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A Captain in the Ranks: A Romance of Affairs

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Title: A Captain in the Ranks: A Romance of Affairs

Author: George Cary Eggleston


        
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A CAPTAIN IN THE RANKS

A Romance of Affairs

by

GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON

Author of "DOROTHY SOUTH," "RUNNING THE RIVER," "THE MASTER OF
WARLOCK," Etc.







[Illustration: "You have saved the Railroad." Page 336.]



A. L. Burt Company,
Publishers, New York

Copyright, 1904,
by
A. S. Barnes & Co.




TO

Mable

_On her wedding day, I dedicate this story with affection_

September 8, 1904




PREFACE


This story is intended to supplement the trilogy of romances in which I
have endeavored to show forth the Virginian character under varying
conditions.

"Dorothy South" dealt with Virginia life and character before the
Confederate war.

"The Master of Warlock" had to do with the Virginians during the early
years of the war, when their struggle seemed hopeful of success.

"Evelyn Byrd" was a study of the same people as they confronted certain
disaster and defeat.

The present story is meant to complete the picture. It deals with that
wonderful upbuilding of the great West which immediately followed the
war, and in which the best of the young Virginians played an important
part.

The personages of the story are real, and its events are mainly facts,
thinly veiled.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                     PAGE

       I THE FINAL FIGHT                         1

      II ALONE IN THE HIGH MOUNTAIN             18

     III THE NEW BIRTH OF MANHOOD               29

      IV A PRIVATE IN THE ARMY OF WORK          38

       V THE BEGINNING OF A CAREER              42

      VI A CAPTAIN IN THE ARMY OF WORK          48

     VII THE "SIZING UP" OF GUILFORD DUNCAN     59

    VIII ON DUTY                                64

      IX ONE NIGHT'S WORK                       70

       X ALLIANCE, OFFENSIVE AND DEFENSIVE      87

      XI THE WAYS OF GUILFORD DUNCAN           100

     XII BARBARA VERNE                         107

    XIII A BATTLE AND AN ACQUAINTANCE          119

     XIV A SOCIAL ADVANCE                      129

      XV THE COMING OUT OF BARBARA             141

     XVI A NEW ENEMY                           146

    XVII AN OLD FRIEND                         160

   XVIII DICK TEMPLE'S PLANS                   168

     XIX DICK TEMPLE'S STORY                   175

      XX IN THE SUMMER TIME                    181

     XXI AN INTERVIEW WITH NAPPER TANDY        188

    XXII UNDER THE HONEYSUCKLES                198

   XXIII CAPTAIN WILL HALLAM IN THE GAME       202

    XXIV BARBARA'S ANSWER                      214

     XXV TEMPLE AND TANDY                      224

    XXVI A PACT WITH BARBARA                   242

   XXVII MRS. HALLAM HEARS NEWS                254

  XXVIII THE BIRTH OF A GREAT RAILROAD         265

    XXIX A SCRAP OF PAPER                      274

     XXX THE MYSTERY OF TANDY                  285

    XXXI ONLY A WOMAN                          293

   XXXII THE RIDDLE EXPLAINED                  298

  XXXIII AT CRISIS                             304

   XXXIV A CHEER FOR LITTLE MISSIE             316

    XXXV THE END OF A STRUGGLE                 323




A CAPTAIN IN THE RANKS




I

THE FINAL FIGHT

[Illustration]


The slender remnant of Lee's artillery swung slowly into position a few
miles west of Appomattox Court House. Wearily--but with spirit
still--the batteries parked their guns in a field facing a strip of
woodland. The guns were few in number now, but they were all that was
left of those that had done battle on a score of historic fields.

Lee had been forced out of his works at Richmond and Petersburg a week
before. Ever since, with that calm courage which had sustained him
throughout the later and losing years of the war, he had struggled and
battled in an effort to retreat to the Roanoke River. He had hoped there
to unite the remnant of his army with what was left of Johnston's force,
and to make there a final and desperate stand.

In this purpose he had been baffled. Grant's forces were on his southern
flank, and they had steadily pressed him back toward the James River on
the north. In that direction there was no thoroughfare for him. Neither
was there now in any other. Continual battling had depleted his army
until it numbered now scarcely more than ten thousand men all told, and
starvation had weakened these so greatly that only the heroism of
despair enabled them to fight or to march at all.

The artillery that was parked out there in front of Appomattox Court
House was only a feeble remnant of that which had fought so long and so
determinedly. Gun after gun had been captured. Gun after gun had been
dismounted in battle struggle. Caisson after caisson had been blown up
by the explosion of shells striking them.

Captain Guilford Duncan, at the head of eleven mounted men, armed only
with sword and pistols, paused before entering the woodlands in front.
He looked about in every direction, and, with an eye educated by long
experience in war, he observed the absence of infantry support.

He turned to Sergeant Garrett, who rode by his side, and said sadly:

"Garrett, this means surrender. General Lee has put his artillery here
to be captured. The end has come."

Then dismounting, he wearily threw himself upon the ground, chewed and
swallowed a few grains of corn,--the only rations he had,--and sought a
brief respite of sleep. But before closing his eyes he turned to Garrett
and gave the command:

"Post a sentinel and order him to wake us when Sheridan comes."

This command brought questions from the men about him. They were
privates and he was their captain, it is true, but the Southern army was
democratic, and these men were accustomed to speak with their captain
with eyes on a level with his own.

"Why do you say, 'when Sheridan comes'?" asked one of Duncan's command.

"Oh, he will come, of course--and quickly. That is the program. This
artillery has been posted here to be captured. And it will be captured
within an hour or two at furthest, perhaps within a few minutes, for
Sheridan is sleepless and his force is not only on our flank, but in
front of us. There is very little left of the Army of Northern Virginia.
It can fight no more. It is going to surrender here, but in the meantime
there may be a tidy little scrimmage in this strip of woods, and I for
one want to have my share in it. Now let me go to sleep and wake me
when Sheridan comes."

In a minute the captain was asleep. So were all his men except the
sentinel posted to do the necessary waking.

That came all too quickly, for at this juncture in the final proceedings
of the war Sheridan was vigorously carrying out Grant's laconic
instruction to "press things." When the sentinel waked the captain,
Sheridan's lines were less than fifty yards in front and were pouring
heavy volleys into the unsupported Confederate artillery park.

Guilford Duncan and his men were moved to no excitement by this
situation. Their nerves had been schooled to steadiness and their minds
to calm under any conceivable circumstances by four years of vastly
varied fighting. Without the slightest hurry they mounted their horses
in obedience to Duncan's brief command. He led them at once into the
presence of Colonel Cabell, whose battalion of artillery lay nearest to
him. As they sat upon their horses in the leaden hailstorm, with
countenances as calm as if they had been entering a drawing room, Duncan
touched his cap to Colonel Cabell and said:

"Colonel, I am under nobody's orders here. I have eleven men with me,
all of them, as you know, as good artillerymen as there are in the army.
Can you let us handle some guns for you?"

"No," answered Colonel Cabell; "I have lost so many guns already that I
have twenty men to each piece." Then, after a moment's pause, he added:

"You, Captain, cannot fail to understand what all this means."

"I quite understand that, Colonel," answered Duncan, "but as I was in at
the beginning of this war, I have a strong desire to be in at the end of
it."

The Colonel's cannon were firing vigorously by this time at the rate of
six or eight shots to the minute from each gun, but he calmly looked
over the little party on horseback and responded:

"You have some good horses there, and this is April. You will need your
horses in your farming operations. You had better take them and your men
out of here. You can do no good by staying. This fight is a formality
pure and simple, a preliminary to the final surrender."

"Then you order me to withdraw?" asked Duncan.

"Yes, certainly, and peremptorily if you wish, though you are not under
my command," answered Colonel Cabell. "It is the best thing you can do
for yourself, for your men, for your horses, and for the country."

Duncan immediately obeyed the order, in a degree at least. He promptly
withdrew his men to the top of a little hillock in the rear and there
watched the progress of the final fight. His nerves were all a-quiver.
He was a young man, twenty-five years old perhaps, full of vigor, full
of enthusiasm, full of fight. He was a trifle less than six feet high,
with a lithe and symmetrical body, lean almost to emaciation by reason
of arduous service and long starvation. He had a head that instantly
attracted attention by its unusual size and its statuesque shape. He was
bronzed almost to the complexion of a mulatto, but without any touch of
yellow in the bronze. He was dark by nature, of intensely nervous
temperament, and obviously a man capable of enormous determination and
unfaltering endurance.

He had not yet lost the instinct of battle, and it galled him that he
must sit idly there on his horse, with his men awaiting his orders,
simply observing a fight in which he strongly desired to participate. He
could see the Federal lines gradually closing in upon both flanks of the
artillery, with the certainty that they must presently envelop and
capture it. Seasoned soldier that he was, he could not endure the
thought of standing still while such a work of war was going on.

Seeing the situation he turned to his men, who were armed only with
swords and pistols, and in a voice so calm that it belied his impulse,
he said to them:

"This is our last chance for a fight, boys. I am going into the middle
of that mix! Anybody who chooses to follow me can come along!"

Every man in that little company of eleven had two pistols in his saddle
holsters and two upon his hips, and every man carried in addition a
heavy cavalry saber capable of doing execution at close quarters. They
were gentlemen soldiers, all. The cause for which they had battled for
four long years was as dear to them now as it ever had been. More
important still, their courage was as unflinching in this obvious climax
and catastrophe of the war they had waged, as it had been at Bull Run in
the beginning of that struggle, or in the Seven Days' Fight, or at
Fredericksburg, or Chancellorsville, or Gettysburg, or Cold Harbor.
Duncan had not doubted their response for one moment, and he was not
disappointed in the vigor with which they followed him as he led them
into this final fight. As they dashed forward their advance was quickly
discovered by the alert enemy, and a destructive fire of carbines was
opened upon them. At that moment they were at the trot. Instantly Duncan
gave the commands:

"Gallop! Charge!"

With that demoniacal huntsman's cry which is known in history as the
"Rebel Yell," the little squad dashed forward and plunged into the far
heavier lines of the enemy. There was a detached Federal gun there doing
its work. It was a superb twelve-pounder, and Duncan's men quickly
captured it with its limber-chest. Instantly dismounting, and without
waiting for orders from him, they turned it upon the enemy with vigorous
effect. But they were so fearfully over-matched in numbers that their
work endured for scarcely more than a minute. They fired a dozen shots,
perhaps, but they were speedily overwhelmed, and in another instant
Duncan ordered them to mount and retire again, firing Parthian shots
from their pistols as they went.

When he again reached the little hill to which he had retired at the
beginning of the action, Duncan looked around him and saw that only
seven of his eleven men remained. The other four had paid a final
tribute of their lives to what was now obviously "The Lost Cause."

By this time the fight was over, and practically all that remained of
the artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia was in possession of the
enemy.

But that enemy was a generous one, and, foreseeing as it did the
surrender that must come with the morning, it made no assault upon this
wandering squad of brave but beaten men, who were sadly looking upon the
disastrous end of the greatest war in human history.

Captain Duncan's party were on a bald hill within easy range of the
carbines of Sheridan's men, but not a shot was fired at them, and not so
much as a squad was sent out to demand their surrender.

Night was now near at hand and Guilford Duncan turned to his men and
said:

"The war is practically over, I suppose; but I for one intend to stick
to the game as long as it lasts. General Lee will surrender his army
to-night or to-morrow morning, but General Johnston still has an army
in the field in North Carolina. It is barely possible that we may get to
him. It is my purpose to try. How many of you want to go with me?"

The response was instantaneous and unanimous.

"We'll all stick by you, Captain, 'till the cows come home,'" they
cried.

"Very well," he answered. "We must march to James River to-night and
cross it. We must make our way into the mountains and through Lynchburg,
if possible, into North Carolina. We'll try, anyhow."

All night long they marched. They secured some coarse food-stuffs at a
mill which they passed on their way up into the mountains. There for a
week they struggled to make their way southward, fighting now and then,
not with Federal troops, for there were none there, but with marauders.
These were the offscourings of both armies, and of the negro population
of that region. They made themselves the pests of Virginia at that time.
Their little bands consisted of deserters from both armies, dissolute
negroes, and all other kinds of "lewd fellows of the baser sort." They
raided plantations. They stole horses. They terrorized women. They were
a thorn in the flesh of General Grant's officers, who were placed in
strategic positions to prevent the possible occurrence of a guerrilla
warfare, and who therefore could not scatter their forces for the
policing of a land left desolate and absolutely lawless.

In many parts of the country which were left without troops to guard
them, at a time when no civil government existed, these marauders played
havoc in an extraordinary way. But the resoluteness of General Grant's
administration soon suppressed them. Whenever he caught them he hanged
or shot them without mercy, and with small consideration for
formalities. In the unprotected districts he authorized the
ex-Confederates, upon their promise to lend aid against the inauguration
of guerrilla warfare, to suppress them on their own account, and they
did so relentlessly.

During the sojourn in the mountains, in his effort to push his way
through to Johnston, Guilford Duncan came upon a plantation where only
women were living in the mansion house. A company of these marauders had
taken possession of the plantation, occupying its negro cabins and
terrorizing the population of the place. When Duncan rode up with his
seven armed men he instantly took command and assumed the _rôle_ of
protector. First of all he posted his men as sentries for the protection
of the plantation homestead. Next he sent out scouts, including a number
of trusty negroes who belonged upon the plantation, to find out where
the marauders were located, and what their numbers were, and what
purpose they might seem bent upon. From the reports of these scouts he
learned that the marauders exceeded him in force by three to one, or
more, but that fact in no way appalled him. During a long experience in
war he had learned well the lesson that numbers count for less than
morale, and that with skill and resoluteness a small force may easily
overcome and destroy a larger one.

He knew now that his career as a Confederate soldier was at an end.
Federal troops had occupied Lynchburg and all the region round about,
thus completely cutting him off from any possibility of reaching General
Johnston in North Carolina. He had no further mission as a military
officer of the Southern Confederacy, but as a mere man of courage and
vigor he had before him the duty of defending the women and children of
this Virginia plantation against about the worst and most desperate type
of highwaymen who ever organized themselves into a force for purposes of
loot and outrage.

He sent at once for the best negroes on the plantation--the negroes who
had proved themselves loyal in their affection for their mistresses
throughout the war. Having assembled these he inquired of the women what
arms and ammunition they had. There were the usual number of shotguns
belonging to a plantation, and a considerable supply of powder and
buckshot. Duncan assembled the negroes in the great hall of the
plantation house and said to them:

"I have seven men here, all armed and all fighters. I have arms enough
for you boys if you are willing to join me in the defense of the ladies
on this plantation against about the worst set of scoundrels that ever
lived on earth."

Johnny, the head dining-room servant, speaking for all the rest,
replied:

"In co'se we is. Jest you lead us, mahstah, and you'll see how we'll do
de wu'k."

Then Duncan armed the negroes, every one of whom knew how to use a gun,
so that he needed not instruct them, and he led them forth with his own
seasoned soldiers at their head.

"Now then," he said, "we are going to attack these fellows, and you know
perfectly well that they are a lot of cowards, and sneaks, and
scoundrels. If we are all resolute we can whip them out of their boots
within a few minutes. Either we must do that, or they will whip us out
of our boots and destroy us. I do not think there is much doubt about
which is going to whip. Come along, boys."

The marauders had established themselves in four or five of the negro
quarters on the plantation, and in a certain sense they were strongly
fortified. That is to say, they were housed in cabins built of logs too
thick for any bullet to penetrate them. Four of these cabins were so
placed that a fire from the door and the windows of either of them would
completely command the entrance of each of the others. But to offset
that, and to offset also the superiority of numbers which the marauders
enjoyed, Guilford Duncan decided upon an attack by night. He knew that
he was outnumbered by two or three to one, even if he counted the
willing but untrained negroes whom he had enlisted in this service. But
he did not despair of success. It was his purpose to dislodge the
marauders in a night attack, when he knew that they could not see to
shoot with effect. He knew also that "He is thrice armed who knows his
quarrel just."

Cautioning his men to maintain silence, and to advance as quickly as
possible, he got them into position and suddenly rushed upon the first
of the four or five negro quarters. Knowing that the door of this house
would be barricaded, he had instructed some of the negroes to bring a
pole with them which might be used as a battering ram. With a rush but
without any hurrah,--for Duncan had ordered quiet as a part of his plan
of campaign,--the negroes carried the great pole forward and instantly
crushed in the door. Within ten seconds afterwards Duncan's
ex-Confederate soldiers, with their pistols in use, were within the
house, and the company of marauders there surrendered--those of them who
had not fallen before the pistol shots. This first flush of victory
encouraged the negroes under his command so far that what had been their
enthusiasm became a positive battle-madness. Without waiting for orders
from him they rushed with their battering ram upon the other houses
occupied by the marauders, as did also his men, who were not accustomed
to follow, but rather to lead, and within a few minutes all of those
negro huts were in his possession, and all their occupants were in
effect his prisoners.

At this moment Guilford Duncan, who had now no legal or military
authority over his men, lost control of them. Both the negroes and the
white men seemed to go mad. They recognized in the marauders no rights
of a military kind, no title to be regarded as fighting men, and no
conceivable claim upon their conquerors' consideration. Both the negroes
and the white men were merciless in their slaughter of the marauding
highwaymen. Once, in the _mêlée_, Guilford Duncan endeavored to check
their enthusiasm as a barbarity, but his men responded in quick,
bullet-like words, indicating their idea that these men were not
soldiers entitled to be taken prisoners, but were beasts of prey,
rattlesnakes, mad dogs, enemies of the human race, whose extermination
it was the duty of every honest man to seek and to accomplish as quickly
as possible.

This thought was conveyed rather in ejaculations than in statements
made, and Guilford Duncan saw that there was neither time nor occasion
for argument. The men under his command felt that they were engaged in
defending the lives and the honor of women and children, and they were
in no degree disposed to hesitate at slaughter where so precious a
purpose inspired them. Their attitude of mind was uncompromising. Their
resolution was unalterable. Their impulse was to kill, and their victims
were men of so despicable a kind that after a moment's thought Guilford
Duncan's impulse was to let his men alone.

The contest lasted for a very brief while. The number of the slaughtered
in proportion to the total number of men engaged was appalling. But this
was not all. To it was immediately added the hasty hanging of men to the
nearest trees, and Guilford Duncan was powerless to prevent that. The
negroes, loyal to the mistresses whom they had served from infancy, had
gone wild in their enthusiasm of defense. They ran amuck, and when the
morning came there was not one man of all those marauders left alive to
tell the story of the conflict.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the meanwhile Guilford Duncan, by means of his men, had gathered
information in every direction. He knew now that all hope was gone of
his joining Johnston's army, even if that army had not surrendered, as
by this time it probably had done. He therefore brought his men
together. Most of them lived in those mountains round about, or in the
lower country east of them, and so he said to them:

"Men, the war is over. Most of you, as I understand it, live somewhere
near here, or within fifty miles of here. As the last order that I shall
ever issue as a captain, I direct you now to return to your homes at
once. My advice to you is to go to work and rebuild your fortunes as
best you can. We've had our last fight. We've done our duty like men.
We must now do the best that we can for ourselves under extremely
adverse circumstances. Go home. Cultivate your fields. Take care of your
families, and be as good citizens in peace as you have been good
soldiers in war."

There was a hurried consultation among the men. Presently Sergeant
Garrett spoke for the rest and said:

"We will not go home, Captain Duncan, until each one of us has written
orders from you to do so. Some of us fellows have children in our homes,
and the rest of us may have children hereafter. We want them to know, as
the years go by, that we did not desert our cause, even in its dying
hours, that we did not quit the army until we were ordered to quit. We
ask of you, for each of us, a written order to go home, or to go
wherever else you may order us to go."

