The Fortune Hunter Part 13

"If I'd made this discovery originally I'd agree with you, sir. But, quite to the contrary, it was pointed out to me by one of the shrewdest business minds in the United States--a man who'd been a country boy to begin with. And I've come to the conclusion that he's right."

"So you're here."

"Here I am."

"And what do you propose doing?"

"I'm reading law, Mr. Littlejohn; that I shall continue. In the meantime, I shall keep my eyes open. At any day, at any amount, the opportunity may present itself, the opportunity I'm looking for."

"Probably you're right," I a.s.sented, impressed, as we turned a corner.

A young woman in a very attractive linen gown was strolling toward us, quite prettily engaged with a book which she read as she walked, her fair young head bowed beneath a sunshade which tinted her face becomingly. She gave me a shy smile and a low-voiced greeting as we pa.s.sed. Only my knowledge of the young woman prevented me from being blinded by her engaging appearance.

"That," said I, when we were out of earshot, "shows you what a furore a good-looking young man can create in a town like this. Josie Lockwood has put on her best bib-and-tucker to go walking in this afternoon, on the off-chance of meeting you, Mr. Duncan."

"Flattery note," he commented. "Who's Josie Lockwood?"

"Daughter of Blinky Lockwood, the richest man in Radville."

"Ah!" he said cryptically.

We had come to Miss Carpenter's. I opened the gate for him, but he stood aside, refusing to precede me. And courtesy in the young folk of to-day warms my old heart.

He had as much for Hetty Carpenter. Within an hour he had insinuated himself into her good graces with a deftness, an ease, that astounded.

Within three hours he was established, bag and baggage, in her very best room.

And thirty minutes after she had helped Duncan unpack, Hetty had to run downtown to buy a spool of thread.

VII

A WINDOW IN RADVILLE

A jealous secret, which has never heretofore been divulged, is responsible for the prosperity of the Radville _Citizen_--at least, in very great measure. As the discoverer of this recipe for circulation, I have kept it carefully locked in my guilty bosom for many a year, and if I now betray it I do so without scruple, for the _Gazette_ is now established firmly in a groove of popularity from which you'd find it hard to oust the paper. So here's letting the cat out of the bag:

The policy of the _Citizen_ has long been to devote its columns mainly to the exploitation of what is known in newspaper terminology as "the local story." Of the news of the great outside world we're parsimonious, recognising the fact that the coronation of King Edward VII. is a matter of much less import to our community than the holocaust which was responsible for the destruction of Sir Higginbottom's new hen-house. Similarly a West Indian tornado involving losses running up into hundreds of thousands of dollars sinks into relative insignificance as compared with the local weather forecast and its probable effect on crops not worth ten thousand; while the enforced abdication of the Sultan of Turkey gets a "stick" (a s.p.a.ce in a newspaper column about as long as your forefinger, if you have a small hand) as contrasted with the column and a half a.s.signed to the death of old Colonel Bohun.

Now, naturally, a paper in a small country town can't afford a large and hustling staff of enthusiastic reporters; and very probably the _Citizen_ would overlook many items and stories of burning local interest were it not for the fact that the population has been cunningly made to serve in a reportorial capacity without either pay or its own knowledge. We literally get our local news by wireless; and from dawn to dark there's a constant supply of it on tap.

It's this way: our editorial rooms are in the second storey of a building overlooking Court House Square. The lower floor is occupied by the Post Office, and in front of the Post Office are a hitching-post and two long, weather-scarred benches, while just across the road--I mean street--on the boundary of the square proper--is a near-bronze drinking-fountain and watering-trough erected from the proceeds of several fairs given by the local branch of the W. C. T. U. Naturally, indeed inevitably, all Radville gravitates to the Post Office, bringing the news with it, and stops to discuss it on the steps or the benches or by the fountain; and the acoustics are admirable. With a window open and scratch-pad handy, the keen-eared scribe at his desk in our offices can hardly fail to pick up every sc.r.a.p of town information between sunrise and dusk.... Of course, in winter the supply's not so good.

Winter before last we all suffered with colds acquired through keeping the windows open; and last winter our circulation fell off surprisingly through keeping them closed. This winter we contemplate cutting a trap-door through the floor for the ostensible purpose of ventilation.

And thus it was that I managed to hear much of Mr. Duncan while I myself was engaged in formulating an estimate of the young man. He engaged the popular imagination no less than mine own, although I was more intimately a.s.sociated with him--as a fellow-resident at Hetty Carpenter's. My professional duties making their habitual demands upon my time, I saw, it may be, less of him than many of our people.

Certainly I learned less of his ways from first-hand knowledge. But from my desk (it's the nearest to the window right above the Post Office door) I was enabled to keep a pretty close line upon his habits and movements, during the first fortnight of his stay in Radville.

At home I saw him with unvarying regularity at meal-times and less frequently after supper. Between whiles he seemed to observe a fairly regular routine: in the morning, after breakfast, he walked abroad for his health's sake; in the afternoon and evening he sequestered himself in his room for the pursuit of his legal studies. About the genuineness of these latter I was long without a question: having been privileged to inspect his room I found it redolent of an atmosphere of highly commendable application. His writing table was a model of neatness, and his store of legal treatises impressed one vastly. That no one, not even Hetty Carpenter, ever saw the room without remarking the open volume of "The Law of Torts," with its numerous pages painstakingly s.p.a.ced by slips of paper by way of bookmarks, is an attested fact. That it was always the same volume is less widely known.

