Jewel Weed Part 13

"Miss Quincy is not here to-day," Norris said without looking up.

"I know it," d.i.c.k answered promptly. "Are you through yet?"

"I've finished with the ephemerae of this particular Tuesday, and before I begin on those of Wednesday, I have a few precious moments to waste on you." Ellery wheeled his chair around.

"Do you know that this is Decoration Day and a holiday?"

"Is there anything a sub-editor does not know?"

"Have you ever been to the Falls of Wabeno?"

"No."

"And you call yourself a true citizen of St. Etienne? Come with me and see the populace chew gum amid scenes of natural beauty."

"I thought we were going to agitate civic reform."

"We'll agitate as we go along. Come, Ellery, it's a superb day. I feel like the bursting buds. Let's get out."

"My dear d.i.c.k," said Norris, "the trouble with you is that you never want to do anything; you always want to do something else. I begin to think that there are compensations to a man in having fate hold his nose to the grindstone. He learns persistence, w.i.l.l.y-nilly."

"Stop your growling. Up, William, up, and quit your galley-proof. I am willing to bet that my flashes in the pan will do things before I am through."

"I dare swear they will get way ahead of my grubbing," Ellery rejoined, slamming his desk. "Come, I'll go with you."

On the southern outskirts of the city lay a park where art had done no more than retouch nature. Here a placid stream suddenly transformed itself into an imposing waterfall, plunging with roars over a rocky cliff, and sending its spray whirling high in air to paint a hundred illusive rainbows amid outstretching tree-branches or against a somber background of stone.

d.i.c.k left his motor near the brink of the cliff above the Falls and the two climbed down the steep bank, stopping now and again to yield to the fascination of rus.h.i.+ng water and to snuff the fresh-flying mist as it swept into their faces.

Caught in the gully below, the stream, which had suddenly contracted a habit of unruliness, tumbled onward under trees and through overhanging rocks until it joined the Mississippi a half-mile away.

There were other people, hordes of them, tempted by May suns.h.i.+ne.

"What is it, Ellery," d.i.c.k demanded, "what deep-seated idealism is it that draws these crowds to the most beautiful spot near town as soon as spring offers more than half an invitation?"

"It certainly isn't a poetry that crops out in their clothes or in their conversation," Norris grumbled. "The staple remark seems to be, 'Gee, ain't it pretty?'"

"You mustn't expect to see aristocracy here; this is too cheap, and too easy to reach. Your aristocrat prefers less beauty at greater effort and more cost. This is the place to touch elbows with the populace."

They had climbed down the long winding steps by this time, and were leaning against the parapet of a small rustic bridge that crossed below the Falls.

"Let's sit down on that bench," said d.i.c.k, "and let the suns.h.i.+ne trickle through the trees and through us, and feel the spray in our nostrils, and delight in hanging maidenhair ferns, and watch the girls go by--the girls in pink and blue dresses, each leaning on the arm of a swain who grins. It's vastly more fun than a fas.h.i.+onable parade."

The branches met overhead, darkening the narrow chasm; the steep banks were spattered with dutchman's breeches that fluttered like b.u.t.terflies poised for a moment; down stream a few yards, where the valley widened, lay a tiny meadow where the sun fell full on a carpet of crow-foot violets that gave back the May sky. Two squirrels chased each other around a big maple, and a blue jay looked on and commented.

"Why is this stream of girls and men out for their holiday like baked ice-cream?" asked d.i.c.k. "That isn't a conundrum; it's a philosophic question."

"I know, they give you the same sense of incongruity," Ellery answered lazily.

"But I like them," d.i.c.k pursued. "I like a great many more kinds of people than you do, Norris. You are narrow-minded. You want to a.s.sociate only with the good and true and bathed."

"Oh, I wish well to the majority of the race, but there are some that I do not care to eat with."

Something in Ellery's voice made his friend turn and survey him.

"You look tired. You're working too hard. Don't make the western mistake of thinking frazzled nerves mean energy."

"That isn't my kind," Ellery smiled. "I'm all right. Let me spurt for a while. I got my position through favor, d.i.c.k, yours and Uncle Joe's. I didn't particularly deserve it, and I didn't know anything about the work; so, for your sake as well as my own, I have determined to make good. Friends.h.i.+p may give a fellow his chance, but it doesn't hold down a job, you know."

"Pooh! You've made good already. A man can be tremendously experienced--for the West--when he's been at a thing a year. Look at me and my work."

"What do you consider your work? Road inspector?" For, to tell the truth, Norris was not wholly satisfied with d.i.c.k's year of dawdling around the streets.

"My profession," d.i.c.k answered with oracular gravity, "is a combination of hard work and fine art. It requires both toil and genius. I think I may say, with all natural modesty, that I have shown great natural apt.i.tude for it. My profession is making friends. I have made friends useful and ornamental, friends great and small, friends beautiful and friends the opposite--which reminds me of your previous question, city politics. Whom do you suppose I supped with last night?"

"Whom?"

"With the Honorable, or by courtesy dubbed Honorable, William Barry,"

d.i.c.k replied triumphantly.

"'Piggy' Barry?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Ellery, turning on d.i.c.k in surprise.

"Alderman Barry? The boss?"

"'Piggy' does somehow sound more appropriate than 'Honorable'," d.i.c.k said meditatively.

"And is he one of the people you like?" questioned Ellery with unfeigned surprise.

"For business purposes, yes. If I'm going to get into politics some day, it becomes me to cultivate local statesmen, doesn't it? I took the great man to the theater, or at least to something that called itself the theater, and I gave him an excellent supper afterward. He seemed to appreciate it and my society."

"I dare say you made yourself agreeable. Do you expect he will help you in your public career?"

"Not voluntarily, perhaps; but I wanted to know him, better and better.

Under benign influences, he is indiscreet. He reminded me last night of Louis XIV. He might have said, 'St. Etienne, it is I,' but in his simpler and less sophisticated language, he was content to remark, 'I'm the whole d.a.m.n show, see?'"

"I'm glad he knew enough to put the appropriate adjective before show,"

said Ellery grimly.

"And yet I suspect that, even in that statement, he lied," d.i.c.k went on.

"I studied him last night. You'll never persuade me that that man, whose head is all face and neck, does the intricate planning and wire-pulling that runs this city. I've an idea Barry is only the two placards on each side of the sandwich-man. He may be the adjective show, but I doubt if he's the man."

"Have you discovered who is the real sandwich-man?"

"No, I haven't. My reasoning is inductive. I see numerous little holes with small tips of threads sticking through them, but when I try to get hold of the threads to pull them out and examine them, the ends are too short or my fingers are too big. But get hold of them I shall, sooner or later, by hook or crook. If I don't give some of those fellows the slugging of their lives, my name isn't Richard Percival."

"I suspect that it is Richard Percival," said Ellery with a whimsical glance of affection.

"This, as I read it, is the history," d.i.c.k went on. "Six years ago, when you and I were sub-freshmen, and unable to take an active part, there was a brief spasm of reform. It was a short episode of fisticuffs and fighting, which is for a day--a very different thing from governing, which goes steadily on from year to year. But this reform movement did result in giving the city a good charter."