The Captain fully understood the loyalty of feeling which underlay this
request, and he promptly responded to it. Taking from his pocket a
number of old letters and envelopes, he searched out whatever scraps
there might be of blank paper. Upon these scraps he issued to each man
of his little company a peremptory order to return to his home, with an
added statement in the case of each that he had "served loyally,
bravely, and well, even unto the end."

That night, before their final parting, the little company slept
together in the midst of a cluster of pine trees, with only one sentry
on duty.

The next day came the parting. The captain, with tears dimming his
vision, shook hands with each of his men in turn, saying to each, with
choking utterance: "Good-by! God bless you!"

Then the spokesman of the men, Sergeant Garrett, asked:

"Are you going home, Captain Duncan?"

For twenty seconds the young Captain stared at his men, making no
answer. Then, mastering himself, and speaking as one dazed, he replied:

"Home? Home? On all God's earth I have no home!"

Instantly he put spurs to his horse, half unconsciously turning toward
the sunset.

A moment later he vanished from view, over the crest of a hill.




II

ALONE IN THE HIGH MOUNTAINS


The young man rode long and late that night. His way lay always upward
toward the crests of the high mountains of the Blue Ridge Range.

The roads he traversed were scarcely more than trails--too steep in
their ascent to have been traveled by wagons that might wear them into
thoroughfares. During the many hours of his riding he saw no sign of
human habitation anywhere, and no prospect of finding food for himself
or his horse, though both were famishing.

About midnight, however, he came upon a bit of wild pasture land on a
steep mountain side, where his horse at least might crop the early grass
of the spring. There he halted, removed his saddle and bridle, and
turned the animal loose, saying:

"Poor beast! You will not stray far away. There's half an acre of grass
here, with bare rocks all around it. Your appetite will be leash enough
to keep you from wandering."

Then the young man--no longer a captain now, but a destitute, starving
wanderer on the face of the earth--threw himself upon a carpet of pine
needles in a little clump of timber, made a pillow of his saddle, drew
the saddle blanket over his shoulders to keep out the night chill,
loosened his belt, and straightway fell asleep.

Before doing so, however,--faint with hunger as he was, and weary to the
verge of collapse,--he had a little ceremony to perform, and he
performed it--in answer to a sentimental fancy. With the point of his
sword he found an earth-bank free of rock, and dug a trench there. In it
he placed his sword in its scabbard and with its belt and sword-knot
attached. Then drawing the earth over it and stamping it down, he said:

"That ends the soldier chapter of my life. I must turn to the work of
peace now. I have no fireplace over which to hang the trusty blade. It
is better to bury it here in the mountains in the midst of desolation,
and forever to forget all that it suggests."

When he waked in the morning a soaking, persistent, pitiless rain was
falling. The young man's clothing was so completely saturated that, as
he stood erect, the water streamed from his elbows, and he felt it
trickling down his body and his legs.

"This is a pretty good substitute for a bath," he thought, as he removed
his garments, and with strong, nervous hands, wrung the water out of
them as laundresses do with linen.

He had no means of kindling a fire, and there was no time for that at
any rate. Guilford Duncan had begun to feel the pangs not of mere
hunger, but of actual starvation--the pains that mean collapse and
speedy death. He knew that he must find food for himself and that
quickly. Otherwise he must die there, helpless and alone, on the
desolate mountain side.

He might, indeed, kill his horse and live for a few days upon its flesh,
until it should spoil. But such relief would be only a postponing of the
end, and without the horse he doubted that he could travel far toward
that western land which he had half unwittingly fixed upon as his goal.

He was well up in the mountains now, and near the crest of the great
range. The Valley lay beyond, and he well knew that he would find no
food supplies in that region when he should come to cross it. Sheridan
had done a perfect work of war there, so devastating one of the most
fruitful regions on all God's earth that in picturesque words he had
said: "The crow that flies over the Valley of Virginia must carry his
rations with him."

In the high mountains matters were not much better. There had been no
battling up there in the land of the sky, but the scars and the
desolation of war were manifest even upon mountain sides and mountain
tops.

For four years the men who dwelt in the rude log cabins of that
frost-bitten and sterile region had been serving as volunteers in the
army, fighting for a cause which was none of theirs and which they did
not at all understand or try to understand. They fought upon instinct
alone. It had always been the custom of the mountain dwellers to
shoulder their guns and go into the thick of every fray which seemed to
them in any way to threaten their native land. They went blindly, they
fought desperately, and they endured manfully. Ignorant, illiterate,
abjectly poor, inured to hardship through generations, they asked no
questions the answers to which they could not understand. It was enough
for them to know that their native land was invaded by an armed foe.
Whenever that occurred they were ready to meet force with force, and to
do their humble mightiest to drive that foe away or to destroy him,
without asking even who he was.

It had been so in all the Indian wars and in the Revolutionary struggle,
and it was so again in the war between the States. As soon as the call
to arms was issued, these sturdy mountaineers almost to a man abandoned
their rocky and infertile fields to the care of their womankind and went
to war, utterly regardless of consequences to themselves.

During this last absence of four years their homes had fallen into
fearful desolation. Those homes were log cabins, chinked and daubed,
mostly having earthen floors and chimneys built of sticks thickly
plastered with mud. But humble as they were, they were homes and they
held the wives and children whom these men loved.

All that was primitive in American life survived without change in the
high mountains of Virginia and the Carolinas. In the Piedmont country
east of the Blue Ridge, and in the tide-water country beyond, until the
war came there were great plantations, where wealthy, or well-to-do, and
highly educated planters lived in state with multitudinous slaves to
till their fertile fields.

West of the Blue Ridge and between that range and the Alleghenies lay
the Valley of Virginia, a land as fruitful as Canaan itself.

In that Valley there dwelt in simple but abundant plenty the sturdy
"Dutchmen," as they were improperly called,--men of German descent,--who
had pushed their settlements southward from Pennsylvania along the
Valley, establishing themselves in the midst of fertile fields, owning
few slaves, and tilling their own lands, planting orchards everywhere,
and building not only their houses, but their barns and all their
outbuildings stoutly of the native stone that lay ready to their hands.

That region was now as barren as Sahara by reason of the devastation
that Sheridan had inflicted upon it with the deliberate and merciless
strategic purpose of rendering it uninhabitable and in that way making
of it a no-thoroughfare for Confederate armies on march toward the
country north of the Potomac, or on the way to threaten Washington
City.

The little mountain homesteads had been spared this devastation. But
their case was not much better than that of the more prosperous
plantations on the east, or that of the richly fruitful Valley farms on
the west. In war it is not "the enemy" alone who lays waste. Such little
cribs and granaries and smoke houses as these poor mountain dwellers
owned had been despoiled of their stores to feed the armies in the
field. Their boys, even those as young as fourteen, had been drawn into
the army. Their hogs, their sheep, and the few milch cows they
possessed, had been taken away from them. Their scanty oxen had been
converted into army beef, and those of them who owned a horse or a mule
had been compelled to surrender the animal for military use, receiving
in return only Confederate treasury notes, now worth no more than so
much of waste paper.

Nevertheless Guilford Duncan perfectly understood that he must look to
the impoverished people of the high mountains for a food supply in this
his sore extremity. Therefore, instead of crossing the range by way of
any of the main-traveled passes, he pushed his grass-refreshed steed
straight up Mount Pleasant to its topmost heights.

There, about noon, he came upon a lonely cabin whose owner had reached
home from the war only a day or two earlier.

There was an air of desolation and decay about the place, but knowing
the ways of the mountaineers the young man did not despair of securing
some food there. For even when the mountaineer is most prosperous his
fences are apt to be down, his roof out of repair, and all his
surroundings to wear the look of abandonment in despair.

Duncan began by asking for dinner for himself and his horse, and the
response was what he expected in that land of poverty-stricken but
always generous hospitality.

"Ain't got much to offer you, Cap'n'," said the owner, "but sich as it
is you're welcome."

Meanwhile he had given the horse a dozen ears of corn, saying:

"Reckon 't won't hurt him. He don't look 's if he'd been a feedin' any
too hearty an' I reckon a dozen ears won't founder him."

For dinner there was a scanty piece of bacon, boiled with wild mustard
plants for greens, and some pones of corn bread.

To Guilford Duncan, in his starving condition, this seemed a veritable
feast. The eating of it so far refreshed him that he cheerfully answered
all the questions put to him by his shirt-sleeved host.

It is a tradition in Virginia that nobody can ask so many questions as a
"Yankee," and yet there was never a people so insistently given to
asking questions of a purely and impertinently personal character as
were the Virginians of anything less than the higher and gentler class.
They questioned a guest, not so much because of any idle curiosity
concerning his affairs, as because of a friendly desire to manifest
interest in him and in what might concern him.

"What mout your name be, Cap'n?" the host began, as they sat at dinner.

"My name is Guilford Duncan," replied the young man. "But I am not a
Captain now. I'm only a very poor young man--greatly poorer than you
are, for at least you own a home and a little piece of the mountain top,
while I own no inch of God's earth or anything else except my horse, my
four pistols, my saddle and bridle and the clothes I wear."

"What's your plan? Goin' to settle in the mountings? They say there'll
be big money in 'stillin' whisky an' not a-payin' of the high tax on it.
It's a resky business, or will be, when the Yanks get their-selves
settled down into possession, like; but I kin see you're game fer resks,
an' ef you want a workin' pardner, I'm your man. There's a water power
just a little way down the mounting, in a valley that one good man with
a rifle kin defend."

"Thank you for your offer," answered Duncan. "But I'm not thinking of
settling in the mountains. I'm going to the West, if I can get there.
Now, to do that, I must cross the Valley, and I must have some
provisions. Can you sell me a side of bacon, a little bag of meal, and a
little salt?"

"What kin you pay with, Mister?"

"Well, I have no money, of course, except worthless Confederate paper,
but I have two pairs of Colt's 'Navy Six' revolvers, and I'd be glad to
give you one pair of them for my dinner, my horse's feed, and the
provisions I have mentioned."

"Now look-a-here, Mister," broke in the mountaineer, rising and
straightening himself to his full height of six feet four. "When you
come to my door you was mighty hungry. You axed fer a dinner an' a hoss
feed, an' I've done give 'em to you, free, gratis, an' fer nothin'. No
man on the face o' God's yearth kin say as how he ever come to Si
Watkins's house in need of a dinner an' a hoss feed 'thout a gittin'
both. An' no man kin say as how Si Watkins ever took a cent o' pay fer a
entertainin' of angels unawares as the preachers says. Them's my
_principles_, an' when you offer to pay fer a dinner an' a hoss feed,
you insults my _principles_."

"I sincerely beg your pardon," answered Duncan hurriedly. "I am very
grateful indeed for your hospitality, and as a Virginian I heartily
sympathize with your sentiment about not taking pay for food and
lodging, but----"

"That's all right, Mister. You meant fa'r an' squa'r. But you know how
it is. Chargin' fer a dinner an' a hoss feed is low down Yankee
business. Tavern keepers does it, too, but Si Watkins ain't no tavern
keeper an' he ain't no Yankee, neither. So that's the end o' that
little skirmish. But when it comes to furnishin' you with a side o'
bacon an' some meal an' salt, that's more differenter. That's business.
There's mighty little meal an' mighty few sides o' bacon in these here
parts, but I don't mind a-tellin' you as how my wife's done managed to
hide a few sides o' bacon an' a little meal from the fellers what come
up here to collect the tax in kind. One of 'em found her hidin' place
one day, an' was jest a-goin' to confisticate the meat when, with the
sperrit of a woman, that's in her as big as a house, she drawed a bead
on him an' shot him. He was carried down the mounting by his men, an'
p'r'aps he's done got well. I don't know an' I keers less. Anyhow, we's
done got a few sides o' bacon an' a big bag o' meal an' a bushel o'
salt. Ef you choose to take one o' them sides o' bacon, an' a little
meal an' salt, an' give me one o' your pistols, I'm quite agreeable. The
gun mout come in handy when I git a little still a-goin', down there in
the holler."

"I'll do better than that," answered Duncan. "I'll give you a pair of
the pistols, as I said."

"Hold on! Go a leetle slow, Mister, an' don't forgit nothin'. You
preposed to gimme the p'ar o' pistols fer the bacon an' meal an' salt,
_an'_ fer yer dinner an' hoss feed. I've done tole you as how Si Watkins
don't never take no pay fer a dinner an' a hoss feed. So you can't offer
me the p'ar o' pistols 'thout offerin' to pay fer yer entertainment of
man an' beast, an' I won't have that, I tell you."

"Very well," answered Duncan; "I didn't mean that. I'll give you one of
the pistols in payment for the supply of provisions. That will end the
business part of the matter. Now, I'm going to do something else with
the other pistol--the mate of that one."

With that he opened his pocket knife and scratched on the silver
mounting of the pistol's butt the legend: "To Si Watkins, in memory of a
visit; from Guilford Duncan, Cairo, Illinois."

Then handing the inscribed weapon to his host he said:

"I have a right to make you a little present, purely in the way of
friendship, and not as 'pay' for anything at all. I want to give you
this pistol, and I want you to keep it. I don't know where I am going to
live and work in the West, and I don't know why I wrote 'Cairo,
Illinois' as my address. It simply came to me to do it. Perhaps it's a
good omen. Anyhow, I shall go to Cairo, and if I leave there I'll
arrange to have my letters forwarded to me, wherever I may be. So if
you're in trouble at any time you can write to me at Cairo. I am as poor
as you are now--yes, poorer. But I don't mean to stay poor. If you're in
trouble at any time, I'll do my best to see you through, just as you
have seen me through this time."




III

THE NEW BIRTH OF MANHOOD


Half an hour later the young man resumed his journey westward, passing
down the farther slopes of the mountain.

"Wonder why I wrote 'Cairo' as my address," he thought, as his trusty
horse carefully picked his way among the rocks and down the steeps. "I
hadn't thought of Cairo before as even a possible destination. I know
nobody there. I know absolutely nothing about the town, or the
opportunities it may offer. I'm not superstitious, I think, but somehow
this thing impresses me, and to Cairo I shall go--if only to receive Si
Watkins's letter when it comes," he added with a smile.

Then he began a more practical train of thought.

"I've food enough now," he reflected, "to last me scantily for a few
days. During that time I must make my way as far as I can toward the
Ohio River at Pittsburg or Wheeling or Parkersburg. When I reach the
River I must have money enough to pay steamboat fare to Cairo. There is
no money in these parts, but West Virginia is practically a Northern
State, and there are greenbacks there. I'll sell my remaining pistols
there. A little later I'll sell my horse, my saddle, and my bridle. The
horse is a good one, and so is the saddle. Surely I ought to get enough
for them to pay my way to Cairo."

Then came another and a questioning thought:

"And when I get to Cairo? What then? I've a good university education,
but I doubt that there is a ready market for education in any bustling
Mississippi River town, just now. I'm a graduate in law, but Heaven
knows I know very little about the profession aside from the broad
underlying principles. Besides, I shall have no money with which to open
an office, and who is going to employ a wandering and utterly destitute
stranger to take charge of his legal business?"

For the moment discouragement dominated the young man's mind. But
presently there came to him a reflection that gave new birth to his
courage.

"I'm six feet high," he thought, "and broad in proportion. I'm in
perfect physical health. I have muscles that nothing has ever yet tired.
Between the wilderness and Appomattox I have had an extensive experience
in shoveling earth and other hard work. I'm in exceedingly good
training--a trifle underfed, perhaps, but at any rate I carry not one
ounce of superfluous fat on my person. I am perfectly equipped for the
hardest kind of physical work and in a busy western town there is sure
to be work enough of that kind for a strong and willing man to do. I
can at the very least earn enough as a laborer to feed me better than
I've been fed for the four years of war."

Curiously enough, this prospect of work as a day laborer greatly cheered
the young man. Instead of depressing his spirits, it for the first time
lifted from his soul that incubus of melancholy with which every
Confederate soldier of his class was at first oppressed. Ever since
Grant had refused in the Wilderness--a year before--to retire beyond the
river after receiving Lee's tremendous blows, Guilford Duncan and all
Confederates of like intelligence had foreseen the end and had
recognized its coming as inevitable. Nevertheless, when it came in fact,
when the army of Northern Virginia surrendered, and when the Confederacy
ceased to be, the event was scarcely less shocking and depressing to
their minds than if it had been an unforeseen and unexpected one.

The melancholy that instantly took possession of such minds amounted to
scarcely less than insanity, and for a prolonged period it paralyzed
energy and made worse the ruin that war had wrought in the South.

Fortunately Guilford Duncan, thrown at once and absolutely upon his own
resources, thus quickly escaped from the overshadowing cloud.

And yet his case seemed worse than that of most of his comrades. They,
at least, had homes of some sort to go to; he had none. There was for
them, debt burdened as their plantations were, at least a hope that some
way out might ultimately be found. For him there was no inch of ground
upon which he might rest even a hope.

Born of an old family he had been bred and educated as one to whom
abundance was to come by inheritance, a man destined from birth to
become in time the master of a great patrimonial estate.

But that estate was honeycombed with hereditary debt, the result of
generations of lavish living, wasteful methods of agriculture, and
over-generous hospitality. About the time when war came there came also
a crisis in the affairs of Guilford Duncan's father. Long before the war
ended the elder man had surrendered everything he had in the world to
his creditors. He had then enlisted in the army, though he was more than
sixty years old. He had been killed in the trenches before Petersburg,
leaving his only son, Guilford, not only without a patrimony and without
a home, but also without any family connection closer than some distant
half-theoretical cousin-ships. The young man's mother had gently passed
from earth so long ago that he only dimly remembered the sweet nobility
of her character, and he had never had either brother or sister.

He was thus absolutely alone in the world, and he was penniless, too, as
he rode down the mountain steeps. But the impulse of work had come to
him, and he joyfully welcomed it as something vastly better and
worthier of his strong young manhood than any brooding over misfortune
could be, or any leading of the old aristocratic, half-idle planter
life, if that had been possible.

In connection with this thought came another. He had recently read Owen
Meredith's "Lucille," and as he journeyed he recalled the case there
described of the French nobleman who for a time wasted his life and
neglected his splendid opportunities in brooding over the downfall of
the Bourbon dynasty, and in an obstinate refusal to reconcile himself to
the new order of things. Duncan remembered how, after a while, when the
new France became involved in the Crimean war, the Frenchman saw a
clearer light; how he learned to feel that, under one regime or another,
it was still France that he loved, and to France that his best service
was due.

"That," thought Guilford Duncan, "was a new birth of patriotism. Why
should not a similar new birth come to those of us who have fought in
the Confederate Army? After all, the restored Union will be the only
representative left of those principles for which we have so manfully
battled during the last four years--the principles of liberty and equal
rights and local self-government. We Confederates believe, and will
always believe, that our cause was just and right, that it represented
the fundamentals of that American system which our forefathers sealed
and cemented with their blood. But our effort has failed. The
Confederacy is eternally dead. The Union survives. What choice is left
to us who followed Lee, except to reconcile ourselves with our new
environment and help with all our might to preserve and perpetuate
within the Union and by means of it, all of liberty and self-government,
and human rights, that we have tried to maintain by the establishment of
the Confederacy? We must either join heart and soul in that work, or we
must idly sulk, living in the dead past and leaving it to our
adversaries to do, without our help, the great good that, if we do not
sulk, we can so mightily help in doing."

He paused in his thinking long enough to let his emotions have their
word of protest against a reconciliation which sentiment resented as a
surrender of principle.

Then, with a resolute determination that was final, he ended the debate
in his own mind between futilely reactionary sentiment and hopeful,
constructive, common sense.