Less directly (that is to say, via my window) I learned of him compendiously from sources which would have been anonymous but for my long acquaintance with the voices of the townspeople.... I write these pages at my desk at home and, if truth's to be told, somewhat surrept.i.tiously; but with these voices ringing in my memory's ear I seem still to be sitting at my erstwhile desk by the window, looking out over Court House Square, chewing the rubber heel of my pencil the while I listen. It's summer weather and there's a smell in the air of dust and heat; the square simmers and s.h.i.+mmers in unclouded suns.h.i.+ne, its many green plots of gra.s.s a trifle grey and haggard with dust, the flagstaff with its two flanking cannon by the bandstand in the middle wavering slightly in the haze of heat; there are two rigs, a farm-wagon and a buckboard, hitched to the post below, and some boys are squirting water on one another by holding their hands over the lips of the fountain across the way. Immediately opposite, on the far side of the square, the Court House rises proudly in all the majesty of its columned front and clapboarded sides; farther along there's the Methodist Church, very severe, with its rows of sheds to one side for the teams of the more rural members. Behind them all bulk our hills, dim and purple against the overwhelming blue of the sky. It's very quiet: there are few sounds, and those few most familiar: the raucous war-cry of a rooster somewhere on the outskirts of town; an intermittent thudding of hoofs in the inch-deep dust of the roadway; Miles Stetson wringing faint but genuine shrieks of agony from his cornet, in a room behind the Opery House on the next street; periodically a shuffle of feet on the sidewalk below; less frequently the whine of the swinging doors at Schwartz's place; above it all, perhaps, the shrill but not unpleasant accents of Angie Tuthill as she pauses on the threshold downstairs and injects surprising information into the nothing-reluctant ears of Mame Garrison.

" ... He's got six suits of clothes, three for summer and three for winter, and two others to wear to parties--one regular full-dress suit and another without any tails on the coat that he told Miss Carpenter was a dinner-coat, but Roland Barnette says he must've meant a Tuxedo, because n.o.body wears that kind of clothes except at night; so how could it be a dinner-coat?... And Miss Carpenter told Ma he's got twelve striped s.h.i.+rts and eight white ones and dozens of silk socks and two dozen neckties and handkerchiefs till you can't count and...."

Mame punctuates this monologue with a regular and excusable "My land!"

and the young voices fade away into the mid-summer afternoon quiet. I am free to resume my interrupted flight of fancy, but I refrain. The atmosphere is soporiferous, hardly conducive to editorial inspiration, and I find the commingled flavours of red-cedar, glue and rubber quite nouris.h.i.+ng.

Presently Dr. Mortimer, the minister, comes down the street in company with his deacon, Blinky Lockwood. They are discussing someone in subdued tones, but I catch references to a worthy young man and the vacancy in the choir.

Josie Lockwood rustles into hearing with Bessie Gabriel in tow. Josie is rattling volubly, but with a hint of the confidential in her tone.

She insists that: "Of course, I never let on, but every time we meet I can just feel him looking and...."

Bessie interposes: "Why, Tracey Tanner's just crazy for fear he'll take on with Angie."

I can see Josie's head toss at this. "I bet he don't know what Angie Tuthill looks like. That's too absurd..."

"Absurd" is Josie's newest word. It's a very good word, too, but sometimes I fear she will wear it threadbare. It closes her remarks as the two girls dart into the Post Office, and there is peace for a time; then they emerge giggling, and I hear Josie declare: "I'd get Roland Barnette to do it, but he's so jealous. He makes me tired."

Bessie's response is inaudible.

"Well," Josie continues, "I'm simply not going to send them out until I meet him. Father said I could give it a week from Sat.u.r.day, but I won't unless--"

Bessie interrupts, again inaudibly.

"Of course I could do that, but ... if I just said 'Miss Carpenter and guests' that nosey old Homer Littlejohn'd think I meant him too, and if I only said 'guest' it'd look too pointed. Don't you think so?"

To my relief they pa.s.s from hearing, and I feel for my pipe for comfort. Anyway, I never did like Josie Lockwood.... Smoking, I meditate on the astonis.h.i.+ng power of personality. Here is Mr. Nathaniel Duncan no more than a fortnight in our midst (the phrase is used callously, as something sacred to country journalism) and, behold! not yet has the town ceased to discuss him. The control he has over the local mind and imagination is certainly wonderful: the more so since he has apparently made no effort to attract attention; rather, I should say, to the contrary. Quiet and una.s.suming he goes his way, minding his own business as carefully as we would mind it for him, with all the good will in the world, if only we could find out what it is. But we can't leave him alone....

Tracey Tanner interrupts my musings.

"h.e.l.lo!" he tw.a.n.gs, like a tuneless banjo.

"'Lo, Tracey." This lofty and blase greeting can come from none other than Roland Barnette.

"Where you goin'?"

"Over to the railway station."

"What for?"

"To give you something to talk about. I'm going to send a telegram to a friend of mine in Noo York."

"Aw, you ain't the only one can send telegrams. Sam Graham sent one just now."

"_He_ did!"

"Uh-huh. I was sort of hangin' round, when he came in, and I seen him send it myself."