Copper Streak Trail Part 16

"See here, Miss Selden--I'm really not a bad sort. If I can be of any use--here am I. And I lived in the Southwest four years, too--West Texas and New Mexico. Best time I ever had! So I wouldn't be absolutely helpless out there. And I'm my own man--foot-loose. So, if you can use me--for this thing seems to be serious--"

"Serious!" said Mary. "Serious! I can't tell you now. I shouldn't have told you even this much. Go now, Mr. Boland. And if we--if I see where I can use you--that was your word--I'll use you. But you are to keep away from me unless I send for you. Suppose Stan heard now what some gossip or other might very well write to him--that 'Mary Selden walked home every night with a fascinating Francis Charles Boland'?"

"Tell him about me, yourself--touching lightly on my fascinations,"

advised Boland. "And tell him why you tell him. Plain speaking is always the best way."

"It is," said Mary. "I'll do that very thing this night. I think I like you, Mr. Boland. Thank you--and good-bye!"

"Good-bye!" said Boland, touching her hand.

He looked after her as she went.

"Plucky little devil!" he said. "Level and straight and square. Some girl!"

CHAPTER X

Mr. Oscar Mitch.e.l.l, attorney and counselor at law, sauntered down River Street, with the cheerful and optimistic poise of one who has lunched well. A well-set-up man, a well-groomed man, as-it-is-done; plainly wors.h.i.+pful; worthy the highest degree of that most irregular of adjectives, respectable; comparative, smart; superlative, correct.

Mr. Mitch.e.l.l was correct; habited after the true Polonian precept; invisible, every buckle, snap, clasp, strap, wheel, axle, wedge, pulley, lever, and every other mechanical device known to science, was in place and of the best. As to adornment, all in good taste--scarfpin, an unpretentious pearl in platinum; garnet links, severely plain and quiet; an un.o.btrusive watch-chain; one ring, a small emerald; no earrings.

Mr. Mitch.e.l.l's face was well shaped, not quite plump or pink, with the unlined curves, the smooth clear skin, and the rosy glow that comes from health and virtue, or from good living and ma.s.sage. Despite fifty years, or near it, the flax-smooth hair held no glint of gray; his eyes, blue and big and wide, were sharp and bright, calm, confident, almost candid--not quite the last, because of a roving trick of clandestine observation; his mouth, where it might or should have curved--must once have curved in boyhood--was set and guarded, even in skillful smilings, by a long censors.h.i.+p of undesirable facts, material or otherwise to any possible issue.

Mr. Mitch.e.l.l's whole bearing was confident and a.s.sured; his step, for all those fifty afore-said years, was light and elastic, even in sauntering; he took the office stairs with the inimitable sprightly gallop of the town-bred.

Man is a quadruped who has learned to use his front legs for other things than walking. Some hold that he has learned to use his head. But there are three things man cannot do, and four which he cannot compa.s.s: to see, to think, to judge, and to act--to see the obvious; to think upon the thing seen; to judge between our own resultant and conflicting thoughts, with no furtive finger of desire to tip the balance; and to act upon that judgment without flinching. We fear the final and irretrievable calamity: we fear to make ourselves conspicuous, we conform to standard, we bear ourselves meekly in that station whereunto it hath pleased Heaven to call us; the herd instinct survives four-footedness. For, we note the strange but not the familiar; our thinking is to right reason what peat is to coal; the outcry of the living and the dead perverts judgment, closes the ear to proof; and our wisest fear the scorn of fools. So we walk cramped and strangely under the tragic tyranny of reiteration: whatever is right; whatever is repeated often enough is true; and logic is a device for evading the self-evident. Moreover, Carthage should be destroyed.

Such sage reflections present themselves automatically, contrasting the blithesome knee action of prosperous Mr. Mitch.e.l.l with the stiffened joints of other men who had climbed those hard stairs on occasion with shambling step, bent backs and sagging shoulders; with faces lined and interlined; with eyes dulled and dim, and sunken cheeks; with hands misshapen, knotted and bent by toil: if image indeed of G.o.d, strangely distorted--or a strange G.o.d.

