimacy at least, that he had been sure she knew him in the same way--as indeed she did.

"I--that is my name. What can I do for you, Miss Grierson?"

"Oh, _thank_ you," she burst out, with exactly the proper shade of impulsiveness. "Do you know, I was really afraid I might have to introduce myself? I----"

The interruption was of Raymer's making. One of his employees appearing opportunely, he sent the man to the horse's head, and once more held out his hands to Miss Grierson.

"You must come in and get warm," he insisted. "I am sure you have found it very cold driving this morning. Let me help you."

She made a driver's hitch in the reins and let him lift her to the sidewalk. The ease with which he did it gave her a pleasant little thrill of the sort that comes with the realization of a thing hoped for. When she was not too busy with the social triumphs, strength, manly strength, was a passion with Miss Grierson.

Raymer held the office door open for her, and in the grimy little den which had been his father's before him, placed a chair for her at the desk-end.

"Now you can tell me in comfort what I can do for you," he said, bridging the interruption.

"Oh, it's only a little thing. I came to see you about renting a pew in St. John's; that is our church, you know."

Raymer did not know, but he was politic enough not to say so.

"I am quite at your service," he hastened to say. "Shall I show you a plan of the sittings?"

She protested prettily that it wasn't at all necessary; that any assignment agreeable to him and least subversive of the rights and preferences of others would be quite satisfactory. But he got out the blue-print plan and dusted it, and in the putting together of heads over it many miles in the gap of unacquaintance were safely and swiftly flung to the rear.

When the sittings were finally decided upon she opened her purse.

"It is so good of you to take time from your business to wait on me," she told him; and then, in naïve confusion: "I--I asked poppa to make out a check, but I don't know whether it is big enough."

Raymer took the order to pay, glanced at the amount, and from that to the velvety eyes with the half-abashed query in them. Miss Grierson's eyes were her most effective weapon. With them she could look anything, from daggers drawn to kisses. Just now the look was of child-like beseeching, but Raymer withstood it--or thought he did.

"It is more than twice as much as we get for the best locations," he demurred. "Wait a minute and I'll write you a check for the difference and give you a receipt."

But at the word she was on her feet in an eager flutter of protest.

"Oh, please don't!" she pleaded. "If it is really too much, can't you put the difference in the missionary box, or in the--in the rector's salary?--as a little donation from us, you know?"

Then Edward Raymer found that he had not withstood the eye-attack and he surrendered at discretion, compromising on a receipt for the pew-rent. Thus the small matter of business was concluded; but Miss Margery was not yet ready to go. From St. John's and its affairs official she passed deftly to the junior warden of St. John's and his affairs personal. Was the machine works the place where they made steam-engines and things? And did the sign, "No Admittance," on the doors mean that no visitors were allowed? If not, she would so much like to----

Raymer smiled and put himself once more at her service, this time as guide and megaphonist. It was all very noisy and grimy, but if she cared to go through the works he would be glad to go with her.

He did not know how glad he was going to be until they had passed through the clamorous machine-shop and had reached the comparatively quiet foundry. One of Miss Margery's gifts was the ability to become for the moment an active and sympathetic sharer in any one's enthusiasms. In the foundry she looked and listened, and was unsophisticated only to the degree that invites explanation. It was a master-stroke of finesse. A man is never so transparent as when he forgets himself in his own trade-talk; and Raymer was unrolling himself as a scroll for Miss Grierson to read as she ran.

"And you say that is one of the columns for poppa's new block?" she asked, while they stood to watch the workmen drawing a pattern out of the sand of the mould.

"No; that is the pattern: that is wood, and it is used to make the print in the sand into which the melted iron is poured. This part of the mould they are lifting with the crane is called the 'cope,' and the lower half is the 'drag.' When they have drawn the patterns, they will lock the two halves together and the mould will be ready for the pouring. You ought to come some afternoon while we are pouring; it would interest you if you've never seen it."

"Oh, may I? I shall remember that, when I come back from Florida."

"You are going away?" he said quickly.

"Yes; for a few weeks."

"Wahaska will miss you."

"Will it? I wish I could believe that, Mr. Raymer. But I don't know. Sometimes----"

"You mustn't doubt it for a moment. When you drove up a few minutes ago I was thinking that you were the one bit of redeeming color in our rather commonplace picture."