"I for one, shall live in the future and not in the past. I shall make
the best and not the worst of things as they are. I have put the war and
all its issues completely behind me. For half a century to come the men
on either side will organize themselves, I suppose, into societies whose
purpose will be to cherish and perpetuate the memory of the war, and to
make it a source of antagonism and bitterness. Their work will hinder
progress. I will have nothing to do with it. I am no longer a
Confederate soldier. I am an American citizen. I shall endeavor to do my
duty as such, wholly uninfluenced and unbiased by what has gone before.

"Surely there can be no abandonment of truth or justice or principle in
that! It is the obvious dictate of common sense and patriotism. During
the war I freely offered my life to our cause. The cause is dead, but I
live. I have youth and strength. I have brains, I think, and I have
education. These I shall devote to such work as I can find to do, such
help as I can render in that upbuilding of my native land which must be
the work of all Americans during the next decade or longer!

"Good-bye, Confederacy! Good-bye, Army! Good-bye, Lost Cause! I am
young. I must 'look forward and not backward--up and not down.'
Henceforth I shall live and breathe and act for the future, not for the
past! Repining is about the most senseless and profitless occupation
that the human mind can conceive."

At that moment the young man's horse encountered a huge boulder that had
rolled down from the mountain side, completely blockading the path. With
the spirit and the training that war service had given him, the animal
stopped not nor stayed. He approached the obstacle with a leap or two,
and then, with mighty effort, vaulted over it.

"Good for you, Bob!" cried the young man. "That's the way to meet
obstacles, and that's the way I am resolved to meet them."

But the poor horse did not respond. He hobbled on three legs for a
space. His master, dismounting, found that he had torn loose a tendon of
one leg in the leap.

There was no choice but to drive a bullet into the poor beast's brain by
way of putting him out of his agony.

Thus was Guilford Duncan left upon the mountain side, more desolate and
helpless than before, with no possessions in all the world except a pair
of pistols, a saddle, a bridle, a side of bacon, a peck of corn meal,
and a few ounces of salt.

The Valley lay before him in all its barrenness. Beyond that lay
hundreds of miles of Allegheny mountains and the region farther on.

All this expanse he must traverse on foot before arriving at that great
river highway, by means of which he hoped to reach his destination, a
thousand miles and more farther still to the West. But the new manhood
had been born in Guilford Duncan's soul, and he was no more appalled by
the difficult problem that he must now face than he had been by the fire
of the enemy when battle was on. "Hard work," he reflected, "is the
daily duty of the soldier of peace, just as hard fighting as that of the
warrior."

Strapping his saddle and bridle on his back he took his bacon and his
salt bag in one hand and his bag of meal in the other. Thus heavily
burdened he set out on foot down the mountain.

"At any rate my load will grow lighter," he reflected, "every time I
eat, and I'll sell the saddle and bridle at the first opportunity. I'll
make the Ohio River in spite of all."




IV

A PRIVATE IN THE ARMY OF WORK


It was a truly terrible tramp that the young man had before him, but he
did not shrink. So long as his provisions lasted he pushed forward,
stopping only in the woodlands or by the wayside for sleep and for
eating. By the time that his provisions were exhausted he had passed the
Valley and had crossed the crest of the Alleghenies.

He was now in a country that had not been wasted by war, a country in
which men of every class seemed to be reasonably prosperous and hard at
work.

There, by way of replenishing his commissariat, he sold the saddle he
was carrying on his back, and thus lightened his load.

Fortunately it was a specially good saddle, richly mounted with silver,
and otherwise decorated to please the fancy of the dandy Federal officer
from whose dead horse Duncan had captured it after its owner had been
left stark upon the field in the Wilderness. It brought him now a good
price in money, and to this the purchaser generously added a little
store of provisions, including, for immediate use, some fresh meat--the
first that had passed Duncan's lips for more months past than he could
count upon the fingers of one hand.

A little later the young man sold his pistols, but as he pushed onward
toward the Ohio River he found that both traveling and living in a
prosperous country were far more expensive than traveling and living in
war-desolated and still moneyless Virginia.

His little store of funds leaked out of his pockets so fast that,
economize as he might, he found it necessary to ask for work here and
there on his journey. It was spring time, and the farmers were glad
enough to employ him for a day or two each. The wages were meagre
enough, but Duncan accepted them gladly, the more so because the farmers
in every case gave him board besides. Now and then he secured odd jobs
as an assistant to mechanics. In one case he stoked the furnaces of a
coal mine for a week.

But he did not remain long in any employment. As soon as he had a trifle
of money or a little stock of provisions to the good, he moved onward
toward the river.

His one dominating and ever-growing purpose was to reach Cairo. What
fortune might await him there he knew not at all, but since he had
scratched that address on the butt of a pistol, the desire to reach
Cairo had daily and hourly grown upon him until it was now almost a
passion. The name "Cairo" in his mind had become a synonym for
"Opportunity."

It was about the middle of May when the toilsome foot journey ended at
Wheeling. There Duncan, still wearing his tattered uniform, made
diligent inquiry as to steamboats going down the river. He learned that
one of the great coal-towing steamers from Pittsburg was expected within
a few hours, pushing acres of coal-laden barges before her, and he was
encouraged by the information, volunteered on every hand, that the work
of "firing up" under the boilers of these coal-towing boats was so
severe that a goodly number of the stokers always abandoned their
employment in disgust of it, and deserted the boat if she made a landing
at Wheeling, as this approaching one must do for the reason that a
number of coal-laden barges had been left there for her to take in tow.

It was Guilford Duncan's hope to secure a place on her as a stoker or
coal passer, to take the place of some one of the deserters. This might
enable him, he thought, to earn a little money on the way down the
river, instead of depleting his slenderly stocked purse by paying
steamboat fare.

With such prospect in mind he ventured to go into the town and purchase
a pair of boots and a suit of clothes fit for wear when he should reach
Cairo. His worn-out uniform would answer all his purposes while serving
as a stoker.

When the steamboat, with her vast fleet of barges, made a landing,
Guilford Duncan was the first man to leap aboard in search of work.
Unfortunately for him there were few or no deserters from in front of
the furnaces on this trip. He could not secure employment as a stoker
earning wages, but after some persuasion the steamer's captain agreed to
let him "work his passage" to Cairo. That is to say, he was to pay no
fare, receive no wages, and do double work in return for his passage
down the river and for the coarse and unsavory food necessary for the
maintenance of his strength.

"All this is a valuable part of my education," he reflected. "I am
learning the important lesson that in work as in warfare the man counts
for nothing--the service that can be got out of him is the only thing
considered by those in command. I must remember all that, if ever I am
in a position to make a bargain for the sale of my services."

It was in this spirit that the young ex-Captain entered upon his new
career in the army of those that work. He was beginning at the bottom in
the new service, just as he had done in the old. "I set out as a private
in the army," he said to himself. "It was only when I had learned enough
to fit me for the command of others that I was placed in authority. Very
well, I'm beginning as a private again. I must learn all that I can, for
I mean to command in that army, too, some day."




V

THE BEGINNING OF A CAREER


It was a little after sunset on Decoration Day--May 30, 1865--when young
Duncan went ashore from the tow boat at Cairo. The town was ablaze with
fireworks, as he made his way up the slope of the levee, through a
narrow passage way that ran between two mountainous piles of cotton
bales. At other points there were equally great piles of corn and oats
in sacks, pork in barrels, hams and bacon in boxes, and finer goods of
every kind in bales and packing cases. For Cairo was just at that time
the busiest _entrepôt_ in all the Mississippi Valley.

The town was small, but its business was larger than that of many great
cities. The little city lay at the point where the Ohio River runs into
the Mississippi. From up and down the Mississippi, from the Ohio, from
the Tennessee and the Cumberland, and even from far up the Missouri,
great fleets of steamboats were landing at Cairo every day to load and
unload cargoes representing a wealth as great as that of the Indies. A
double-headed railroad from the North, carrying the produce of half a
dozen States, and connecting by other roads with all the great cities
of the land, made its terminus at Cairo. Two railroads from the
South--traversing five States--ended their lines at Columbus, a little
farther down the river, and were connected with the northern lines by
steamboats from Cairo.

Cairo was the meeting place of commerce between the North and the South.
Out of the upper rivers came light-draught steamers. Plying the river
below were steamers of far different construction by reason of the
easier conditions of navigation there. At Cairo every steamboat--whether
from North or South--unloaded its freight for reshipment up or down the
river, as the case might be, upon steamboats of a different type, or by
rail. And all the freight brought North or South by rail must also be
transferred at Cairo, either to river steamers or to railroad cars.

The South was still thronged with Northern troops, numbering hundreds of
thousands, who must be fed and clothed, and otherwise supplied, and so
the government's own traffic through the town was in itself a trade of
vast proportions. But that was the smallest part of the matter. Now that
the war was at an end, the South was setting to work to rebuild itself.
From the Cumberland and the Tennessee rivers, from the lower
Mississippi, from the Arkansas, the Yazoo, the Red River, the White, the
St. Francis, and all the rest of the water-ways of the South, energetic
men, of broken fortune, were hurrying to market all the cotton that they
had managed to grow and to save during the war, in order that they might
get money with which to buy the supplies needed for the cultivation of
new crops.

Pretty nearly all this cotton came to Cairo, either for sale to eager
buyers there, or for shipment to the East and a market.

In return the planters and the southern merchants through whom they did
business were clamorous for such goods as they needed. Grain, hay, pork,
bacon, agricultural implements, seed potatoes, lime, plaster, lumber,
and everything else necessary to the rebuilding of southern homes and
industries, were pouring into Cairo and out again by train loads and
steamboat cargoes, night and day.

Even that was not all. For four years no woman in the South had
possessed a new gown, or new handkerchiefs, or a new toothbrush, or a
new set of window curtains, or a new comb, or new linen for her beds, or
new shoes of other than plantation make, or a new ribbon or bit of lace,
or anything else new. Now that the northern market was open for the sale
of cotton the country merchants of the South were besieged for all these
and a hundred other things, and their orders for goods from the North
added mightily to the freight piles on the levee at Cairo.

As Guilford Duncan emerged from the alley-way between the cotton bales
and reached the street at top of the levee, a still burning fragment of
the fireworks fell upon a bale of which the bagging was badly torn,
exposing the lint cotton in a way very tempting to fire. With the
instinct of the soldier he instantly climbed to the top of the pile,
tore away the burning bunches of lint cotton, and threw them to the
ground, thus preventing further harm.

As he climbed down again a man confronted him.

"Are you a watchman?" asked the man.

"No, I'm only a man in search of work."

"Why did you do that, then?" queried the stranger, pointing to the still
burning cotton scattered on the ground.

"On general principles, I suppose," answered Duncan. "There would have
been a terrible fire if I hadn't."

"What's your name?"

"Guilford Duncan."

"Want work?"

"Yes."

"What sort?"

"Any sort--for good wages." That last phrase was the result of his
stoker experience.

"Well, do you want to watch this cotton to-night and see that no harm
comes to it, either from fire, or--what's worse--the cotton thieves that
go down the alleys, pulling out all the lint they can from the torn
bales?"

"Yes, if I can have fair wages."

"Will three dollars for the night be fair wages?"

"Yes--ample. How far does your freight extend up and down the levee?"

"It's pretty nearly all mine, but I have other watchmen on other parts
of it. This is a new cargo. Your beat will extend----" and he gave the
young man his boundaries.

"You'll be off duty at sunrise. Come to me at seven o'clock for your
pay. I'm Captain Will Hallam. Anybody in Cairo will tell you where my
office is. Good-night."

This was an excellent beginning, Duncan thought. Three dollars was more
money than he had carried in his pocket at any time since he had bought
his suit of clothes at Wheeling. Better still, the promptitude with
which employment had thus come to him was encouraging, although the
employment was but for a night. And when he reflected that he had won
favor by doing what seemed to him an act of ordinary duty, he was
disposed to regard the circumstance as another lesson in the new service
of work.

The night passed without event of consequence. There were two or three
little fires born of the holiday celebration, but Guilford Duncan
managed to suppress them without difficulty. Later in the night the
swarm of cotton thieves--mainly boys and girls--invaded the levee, with
bags conveniently slung over their shoulders. As there were practically
no policemen in the town, and as his beat was a large one, young Duncan
for a time had difficulty in dealing with these marauders. But after he
had arrested half a dozen of them only to find that there were no police
officers to whom he could turn them over, he adopted a new plan. He
secured a heavy stick from a bale of hay, and with that he clubbed every
cotton thief he could catch. As a soldier it was his habit to adapt
means to ends; so he hit hard at heads, and seized upon all the stolen
goods. It was not long before word was passed among the marauders that
there was "a devil of a fellow" in charge of that part of the levee, and
for the rest of the night the pilferers confined their operations to
spaces where a less alert watchfulness gave them better and safer
opportunities.

Thus passed Guilford Duncan's first night as a common soldier in the
great army of industry.

In the morning, at the hour appointed, he presented himself to Captain
Will Hallam, and was taken into that person's private office for an
interview.




VI

A CAPTAIN IN THE ARMY OF WORK


Captain Will Hallam Was a Man Of The Very Shrewdest sense,
fairly--though not liberally--educated, whose life, from boyhood onward,
had been devoted to the task of taking quick advantage of every
opportunity that the great river traffic of the fifties had offered to
men of enterprise and sound judgment.

Beginning as a barefoot boy--about 1850, or earlier, he never mentioned
the date--he had "run the river" in all sorts of capacities until, when
the war came, temporarily paralyzing the river trade, he had a
comfortable little sum of money to the good.

Unable to foresee what the course and outcome of the war might be, he
determined, as a measure of prudence, to indulge himself and his little
hoard in a period of safe waiting. He converted all his possessions into
gold and deposited the whole of it in a Canadian bank, where, while it
earned no interest, it was at any rate perfectly safe.

Then he sought and secured a clerkship in the commissary department of
the army, living upon the scant salary that the clerkship afforded, and
meanwhile acquainting himself in minute detail with the food resources
of every quarter of the country, the means and methods of transportation
and handling, and everything else that could in any wise aid him in
making himself a master in commerce.

Then one day in 1863, when he had satisfied himself that the fortunes of
war were definitely turning and that in the end the Union cause was
destined to triumph, he made a change.

He resigned his clerkship. He recalled his money from Canada, and
considerably increased at least its nominal amount by converting the
gold into greatly depreciated greenbacks.

With this capital he opened a commission and forwarding house at Cairo,
together with a coal yard, a bank, five wharf boats, half a dozen tugs,
an insurance office, a flour mill, and other things. He sent for his
brothers to act as his clerks and presently to become his partners.

From the beginning he made money rapidly, and from the beginning he was
eagerly on the lookout for opportunities, which in that time of rapid
change were abundant. He quickly secured control of nearly all the
commission and forwarding business that centered at Cairo. By
underbidding the government itself he presently had contracts for all
the vast government business of that character.

He was always ready to take up a collateral enterprise that promised
results. When the Mississippi River was reopened to commerce by the fall
of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Captain Will Hallam was the first to see
and seize the opportunity. He bought everything he could lay his hands
on in the way of steamboats and barges, and sent them all upon trading
voyages--each under charge of a captain, but each directed by his own
masterful mind--up and down the Mississippi, and up and down the Ohio,
and up and down every navigable tributary of those great rivers.

This field was quickly made his own, so far as he cared to occupy it. If
a rival attempted a competition that might hurt his enterprises, Captain
Hallam quietly and quite without a ripple of anger in his voice,
dictated some letters to his secretary. Then freight rates suddenly fell
almost to the vanishing point, and after a disastrous trip or two, his
adversary's steamboats became his own by purchase at low prices, and
freight rates went up again. He bore no enmity to the men who thus
antagonized him in business and whom he thus conquered. His attitude
toward them was precisely that of a soldier toward his enemy. So long as
they antagonized him he fought them mercilessly; as soon as they fell
into his hands as wounded prisoners, he was ready and eager to do what
he could for them.

Those of them who knew the river, and had shown capacity in business,
were made steamboat captains in his service, or steamboat clerks, or
wharf-boat managers, or agents, or something else--all at fair
salaries.

It was Captain Will Hallam's practice to make partners of all men who
might render him service in that capacity. Thus when he saw how great a
business there must be at Cairo in supplying Pittsburg steam coal to the
government fleets on the Mississippi, and to the thousands of other
steamboats trafficking in those waters, he went at once to Pittsburg and
two days later he had made a certain Captain Red his partner in the
control of that vastly rich trade.

Captain Red was the largest owner of the Pittsburg mines, and the
pioneer in the business of carrying coal-laden barges in acres and
scores of acres down the river, pushing them with stern-wheel steamers
of large power, but still of a power insufficient for the accomplishment
of the best results.

Captain Red's fleet was unable to control the trade. Captain Hallam
pointed out to him the desirability of making it adequate and dominant.
Within two days the two had formed a partnership which included a number
of New York bankers and investors as unknown and silent stockholders in
the enterprise, and an abundant capital was provided. An order was given
for the hurried building of the Ajax, the Hector, the Agamemnon, the
Hercules, and half a dozen other stern-wheel steamers of power so great
that they could not carry the coal needed for their own furnaces, but
must tow it in barges alongside.

These powerful steamers were to push vast fleets of coal-laden barges
down the river all the way from Pittsburg on the east to St. Louis on
the west, and New Orleans on the south. They were to supply, through
Hallam's agents, every town along the river and every steamboat that
trafficked to any part of it. Hallam was master of it all. Cairo was to
be the central distributing point, and if anybody along the river owned
a coal mine in Kentucky or Indiana, or elsewhere, he was quickly made to
understand that his best means of marketing his product at a profit was
to sell it through the Hallam yards at Cairo.

In the meanwhile, as one region after another in the South was conquered
by the Union arms, Captain Hallam, whose long river service had brought
him into acquaintance with pretty nearly everybody worth knowing south
of Cairo, established agents of his own at every point where there was
cotton to be bought at extravagant prices, payable in gold, even while
the war was going on. These agents bought the cotton, the planters
agreeing to deliver it upon the banks of the rivers and leave it there
at Hallam's risk. Then Captain Hallam's steamboats, big and little,
would push their way up the little rivers, take the cotton on board, and
carry it to Cairo.

At Cairo, while the war lasted, there were difficulties to be
encountered. Military authority was supreme, and just when the influx of
cotton was greatest, military authority arbitrarily decreed that no
cotton should be shipped from Cairo to the North or East without a
military permit. For a time this decree seriously embarrassed trade. The
warehouses in Cairo were choked and glutted with cotton. New ones were
built only to be choked in the same way. The levee was piled high with
precious bales. Even vacant lots and unoccupied blocks in the low-lying
town were rented and made storage places for cotton bales, piled into
veritable mountains of wealth. For cotton was worth forty or fifty cents
a pound, and even more, at that time, and scores of mills were idle for
want of raw material, both in England and in New England, while not a
bale could be shipped because the military authorities would issue no
permits.

Will Hallam one day set himself down to think this thing out. "Why do
the military authorities deny us shipping permits?" he asked himself.
"The eastern buyers want the cotton, and we western holders of it want
to sell it to them. There is absolutely no military or other good reason
why the owner of cotton in one northern city should not be allowed to
ship it to other northern cities where it is needed." Then he saw a
light.

"The military people, or some of them, want a slice of the profit.
That's what's the matter. I don't like to pay a bribe, but in a military
time like this, and while Cairo is under martial law, I suppose I must
submit to conditions as they are. I'm no theorist or moralist. I'm
fairly honest, I think, but I'm a practical business man. Besides, I've
a dozen partners interested in this cotton, and I owe it to them to get
it off to a market. If I don't, most of them will go to the bowwows,
financially. The military authorities have no right to forbid shipment
and ruin men in this way, but they have the power and they are
exercising it. What's that the Bible says about ploughing with the other
fellow's heifer, and making friends with the Mammon of unrighteousness?
I always play the game according to the rules, no matter whether I like
the rules or not. I'll play this hand in that way."