Consider now, in a world yielding enough and to spare for all, the endless succession of wise men, from the Contributing Editor of Proverbs unto this day, who have hymned the praise of diligence and docility, the scorn of sloth. Yet not one sage of the bountiful bunch has ever ventured to denounce the twin vices of industry and obedience.

True, there is the story of blind Samson at the mill; perhaps a parable.

Underfed and overworked for generations, starved from birth, starved before birth, we drive and harry and crush them, the weakling and his weaker sons; we exploit them, gull them, poison them, lie to them, filch from them. We crowd them into our money mills; we deny them youth, we deny them rest, we deny them opportunity, we deny them hope, or any hope of hope; and we provide for age--the poorhouse. So that charity is become of all words the most feared, most hated, most loathed and loathsome; worse than crime or shame or death. We have left them from the work of their hands enough, scantly enough, to keep breath within their stunted bodies. "All the traffic can bear!"--a brazen rule. Of such sage policy the result can be seen in the wizened and undersized submerged of London; of nearer than London. Man, by not taking thought, has taken a cubit from his stature.

Meantime we prate comfortable blasphemies, scientific or other; natural selection or the inscrutable decrees of G.o.d. Whereas this was manifestly a Hobson's selection, most unnatural and forced, to choose want of all that makes life sweet and dear; to choose gaunt babes, with pinched and livid lips--unlovely, not unloved; and these iniquitous decrees are most scrutable, are surely of man's devising and not of G.o.d's. Or we invent a fire-new science, known as Eugenics, to treat the disease by new naming of symptoms: and prattle of the well born, when we mean well fed; or the degenerate, when we might more truly say the disinherited.

It is even held by certain poltroons that families have been started gutterward, of late centuries, when a father has been gloriously slain in the wars of the useless great. That such a circ.u.mstance, however glorious, may have been rather disadvantageous than otherwise to children thereby sent out into the world at six or sixteen years, lucky to become ditch-diggers or tip-takers. That some proportion of them do become beggars, thieves, paupers, sharpers, other things quite unfit for the ear of the young person--a disconcerting consideration; such ears cannot be too carefully guarded. That, though the occupations named are entirely normal to all well-ordered states, descendants of persons in those occupations tend to become "subnormal"--so runs the cant of it--something handicapped by that haphazard bullet of a lifetime since, fired to advance the glorious cause of--foreign commerce, or the like.

Mr. Mitch.e.l.l occupied five rooms lined with law books and musty with the smell of leather. These rooms ranged end to end, each with a door that opened upon a dark hallway; a waiting-room in front, the private office at the rear, to which no client was ever admitted directly. Depressed by delay, subdued by an overflow of thick volumes, when he reaches a suitable dejection he is tip-toed through dismal antechambers of wisdom, appalled by tall bookstacks, ushered into the leather-chaired office, and there further crushed by long shelves of dingy tin boxes, each box crowded with weighty secrets and shelved papers of fabulous moment and urgency; the least paper of the smallest box more important--the unfortunate client is clear on that point--than any contemptible need of his own. Cowed and chastened, he is now ready to pay a fee suitable to the mind that has absorbed all the wisdom of those many bookshelves; or meekly to accept as justice any absurdity or monstrosity of the law.

Mr. Mitch.e.l.l was greeted by a slim, swarthy, black-eyed, elderly person of twenty-five or thirty, with a crooked nose and a crooked mind, half clerk and half familiar spirit--Mr. Joseph Pelman, to wit; who appeared perpetually on the point of choking himself by suppressed chucklings at his princ.i.p.al's cleverness and the simplicity of dupes.

"Well, Joe?"

"Two to see you, sir," said Joe, his face lit up with sprightly malice.

"On the same lay. That Watkins farm of yours. I got it out of 'em. Ho ho!

