Mr. Bingle Part 8

"Now, Mr. Bingle," said Sigsbee, drawing a chair up close to the little man's knee, "I want the truth. Have you no--"

"Before heaven, Mr. Sigsbee, I--I swear I am innocent of--"

"Have you no inkling of what has befallen you?" concluded the other.

"No, sir, I haven't," declared Mr. Bingle with conviction.

"Well, my dear sir," said Sigsbee, laying his hand upon Bingle's knee and speaking with grave impressiveness, "your late and lamented uncle, Joseph Hooper, in his will, devises that you are his princ.i.p.al--I might almost say, his sole heir. He has left practically everything to you, sir. I--I pray you, be calm. Do not allow this astonis.h.i.+ng, this prodigious--"

"Oh," exclaimed Mr. Bingle, with a huge sigh of relief and a sudden relaxing of all his taut nerves, "I know all about THAT, Mr. Sigsbee.

Is that all?"

"All?" with a stare of amazement.

"We often joked about it, poor old Uncle Joe and I. He seemed to enjoy a chuckle once in awhile, in spite of the way the world had used him."

"I now realise that you are quite ignorant about the whole matter, Mr.

Bingle. My letter would have enlightened you, of course, but as you did not receive it, I fear that--"

"I didn't open my letters this morning. Quite forgot 'em, sir. You see, Mrs. Bingle came down with a fearful--"

"Yes, yes," interrupted Mr. Sigsbee. "Perhaps it would be well for me to describe myself a little more clearly to you, Mr. Bingle. I am of the firm of Bradlee, Sigsbee & Oppenheim, lawyers. We have been acting for Mr. Hooper for the past six months, or, in other words, since his return to New York City. Our relations were or a--er--a somewhat Secret nature, I may say. He made the somewhat Extraordinary demand upon us, at the time we were Retained, that we should conduct his affairs with the Utmost secrecy. Especially, ser, were we required to Keep you in the dark as to the real--"

"Just a moment, sir," interrupted Mr. Bingle, sitting up very straight, and staring. "May I ask one questions? Are you sure you haven't got my Uncle Joe confused with another Joseph Hooper? To my certain knowledge, he had no transactions with lawyers while staying at my house. You've got the wrong man, sir, I--" "I've got the right man, Mr. Bingle," said the lawyer, with a smile. "Your uncle was a strange man. Have you never heard of Joseph H. Grimwell?"

"Certainly. Every one has heard of him."

"Well, your uncle was Joseph H. Grimwell, the millionaire mine-owner and lumber king. For fifteen years the name of Joseph Grimwell took the place of--I beg your pardon! I did not mean to put it so abruptly, sir.

Calm yourself! I--"

"All right," said Mr. Bingle, suddenly collapsing into the chair after struggling to his feet, his eyes bulging. "All right. I'm--I'm calm. Go on with the story. You can't expect me to believe it, however. How on earth could poor old Uncle Joe Hooper, who was actually starving when he came to me last--"

"That is the best part of the story, Mr. Bingle," said Sigsbee, settling back in his chair and linking his plump hands benevolently across his expansive and somewhat overhanging waistcoat. "That is the best part of the story, sir."

CHAPTER V

THE STORY OF JOSEPH

Mr. Bingle went home in a taxi-cab, completely done up.

Back in 1885, Joseph Hooper, disgraced, disowned by his family and as poor Job's turkey, made a brief but sufficiently explicit will in which he named his beloved nephew Thomas Singleton Bingle as his sole heir.

He drew it up on the surface of a fresh, unused postal card, and had it properly witnessed by the bailiff who came to Bingle's apartment to demand his appearance before a court to show cause why he should not consider himself in contempt for having disregarded the order to pay monthly sums in the shape of alimony to his late but unlamented wife.

In looking about for the second witness, he observed a levying deputy sheriff in the act of carrying off his last and only possession of value, to wit: a gold-headed cane that had been left to him by his father. With a fine sense of irony, he persuaded the aforesaid deputy sheriff to affix his signature to the will, and then remarked with deep sarcasm that he had "put his house in order" so far as it was in his power to do so. Inasmuch as the deputy sheriff was making way with what looked to be his entire estate, saving the clothes upon his back and the post-card (which he had taken the precaution to address to his lawyers, thereby securing its protection by the United States Government), Mr. Hooper's last will and testament as uttered on the 16th day of October, 1885, was necessarily brief and succinct. It merely said:

"I hereby revoke any former will I may have made prior to this date, and now bequeath to my beloved nephew, Thomas Singleton Bingle, my entire fortune, which at this time appears to be not my face but my figure. I therefore bequeath to him my physical person, and vest in him the right to chuck it into the river, or to dispose of it for medical purposes, as he may see fit, provided however that I shall first have been declared sufficiently dead by competent judges. I also bequeath to him any property, great or small, that may be in my possession at the time of my demise, even though it be no more than the collar-b.u.t.ton with which he so kindly supplied me this morning, and which I shall always retain as a mark of his devotion, knowing well what it means for a man to deprive himself of a cherished belonging."