She let him look into what she wished him to believe were the very ultimate depths of the velvety eyes when she said: "You shouldn't flatter, Mr. Raymer. For one thing, you don't do it easily; and for another, it's disappointing."

They were passing out of the foundry on their way back to the office and he held the weighted door open for her.

"A bit of honest praise isn't flattery," he protested. "But supposing it were a mere compliment--why should you find it disappointing?"

"Because one has to have anchors of some sort; anchors in sincerity and straightforwardness, in the honesty of purpose that will say, '_No-no!_' and slap the best-beloved baby's hands, if that's what is needed. That is your proper rôle, Mr. Raymer, and you must never hesitate to take it."

It was the one small lapse from the strict conventionalities, but it sufficed to cut out all the middle distances. The tour of the works which had begun in passing acquaintance ended in friendship, precisely as Miss Grierson had meant it should; and when Raymer was tucking her into the cutter and wrapping her in the fur robes, she added the finishing touch, or rather the touch for which all the other touches had been the preliminaries.

"I'm so glad I had the courage to come and see you this morning. We have been dreadfully remiss in church matters, but I am going to try to make up for it in the future. I'm sorry you couldn't come to us last evening. Please tell your mother and sister that I _do_ hope we'll meet, sometime. I should so dearly love to know them. Thank you so much for everything. Good-by."

Raymer watched her as she drove away, noted her skilful handling of the fiery Kentuckian and her straight seat in the flying cutter, and the smile which a day or two earlier might have been mildly satirical was now openly approbative.

"She is a shrewd little strategist," was his comment; "but all the same she is a mighty pretty girl, and as good and sensible as she is shrewd. I wonder why mother and Gertrude haven't called on her?"

Having thus mined the Raymer outworks, Miss Grierson next turned her batteries upon the Farnhams. They were Methodists, and having learned that the doctor's hobby was a struggling mission work in Pottery Flat, Margery called the paternal check-book again into service, and the cutter drew up before the doctor's office in Main Street.

"Good-morning, doctor," she began cheerfully, bursting in upon the head of the First-Church board of administrators as a charming embodiment of youthful enthusiasm, "I'm running errands for poppa this morning. Mr. Rodney was telling us about that little First-Church mission in Pottery Flat, and poppa wanted to help. But we are not Methodists, you know, and he was afraid--that is, he didn't quite know how you might----"

It was an exceedingly clever bit of acting, and the good doctor capitulated at once, discrediting, for the first time in his life, the intuition of his home womankind.

"Now that is very thoughtful and kind of you, Miss Margery," he said, wiping his glasses and looking a second time at the generous figure of the piece of money-paper. "I appreciate it the more because I know you must have a great many other calls upon your charity. We've been wanting to put a trained worker in charge of that mission for I don't know how long, and this gift of yours makes it possible."

"The kindness is in allowing us to help," murmured the small diplomat. "You'll let me know when more is needed? Promise me that, Doctor Farnham."

"I shouldn't be a good Methodist if I didn't," laughed the doctor. Then he remembered the Mereside reception and the regrets, and was moved to make amends. "I'm sorry we couldn't be neighborly last night; but my sister-in-law is very frail, and Charlotte doesn't go out much. They are both getting ready to go to Pass Christian, but I'm sure they'll call before they go South."

"I shall be ever so glad to welcome them," purred Miss Margery, "and I do hope they will come before I leave. I'm going to Palm Beach next week, you know."

"I'll tell them," volunteered the doctor. "They'll find time to run in, I'm sure."

But for some reason the vicarious promise was not kept; and the Raymers held aloof; and the Oswalds and the Barrs relinquished the new public library project when it became noised about that Jasper Grierson and his daughter were moving in it.

Miss Margery possessed her soul in patience up to the final day of her home staying, and the explosion might have been indefinitely postponed if, on that last day, the Raymers, mother and daughter, had not pointedly taken pains to avoid her at the _lingerie_ counter in Thorwalden's. It was as the match to the fuse, and when Miss Grierson left the department store there were red spots in her cheeks and the dark eyes were flashing.

"They think I'm a jay!" she said, with a snap of the white teeth. "They need a lesson, and they're going to get it before I leave. I'm not going to sing small all the time!"