Then turning to his secretary, he said:

"Call the main office cashier by telegraph and tell him to come to me at
once, here at the house."

There were no telephones in that day, but Captain Will Hallam was
accustomed to say that, living, as he did, in the nineteenth century, he
made free use of nineteenth century conveniences in his business. He had
laced the little city with telegraph wires, connecting his house not
only with his office, and many warehouses, but with the houses of all
the chief men in his employ, even to the head drayman. And he exacted of
every one of his employees a reasonable facility in the use of the Morse
telegraph.

Captain Hallam had many rules for the governance of his own conduct.
Among them were these:

"Never be a fool--look at the practical side of things.

"Never let anything run away with you--keep cool.

"Never be in a hurry--make the other fellows do the hustling.

"Never let the men you work with know what you are doing--they might
talk, or they might do a little business on their own account.

"Never be satisfied with anything as it is--there is always some way of
bettering it.

"Never send good money after bad--it doesn't pay.

"Never waste energy in regretting a loss--there's a better use for
energy.

"Never hesitate to pay for your education as you get it--use the
telegraph freely, and keep in close communication with the men who are
likely to know what you want to know.

"When you want a man to keep still, make it worth his while--but don't
say anything to him about it. That opens the way to blackmail.

"Never take a drink--it unbalances the judgment.

"Never get angry--that's worse than taking a dozen drinks.

"Never do anything till you are ready to do it all over and clear
through."

In obedience to the spirit of these rules, Captain Will Hallam, as soon
as he had sent off his telegraphic messages, went out into his garden
and hoed a while. Then he called John, his English gardener, and gave
him some minute instructions respecting the care of certain plants. John
resented the impertinence of course, but he obeyed the instructions,
nevertheless. It was the fixed habit of men who worked for Captain Will
Hallam to obey his commands.

Presently the cashier presented himself, with check book in hand.

"Draw a check for five thousand dollars," commanded Captain Hallam,
"payable 'to the King of Holland or Bearer'. Mind, I say 'bearer,' _not_
'order.' Then draw another check for one hundred dollars, payable to
yourself."

Not another word was said. No explanation of the gift to the cashier was
offered or asked. The cashier understood. He drew the checks and his
employer signed them. The smaller one he handed to his subordinate. The
vastly larger one he thrust into his vest pocket, as he moved around a
corner of the piazza to set his little girls swinging in a new
contrivance which he had purchased for their use.

Presently he returned to his secretary and said:

"Telegraph Mr. Kingsbury to make out an application in proper form for a
military permit to ship five thousand bales of cotton to New York. Tell
him to have it ready for me at two o'clock at the main office."

Two hours later Captain Hallam found the application ready for him on
his office desk. After looking it over he signed and carefully folded it
after the fashion required for military documents, but as he did so he
slipped into it the check for five thousand dollars, payable to the
"King of Holland or Bearer."

No mention of the check was made in the document. If the proceeding
should be resented at headquarters, the enclosure could be excused on
the plea of accident.

Then the man of business bade his secretary envelop the package and send
it by messenger to military headquarters.

It came back promptly with this endorsement on it:

"Application denied. The proposed shipment is larger than this office
regards as proper _under existing circumstances_."

The last three words were heavily and suggestively underscored. Captain
Hallam thought he understood. He was in the habit of understanding
quickly. He called the cashier, handed him the check, first tearing it
into four pieces, and bade him cancel the stub and draw a new check for
ten thousand dollars, payable as before, to "the King of Holland _or
Bearer_."

Then he endorsed the application with the sentence:

"As conditions have somewhat changed since this application was
rejected, I venture to ask a reconsideration."

Half an hour later Captain Hallam was duly and officially notified that
his application for permission to ship five thousand bales of cotton was
granted.

The check--without endorsement--was cashed next day--the bank teller
would never say by whom. But in the meanwhile Captain Hallam had said
to his secretary:

"Telegraph the general freight agent at Chicago for freight cars, as
fast as he can let me have them. Say I have five thousand bales of
cotton awaiting shipment, with more to come as fast as I can get
permits."

Then Captain Hallam mounted his horse and rode away for a
"constitutional."

All this occurred a year or two before the time of Guilford Duncan's
arrival in Cairo; but it was peculiarly characteristic of Captain
Hallam's methods and the story of it is illustrative of his ideas.




VII

THE "SIZING UP" OF GUILFORD DUNCAN


Captain Will Hallam was quick to make up his mind with regard to a man.
He was exceedingly accurate in his human judgments, too, and his
confidence in them had been strengthened by experience in successfully
acting upon them. As he phrased it, he "knew how to size a man up," and,
as the employer of multitudes of men in all parts of the country and in
all sorts of capacities, he had daily need of the skill he had acquired
in that art. It was as much a part of his equipment for the conduct of
his vast and varied enterprises as was his money capital itself.

When young Duncan presented himself in the private office after his
night's vigil as a watchman, Captain Hallam asked him to sit. That was a
recognition of his social status as something better than his employment
of the night before might have suggested. Ordinarily a man employed as a
levee watchman would not have been told to come to the private office at
all. Nor would such a man have seen anybody higher than a junior clerk
in collecting his wages.

But Captain Hallam had been impressed by this newcomer, and he wanted to
talk with him.

He broke at once into a catechism.

"Why did you do that little fire-extinguishing act last night?"

He asked the question precisely as he might have done if he had resented
the saving of his wealth of cotton.

"Oh, it was simple enough. The fire meant damage, and I was there. So,
of course, I put it out."

"But why? The cotton wasn't yours, and you hadn't been hired to watch
it."

"No, of course not. But when a gentle----I mean when any decent man
sees property afire he doesn't ask whose it is before putting out the
blaze."

"You're a Virginian, I should say, from your voice--late of the rebel
army. What's your rank?"

"None now. I've put the war completely behind me. I'm beginning life
anew."

"Good! I wish everybody, north and south, would do the same. But fools
won't, and men are mostly fools, you know. When did you get to Cairo?"

"About five minutes before you saw me putting out the fire. I came down
the river on the big tow boat."

"Where's your baggage?"

"On my back. I have no other clothes. I'll buy some when I earn some
money."

"Where have you been since the surrender?"

"Making my way West."

"How?"

"On foot to Wheeling. Then on the tow boat."

"What fare did they make you pay?"

"None. I worked my way as a stoker--fireman they call it out here."

"No wages? Just passage and grub?"

"That was all."

"What have you got on your wheel house?"

"I fear I don't understand."

"Oh, that's river slang. You know every side-wheel steamer has a
statement of her destination painted on her wheel house. I meant to ask
what are your plans?"

"To find work and do it."

"What kind of work?"

"Any kind that's honest."

"You are educated, I suppose?"

"Yes, in a way. I'm an A. M. and a graduate in law."

"Know anything about business?"

"No, but I shall learn."

"If you can, you mean?"

"Oh, I can. A capable man can learn anything if he really wants to."

"I don't know about that. But I'll gamble on the proposition that you
can."

"Thank you."

"No thanks are needed. I wasn't complimenting. I was just expressing an
opinion."

Scribbling a memorandum on a scrap of paper, Captain Hallam handed it to
Duncan, saying:

"Give that to the cashier as you go out, and get your wages. Then you'd
better get your breakfast. I recommend you, while you're poor, to eat at
the little booths along the levee, where they sell very good sandwiches
and coffee cheap. After breakfast, if you choose to come back here I'll
try to find something for you to do. Oh, I forgot. You were up all
night, so you'll want to sleep."

There was an interrogative note in the last sentence. Captain Hallam was
"sizing up" his man, and he closely scrutinized Duncan's face as the
answer came.

"Oh, I'm used to night duty. I'm ready for a day's work if you can give
me one. As for breakfast, I've had it."

"Then you had money?"

"A very little; but I didn't spend any of it. I sawed and split a load
of wood for the keeper of a booth, and he gave me some bread and ham and
coffee for my work."

"Oh, that's the way you managed it. Very well. Come back here in two
hours anyhow."

After the young man had passed out, Captain Hallam said to one of his
partner brothers:

"That fellow is a good sort. He has sand in his gizzard. When he comes
back set him at work at something or other--several things in succession
in fact--and find out what he can do."

Such was Guilford Duncan's mustering into the new service of work.




VIII

ON DUTY


During the next four or five days Guilford Duncan was kept busy with
various small employments, some of them out of doors and some of them in
the office. During this time Captain Hallam did not again engage him in
conversation, but Duncan knew that the man of business was closely
observing his work. He was not slow to discover that he was giving
satisfaction. He saw that with each day the work assigned him was of a
kind that required a higher intelligence than that of the day before.

Every evening the cashier paid him his day's wages, thus reminding him
that he was not a salaried employee of the house, but a man working for
wages from day to day.

Out of his first wages he had purchased a change of very cheap
underwear, a towel, and a cake of soap. Every morning about daylight he
went to a secluded spot on the levee, for a scrub and a swim. Then he
washed out his towel and placed it with his other small belongings, in a
storage place he had discovered in a great lumber pile.

One morning when he entered the office Captain Hallam gave him several
business letters to answer from memoranda scribbled upon them by clerks
or others. He gave him also a memorandum in his own handwriting, saying:

"Cut that down if you can and make a telegram of it. I'll be back in
half an hour or so. Have it ready for me."

The case was this: A huge steamboat lay at the levee, loaded almost to
the water's edge with grain which Captain Hallam was more than anxious
to hurry to New Orleans to meet a sudden temporary and very marked
advance in that market. That morning the boat had been "tied up"--as the
phrase went--that is to say, she had been legally attached for debt, at
the suit of a firm in St. Louis. Until the attachment should be removed
the boat must lie at Cairo, in charge of a sheriff's officer. Captain
Hallam wished to secure her immediate release, and to that end he
purposed sending the telegram.

When he returned to the office Duncan handed him for inspection and
signature the letters he had written.

"Here is the telegram, also," he said, "but, if you will pardon the
impertinence, I think you had better not send it--at least in the form
you have given it."

"What's the matter?" quickly snapped Hallam.

"It binds you to more than I think you intend."

"Go on! Explain!"

"Why, I cannot help seeing that if you send this dispatch you will make
yourself legally responsible, not only for the claim for which the boat
is now attached, but also for every claim against her that may exist
anywhere. There may be none such, or there may be many. In any case I do
not think you intend to assume them all."

"Go on! The boat must be got away. What do you advise?"

"That you go on her bond for this claim--which seems to me so clearly
illegal that I think you can never be held upon the bond--and----"

"Remind me, when this is over, that you are to come to my house to-night
for consultation on that point. Now go on."

"Well, by going on her bond for this claim, instead of asking the
creditors to release the boat on your promise as made in the telegram,
you can secure her immediate release, making yourself liable, at worst,
for no more than the six hundred dollars claimed."

"But if I do that, what is to prevent another tie-up at Memphis and
another at Vicksburg and others wherever the boat may happen to land.
She's in debt up to the top of her smokestacks, all along the river."

"As you own the cargo, and she can't carry another ton, why should you
let her stop at all? I suppose the captain would do as you desire in
that matter. You might request him to run through without any
landings."

"Request be hanged. I'll tell him what to do and he'll do it. He knows
where cargoes come from. Can you get the papers ready?"

"I can, sir."

"All right. Do it at once." Then turning to a shipping clerk he sent for
the captain of the steamer, to whom he said:

"Get up steam at once. You are to leave in less than an hour. How much
coal have you?"

The captain told him.

"Take two light barges of coal in tow, one on each side, and draw on
them for fuel. When they're empty cast them loose with two men on each
to land them. You can pick them up on your return trip. You are to steam
to New Orleans without a landing anywhere. You understand?"

The captain understood. By this time the papers were ready and after
half an hour spent in legal formalities the released steamboat cast
loose from the wharf and backed out into the river.

Then Captain Hallam turned to Guilford Duncan and said:

"I've an idea that you'll do. If you like I'll put you at regular work
at a monthly salary, and we'll see how we get on together."

"I should like that."

"Very well. Now, where are you boarding?"

"Nowhere. I get what I want to eat at the booths down along the levee."

"But where do you sleep?"

"Among the big lumber piles down there on Fourth street."

Captain Hallam looked at the young man for a moment with something like
admiration in his eyes. Presently he said:

"You'll do. You've got grit and you'll 'make the riffle,' sure. But you
must live more regularly, now that you are to have a salary. I know what
it means to live as you've been doing. I used to do it myself. I could
tell to a cent the nutritive value of a pegged pie or a sewed one, and
at a single glance I could guess the probable proportions of the dog and
cat in a sausage. That sort of thing's all right for a little while, but
not for long, and as for the sleeping among lumber piles, it's risky. I
used to sleep in an empty sugar hogshead by preference, but sleeping out
of doors may give you rheumatism."

"I've been doing it for four years," answered Duncan, smiling, "and I
still have the use of my limbs."

"Yes, of course. I didn't think of that. But you must live better now.
There's a well-furnished room above the office. It was my brother's
quarters before he got married, and it is very comfortable. You can take
it for your own. Give Dutch John, the scrub boy, half a dollar a week to
take care of it for you and that's all the rent you need pay. As for
your meals, most young men in Cairo feed their faces at the hotel. But
that's expensive and what the proprietor calls his 'kuzene' is
distinctly bad. There's a lady, however,--Mrs. Deming,--who furnishes
very good 'square meals,' I hear, over in Walnut street. You'd better
try there, I think. She's what you would call a gentlewoman, but she
needs all the money you'll pay her."

Duncan wondered a little what a 'square meal' might be, but he was
getting somewhat used to the prevalence in the West of those figurative
forms of expression which we call slang. So he took it for granted that
"square meals" were for some reason preferable to meals of any other
geometrical form, and answered simply that he would look up Mrs.
Deming's house after business hours should be over.

"Remember," said Captain Hallam as he passed out of the office, "you are
to see me at my house to-night. Better come to supper--say at seven--and
after supper we'll talk over that law point you mentioned, and other
things."

Duncan wondered a little that Captain Hallam should give him so intimate
an invitation when he knew so little of him. Everybody else in the
office understood. Captain Will was planning to "size up his man" still
further, in an evening's conversation.




IX

ONE NIGHT'S WORK


As the weeks and months went on the results of Guilford Duncan's work
completely justified the confident assertion he had made to Captain
Hallam that _a capable man can learn anything if he really wants to_.

He rapidly familiarized himself with the technicalities, as well as with
the methods and broad principles of business. He sat up till midnight
for many nights in succession, in order to learn from the head
bookkeeper the rather scant mysteries of bookkeeping. By observing the
gaugers who measured coal barges to determine their contents, he quickly
acquired skill in doing that.

It was so with everything. He was determined to master every art and
mystery that in anywise pertained to business, whether the skill in
question was or was not one that he was ever likely to need or to
practice.

His diligence, his conscientiousness in work, his readiness of resource,
his alert intelligence, and his sturdy integrity daily commended him
more and more to the head of the firm, and not many months had passed
before everyone in the office tacitly recognized the young Virginian as
the confidential adviser and assistant of Captain Hallam himself, though
no formal appointment of that kind had been made.

But no advance of salary came to the young man as a result. It was one
of Captain Hallam's rules never to pay a man more for his services than
he must, and never to advance a man's salary until the advance was asked
for.

Captain Hallam was in no fibre of his being a miser, but he acted always
upon those cold-blooded prudential principles that had brought him
wealth. It was not money that this great captain of commerce worshiped,
but success. Success was the one god of his idolatry. Outside of his
business he was liberal in the extreme. Even in his business operations
he never hesitated at lavish expenditure where such expenditure promised
good results. But he regarded all unnecessary spending as waste, of the
kind that imperils success.

In his cynical moments, indeed, he sometimes said that "if you have a
valuable man in your employ, you must keep him poor; otherwise you'll
lose him." But in so saying he perhaps did himself an injustice. He was
apt to feign a heartless selfishness that he did not feel.

Little by little Guilford Duncan had learned all this as he had learned
business methods. He had at first modestly proposed to himself nothing
more in the way of achievement than to make himself a valuable
subordinate--a private, or at most a corporal or a sergeant--in the
ranks of the great army of work. But before many months had passed his
modesty was compelled to yield somewhat to an increasingly clear
understanding of conditions and possibilities. Somewhat to his own
surprise he began to suspect himself of possessing capacities superior
to those of the men about him, and even superior to those of many men
who had risen to high place in commerce and finance.

As Captain Hallam came more and more to rely upon the sagacity and
character of this his most trusted man, he more and more brought young
Duncan into those confidential conferences with the leading men of
affairs, which were frequently necessary in the planning and execution
of important enterprises, or in the meeting of difficulties and
obstacles. In that way Duncan was brought into personal contact with the
recognized masters--big and little--with railroad presidents,
financiers, bankers, capitalists, and other men whose positions were in
a greater or less degree commanding.

At first he modestly held himself as nothing more than the tool and
servitor of these great men. But presently he began to suspect that they
were not very great men after all--to see that it was usually he himself
who devised and suggested the enterprises that these men undertook, and
he who saved them from mistakes in the execution of those enterprises.

Guilford Duncan had never in his life kept a diary. He regarded that
practice as a useless puerility and usually an indulgence in morbid
self-communing and unwholesome self-consciousness. But it was his
practice, sometimes, late at night, to set down upon paper such thoughts
as had interested him during the day, for the sole sake of formulating
them in his own mind. Often he would in this way discuss with himself
questions concerning which he had not yet matured his opinion.

He found the practice conducive to clear thinking and sound judgment. It
served for him the same purpose that the writing of intimate letters
might have done if he had had any intimates to whom to write letters.

"I've been in conference this day," he wrote one night, "with half a
dozen nabobs--not great nabobs, but second rate ones. Mr. M---- was the
biggest one. He's a railroad president, and he always talks loftily of
his 'system' when he means the single railroad he presides over and its
little branches. Then there was D----. He's a General Freight Agent, and
he never forgets the fact or lets anybody else forget it. That's because
he was a small shipping clerk until less than two years ago. I don't
think much of his capacity. Yes, I do. He knows how to manage a big
traffic fairly well, and he has had _nous_ enough to climb out of his
small clerkship into a position of responsibility. What I mean is that
he has little education, no culture, and no intelligence outside of
business. But I begin to see that except in its very highest places,
business does not require anything better than good ordinary ability
inspired by inordinate selfishness. Perhaps that is the reason that the
novelists so rarely--I may say never--take a man of business for the
hero of a romantic story.

"All this has put a new thought into my mind. Why should not I, Guilford
Duncan, make myself a leader, a captain, or even a commanding general of
affairs. I am far better educated than any of these men. They hold that
education is a hindrance rather than a help in business, but in that
they are mightily wrong, as I intend presently to show them. Other
things being equal, a man of trained mind should certainly achieve
better results, even in business, than a man of untrained mind. A man of
trained mind, if he has natural capacity and energy, _can do anything
that he chooses to do_. I must never forget that.

"But the man who would do things of any consequence in business ways
must have money. The bank account is his tool chest.

"I suggested some combinations to-night to those nabobs, and they are
going to carry them out. They would never have thought of the
combinations but for my suggestion. But they can and will carry them
out, with great credit and profit to themselves, because they have
command of money. _I_ could not even think of conducting such affairs,
simply because I have no command of money.

"Very well, then. I shall proceed to get money, just as I should study
to acquire skill in a profession, or just as I should read up the law
pertaining to a matter with which I must deal.

"I shall not learn to love money. That would degrade my soul. I shall
regard money always as a means--a mere tool with which to do such work
as I can in this great undeveloped country.