I kept 'em in different rooms. I hunted up their records in your record books. Doomsday Books, I call 'em. Ho ho!"

Mr. Mitch.e.l.l selected a cigar, lit it, puffed it, and fixed his eye on his demon clerk.

"Now then," he said sharply, "let's have it!"

The demon pounced on a Brobdingnagian volume upon the desk and worried it open at a marker. It had been meant for a ledger, that huge volume; the gray cloth covers bore the legend "N to Z." Ledger it was, of a grim sort, with sinister entries of forgotten sins, the itemized strength or weakness of a thousand men. The confidential clerk ran a long, confidential finger along the spidery copperplate index of the W's: "Wakelin, Walcott, Walker, Wallace, Walsh, Walters; Earl, John, Peter, Ray, Rex, Roy--Samuel--page 1124." His nimble hands flew at the pages like a dog at a woodchuck hole.

"Here't is--'Walters, Samuel: born '69, son of John Walters, Holland Hill; religion--politics--um-um--bad habits, none; two years Vesper Academy; three years Dennison shoe factories; married 1896--one child, b.

1899. Bought Travis Farm 1898, paying half down; paid balance out in five years; dairy, fifteen cows; forehanded, thrifty. Humph! Good pay, I guess."

He c.o.c.ked his head to one side and eyed his employer, fingering a wisp of black silk on his upper lip.

"And the other?"

The second volume was spread open upon the desk. Clerk Pelman flung himself upon it with savage fury.

"Bowen, Chauncey, son William Bowen, born 1872--um--um--married Louise Hill 92--um--divorced '96; married Laura Wing '96--see Lottie Hall. Ran hotel at Larren '95 to '97; sheriff's sale '97; worked Bowen Farm '97 to 1912; bought Eagle Hotel, Vesper, after death of William Bowen, 1900.

Traded Eagle Hotel for Griffin Farm, 1912; sold Griffin Farm, 1914; clerk Simon's hardware store, Emmonsville, Pennsylvania. Heavy drinker, though seldom actually drunk; suspected of some share in the Powers affair, or some knowledge, at least; poker fiend. Bank note protested and paid by endorser 1897, and again in 1902; has since repaid endorsers. See Larren Hotel, Eagle Hotel."

"Show him in," said Mitch.e.l.l.

"Walters?" The impish clerk c.o.c.ked his head on one side again and gulped down a chuckle at his own wit.

"Bowen, fool! Jennie Page, his mother's sister, died last week and left him a legacy--twelve hundred dollars. I'll have that out of him, or most of it, as a first payment."

The clerk turned, his mouth twisted awry to a malicious grin.

"Trust you!" he chuckled admiringly, and laid a confidential finger beside his crooked nose. "Ho ho! This is the third time you've sold the Watkins Farm; and it won't be the last! Oh, you're a rare one, you are!

Four farms you've got, and the way you got 'em ho! You go Old Benjamin one better, you do.

"Who so by the plow would thrive Himself must neither hold nor drive.

"A regular hard driver, you are!"

"Some fine day," answered Mitch.e.l.l composedly, "you will exhaust my patience and I shall have to let you be hanged!"

"No fear!" rejoined the devil clerk, amiably. "I'm too useful. I do your dirty work for you and leave you always with clean hands to show. Who stirs up damage suits? Joe. Who digs up the willing witness? J. Pelman.

Who finds skeletons in respectable closets? Joey. Who is the go-between?

Joseph. I'm trusty too, because I dare not be otherwise. And because I like the work. I like to see you skin 'em, I do. Fools! And because you give me a fair share of the plunder. Princely, I call it--and wise. You be advised, Lawyer Mitch.e.l.l, and always give me my fair share. Hang Joey?

Oh, no! Never do! No fear!" A spasm of chuckles cut him short.

"Go on, fool, and bring Bowen in. Then tell Walters the farm is already sold."

The door closed behind the useful Joseph, and immediately popped open again in the most startling fas.h.i.+on.

"No; nor that, either," said Joseph.