It was surely the goddess of discord who ordained that the blow should be struck while the iron was hot. Five minutes after the rebuff in Thorwalden's, Miss Grierson met Raymer as he was coming out of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank. There was an exchange of commonplaces, but in the midst of it Miss Margery broke off abruptly to say: "Mr. Raymer, please tell me what I have done to offend your mother and sister."

If she had been in the mood to compromise, half of the deferred payment of triumph might have been discharged on the spot by Raymer's blundering attempt at disavowal.

"Why, Miss Margery! I don't know--that is--er--really, you must be mistaken, I'm sure!"

"I am not mistaken, and I'd like to know," she persisted, looking him hardily in the eyes. "It must be something I have been doing, and if I can find out what it is, I'll reform."

Raymer got away as soon as he could; and when the opportunity offered, was besotted enough to repeat the question to his mother and sister. Mrs. Raymer was a large and placid matron of the immovable type, and her smile emphasized her opinion of Miss Grierson.

"The mere fact of her saying such a thing to you ought to be a sufficient answer, I should think," was her mild retort.

"I don't see why," Raymer objected.

"What would you think if Gertrude did such a thing?"

"Oh, well; that is different. In the first place Gertrude wouldn't do it, and----"

"Precisely. And Miss Grierson shouldn't have done it. It is because she can do such things that a few of us think she wouldn't be a pleasant person to know, socially."

"But why?" insisted Raymer, with masculine obtuseness.

It was his sister who undertook to make the reason plain to him.

"It isn't anything she does, or doesn't do, particularly; it is the atmosphere in which she lives and moves and has her being. If it weren't for her father's money, she would be--well, it is rather hard to say just what she would be. But she always makes me think of the bonanza people--the pick and shovel one day and a million the next. I believe she is a frank little savage, at heart."

"I don't," the brother contended, doggedly. "She may be a trifle new and fresh for Wahaska, but she is clever and bright, and honest enough to ignore a social code which makes a mock of sincerity and a virtue of hypocrisy. I like her all the better for the way she flared out at me. There isn't one young woman in a thousand who would have had the nerve and the courage to do it."

"Or the impudence," added Mrs. Raymer, when her son had left the room. Then: "I do hope Edward isn't going to let that girl come between him and Charlotte!"

The daughter laughed.

"I should say there is room for a regiment to march between them, as it is. Miss Gilman took particular pains to let him know what train they were leaving on, and I happen to know he never went near the station to tell them good-by."

XVI

GOOD SAMARITANS

Since she had undertaken to show Wahaska precisely how to deport itself in the conventional field, Miss Grierson took a maid and a chaperon with her when she went to Florida. But when she returned in April, the maid had been left behind to marry the gamekeeper of one of the millionaire estates on Lake Worth, and little Miss Matthews, the ex-seamstress chaperon, had been dropped off in Illinois to visit relatives.

This is how it chanced that Margery, unwilling to set the Wahaskans a bad example, had telegraphed her father to meet her in St. Louis. Also, it shall account as it may for the far-reaching stroke of fate which seated the Griersons at Griswold's table in the Hotel Chouteau café, and afterward made them his fellow travellers in the north-bound sleeping-car _Anita_.

When Jasper Grierson travelled alone he was democratic enough to be satisfied with a section in the body of the car. But when Margery's tastes were to be consulted, the drawing-room was none too good. Indeed, as it transpired on the journey northward from St. Louis, the _Anita's_ drawing-room proved to be not good enough.

"It is simply a crude insult, the way they wear out their old, broken-down cars on us up here!" she was protesting to her father, when they came back from the late dining-car breakfast. "You ought to do something about it." Miss Margery was at the moment fresh from "Florida Specials" and the solid-Pullman vestibuled luxuries of eastern winter travel.

Jasper Grierson's smile was a capitalistic acquirement, and some of his fellow-townsmen described it as "cast-iron." But for his daughter it was always indulgent.

"I don't own the railroad yet, Madgie; you'll have to give me a little more time," he pleaded, clipping the tip from a black cigar of heroic proportions and reaching for the box of safety matches.