"That also is something to be remembered. The era of development is just
beginning. These men are nation builders, though they don't know it, or
intend it, or care anything about that aspect of their activities. Their
motives are the sordid impulses of greed and selfish ambition alone.

"At least that is true of all of them except Captain Hallam. He is a man
apart. His attitude is a peculiar one. He does not care for wealth in
itself and yet he scrambles for it as greedily and as hungrily as the
rest of them. Sometimes I think he regards the whole thing as a game
which he enjoys playing with superior skill, just as one might with
whist or chess. He likes to win, not for the sake of the winnings, but
for the sake of the winning.

"I must go to bed now. To-morrow I'll begin thinking out plans for
getting money. One thing is sure. No man can get much money by working
for any other man. The man who gets rich is he who hires other men to
work for him for less than their work is worth. But it is only by
working for another man that one can get the first little capital--the
first rude but handy tool with which to achieve success. I'll go on
working as a hired man till I get a little hoard together. After
that--well, we shall see."

Duncan was greatly admired but little understood by his fellows in the
service of the Hallam firm, or by the similar people who thronged the
town. His fellows, in and out of the office, were commonplace young men,
all looking to the main chance alone and pursuing it with only such
honesty of conduct as business prudence required. They felt no further
interest in their work than such as was necessary to enable them to
retain their places and their salaries.

Therefore they did not understand Guilford Duncan. Neither could they.
They regarded with amazement and almost with incredulity his
manifestations of sensitive honor and of unselfish loyalty to duty. They
thought of him as a sort of freak, or what we should nowadays call a
crank.

Of course they could not fail to recognize his ability, but they thought
him a good deal of a fool, nevertheless, for not taking selfish
advantage of the opportunities that so frequently came to him. They
could not understand why he should go out of his way, as he very often
did, to render services to the firm which were in no way required or
expected of him. Especially they could not understand why, when he had
rendered such services in a way to attract Captain Hallam's pleased
attention he didn't "strike for something better," as they phrased their
thought.

In one especial case, their amazement over his neglect of an opportunity
bred something like contempt of him in their minds. It was the practice
of the Hallams to keep a fleet of heavily laden coal barges in a bend of
the river above the town, bringing them down one by one to the coalyards
at "The Point" below the city as they were needed. One day in the early
winter, a coal gauger being off duty, Duncan volunteered to go up to the
bend in his stead, and measure the coal in a great fleet of barges that
had just arrived.

He found the barges unsafely bestowed, and suggested to the captain of
the Hallam yard tug boat that he should tow them into a securer
anchorage. As night was at hand the captain of the tug refused, saying
that he would attend to the matter on the morrow.

That night the first storm of the winter broke upon the river, lashing
it to fury, and threatening with destruction every species of craft that
might venture away from moorings.

About midnight one of Duncan's bedroom windows was blown in, scattering
glass and fragments of sash over his bed, and startling him out of
sleep.

Instantly the thought of the exposed coal barges flashed into his mind.
He knew that they were utterly unfit to ride out a storm, being nothing
more than great oblong boxes, loaded nearly to their gunwales with coal.
He remembered, too, the exposed position in which they had been left for
the night.

Hastily drawing on his clothing he hurried to the landing place of the
yard tug. He found no preparations making there for any attempt to save
the barges and their enormously rich cargoes, or even to rescue the
helpless men who had been left on board of them. The engineer of the
tug, who always slept on board, was there, and so were the two deck
hands and the fireman, but the fires were banked, and the captain had
not responded to the duty call of the tempest.

As the immediate representative and chief lieutenant of Captain Hallam,
Guilford Duncan was recognized as a man somewhat entitled to give
orders. On this occasion he promptly assumed so much more of authority
as did not strictly belong to him.

He instantly ordered the engineer to get up steam. He directed one of
the two deck hands to go hurriedly to the tug captain's bedroom and
order him to come to the tug at once.

As he rattled off his orders for putting cable coils aboard, placing all
fenders in position, battening down the hatches, and doing all else that
might render the tug fitter for the perilous service that he intended
to exact of her, his voice took on the old ring of battle, and his
commands came quick, sharp, and penetrating from his set lips, like
those of an officer placing guns in position for a desperate fight.

The captain, who was also sole pilot of the tug, so far obeyed the order
sent to him as to come to the tug landing. But when he looked out upon
the storm-lashed river, he positively refused to obey Duncan's order to
go to the wheel.

"I'll never take the tug out in such a storm as this," he said doggedly.

"But think, man! There are twenty men or more up there on those coal
barges, whose lives simply _must_ be saved. And there is a hundred
thousand dollars' worth of coal there that may go to the bottom any
minute."

"I can't help that. I tell you the tug couldn't live a minute in such a
storm."

"In other words," answered Duncan with measureless contempt in his tone,
"you are a miserable coward, a white-livered wretch, whose life wouldn't
be worth saving if it were in danger. Go back to your bed! Go to sleep!
or _go to hell_, damn you, for the cowardly whelp that you are!"

Then turning to the engineer and the two deck hands, he asked hoarsely:

"Will you men stand to your duty while I go to the wheel?"

"We're with you while she floats, cap'n," said the engineer. "I always
did hate a coward."

"Have you got steam enough?"

"Yes, a hundred and fifty pounds pressure to the square inch, and she'll
need it all."

"All right. Cast her off," commanded Duncan as he stepped to his post in
the pilot house.

He knew, of course, that he was taking terrible risks. Having no pilot's
license he had no legal right to be at the wheel. Should disaster
overtake the tug he would be personally liable for the insurance
forfeited by his act in taking her out in contravention of the judgment
of her captain and pilot. Worse still, should any life be lost in the
adventure, Guilford Duncan would be held to answer for manslaughter.

Well-educated lawyer that he was, he knew all these facts. He perfectly
understood the fearful responsibilities he was taking upon himself. Yet
he faltered not nor failed. There was no moment's hesitation in his
mind. There were lives in peril up there in the bend, and a vast
property exposed to destruction. There was a chance that by taking these
risks he might save both. All that is best in the soul-impulse of the
soldier was his inspiration. He would do his duty--though that duty was
in no wise his except as he had made it his--and let consequences look
out for themselves.

This young fellow had often sniffed the breath of battle in his
nostrils. He had many times done and dared things that only a brave and
self-regardless man could have done and dared. To-night the old
enthusiasm of war came back to his soul, but with a difference. He had
often fought to destroy. He was facing danger now with saving and the
rescue of imperiled human lives for his purpose.

As the tug quitted her moorings and began her voyage up the river,
Duncan caught a glimpse of Captain Hallam's form hurrying toward the
landing. Almost immediately the tug began to plunge in perilous fashion,
thrusting her head under the waves, and shipping water enough to dampen
the fires and diminish steam pressure in a way that threatened failure
to the enterprise.

Failure in the work of rescue was the only thing that Guilford Duncan
feared.

He had already had the hatches securely battened down so that no water
could find its way into the hold. But when he saw that water was rapidly
rushing with every sea into the furnace room, threatening with
extinction the fires that could alone give power to the vessel, he
called one of the deck hands to the wheel, and instructing him as to the
course to be laid, himself hurriedly inspected ship. With the aid of the
other deck hand he quickly removed from bow to stern everything that had
weight. Then he and the deck hand and the fireman, with some aid from
the engineer, proceeded to shovel the coal supply from its bunkers
forward of the fire room into the captain's cabin aft of the furnaces.

This done, the tug no longer ran her prow into and under the tremendous
seas, but rode over them instead, shipping no further water.

Then Duncan returned to the pilot house, and a few minutes later reached
the imperiled fleet of coal barges.

There havoc had already begun. Three barges had gone down and two men
had been drowned. The rest of the barges were riding so uneasily that
their seams were opening, and the water that must presently swamp them
was finding its insidious way through their sides and bottoms.

When the tug appeared, all the men on board the coal barges clamored
piteously to be taken off at once.

"Stand to your duty, men!" shouted Duncan. "Don't be cowards. Do your
part of the work and we'll save all of you and all the coal. Only obey
orders promptly and I'll be responsible for the rest. Go to the pumps
and answer every command promptly."

He then ordered flaming torches kindled on every barge, and in the light
thus created he was able to tow one after another of the coal boats into
that harbor of safety in which the tug captain should have moored them
during the day before, the men meanwhile pumping to keep the water
down.

Then with his clothing drenched and frozen stiff upon him, he steered
the tug back to her landing place, through the now receding storm.

Kennedy, the tug captain, was there, waiting. As Duncan came ashore
Kennedy said menacingly:

"If I get my discharge for this I'll prosecute you for piloting without
a license."

The ice-encased and half-frozen young man made no reply. He simply
hurried ashore.

As he mounted to the top of the levee, though it was only a little after
daylight, Duncan encountered Captain Will Hallam, who stood there
waiting for him.

"Go to the hotel," said the employer. "I've ordered a piping hot bath
for you there, and a blazing wood fire. There's nothing like a wood fire
after a chilling such as you've had. When you get good and warm, go to
bed. When you wake naturally, telegraph to the office for me, and we'll
breakfast together. I've ordered the breakfast--the hotel keeper thinks
it will bankrupt him or make his fortune to furnish it, but that doesn't
matter. Get warm and get some sleep. Sleep as long as you can."

"I don't think I care for sleep," answered the half-frozen and wholly
exhausted young man. "But would you mind sending Dutch John to me at the
hotel? I'd like to have him rub me down with some Turkish towels after
my hot bath. Tell him I have a dollar for him if he rubs me well."

"That fellow is certainly a new brand," muttered Captain Hallam to
himself as he walked away up the levee. "But he's 'triple X' for
endurance and modesty and courage, and all the rest of it. What a
fighter he must have been! I'd like to see him in a hot battle, if I
were bullet proof myself. I'll bet bonds to brickbats he got all the
fight there was in them out of his men. But why doesn't he look out for
his own interests, I wonder? I'm still paying him the salary on which he
began. Any other man in my employ who could have done one-tenth of what
he has done, would have made me pay three times as much by this time.
But then, that's the reason. It's just because he is that sort that he
hasn't bothered about an increase of salary. By George! I'll give it to
him without the asking! I never did such a thing before in all my life.
It will startle the office people out of their wits, but they need
startling, and as for their wits--well----"

He didn't complete the sentence; for just then he met Dutch John.

"Go down to the hotel at once," he commanded. "Go on the run. Go to Mr.
Duncan's room and rub all the skin off his body. He'll give you a dollar
for a good rub. I'll give you five dollars more if he is satisfied."

"I must milk your cows first," answered the stolid German boy, whose
occupations were varied and sometimes conflicting.

"Oh, let the cows go hang! Or let the half-dozen accomplished young
ladies whom my wife employs to keep her establishment in order, milk
them! You go to the hotel and rub that man into condition. Damn the
cows!"

Obviously, young Duncan's performance of that stormy night had awakened
Captain Hallam to enthusiasm. He was not much given to enthusiasms, but
this one was thoroughly genuine.

"Yes, by George!" he said between his clenched teeth, "I'll multiply
that fellow's salary by three and let the office people wonder! Perhaps
it will give them a hint. No, it won't. Or at least they won't take the
hint. But anyhow, I'll do it, if only for what the newspapers call
'dramatic effect.'"

Entering the office, where, at this hour, the clerks were assembling,
Captain Hallam said, in his figurative fashion:

"That fellow Duncan has got more cogs in his gearing wheels than all the
rest of you put together. You call him a freak; you call him eccentric,
because he isn't like you. Now let me tell you that that's a sort of
eccentricity that you'll do well to cultivate. The less you are like
yourselves and the more you're like him, the better it will be for you.
He thinks. You don't. He does all he can. You do as little as you can.
He shall have his reward. He shall have a salary three times that of the
best man in the office. And more than that, he shall have the right to
command here. Whatever orders he gives shall be obeyed, just as if they
were my own. He is your model to imitate, so far as you can. But most of
you can't. Most of you care only to get through a day's work for a day's
wages. You have no loyalty, no concern for the business. Not a man jack
of you thought of the storm last night as a circumstance that imperiled
human life and my property. He did. You lay still in your beds listening
to the rain on the roof, and sinking into sweet slumbers to the tune of
its pattering. He was up and out, and risking his life to meet the
emergency. Can't you see that that makes all the difference between a
successful man and an unsuccessful one? Can't you understand that--oh,
pshaw! What's the use of talking to stumps?"

That was the very longest speech that Captain Will Hallam had ever made
in his life. It was not without effect. It did not inspire any of the
clerks to fresh endeavor, or to a more conscientious service. But it
made every one of them an implacable enemy of Guilford Duncan, and
inflamed every one of them with an insatiable desire to injure him
whenever occasion might offer.

Thus, by his night's heroic endeavor, Guilford Duncan had succeeded not
only in making an enemy of Captain Kennedy, but in making himself
_anathema_ _maranatha_ in the Hallam office besides.

He was taking a bath, however, at that time, and not thinking of these
matters.




X

ALLIANCE, OFFENSIVE AND DEFENSIVE


"How did you come to do that?"

That was the first question Captain Hallam fired at Duncan after the
hotel waiter had quitted the room to bring a further supply of coffee
and broiled bacon.

"Why, it's simple enough," answered Duncan, with a touch of
embarrassment in his tone. "You see, I was up there yesterday gauging
coal. I knew the barges were anchored in a dangerous position, and so
when the storm broke, there wasn't anything else to do but get into my
clothes and send the tug up there to the rescue."

"But it wasn't your business to look after the coal up in the bend?"

Duncan slowly drank three sips of coffee before answering that eagerly
questioning remark. Then he leant forward and said, slowly and with
emphasis:

"I conceive it to be my business, and my duty as well as my pleasure, to
do all that I can to promote the interest of the man who employs me."

"But that was a risky thing to do. You took your life in your hands, you
know?"

"I suppose I did, but that's a small matter. There were twenty other
lives in danger. And what is one man's life when there is a duty to be
done? We've all got to die sometime."

Captain Hallam did not utter the thought that was in him. That thought
was:

"Well, of all the queer men I have ever had to deal with, you are
certainly the queerest! Still, I think I understand you, and that's
queerer still."

Instead of speaking he sipped his coffee. Then he rose and "tickled the
denunciator." That was his phrase for ringing for a servant.

"Put some more wood on the fire," he commanded when the servant came.

"I've put it all on, a'ready," answered the man.

"Well, bring some more."

"It'll be extry charge, sir."

"Never mind that," said Captain Hallam. "Do as you are told, and when
the thing is over I'll issue a loan, raise some money, and pay the bill.
You know who I am, don't you?"

"No, sir. You see, I've just come to Cairo."

"Very well, then. Go to the office of the hotel and tell the people
there that Captain Will Hallam is ordering more wood than you think he
can pay for. They'll tell you what to do. In the meantime, here's a
quarter for you."

This by-play with the serving man relieved Captain Hallam of a sense of
embarrassment which he felt in approaching the next thing he had in
mind.

"What do you want, Duncan, for last night's work?"

Duncan looked at his companion for half a minute before answering. Then
he said:

"I want that tug captain of yours discharged."

"Why?"

"Because he's a coward and an utterly unfit man. Human life may depend
upon his courage at any moment, and he has no courage."

"Is that _all_ you want?"

"Yes. That's all."

"Why don't you demand an increase in your salary? Anybody else would.
But, perhaps you don't care for a bigger salary? You're a queer sort,
you know."

"Oh, yes; I care very much for an increase," answered Duncan.

"Then why didn't you seize upon the opportunity to ask for it?"

"Must I tell you, frankly?"

"I wish you would. It might help me to understand you."

"Well, it is simple enough. You gave me employment when I was
desperately in need of it. I should be an ingrate if I did not consider
your interests in all that I do. I think I ought to have a larger
salary than you are now paying me. I think I earn it, and it has been
my purpose to ask for it when the proper time should come."

"Then why haven't you been in a hurry to ask for it now? There couldn't
be a better time."

"Pardon me, but I cannot agree with you. It so happens that just at this
moment I have several very important matters of yours in my charge. You
have entrusted them to me, and they have come so exclusively under my
control that nobody else--not even you--could conduct them to a
successful issue so well as I can. Under such circumstances, of course,
I cannot make any personal demand upon you, without indecency. To do so
would be to take advantage of your necessities. It would amount to a
threat that, if you refused my demands, I would abandon these
enterprises and leave you to get out of all their difficulties as best
you could. Don't you see, Captain Hallam, that under such circumstances,
I simply could not make a demand upon you for more salary, or for
anything else of personal advantage to myself?"

"No, I don't see it at all. And yet, somehow, I seem to understand you.
If I were in your place I'd regard these circumstances as trump cards,
and I'd lead them for all they are worth. So would any other man in the
Mississippi Valley--or anywhere else, I think."

"That may perhaps be so, and I suppose I am 'queer,' as you say. But to
me it would seem a despicable thing to take advantage of the fact that
you need me in these affairs of yours. You have bidden me be frank. I
will be so. When I came to Cairo I sought work of the hard, physical
kind, at the small wages that such work commands. You quickly gave me
better work and larger pay than I had expected to earn for months to
come. Little by little you have advanced me in your regard until now I
seem to enjoy your confidence. When you first brought me into contact
with the big men of affairs--more or less big--I was oppressed with an
exaggerated sense of their greatness. Presently, I discovered that while
you are always deferential toward them, you are distinctly their
superior in intellect and in your grasp of affairs. You allow them to
think that they are your masters, while in fact you never fail to have
your way, and to compel them and the many millions of other people's
money whose use they control, to your own purposes."

At this point Hallam uttered a low chuckle.

"A little later I discovered another fact," continued Duncan. "It slowly
dawned upon my mind that you put me forward in your conferences with
them, because you valued my suggestions and my initiative more than you
did theirs. Thinking of that I came at last to the conclusion that I
must, in fact, be superior to these men in those qualities that
originate, execute, achieve. Otherwise, with your genius for affairs,
you would have suppressed me and listened to them."

Again Hallam chuckled.

"Then another thought occurred to me. The only reason why they can
execute plans that I conceive, while I cannot, is that they have
considerable money of their own and command of much greater sums not
their own, while I have neither. They have the tools and the materials.
I have neither. The clumsiest mechanic, who has tools and materials to
work with, can do things that the most skillful mechanic who has neither
tools nor materials, cannot do.

"I have decided, therefore, to possess myself of tools and materials, in
order that I may make myself a master workman, and do my part in the
great nation-building enterprises of the time and country."

"Would you mind explaining what you mean by that?" interrupted Hallam,
whose eagerness in listening had caused him to let his second cup of
coffee grow cold.

Duncan arose, without answering, crossed the room, pressed the button,
and then said:

"It is a subject that I very much wish to talk with you about. But your
coffee is cold. When you get a fresh cup, I'll explain."

He said no more till the waiter came, served the coffee and left the
room. Then he began:

"People who live all their lives in the mountains have no adequate
conception or perception of the grandeur of the scenery that surrounds
them. We never any of us fully understand the things against which we
'rub our eyes,' as a witty Frenchman has put it. It is for that reason,
perhaps, that what is going on here in the West does not impress you in
the same way in which it impresses me. You men of affairs are just now
beginning to do the very greatest work of nation building that has ever
been done since time began. But you are so close to your work that you
do not appreciate its collossal proportions. You have no perspective. In
that I have the advantage of you. Coming, as I do, out of the dead past,
contemplating the present as I do, and looking to the future as I must,
I see the grandeur to which your detailed work is tending, with a
clearness of vision impossible to you because of your nearness to it.
May I go on and set forth the whole of my thought?"

"Yes, certainly. I want to hear. Go on!"