This was written in a very fine, cramped hand, and there was ample room at the bottom for his own signature and those of the witnesses, although it must be said that the elegant symmetry of the doc.u.ment was destroyed by the bulging scrawl of the bailiff, whose name was Abraham Kosziemanowski and who had to turn the final two syllables down at a sharp angle in order to get the whole of his signature on the card.

Bradlee, Sigsbee & Oppenheim, on the receipt of this jocose instrument, immediately communicated with their once magnificent client, who laconically instructed them to put it away in a very safe place as it might come in handy some time. To their own and to his subsequent surprise, they DID put it away in a safe place, but forgot all about it until he walked in upon them fifteen years afterwards and revealed himself as the great and only Joseph H. Grimwell.

Having once disinherited his children, he was then in the mood to reconsider his act, being alive to the fact that his days were numbered. But he went about the business with the sagacity of an old dog who has been kicked hard by some one who was not his master.

Instead of proclaiming himself to be the Midas-like Joseph Grimwell, he appeared before his son and daughters, as poor old Joseph Hooper, their long lost father, as poor--nay, even poorer than when he went away, for he had lost the rugged health that was his only possession at the beginning of his vicissitudes.

a.s.suming a condition of abject, though genteel poverty, he went to each of them in turn. He wanted to give them a chance to reconsider, as he had done. But they would have none of him! Vastly dismayed by the failure of his nice little scheme to trick them into filial responsibility, he was on the point of shouting his denunciations from the house-tops when he suddenly remembered Tom Bingle: he wondered if Tom would receive him--an old derelict--with open arms.

He presented himself, with his battered valise, at the door of Thomas Bingle's apartment--and was given a warm, even hearty reception!

And it was on that day--at that very hour, so to speak--that Thomas Bingle became a fabulously rich man without the slightest effort or intention on his part.

Mr. Hooper one day recalled to mind the postal-card will. If his memory served him right there was something jocose and undignified about it--something that would not look well in the public prints. He visited the offices of his lawyers, recovered the amazing instrument, and forthwith set about to make a new will, bereft of certain grewsome stipulations but quite as sweeping in purpose as the other had been. In fact, he left his fortune--as he had done before--to his beloved nephew, Thomas Singleton Bingle, with three precautionary bequests to his son and daughters, providing against the contests that were sure to follow. He bequeathed the sum of one thousand dollars to each of his children, and he signed his name once more as Joseph H. Hooper--for the first time in fourteen years.

His wanderings as a tramp--in his own account of himself he used the word "tramp" with a shocking lack of pride--led him inevitably into the far Northwest. Men were doing things up there. The country fairly seethed with the activity of live, virile men who were taking the first staunch grip upon the tricky wheel of fortune and were turning it to their own account. Every man was building; no man complained of conditions, for conditions were so new and so ready to hand that he who found fault was merely lessening his own chance to secure his share of the vast resources that spread before him, welcoming the greedy fingers of him who courted the future and shunned the past. All men lived in the present out there in the great stretches, and all men were strong and eager.

Joseph Hooper caught the fever that infected the West. He shook off the fetters that bound him to a far from enchanted East, and began to squirm with the first tickling sensations of an ambition that had never really made itself felt, even in the old days of successful achievement among men who were content to tread the beaten and commonplace highway toward riches. The spirit of the West gripped him in its great, enveloping hands, picked him out of the slough and set him down again, plump upon his two feet, high and dry, prodding him violently all the while with a spur that would not permit him to stop or to take a step backward, with the natural result that he moved forward--slowly, dazedly at first, and then with a mighty rush.

He had one advantage over most of the men who were being driven helter-skelter by the grateful lash of the West: he was a trained money-getter. Back of him were generations of shrewd business men, while dormant in his own being was the half-stunned thing called natural ability. The simple shrewdness of Joseph Hooper, combined with a certain hitherto unconfessed lack of respect for the Golden Rule, to say nothing of a vain-glorious desire to kick the world that had kicked him, soon produced opportunities that paved the way for his rehabilitation.

Without a dollar to his name, with nothing in the shape of resources save a self-sufficient nerve and an infinite eastern contempt for these struggling westerners, he began to promote things!