"I'll begin now, if you are going to smoke that dreadful thing in this stuffy little den," was the unfilial retort; and the daughter found a magazine and exchanged the drawing-room with its threat of asphyxiation for a seat in the body of the car.

For a little while the magazine, or rather the pictures in it, sufficed for a time-killer. Farther along, the panorama of eastern Iowa unrolling itself beside the path of the train served as an alternative to the pictured pages. When both the book and the out-door prospect palled upon her, Miss Margery tried to interest herself in her immediate surroundings.

The material was not promising. Two old ladies dozing in the section diagonally across the aisle, four school-girls munching chocolates and restlessly shifting from seat to seat in the farther half of the car, and the conductor methodically making out his reports in the section opposite, summed up the human interest, or at least the visible part of it. Half-way down the car one of the sections was still curtained and bulkheaded; and when Miss Grierson curled up in her seat and closed her eyes she was wondering vaguely why the porter had left this one section undisturbed in the morning scene-shifting.

The northward-flying train was crossing a river, and the dining-car waiter was crying the luncheon summons, when Margery awoke to realize the comforting fact that she had successfully slept the forenoon away. With the eye-opening came a recurrence of the last-remembered waking thought--the wonder why the curtained section was still undisturbed. When she was leaving the _Anita_ with her father, the explanation suggested itself: of course, the occupant of the middle section must be ill.

Luncheon over, there was nothing to remind her of the probable invalid in Number Six until late in the afternoon when, looking through the open door of the drawing-room, she saw the porter carrying a glass of water to the invisible sufferer. Quite suddenly her interest became acute. Who was the sick one? and why was he, or she, travelling without an attendant?

With Margery Grierson, to question was to ascertain; and the Pullman conductor, once more checking his diagrams in Section Eleven, offered the readiest means of enlightenment. A few minutes later Margery rejoined her father in the private compartment.

"Do you remember the nice-looking young man who sat at the table with us in the Chouteau last night?" she began abruptly.

The gray-wolf Jasper nodded. He had an excellent memory for faces.

"What did you think of him?" The query followed the nod like a nimble boxer's return blow.

"I thought he paid a whole lot more attention to you than he did to his supper. Why?"

"He is on this car; sick with a fever of some kind, and out of his head. He is going to Wahaska."

"How do you know it's the same one?"

"I made the conductor take me to see him. He talked to me in Italian and called me '_Carlotta mia_.'"

"Humph! he didn't look like a dago."

"He isn't; it's just because he is delirious."

There was a long pause, broken finally by a curt "Well?" from the father.

"I've been thinking," was the slow response. "Of course, there is a chance that he has friends in Wahaska, and that some one will be at the train to meet him. But it is only a chance."

"Why doesn't the conductor telegraph ahead and find out?"

"He doesn't know the man's name. I tried to get him to look for a card, or to break into the suit-cases under the berth, but he says the regulations won't let him."

"Well?" said the father again, this time with a more decided upward inflection. Then he added: "You've made up your mind what you're going to do: say it."

Margery's decision was announced crisply. "There is no hospital to send him to--which is Wahaska's shame. Maybe he will be met and taken care of by his friends: if he is, well and good; if he isn't, we'll put him in the carriage and take him home with us."

The cast-iron smile with the indulgent attachment wrinkled frostily upon Jasper Grierson's heavy face.

"The Good Samaritan act, eh? I've known you a long time, Madgie, but I never can tell when you're going to break out in a brand-new spot. Didn't lose any of your unexpectedness in Florida, did you?"

Miss Margery tossed her pretty head, and the dark eyes snapped.

"Somebody in the family has to think of something besides making money," she retorted. "Please lend me your pencil; I want to do some wiring."

All other gifts apart, Miss Grierson could boast of a degree of executive ability little inferior to her father's; did boast of it when the occasion offered; and by the time the whistle was sounding for Wahaska, all the arrangements had been made for the provisional rescue of the sick man in Lower Six.

At the station a single inquiry served to give the Good Samaritan intention the right of way. There were no friends to meet Lower Six; but the Grierson carriage was waiting, with the coachman and a Mereside gardener for bearers. From that to putting the sick man to bed in one of the guest-chambers of the lake-fronting mansion at the opposite end of the town was a mere bit of routine for one so capable as Miss Grierson; and twenty minutes after the successful transfer, she had Dr. Farnham at the nameless one's bedside, and was telephoning the college infirmary for a nurse.