"Well, then, let me explain and illustrate. A little while ago, in going
over your accounts, I discovered that the cotton and grain you shipped
from Cairo to New York must be five times transferred from one car to
another. That entailed enormous and needless expense in addition to the
delay. A few weeks ago I suggested to a conference of railroad nabobs at
your house that you should organize a line of through freight cars,
which should be loaded at Cairo, St. Louis, Chicago, or anywhere else
in the West, and hauled through to New York, Boston, or anywhere else in
the East, without breaking bulk. The saving of expense was so obvious
that you put a hundred thousand dollars into the line and the railroad
magnates made specially good terms for the hauling of the car. You
expect and will get dividends from your investment. The railroad men see
profit for their companies in the operation of the line. That is all
that you and they foresee of advantage. In my view that is the very
smallest part of the matter."

"How do you mean?"

"Why, taking cotton as a basis of reckoning, this through-line system of
transportation, owned independently of the railroads, will make an
important saving in the cost of raw materials to the owners of New
England mills. They will run more spindles and set more looms agoing
than they would have done without the through line's cheapening of raw
material. They will pay better wages and reap larger profits. They will
produce more goods, and they will sell them at a smaller price. The
farmer in the West will pay less for his cotton goods and get more for
his grain because of the through line's cheapening of transportation. He
and his wife and his children will dress better at less cost than they
otherwise could do. Bear in mind that the line's cars will carry other
things than cotton. The people of the East will get their breadstuffs
and their bacon and their beef far cheaper because of its existence than
they otherwise could.

"That is one step in advance, and it is only one. The success of this
line is now assured. A dozen or a score of other through freight lines
will be organized and operated in competition with it. The present
line's rate of one and a half cents per ton per mile will presently be
cut down by competition to half a cent per ton per mile, or even less. I
shall not be surprised if, with the improvement of railroads and with
their closer co-operation the freight rate shall ultimately be reduced
even to one-fifth or one-tenth of a cent per ton per mile.

"Now, again. A little while ago you were in Washington. You found it
necessary to execute certain papers and to file them in Chicot County,
Arkansas, before a certain fixed date. You ordered me by telegraph to
prepare the papers and bring them to you in Washington in the speediest
way possible, in order that I might carry them, within the time limit,
to their destination. I started for Washington within five minutes, by
the quickest possible route, preparing the papers on the train. I had to
change cars five times between Cairo and Washington, and seven times
more between Washington and Memphis. All that will presently be changed.
In our conference the other day with the railroad men, I suggested
something to the car builder, George M. Pullman, which will some day
bear fruit. At present every railroad runs its own sleeping cars and
runs them at a loss. Some of them have quit running them because they
lost money. The trouble is that the passenger must get up in the middle
of the night and transfer from one sleeping car to another. Therefore he
takes no sleeping car. I have suggested to the car builder, Pullman,
that he shall take the sleeping car service into his own hands and run
his cars through from every western to every eastern city without
change, he paying the railroads for hauling his cars and he collecting
the revenue that men will be willing to pay for the comfort of through
transportation.

"Now, all this is merely a beginning. The railroads of this country,
together with the new ones now building, will presently be consolidated
into great systems. Transportation, both as to freight and as to
passengers, is now done at retail, and the cost is enormous. It will,
after a while, be done at wholesale, and at a proportionate reduction in
cost.

"Now the thought that is in my mind is this: We have got to build this
great nation anew upon lines marked out by the events of the last few
years. The war has been costly--enormously costly. It has saddled the
country with a debt of about three billions of dollars, besides the
incalculable waste. But it has awakened a great national self
consciousness which will speedily pay off the debt, and, incidentally,
develop the resources of the country in a way never dreamed of before.
Those resources, so far as they are undeveloped, or only partially
developed, lie mainly in the West and South. It is our duty to develop
them.

"The government is building a railroad to the Pacific coast. That, when
it is done, will annex a vast and singularly fruitful country to the
Union. The fertility of the soil there, and the favorable climatic
conditions, promise results that must presently astonish mankind. But in
the meanwhile it is our part of the nation-building work to develop the
resources of what we now call the West. Minnesota, in its eastern part,
is already producing wheat in an abundance that discourages all eastern
farmers and sets them to the culture of small fruits and to truck
gardening for the supply of the great cities there. There is great gain
even in that. Presently the Minnesota wheat farmers will extend their
limitless fields into the Dakotah country as soon as railroads are built
there--and a new era of development will begin."

"Why do you not include the South in your reckoning?" asked Hallam.

"I do. Under the new conditions the South will produce more cotton than
it ever did, and its coal and iron resources will be enormously
developed. But the South is, for the present, handicapped by disturbed
conditions and a disorganized labor system. It will be long before that
region shall take its full share in national development--in what I
call 'nation building.'

"Pardon me for wandering so far afield. I have meant only to show you
what I regard as the true character of the work that you and your
associates are doing. Now, I wish and intend to do my share in that
work. To that end, I must have money of my own, and that control of
other people's money which comes only to men who have money of their
own. I don't care a fig for money for its own sake. I want it as a tool
with which I may do my work."

"I think I understand you," answered Hallam, after a few minutes'
reflection. "You shall have the tools. You have already put away
two-thirds of your salary from month to month. I have to-day multiplied
that salary by three. You'll soon have 'grub stakes' for any enterprise
you may choose to enter upon. But that isn't all. If it were, it would
mean that I am to lose you presently. I don't mean to do that. You are
too good a man for a clerk. I propose to make of you a partner in all my
outside enterprises. I must go now. I've five people to meet at ten
o'clock. Come to me after that hour, if you're sufficiently rested, and
we'll talk business."

"Oh, I'm sufficiently rested already. I'll join you at ten or a little
later, as I suppose you won't be free till then."

Captain Will Hallam rose, grasped the hand of his companion, and, after
a look into his eyes, said:

"You're the right sort. You have vim, force, pathos, and energy. You and
I, working together, will salivate things in a way that will make
Calomel ashamed of itself."

"But how about Kennedy and his discharge?" asked Duncan.

"Oh, that's settled. I've sent him his quittance papers, and he's your
enemy for all time. You can stand that."

"Yes, so long as you are my friend."




XI

THE WAYS OF GUILFORD DUNCAN


During all this time Guilford Duncan had been taking his meals at the
little boarding house of Mrs. Deming. The other boarders--a dozen in
all, perhaps--did not interest him at first, and for a time he took his
meals in silence, except for courteous "good-mornings" and
"good-evenings." His table companions were mainly young clerks of
various grades, with whose ideas and aspirations young Duncan was very
slightly in sympathy.

After a time, however, he decided that it was his duty to cultivate
acquaintance with these table companions, in whom he recognized private
soldiers in the great army of work--the men upon whom the commanders of
all degrees must rely for the execution of their plans.

Accordingly, Duncan began to take an active part in the conversations
going on about him, and little by little he injected so much of interest
into them that whenever he spoke he was listened to with special
attention. Without assuming superiority of any kind, he came to be
recognized as in fact superior. He came to be a sort of Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table, directing the conversations there into new channels and
better ones.

It was his practice to buy and read all the magazines as they appeared,
including the particularly interesting eclectic periodicals of that
time, in which the best European thought was fairly represented.

His reading furnished him many interesting themes for table talk, and
presently the brightest ones among his companions there began to
question him further concerning the subjects he thus mentioned. After a
little while some of them occasionally borrowed reading matter of him,
by way of still further satisfying their interest in the matters of
which he talked at table.

A little later still, these brighter young men, one by one, began to
visit Duncan's room in the evenings. In the free and easy fashion of
that time and region, he made them welcome without permitting their
coming or going to disturb his own evening occupations in any serious
way. His room was very large, well warmed, and abundantly lighted, for
he had almost a passion for light. There was always a litter of new
magazines, weekly periodicals, and the like on the big table in the
centre of the room, and there were always piles of older ones in the big
closet. Still further there was a stand of bookshelves which was
beginning to be crowded with books bought one by one as they came out,
or as Duncan felt the need of them. Literature was the young man's only
extravagance, and that was not a very expensive one.

"Welcome! Help yourself! Read what you like and you won't disturb me."
That was the spirit of his greeting to all these his friends whenever
they entered his door, and it was not long before the room of the young
Virginian became a center of good influence among the young men of the
town.

How greatly such an influence was needed the bank officers and other
"solid" men of the city well knew and strongly felt. Few of them ever
thought of reading anything themselves except the commercial columns of
the newspapers, but they had reasons of their own for recognizing the
good work Guilford Duncan was quietly doing, by cultivating the reading
habit among their clerks.

Cairo was an ill-organized community at that time. The great majority of
its people were "newcomers," from all quarters of the country, who had
as yet scarcely learned to know each other. War operations had filled
the town for several years past with shifting crowds of adventurers of
all sorts, who found in disturbed conditions their opportunity to live
by prey. There were gambling houses and other evil resorts in dangerous
numbers, where soldiers and discharged soldiers on their way through the
place were tempted to their ruin by every lure of vice and every ease of
opportunity to go astray.

The solid men deplored these conditions, but were as yet powerless to
better them. After the rush of discharged soldiers through the town
ceased, the evil influences began to operate more directly upon the
clerks and other young men of the city itself. Some who had begun life
there with every prospect of worthy careers had sunk into degradation
through vicious indulgence. Others who still managed to hold their
places in business and to do their work tolerably were manifestly
falling into habits that darkened their futures. In two or three
instances young men of good bringing up, who had earned enviable
reputations for diligence and good conduct, were lured into the gambling
dens, robbed there, and at last were tempted to defalcations and even
sheer robberies of the employers who trusted them. In one conspicuous
case a youth who had won special regard among the better people by the
tender care he was taking of his mother, and by diligence and
faithfulness in his work, fell a victim to the passion of gambling,
robbed money packages that passed through his hands as a cashier in an
express office, was caught, convicted, and sentenced to prison as a
common felon, to the saddening of all the town.

Under such circumstances even the least cultivated of the hard-headed
business men could not fail to regard with special pleasure the silent
work that Duncan was doing for the salvation of at least a considerable
group of young men who might otherwise have fallen victims to the evil
conditions that beset them.

Apart from his association with the young men who frequented his room,
Duncan had no social life at all. He never visited at any house, except
that Captain Hallam frequently had him to a meal over which the two
might "talk business," or where he might meet and help entertain
prominent men of affairs from other cities, whose visits were inspired
by commercial purposes far more than by considerations of a social
nature.

It created some little astonishment, therefore, when one day at the
boarding house table, Duncan said to those about him:

"I hear that you fellows are organizing some sort of club for social
purposes. Why haven't you given me a chance to join?"

"We didn't think you would care for such things. You never go out, you
know, and----"

"What is the purpose of your organization, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Oh, certainly not. We're simply making up a little group, which we call
'The Coterie,' to have a few dancing parties and amateur concerts, and
the like, in the big hotel dining room, during the winter. We've a
notion that the young people of Cairo ought to know each other better.
Our idea is to promote social intercourse and so we're all chipping in
to pay the cost, which won't be much."

"Well, may I chip in with the rest?"

Seeing glad assent in every countenance, he held out his hand for the
subscription paper, and put down his name for just double the largest
subscription on it. Then passing it back he said:

"I think I may be able to secure some support for so good an
undertaking, from the business men of the city and from others--the
lawyers, doctors, and the like. Your entertainments certainly ought to
have the benefit of their countenance. At any rate, I'll see what I can
do. I don't know that I shall myself be able to attend the dances and
the like--in fact, I'm sure I shall not--but I'll do what I can to help
the cause along."

He did what he could, and what he could was much. The solid men, when he
brought the subject to their attention, felt that this was an extension
of that work of Duncan's for the betterment of the town, which they so
heartily approved. They subscribed freely to the expense, and better
still, they lent personal countenance to the entertainments.

Guilford Duncan also attended one of the entertainments, though it had
been his fixed purpose not to do so. The reason was that Guilford Duncan
was altogether human and a full-blooded young man. From the time of his
arrival at Cairo until now, he had not had any association with women.
When such association came to him he accepted it as a boon, without
relaxing, in any degree, his devotion to affairs.

It was the old story, related in a thousand forms, but always with the
same purport, since ever the foundations of the world were laid.

"Male and female created he them." "And God saw that it was good."

All of human history is comprehended in those two sentences quoted from
the earliest history of mankind.




XII

BARBARA VERNE


The person who had originated and who conducted Mrs. Deming's boarding
house--famous for its fare--was, in fact, not Mrs. Deming at all. That
good lady would pretty certainly have scored a failure if she had tried
actively to manage such an establishment. She had never in her life
known necessity for work of any kind, or acquired the least skill in its
doing. She had been bred in luxury and had never known any other way of
living until a few months before Guilford Duncan went to take his meals
at what was known as her "table."

She had lived in a spacious and sumptuously furnished suburban house
near an eastern city, until two years or so before the time of this
story.

When Barbara Verne, her only sister's child, was born and orphaned
within a single day, and under peculiarly saddening circumstances, the
aunt had adopted her quite as a matter of course.

No sooner had Barbara ceased to be an infant in arms than she began to
manifest strong and peculiar traits of character. Even as a little child
she was wondered at as "so queer--so old fashioned, don't you know?"

She had a healthy child's love for her dolls, and though the persons
around her had not enough clearness of vision to see that she was
fruitfully and creatively imaginative in her peculiar way, her dolls'
nursery was full of wonderful stories, known only to herself and the
dolls. Every doll there had a personality, a history, and a character of
its own. Barbara was the intimate of all of them--the confidential
friend and companion, who listened to their imagined recitals of griefs
and joys with a sympathetic soul, counseled them in a prematurely old
way, chided them gently but firmly for their mistakes, commended good
conduct whenever she discovered it in them, and almost mercilessly
rebuked such shortcomings as common sense should have spared them. For
common sense was Barbara's dominant characteristic.

She never told their stories to anybody. That, she felt, would have been
to betray their confidence shamefully. It was only by eavesdropping on
the part of her nursery maid, and by casual overhearings of her talk
with her dolls that their life stories became known to anybody except
herself.

And Barbara quickly put an end to the eavesdropping when she discovered
it. She had a French nursery governess, Mathilde, whose double function
it was to look after the child and to teach her French by talking to her
only in that tongue. The maid, in fact, made the child teach her
English, by talking with her chiefly in that language.

That, however, was an offense the child did not consider. She did not
greatly value instruction in French--"English is so much better," she
used to say to her aunt. "And besides, nobody ever talks in French. So
why should we bother about it? Of course, I like to have La Fontaine's
Fables read to me, and I like to read them to my dolls, because the
dolls always enjoy them."

"How do you know that, Barbara?"

"Why, because they never interrupt. When I tell them 'make up' stories
of my own, they often interrupt me. They 'want to know,' and sometimes I
can't tell them. But with La Fontaine's stories it is never so. Still I
don't think French is of much consequence."

That was the ill-informed and immature judgment of a child of seven or
eight years. Perhaps the other judgment with which that same child
coupled it in the lectures she sometimes gave her French nursery
governess was sounder.

"Mathilde, you are an eavesdropper," she solemnly said to the girl one
night. "You hide behind the door and listen while Phillida tells me
about the way Corydon treats her. And you listen while I tell Phillida
not to be foolish, and while I talk to Corydon about his behavior. I
shouldn't mind that so much, Mathilde, if you didn't laugh at the dolls
and their troubles. I don't like that."

But, notwithstanding the child's imaginative gift, she was intensely
practical, in a quick-witted way that often astonished those about her.
She had an eager desire to learn domestic arts, and her peculiar
conscientiousness in the doing of whatever she undertook to do, usually
resulted in a skill superior to that of her teachers.

She loved to haunt the kitchen, where her courtesy won even the
cantankerous cook for a friend, and from her the girl learned so much of
her art that the cook could teach her no more. In the laundry the
good-natured Irish woman who presided over that department of household
economy gave her always so warm a welcome that the child came to think
of the faithful woman as one of her choicest friends. Working with her
over a little ironing board, Barbara quickly became expert in all the
finer and more delicate operation of her art, or as the laundress
herself said:

"Shure, the blissed choild puts the raal Oirish accint into the doin' up
of a pretty frock."

When she grew a little older, Barbara's French nursery governess left
her, and from that hour, almost without knowing it, the child took her
education largely into her own hands, and her aunt stood too much in awe
of her almost preternatural resoluteness, to interfere in any serious
way. She provided masters for the child, but it was the girl herself and
not the masters who decided what she should learn.

In that early time it was not generally thought necessary, or even
desirable, to send girls away from home to study in colleges in company
with boys--to learn Latin, Greek, mathematics, and basketball--to read
the indecencies of classic literature--and to mould themselves into an
unlovely similitude to men. But there were frivolities in the education
of women then which were almost as conspicuous as are the masculinities
that have since taken their place.

In Barbara's case neither of these influences was felt. Without quite
knowing what her own thought was, the girl early made up her mind that
she would learn thoroughly all things that a woman must practice in
life, that she would make herself fit to do a woman's part in the world
without any pretense whatever.

She was set at one time to learn the piano, as in that day every girl
was, to the saddening of human existence and the torturing of human
nerves. After taking a few lessons Barbara was shrewd enough to discover
that she had no musical gifts worth cultivating. She therefore promptly
requested her aunt to dismiss her music master.

"Oh, but you must learn to play, you know, dear."

"Why must I, auntie?"

"Oh, well, every girl must, you know."

"But why, auntie?" persisted the little female Socrates.

"Why, it's a necessary part of every girl's education, you know."

"Oh, I know they all do it," answered the girl, "but most of them would
do better to leave it alone. You often say that it tortures you to hear
girls 'pound the piano' when they want to show off. Now, I haven't the
gift for music, and I don't want to show off. Why should I learn to
'pound the piano' and make other people miserable?"

So the argument went on, and it ended at last, as it was predestined to
end, in the abandonment of the piano lessons, leaving Barbara to grow up
in complete ignorance of an art which, in that half-barbaric time, was
deemed a necessary "accomplishment" of every young woman who had
fingers, whether she had any perception of music or not.

For the rest, Barbara educated herself upon lines which she deemed
womanly. There was no art of kitchen or laundry or sewing room in which,
as she grew older, she did not make herself the superior of the highly
paid servitors whose skill her aunt employed to perform such functions.
For explanation she said only:

"I am to be a woman. I must know how to do all womanly things. If I
don't know all that better than the servants do, I must always be
dependent upon servants. I think that would be humiliating."

In the same spirit she took up such school studies as she deemed proper
to her womanhood and only such. But she gave to each a degree of
conscience that always surprised her teachers. She had not the gift of
learning easily, but her devotion was such that she learned thoroughly
in spite of all the difficulties. She early conceived the notion that
she must know her own language well--how to spell it, how to pronounce
it, and, still more, how to use it simply, honestly, and effectively in
the expression of her thought. Her over-mastering devotion to truth
would not let her rest content with any loose or inaccurate expression.
"No," she would say, "that isn't the word I want. It doesn't say just
what I mean," and she would never be satisfied until she found the word
she did want.

The handwriting to which she schooled herself was in like manner
scrupulously truthful. The writing masters of that time cared far more
for ornateness than for verity, or even legibility. They laboriously
taught their pupils to make "hair" lines for upstrokes and heavily
"shaded" ones for down. They decorated their capital letters with
meaningless flourishes, and they did many other things equally useless
and unworthy.

Barbara would have nothing to do with such insincerities. She would not
even try to learn them. She studied the essential form of each letter,
and, discarding everything else, she wrote, as she herself said, "so
that other people might read easily." The result was a dainty little
round-lettered text, which had truth for its basis and uncompromising
sincerity for its inspiration.

Arithmetic gave her a good deal of trouble. Had the mastery of that
science been an "accomplishment," she would have put it aside as one for
which she had no gift, as she had done with music. But she realized that
one must acquire a certain facility in calculation, and she did all the
work necessary to acquire that facility. She puckered her pretty
forehead over the "sums" that she had to do, and she often, all her
life, employed roundabout methods in doing them. But in the end she got
the "answers" right, and that was all that the little truth worshiper
cared for in the case.