The field was fresh and fertile. Inside of two years he reaped a half-dozen harvests--and replanted as he went along! First, he promoted a street railway in a place called Mockawock; then it became necessary for some one to establish reasons for the existence of such a thing as a car-line in a town that could be traversed on foot, from one end to the other, in less than eight minutes; so he began to promote the organisation of a wagon factory at one extreme and a pickle works at the other, possessing the far-sightedness to put them so far away from each other that if one wanted to go to the pickle works from the wagon factory, or vice versa, he would have to go by trolley unless he possessed the hardiness of an ox and was not dismayed by the vastness of the city limits. For like all towns in the great Northwest, Mockawock had its limits and they were wide enough to make New York or Chicago appear cramped by comparison. One could walk for hours in a straight line south from the public square in Mockawock and still not be "out in the country," figuratively speaking, although he might not see a house or a human being--unless he turned his head--after the first ten minutes. He could also walk west or north in the same futile effort to get out of the "city" into the "country," but he could not walk east for more than two city blocks. Mockawock happened to be situated on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Superior and not even the most boastful citizen would have contended that the city limits reached far in that direction.

And, having successfully promoted such enterprises in Mockawock as would tend to convince the citizens that some day the city limits would have to be extended, he very wisely took the gains acquired in the sale of options, the disposal of franchises, the surrender of equities, and all such, and slipped away to the vast forests in the north, where he bought timber-land by the section.

Another town required stirring up by this time, so he descended upon it, backed by the reputation gained at Mockawock and, before the citizens could say Jack Robinson, he had skilfully promoted a number of enterprises, including a belt railroad, an electric lighting plant, and a new evening newspaper, all of which fairly set the town by the ears and made him one of the most important figures in the upper Lake region.

Once more he slipped off into the forests and took unto himself additional sections of virgin timber at inconceivably low prices. Other men made much of the wheat-field and the town-lot, but Joseph Hooper saw fortune in the forests. Again and again he increased his timber land holdings. People thought he was buying up town-sites and smiled smugly among themselves as they discussed the dreadful shock he was to have when the time came for him to begin clearing away the timber!

All this time he was known as Joseph H. Grimwell. There was no such person as Joseph Hooper. That discredited individual had died, so to speak, by the wayside, a vagabond. New York had lost track of him; his family believed him to be dead--or in prison! It is barely possible that he ought to have been incarcerated for some of his skilfully manipulated enterprises, but that has nothing to do with this narrative. It is relevant to dwell only upon the contention that riches come swiftly to him who makes use of both hands without caring whether the left knows what the right is doing or the other way about. At any rate, Joseph Grimwell was a better man than Joseph Hooper ever had been, and he was a wiser man in many respects than Solomon the historic.

In brief, there came a day when his timber turned to gold. The name of Grimwell became a household word. It even penetrated to the secret crannies of Wall Street. Men who did not know oak from soft pine began to plead with him to be "let in on the ground floor." Gentlemen who sat in mahogany offices and wors.h.i.+pped at unseen shrines, took notice of this man of the West who was getting more than his share of the pillage. Promoters sought him out and haggled with him--haggled with the prince of promoters! They tried to let him into the secret of making money!

Fortune may not always favour the brave, but it continues to do a little something every now and then for the bold. In Joseph Grimwell's case, it overlooked the fact that he was neither brave nor bold but rewarded him for being interestingly tricky. Out of sheer respect for his cleverness in acquiring all of the timber land available, Fortune set about to outdo him in productiveness. It suddenly remembered that it had placed three rich copper deposits in separate and distinct parts of his land and kindly directed him to the spots.

Now, copper can be turned into gold quite as readily as ice, or beef, or hops, or any of the products of man's experimentation, just as one can make hay while the sun s.h.i.+nes, even though his field of activity lies at the bottom of an oil-well. Mr. Grimwell made gold out of his copper, just as he made it out of oak and pine and ash, and when he came to be three score years and ten he had so many dollars that, like Old Mother Hubbard, he didn't know what to do with them.

It suddenly dawned upon him that there was no one to whom he could leave this vast acc.u.mulation unless he made peace with his past.

He sold out all of his holdings, reducing everything to coin of the realm, and once more became a wanderer in search of a place to lay his head. With fourteen or fifteen millions of dollars in his purse, so to speak, he slunk into New York, a beggar still and hungrier than he had ever been in his life.

Then he tried out the plan that failed. His lawyer and his doctor alone knew that Joseph Grimwell and Joseph Hooper were one and the same person, and they were pledged to secrecy. One of them drew up his will and the other made death as easy as possible for him. His nephew, poor wretch, buried him in a grave alongside a devoted sister, froze his ears while doing so--and lost his job in the bank besides!