Naturally, there were explanations to be made when the doctor came down. To her first anxious question the answer came gravely: "You have a very sick man on your hands, Miss Margery." Then the inevitable: "Who is he?"

She spread her hands in a pretty affectation of embarrassment.

"What will you think of me, Doctor Farnham, when I tell you that I haven't the littlest atom of an idea?"

Charlotte's father was a small man, with kindly eyes and the firm, straight-lined mouth of his Puritan forebears. "Tell me about it," he said concisely.

"There is almost nothing to tell. He was sick and out of his head, and his ticket read to Wahaska. No one on the train seemed to know anything about him; and he couldn't tell us anything himself. So when we found there was no one to meet him at the station, we put him into the carriage and brought him home. There didn't seem to be anything else to do."

A shrewd smile flickered for an instant in the kindly eyes of Wahaska's best-beloved physician.

"Almost any one else would have found plenty of other things to do--or not to do," was his comment. "Are you prepared to go on, Miss Margery?"

"Taking care of him until he is able to take care of himself?--certainly," was the quick reply.

"Then I'll tell you that it is likely to be a long siege, and probably a pretty serious one. I can't tell positively without the microscope, but I'm calling it malaria, with complications. There seems to be a general break-down, as if he had been overworking or starving himself. You'll need help."

"I know; I've just been 'phoning the college, but they can't spare anybody out of the infirmary. Find me some one, doctor."

Dr. Farnham took time to think.

"Let me see: you'll need a good, strong fellow who can be patient and kind and inflexible and even brutal, by turns. I wonder if we couldn't get Sven Oleson? The Raymers had him when Edward was down with typhoid, and he was a treasure when we could make him understand what was wanted."

There were fine little lines coming and going between Miss Margery's straight black brows. "We needn't do it by halves, doctor," she said decisively. "If it would be better to wire St. Paul or Minneapolis and get a trained nurse----"

"--You'd stand the extra expense, of course," laughed the doctor. "You are all the world's good angel when you set out to be, Miss Margery. But it won't be necessary; Oleson will do, if I can get him. And I'll send him or somebody else before bedtime. Meanwhile, there's nothing to do but to keep your patient quiet; and he'll do that for himself for a few hours. I gave him a bit of an anodyne before I came down."

Margery went to the outer door with her kindly counsellor, playing the part of the gracious hostess as one who is, or who means to be, precisely letter-perfect.

"It will soon be time for your daughter and Miss Gilman to come home, won't it, doctor?" she asked.

"Yes. I had a letter from Charlotte to-day. They are coming by boat to Winona, and they should have left St. Louis this morning." Then, to match the neighborly interest: "You are looking extremely well, Miss Margery. Your few weeks in Florida were pleasant ones, I know."

"Yes; they were pleasant. But I'm always well. Has poppa been working himself to death while I've been away?"

There was the faintest glimmer of an amused smile in the doctor's eyes when he said: "No, not quite, I guess. He has been out here with the masons and carpenters who are building the stables, every fine day, I think, and that was by way of being a recreation for him."

Margery nodded brightly. "I thought perhaps he would do that if I went away. But I mustn't keep you. Be sure and telephone me about Sven. I'll send the cart after him if you tell me to."

The doctor promised; and after he was gone, she went slowly up-stairs and let herself softly into the room of shaded lights. The sick man was resting quietly, and he did not stir when she crossed to the bed and laid a cool palm on his forehead.

"You poor castaway!" she murmured. "I wonder who you are, and to whom you belong? I suppose somebody has got to be mean and sneaky and find out. Would you rather it would be I than some one else who might care even less than I do?"

The sleeping man opened unseeing eyes and closed them again heavily. "I found the money, _Carlotta mia_; you didn't know that, did you?" he muttered; and then the narcotic seized and held him again.

His clothes were on a chair, and when she had carried them to a light that could be shaded completely from the bed and its occupant, she searched the pockets one by one. It was a little surprising to find all but two of them quite empty; no cards, no letters, no pen, pencil, pocket-knife, or purse; nothing but a handkerchief, and in one pocket of the waistcoat a small roll of paper money, a few coins and two small keys.