She early became fond of reading such books as appealed to her. She
would never consent to believe that she _ought_ to read books that did
not find a response in her mind, merely on the ground that their reading
was deemed a proper part of every young person's education.

"All that sort of thing is 'show off,'" she used to say. "It is a false
pretense;" and she scorned all false pretenses.

Yet she was by no means an idly self-indulgent reader. She diligently
mastered some books that did not particularly interest her, because she
believed them to contain information or instruction or counsel that
might benefit her.

When she was only a dozen years old or so, the little woman took upon
herself the duties of housekeeper in her aunt's mansion, and kept order
there in a way that won something like local fame for herself. It was
not art, or intuition, or rule that inspired her. It was temperament.

Absolute cleanliness was to her a religion, and the servant who fell in
the remotest way short of that was quickly made to think of herself as
an unregenerate sinner. Absolute neatness was another requirement which
the budding little woman insisted upon with relentless persistence. Then
again it seemed to her that there was no possible excuse for any cooking
short of the best.

"Why should a beefsteak be scorched?" she would ask protestingly. "It is
only a question of attention and honesty. Why should the aroma be boiled
out of a pot of coffee? Again, it is only a matter of attention and
honesty." That was her attitude always, and the servant who hoped to
please her must ceaselessly recognize it.

Sometimes her aunt would plead for a little lenity in these matters, but
the girl would grant none. "The servants are employed to do things
right. Why should I let them do things wrong? They profess to have skill
in such work. Surely, they ought to do it as well as I can, who have no
skill. And besides, it wouldn't be good for them to let them off with
less than the best. They would degenerate. They have their living to
make by work, and the better work they do the better work they can do."

A few years later the aunt's husband met with misfortune and went to the
West. Presently he died, and Barbara's aunt was widowed and
impoverished at one and the same time.

Then it was that Barbara rose in the strength of her practical wisdom,
and met the emergency with all of character that she had built up. Her
aunt was helpless, so Barbara took matters into her own hands. She was
nearly twenty years old then, and her capacities as a housekeeper had
ripened through use until she felt modestly confident of herself.
"Besides," she argued, "there is nobody else to do things if I don't."

She persuaded her aunt to take a little house with a big sunny dining
room, and there she offered to the young bachelors of the town--in her
aunt's name--better meals than they could get at the pretentious hotel,
and she charged them scarcely more than half the hotel rate.

One by one the best of the young men in the town were drawn to Barbara's
table until the dining room was filled. After that anyone who wished to
join the circle must put his name upon a waiting list, and bide his time
till there should be a vacancy. For Barbara held that it would be unjust
to crowd present boarders in order to take new ones, and she hated all
injustice. The waiting list was always long, for the fame of Barbara's
table was great.

When her friends suggested an increase in her charges, she promptly said
them nay. "I'm charging enough," she answered. "The gentlemen pay us
enough to keep auntie and me comfortable. They have to work hard for
their money, and it would be very mean to charge them more, merely
because they'll pay it rather than get their meals anywhere else."

"Perhaps so," answered Captain Will Hallam, who had pressed this advice
upon the girl. "But it's always good business, you know, to get what you
can. A thing is worth what it will sell for, and your good dinners, Miss
Barbara, would sell for a good deal more than you are charging for
them."

But Barbara would not listen to the wisdom of "business." Hers was the
wisdom of a white soul, and it controlled her absolutely.

And it really was her own skill that made her table famous. She hired a
cook, of course, after her little business became prosperous, and
sometimes for a brief while she trusted to the cook's skill. Then her
conscience beset her because the breakfasts and dinners and suppers were
not prepared in that perfection which alone could satisfy this
conscientious little woman's soul. "You see, it isn't honest, aunty,"
she would say in explanation whenever she returned to the kitchen and
gave personal attention to every detail. "We are charging these young
gentlemen for their meals, and it seems to me dishonest if we give them
less than the best that we can. They come to us because they have heard
that we serve the best meals that can be had in Cairo. How mean and
wrong it would be for us to trade upon that reputation and give them
meals of an inferior quality! I simply can't get a cook who will do
things at their best, and so I must do most of the cooking myself, and
then I'll know it is well done."

She hired a "neat-handed Phyllis," in a cambric gown--which Barbara
insisted must be fresh and clean every day--to wait upon the table. She
hired a handy negro boy to wash dishes, scrub, and prepare vegetables
under her own direction. She did all the more important part of the
cooking herself, and the negro boy, Bob, simply worshiped the girl whom
he always addressed as "Little Missie."




XIII

A BATTLE AND AN ACQUAINTANCE


There were boys in Cairo, of course, and equally of course some of them
were bad. The bad ones used to do things to annoy Robert's "Little
Missie." Robert proceeded to thrash them upon every proper occasion, and
he did it with a thoroughness that left nothing to be desired
thereafter. When Robert had thrashed a boy, that boy went to bed for
repairs. And he was apt to be reticent as to where and how he had
received his bruises. That was because Robert always ended a fist
encounter with a warning.

"Ef you don't want a double dose o' dis here you'll prehaps obstain f'um
mentionin' de name o' de culled gentleman wot gib it ter you."

And the victim usually "obstained." If he didn't it was presently the
worse for him.

Robert had been born in the South. He had lived there till his
fourteenth year. He had there imbibed certain doctrines of pugnacious
chivalry. There had been bred in his bone the conviction that it was
every strong man's duty to protect every woman, and to punish any
disrespect shown to her.

In Robert's view there was only one gentlewoman in Cairo--his "Little
Missie"--and it seemed to him as clearly a matter of duty to protect her
against annoyance as it was to scrub the kitchen floor or to wash the
dishes.

It was through one of Robert's battles that Guilford Duncan became
acquainted with his hostess, Barbara Verne. That young woman very rarely
appeared in the dining room, and so the young Virginian had scarcely
more than met her, when one morning on his way to breakfast he came upon
a battle between Robert--"free man of color," as he loved to call
himself--and three Cairo boys who had waylaid him in order to avenge the
punishment he had given a few days before to one of them who had
playfully hurled half a brick through Barbara's kitchen window.

When Duncan came upon the battlefield, Robert was backed up against a
dead wall. Two of his adversaries had gone to grass, and the third was
hesitating to prosecute the attack alone. Seeing his hesitation,
Bob--great strategist that he was--instantly decided to convert his
successful defense into a successful offense, without delay. Quitting
his defensive position against the wall, he rushed upon his remaining
adversary, who promptly retreated without waiting to reckon up the
casualties.

Then Bob jumped upon his other and slowly rising antagonists, knocked
them down again and hurriedly exacted of each a "wish-I-may-die" promise
to let "Little Missie" alone from that day forth.

"Good for you, Bob!" exclaimed young Duncan. "But we'll make that
promise more binding. Help me and I'll take these young ruffians before
Judge Gross and compel them to give bonds for good behavior."

It didn't take long to arraign the culprits, prove that they had thrown
a brickbat through Barbara's window, and secure an order of the court
requiring them to give considerable bonds for good behavior in future.

This brought their parents into court and subjected them to a good deal
of annoyance and trouble. They had to give bonds, and more troublesome
still, they had to control their boys. Then again the newspapers
published the facts.

In this way Guilford Duncan multiplied his enemies in Cairo. But he had
a deep-seated conviction that it is worth a man's while to make enemies
by doing right. In this matter he had done only right. He had invoked
the law for the protection of a woman, and he had completely
accomplished his purpose. He cared nothing for the revilings that
ensued, but Ober, the man of brains and character who edited the
principal newspaper of the town, took the matter up and made much of it.

"This town is barbaric," he wrote in his editorial columns, "It owes
sincere thanks to Mr. Guilford Duncan for teaching it that law is
supreme, that it is to the law we should appeal in every case of wrong
doing. The parents of the young hoodlums who have been bound over to
keep the peace have long needed this lesson. This newspaper rejoices
that the lesson has been given in so emphatic and conspicuous a manner.
It congratulates its young fellow citizen, Mr. Duncan, upon the quality
of his citizenship, and upon the results of its activity."

Within an hour after that editorial appeared, three columns of
advertisements were angrily withdrawn from Ober's newspaper.

Within the next hour Captain Will Hallam quietly sent in nineteen
columns of advertisements, and wrote to Ober: "Stand by your guns and
I'll stand by you. If the damned fools think they can squelch you or
Duncan in such a case as this, we'll teach them better. Spread my
advertisements all over the paper and send bills to me. Keep it up.
We'll make Cairo a better town to live in, or we'll know why. The thing
to do now is to make a systematic campaign against abuses. Do it with
all your might, and I'll stand by you.

"I'll get Duncan to help you. He's a queer fellow, but he knows how to
use vitriol instead of ink, and it's vitriol we need just now."

In the meanwhile the entire talk of the little city was of Duncan's
activity in haling the hoodlum sons of highly "respectable" parents
before a magistrate, as a consequence of their battle with a "nigger."
On that subject tongues wagged busily, pro and con. The friends of the
aggrieved parents who had been forced to give bonds for the good
behavior of their ill-regulated offspring, indignantly made a "race
issue" of a matter which had nothing whatever to do with race prejudice.

They could not understand how a southerner and an ex-Confederate soldier
could thus have taken the part of a "nigger" against "respectable white
boys." Others who were clamorous for the "rights of the negro," rejoiced
in Duncan as a convert to their doctrine.

Both were wrong, of course. Neither in the remotest way recognized the
real impulses of his act, namely, the impulse to protect a woman and the
impulse of a law-loving citizen to insist upon the equal enforcement of
the law, for the sake of good order in the community. But Duncan
concerned himself with none of these things. He had done his simple duty
as a man and as a citizen, and he had no care whatever for consequences.

And yet the consequences were such as vitally affected his entire career
in more ways than one. His performance brought him, for one thing, into
close acquaintance with a certain young woman whom he had scarcely known
before, and whose destiny it was to influence the entire future course
of his life.

It was Duncan's habit to sit long and smoke over his final cup of coffee
at the evening meal. The other table boarders were accustomed to hurry
away as soon as they had swallowed their supper, leaving him in sole
possession of the dining room.

On the evening of the day on which the events already related occurred,
he sat as usual, smoking, sipping his coffee, and reading Ober's evening
newspaper. Presently Barbara Verne entered, and with a manner in which
extreme shyness was mingled with a resolute determination to do the duty
that lay before her, approached young Duncan and held out her hand. As
he rose deferentially to greet her, taking her proffered hand in his,
the girl said:

"I've come to thank you, Mr. Duncan. It was very kind of you--to protect
Robert, you know--and me. I'm Barbara Verne. Thank you, ever so much."

As she made her little speech the brave but timid girl looked him in the
eyes with the embarrassed front of a child set to do a duty, mingled
with the calm composure of a woman who knows and cherishes the dignity
of her womanhood.

Duncan protested that no thanks were due him for doing his simple duty,
and, after a word or two more, the girl quitted the room, while Duncan,
gallantly bowing, held the door open for her.

The little interview lasted for less than two minutes, and not an
unnecessary word was spoken on either side. Yet it seemed to Duncan an
event of consequence, as indeed, it proved to be.

Something in the girl's voice, or manner, or something in her eyes, or
something in her grace of movement, her bearing, her mingled simplicity
and dignity--or something in all these combined--had mightily impressed
him. He had seen little of women in any intimate way, and while he
honored womanhood and deferred to it, as every sound-souled man must, he
had thought himself quite indifferent to women in their individual
personality. But somehow he could not feel so with Barbara Verne, and
later in the evening he scourged himself for his folly in continuing to
think of her to the interruption of the reading he had set himself to
do.

"What's the matter with me?" he asked himself almost with irritation, as
at last he laid down the volume of Herbert Spencer's Social Statics,
over which he had been laboring in vain. "I can't read a single
paragraph with understanding. I can't keep my attention upon the lines
as I read them. I must be tired out--though I don't know what has tired
me. Fortunately I've no visitors to-night. They have all gone to hear
the Swiss Bell Ringers at the Athenæum. I wonder if anybody took Barbara
Verne?"

Thus his thought came back again to the girl and he was annoyed with
himself for having permitted that.

"I do not know the girl at all," he reflected. "Except to bow a distant
'good-morning' or 'good-evening' at infrequent intervals, I never spoke
to her until this evening, and then the interview was one of purely
formal courtesy. And yet here I am thinking about her so persistently
that even Herbert Spencer cannot win my attention."

Then he sat for a time trying to think of something else, or trying,
with renewed resolution, to concentrate his attention upon his book.

The effort was a dismal failure. Barbara Verne's eyes gazed softly at
him out of the page, her gentle voice echoed in his ears, and the
simple, straight-forward words of thanks that she had spoken thrust out
of his mind the words of the great philosopher, as the youth endeavored
to read them.

He was sitting, in his dressing gown, with his slippered feet resting
upon a stool. In the large grate a mass of Pittsburg coal blazed and
flickered restfully. At his elbow softly burned a shaded student lamp,
on a table covered with a scarlet and black cloth, and littered with
books. The curtains--inexpensive, but heavy--were closely drawn to shut
out every suggestion of the wintry night outside.

"Confound it," muttered the young man aloud, as he again threw down the
book, this time without marking his place; "if I weren't so supremely
comfortable here, I'd get myself into my clothes again and go out to
fight the night for a while. That would be the right thing to do, but
I'm too self-indulgent to do it. Wonder if Barbara Verne ever shirked a
duty for the sake of comfort?"

Thus he began again to think of the girl.

"She's a new type to me," he thought, as he gazed into the fire. "She
seems almost a child, and yet altogether a woman. Wonder what her life
has been. I fancy she felt, when she came in to thank me, like a child
who has been naughty and is required to make a proper apology. There was
certainly a suggestion of that sort of thing in her manner, just at
first. Then the strong woman in her mastered the child, and she carried
out her determination resolutely. It is very charming, that combination
of shy child-likeness, with the self-control of a strong woman."

At this point Guilford Duncan impatiently kicked over his footrest, rose
to his feet and began dressing for the out of doors. "What an idiot I
am!" he thought. "Here I am presuming to analyze the moods and motives
of a young woman of whose life and character I know nothing whatever,
and with whom I have exchanged not more than a dozen or twenty sentences
in all my life. You need a drenching in the storm, Guilford Duncan, and
you shall have it, in the interest of your sanity."

Donning his boots and overcoat, and pulling his slouch hat well down
over his eyes and ears, the young man strode out into the storm.

When he came back at midnight, drenched and chilled, his fire had burned
itself out. After he had rubbed his damp skin into a healthful glow, he
extinguished the lamp and crawled into bed.

In spite of all, however, Guilford Duncan was still thinking of Barbara
Verne, when, at last, he sank to sleep. His final thought of her took
the form of a resolution:

"I will call upon her, and become really acquainted with her. That will
cure me of this strange and utterly absurd fascination. Of course the
girl must be commonplace in the main, and when I come to realize that,
the glamour will fade away."




XIV

A SOCIAL ADVANCE


Guilford Duncan carried out his purpose, as he thought, with a good deal
of tact. He began by calling, not upon Barbara, but upon three or four
other young women--a thing he had never done before. He thought in this
way to make his call upon Barbara, when it should come, an inconspicuous
event. To his surprise, his entrance thus into society created something
of a flutter among the women-folk, especially the married women who had
marriageable daughters, or who were matchmakingly interested in other
young women, not their daughters.

For Guilford Duncan, the moment he was thought of as a social factor,
and a matrimonial possibility, was seen to be the "best catch" in the
little city, the most desirable young man in the town. He was young and
distinctly handsome. He was a man of education, culture, and superior
intelligence. His manners were easy, polished, and very winning.
Especially he treated women with a certain chivalric deference, that
pleased them even more than they knew. Captain Will Hallam's wife, who
was the social leader of the city, said to him one day:

"You must be careful what you do in the way of paying attention to young
women. A very little attention on your part is apt to mean a great deal
to a girl--and still more to her mamma."

"But why should it?" asked Duncan, in unfeigned astonishment. "Why
should ordinary social courtesy on my part mean more than the same thing
means in the case of any other young man?"

"I don't know that I can tell you," she answered. "At least, I don't
know that I can make you understand."

"I sincerely wish you would try. I certainly do not want to----" He
hesitated, and did not complete the sentence.

"Oh, I know all that. I know what you mean, because it is what I mean. I
tell you that if you pay more than just a little, and a very casual,
attention to any girl, the girl, and, worse still, all her elderly
female relatives, are likely to misconstrue your motives. You are in
serious danger of breaking some tender hearts, and winning for yourself
the reputation of being that most detestable thing--a male flirt."

"But really, Mrs. Hallam," interrupted the perplexed young man, "I don't
understand----"

"Of course you don't, and of course I'm glad you don't. You'd be a
detestably conceited popinjay if you did. But I do, and in a strictly
limited way I'm going to explain it to you for your own good, and as a
warning. I can't explain it fully without treason to my own sex. But
I'll tell you this much: you have a singularly pleasing, soothing,
caressing, and most winning manner with women--all women. You are
respectful--no, that isn't the word. You are courteously gentle and
deferential, and solicitous to give pleasure. Anyhow, you please women.
Then, again, you have made yourself the most conspicuous young man in
Cairo, and everybody counts upon your success as certain. There, I'm not
going to explain further; I only warn you."

"But, Mrs. Hallam, I have not called more than twice upon any one girl,
and----"

"Well, don't. That's all I've got to say."

Duncan went away puzzled. He had intended to be very shrewd and
circumspect in this matter. He had intended, by calling once or twice
upon each of several young women, to deprive the calls he intended to
make upon Barbara of any look of significance, and now, before he had
even begun to cultivate acquaintance with Barbara, he found his small
preparatory callings the subject of curiosity and gossip.

He was resolved not to be balked of his purpose, however. He saw no
reason to permit that. He would go that very evening to see Barbara, and
he would repeat the visit from time to time, until a fuller
acquaintance with the girl should cure him of his fascination.
Acquaintance must do that, he was persuaded.

He carried out his part of the program resolutely. If the results were
not precisely what he expected, and intended, the fault was not his own.

Barbara Verne was not accustomed to receive visits from young men. She
was almost too young, for one thing, or, at least, she had been almost
too young until about this time. Moreover, her life was unusually
secluded. She devoted all her time to her exacting household duties.
Except that she attended church once each Sunday, she was never seen in
any public place, or anywhere else, outside of her aunt's house, or the
house of her single friend--Mrs. Richards--a retiring matron, who
neither received company nor went out anywhere. These two--the young
girl and the middle-aged matron--were somewhat more than intimate in
their affection, but apart from this one friend, Barbara visited nobody.
The young women of the town did not think of her, therefore, as one of
themselves at all. They regarded her rather as a child than as a young
woman, though if they had troubled to think about the matter, they would
have remembered that she was as old as some of themselves.

When Guilford Duncan made his first call upon Barbara, therefore, that
young person was very greatly astonished, but she was in no way
embarrassed. It was her nature to meet all circumstances and all events
frankly, and to do with conscientious faithfulness whatsoever she
conceived to be her duty. So when Guilford Duncan called upon her, she
promptly put away her surprise, and entered the little parlor to greet
him.

She did not keep him waiting, and he specially liked that. He was apt to
be impatient of waiting. She did not think it necessary to change her
gown. It was her habit to dress with exceeding simplicity and extreme
neatness. She could not afford anything pretentious in dress, and she
would make no false pretense. Besides, she owned no better gown than the
one of French calico, which she was already wearing.

So, without a minute's wait, Barbara walked into the parlor and greeted
her visitor, not without some lingering trace of surprise at the honor
done her, but with no touch of foolish embarrassment in her manner.
Barbara was simply her own sweet, natural self, and when Duncan went
away, after his call, the glamour of her personality was more strongly
upon him than ever.

"She, at least," he thought as he walked toward the levee, "will not
misconstrue my call, as Mrs. Hallam suggests. She is too womanly, too
sincere, too genuine for that. I shall call again very soon, though,
now that I think of it, she forgot to ask me to do so. Never mind. I'll
manufacture some excuse--oh, by Jove, I have it! 'The Coterie' is to
give a fancy dress dance a week from to-night. I'll invite her to go. I
wonder if she will accept. I hope so, but even if she doesn't, the
invitation will give me ample excuse for calling. I'll do it to-morrow
evening. I suppose women need a little time to get ready for such
functions. Anyhow, I'll call on her to-morrow evening and invite her. I
wonder if anybody else has anticipated me in that? No, I'll wager not. I
never heard of her going out, or even of anybody calling upon her.
Still," he reflected, as he mounted to his room and lighted his lamp and
his fire, "that sort of thing might happen." Then, after a pause: "I
reckon I'd better send her a note to prepare her. I'll write it
to-night, and leave it at breakfast in the morning. She never quits the
kitchen regions while breakfast is on. I wonder if she's as neat, and
trim, and pretty when she's making coffee, or doing whatever it is that
they do to ham, as she always is when she visits other parts of the
house?"

Turning, he locked his door. That was a very unusual proceeding on his
part, as it was well understood that his "latchstring was always out" of
an evening, and the young men, who were in the habit of reading in his
room, were accustomed to open and enter at will, without the formality
of knocking.

A moment later, some one confidently turned the door-knob. Instantly
Duncan realized the situation and came to his senses. He abandoned his
purpose of writing to Barbara, as an absurdity, and promptly unlocked
the door to the visitor, making some sort of excuse for his
forgetfulness in having fastened it.

When he called upon Barbara the next evening, and asked her to attend
the dance under his escort, her astonishment was manifest, in spite of
her best endeavors to conceal it. She had never before been invited to
such a function, and she had not dreamed of this. That, however, was not
her greatest occasion for surprise. In her modesty she had never thought
of herself as in any way the fellow or equal of the other girls in town,
who were eagerly invited to attend everything in the way of
entertainments. If any other young man in town had asked her to be his
partner on this occasion, she would have regarded the occurrence as a
surprising one; to be asked by Guilford Duncan was more astonishing than
all. She knew the high place he had won for himself in Cairo. She knew
that he was everywhere regarded as altogether the superior of all the
other young men intellectually, morally, socially, and in all other
ways. She regarded him as an aristocrat among men, a man who had always
held aloof from the society around him, as if it were quite unworthy of
his attention. She had woman's instinct enough, too, to know how greatly
honored any other girl in the city would feel if asked by him to any
function. The fact that he had asked her instead of some other, puzzled
her almost to bewilderment.

At first she gave him no answer. She was obviously thinking, and Duncan
let her think on. He thought she looked exceedingly pretty while
thinking. He observed a slight puckering of her forehead at the time,
which seemed to him to add interest to her face. After a little she aid:

"Thank you, Mr. Duncan, for your invitation. I am more pleased with it
than I can say. But I think I must ask you to excuse me. I think I can't
possibly go to the dance."

"May I ask why not? Do you not care for dancing and society?"

"Oh, I care very much--or, rather," she added, with scrupulous fidelity
to truth--"I should care very much to attend this party--I should enjoy
it more than anything, but----"

"Will you think me impertinent," Duncan asked, when she thus stopped in
the middle of her sentence, "will you think me impertinent if I ask you
what comes after that word 'but?'"

"Oh, I think you mustn't ask me that. At least, I think I mustn't answer
you."

"Very well," replied the young man, pleased with the girl's manner, in
spite of his disappointment over her hesitation. "May I make a
suggestion? If you had simply said 'no' to my invitation, of course I
should not think of urging it upon you. But what you have said shows me
that you would welcome it, if there were not something in the way.
Perhaps you can overcome the difficulty. Will you not try? Will you not
take a little time to think, and perhaps to consult with your friends?"

"I should like to, but that would be unfair to you. It might deprive you
of an opportunity to ask someone else."

"I shall ask no one else. I shall not attend the affair at all, unless I
am privileged to escort you. If I may, I will call to-morrow evening,
and every evening, until you can give me your decision."

There was a certain masterfulness in his manner and utterance, which
seemed to leave no chance for further discussion. So Barbara simply
said:

"Very well. I'll be ready to answer you to-morrow evening. I suppose I
am ready now, but you wish me to wait, and it shall be so."

Duncan hurriedly took his leave. Perhaps he feared that if he stayed
longer, the girl might make her "no" a final one. Otherwise he hoped for
a better outcome.

When he had gone, poor little Bab sat for a time in bewilderment. She
still could not understand why such a man as Guilford Duncan--whom
everybody regarded as the "coming man" in Cairo--should have chosen her,
instead of some other, as the recipient of his invitation. She could not
still a certain fluttering about her heart. She was full of joy, and
yet she was sorely grieved that she must put aside what seemed to her a
supreme opportunity to be happy for a time.

It was always her way, when any emotion pleased or troubled her, to go
to her friend, Mrs. Richards, for strength and soothing. So, now she
suddenly sprang up, put on her hat and wraps, and hurried to her one
friend's home. The distance was so small that she needed no escort,
particularly as Robert, who happened to be at the gate, could see her
throughout the little journey. And she knew that the faithful negro boy
would wait there until her return.

"You are all in a flurry, child," said her friend, for greeting. "What
is it about? Do you come to me for advice, or sympathy, or consolation?"

For Mrs. Richards knew of Duncan's visit, and with a shrewd woman's wit
she guessed that Barbara's disturbance of mind was in some way connected
with that event.

"No," answered the girl. "I didn't come to consult you--at least I think
I didn't--it is only that something has happened, and I want to tell you
about it."

"Very well, dear. Go on."

"Oh, it's nothing very important. I don't know why I feel about it as I
do, but----"

"Perhaps if you tell me what it is, I may help you to solve your
riddles. What is it?"

"Why, only that Mr. Guilford Duncan has asked me to go with him to the
party next week."

"Well, go on. I see nothing strange in that."

"Why--don't you understand, it is _Mr. Duncan_, and he has asked _me_."

"I see nothing yet to wonder at," calmly replied her friend. "Indeed, it
seems to be quite natural. I have understood Mr. Duncan to be a
gentleman of uncommonly good taste. If he has made up his mind to attend
the dance, why shouldn't he choose for his partner, the best, the
dearest, and most charming girl in the city? Of course you are going?"

"Why, no, of course I can't. I told him so, but he urged me to postpone
a final decision till to-morrow evening. I thought that would be
useless, and that the delay might make him miss a chance to engage some
other girl; but he insisted that he wasn't going at all unless I would
go with him, so just because he seemed to wish it, I promised to wait
till to-morrow evening before saying a final 'no.' Somehow you simply
have to do what Mr. Duncan wants you to do, you know."

"Mr. Guilford Duncan is rising rapidly in my estimation," answered
Barbara's friend. "I have understood that he is a man of good sense and
good taste. Obviously he deserves that high repute. Your 'no' must be
'yes,' Bab."

"Oh, but that's impossible!"

"I don't see it."

"Why, you _know_ I can't afford a gown."

"I still don't see it. It's to be a fancy dress affair, I believe?"

"Yes, of course."

"Then you can go in any character you like. You've your drab-gray dress,
and it's as fresh as new. I'll go over to your house and alter it for
you. Then with a white cape of Bishop's lawn, and a white cap and apron,
we'll make you into the most charming little Quaker maiden imaginable.
The character will just suit you, because you suit it. That matter is
settled. Go home now and go to bed, and you mustn't dream of anything
but 'yes.'"

So the good woman fended off thanks, and sent the happy girl home with
an enhanced sense of the value of friendship.




XV

THE COMING OUT OF BARBARA


There was a flutter throughout the ballroom when Guilford Duncan, in the
costume of Hamlet, ushered in Barbara Verne, in her Quaker-maid's dress.
The impulses behind the flutter were various, but surprise was the
dominant one.

Nobody had expected the reserved young Virginian to attend the function.
Nobody had dreamed of seeing Barbara Verne there. Still more certainly,
nobody had expected Duncan to escort "the daughter of his landlady," as
one of the chattering mammas spitefully called Barbara.

"Upon my word, the girl is pretty, when she's made up that way," said
another.

"She is more than pretty," quietly interposed Mrs. Will Hallam; "she is
the most beautiful girl in the room. And she is far less 'made up' than
any of the rest. Her costume is simplicity itself. I'm glad the dear
girl is here."

The gracious lady presently beckoned to Duncan, who promptly responded.
Then taking some pains that those about her should hear every word, she
said:

"Thank you, Duncan, for bringing Barbara, and my sincerest
congratulations on your good taste. I was just saying, when I caught
your eye, that she is the most beautiful girl in the room, and certainly
she is the most charming. You must bring her to me for a greeting and
congratulations, when the first set is over. There goes the music, now.
Don't stop to answer me."

Mrs. Hallam's little speech, and the marked favor she showed to Barbara
throughout the evening, rather stimulated, than checked, the malicious
chatter of the half dozen women who were disposed, on behalf of their
daughters, to feel jealous of Bab. But they were at pains that Mrs.
Hallam should not hear them. For that lady was conspicuously the social
queen of the city and, gracious as she was, she had a certain clever way
of making even her politest speeches sting like a whip-lash when she was
moved to rebuke petty meanness of spirit.

"What on earth can young Duncan mean?" asked one of them when the group
had placed distance between themselves and Mrs. Hallam, "by bringing
that girl here? She isn't in society at all."

"I should say not. And Duncan is such an aristocrat, too."

"Perhaps that's it. Maybe he has done this by way of showing his
contempt for Cairo society."

"Oh, no," answered another. "He's simply amusing himself, like the male
flirt that he is. He has paid marked attention to half a dozen lovely
girls in succession, and now he brings Barbara Verne here just to show
them how completely he has dropped them."

In the mean while Duncan was behaving with the utmost discretion. After
the first set was over, he danced with one after another of the young
women upon whom he had lavished so much of "marked attention" as may be
implied from one, or at most two, formal calls upon each.

But this circumspection did not stop the chatter.

"Wonder if Mrs. Hallam means to take the girl up? It would be just like
her to do that, she's so fond of Duncan, you know; if she does----"

"Pardon me, but unless Mrs. Hallam has placed her character in your
hands for dissection, ladies, I must ask you not to discuss it further."

That utterance came from Captain Will Hallam, who happened to be
standing by the wall, very near the woman who had last spoken. It was
like a thunderbolt in its effect, for there was not one of the gossips
whose husband's prosperity was not in some more or less direct way in
Will Hallam's hands.

Instantly he turned and walked away to where Barbara shyly sat in a
corner, while half a dozen young men stood and talked with her. For
whatever the matrons might think, the young men all seemed eager for
Barbara's favor, and were making of her the belle of the evening by
their attentions.

To the astonishment of all of them, Hallam asked Barbara for her dancing
card. Nobody had ever heard of the great man of business dancing. He was
middle-aged, absorbed in affairs, and positively contemptuous of all
frivolities. He had come to the party only to bring his wife. He had
quickly gone away again, and he had now returned only to escort Mrs.
Hallam home. Nevertheless, he asked Barbara for her card and, finding it
full, he turned to Duncan, saying:

"I see that the next set is yours, Duncan. Won't you give it up to me,
if Miss Barbara permits?"

Half a minute later the music began again and, to the astonishment of
the whole company, Captain Will Hallam led out the demure little
Quakeress, and managed to walk through a cotillion with her, without
once treading on her toes.

That was Captain Will Hallam's way of emphasizing his displeasure with
the gossips, and marking his appreciation of Barbara. It was so
effective as to set the whole feminine part of the community talking for
a week to come. But of this the secluded girl heard not a word. The only
change the events of the evening made in the quiet routine of her life
was that all the best young men in the town became frequent callers upon
her, and that thereafter she was sure to receive more than one
invitation to every concert, dance, or other entertainment, as soon as
its occurrence was announced.

But enough of the gossip reached Guilford Duncan's ears to induce angry
resentment and self-assertion on his part.

"I told you how it would be, Duncan," said Mrs. Will Hallam to him not
long afterwards. "But I'm glad you did it. It was the manly, as well as
the kindly thing to do."

"Thank you," the young man answered. "I mean to do more of the same
sort."

He did not explain. Mrs. Hallam was in need of no explanation.




XVI

A NEW ENEMY


It was about this time that Guilford Duncan managed to make a new enemy,
and one more powerful to work him harm, upon occasion, than all the rest
whom he had offended.

Napoleon Tandy, president of the X National Bank,--whose name had been
first popularly shortened to "Nap Tandy" and afterwards extended again
into "Napper Tandy,"--was the only man in Cairo who had enough of
financial strength or of creative business capacity to be reckoned a
rival of Captain Will Hallam, or his competitor in commercial
enterprises.

He had several times tried conclusions with Hallam in such affairs, but
always with results distinctly unsatisfactory to himself. Or, as Hallam
one day explained to Duncan, "He has got a good deal of education at my
hands, and he has paid his tuition fees."

Tandy was not yet past middle age, but he was always called "Old Napper
Tandy," chiefly because of certain objectionable traits of character
that he possessed. He was reputed to be the "meanest man in Southern
Illinois." He was certainly the hardest in driving a bargain, the most
merciless in its enforcement. He was cordially hated and very greatly
feared. Cold, self-possessed, shrewd, and utterly selfish, his attitude
toward his fellow men, and toward himself, was altogether different from
that of his greater competitor, Hallam. He felt none of Hallam's
"sporting interest," as Duncan called it, in playing the game of
commerce and finance. He was quick to see opportunities, and somewhat
bold in seizing upon them, but no thought of popular or public benefit
to accrue from his enterprises ever found lodgment in his mind. He had
put a large sum of money into the Through Line of freight cars, but he
had done so with an eye single to his own advantage, with no thought of
anything but dividends. He had contemptuously called Duncan "a rainbow
chaser," because that young man had spoken with some enthusiasm of the
benefits which the cheapening of freight rates must bring to the people
East and West.

"Well, he has a mighty good knack of catching his rainbows, anyhow,"
answered Hallam; "and you'd better not let the idea get away with you
that he isn't a force to be reckoned with. He's young yet, and very new
to business, but you remember it was he who first suggested the Through
Line, and worked it out."

In brief, Napper Tandy was a very greedy money-getter, and nothing else.
He hated Hallam with all that he had of heart, because Hallam was his
superior in the conduct of affairs, and because Hallam had so badly
beaten him in every case of competitive effort, and perhaps because of
some other things.

On his part, Will Hallam, without hating, cordially detested the man
whom he had thus beaten and made afraid.

Nevertheless, these two never quarreled. Each of them was too worldly
wise to make an open breach with one whose co-operation in great affairs
he might at any time need.

"I never quarrel with a man," said Hallam to Duncan, by way of
explaining the situation. "I never quarrel with a man till he is in the
poor-house. So long as he's at large I may need him any day. It doesn't
pay for a man to cut off his own fingers."

So between these two there was always an outward semblance of peace,
even when war was on between them, and it frequently happened that they
were closely associated in enterprises too large for either to conduct
so well alone.

On the night of the ball, Hallam took Duncan aside and said to him:

"I wish you'd take the seven o'clock train this morning and go up to the
mines for a few days. Everything there seems to be at sixes and sevens.
I can't make head or tail out of it all. All I know is that the
confounded mine is losing a good many thousands of my dollars every
month. I want you to go up and make a thorough investigation. If you
can't find a way out I'll shut up the hole in the ground and quit."

Captain Hallam knew, of course, that Duncan could not get much sleep
that night, but he had long ago learned that Guilford Duncan utterly
disregarded personal comfort whenever duty called, and so he had no
hesitation in thus ordering his young lieutenant to take an early
morning train on the heels of a night of dancing.

"Perhaps you'd better go up there with me," suggested Duncan.

"No, that would embarrass matters. I've been up several times, and I
want you to bring a fresh mind to bear upon the trouble. I'll telegraph
the people there to put everything at your command. I want you to study
the situation and make up your mind, just as if the whole thing belonged
to you. Part of it does, you know, and more of it shall, if you find a
way out. If the thing can be made to go, I'll give you ten more of the
hundred shares, in addition to the five you already own. Good-night, and
good-bye till you're ready to report."

Captain Will Hallam had recently bought this coal mine on a little
branch railroad in the interior of Illinois. He had not wanted to buy
it, but had done so by way of saving a debt. The mine had been badly
constructed at the beginning, and latterly it had been a good deal
neglected. There were other difficulties, as Duncan soon discovered, and
the coal resources of the property had never been half developed. In
recognition of his services in examining titles and other matters
connected with the purchase, Hallam had given the young man five per
cent. of the company's stock. He was thus, for the first time, working
in part for himself, when he was sent to study the situation.

Quietly, but insistently, in face of the surly opposition of the
superintendent, who was also styled chief engineer, Duncan looked into
things. It was true, as the superintendent sullenly said, that this
young man knew nothing of coal mining; but it was also true, as Duncan
answered, that he knew how to learn.

And he did learn. He learned so much that after three or four days, he
sent a telegram to Captain Will Hallam, saying:

     Give me a perfectly free hand here or call me home. I must have all
     the authority you possess or I can be of no use. Answer by
     telegraph.

For response, Will Hallam telegraphed:

     Consider yourself the whole thing. I give you complete and absolute
     authority. Hire or discharge men at will. Order all improvements
     you think best. Draw on the bank here for any sum you need. Only
     make the thing go if you can.

Telegraphing was much more expensive in those days--forty years
ago--than it is now. And yet in neither of these dispatches was there
any seeming effort to spare words. That was Captain Will Hallam's rule
and practice. His frequent instruction to all his subordinates ran
somewhat in this wise:

"Never save a word in telegraphing at the risk of being misunderstood.
Mistakes are the most costly luxuries that a man can indulge in. Never
forget that we live in the Nineteenth Century."

In that spirit Captain Will sent a dozen other telegrams that day,
addressed to all the different men at the mines who had even the
smallest pretension to authority. In each of them he said:

     Guilford Duncan represents me fully and absolutely. His authority
     is unlimited. Obey him or quit. Obey him with all good will. Help
     him if you can, and in every way you can. There must be no
     interference, no kicking, no withholding of information. These are
     orders.

Thus armed, Duncan set to work in earnest.

"Why isn't your output of coal larger than it is?" he asked of Davidson,
the superintendent.

"I can't make it larger under the circumstances."

"What are the circumstances? What difficulties are there in the way? You
have miners enough, surely."

"Well, for one thing, the mine is badly ventilated. Many of the best
galleries are filled with choke-damp, and must be kept closed."

"Why don't you improve the ventilation? As an engineer you ought to
know how to do that much."

"It isn't feasible, as you would know, Mr. Duncan, if you knew anything
about mining."

"Oh, never mind my ignorance. It is your knowledge that I'm concerned
about just now. Do I understand you to say that a mine lying only
seventy-five feet or so below the surface cannot be ventilated?"

"I suppose it might be if the business could afford the expense."

"The business can and will afford any expense that may be necessary to
make it pay. If you know enough of engineering to devise a practicable
plan for ventilating the mine, I'll furnish you all the money you need
to carry it out."

He had it in mind to add: "If you don't know enough for that, I'll find
a more competent engineer," but he kept his temper and refrained.

"Twouldn't be of any use," answered Davidson, after a moment. "We're
producing more coal now than we can market."

"How is that? I don't understand. Your order book--which I looked over
to-day--shows orders a full month ahead of shipments, besides many
canceled orders, countermanded because not filled promptly enough to
satisfy the customers. You're superintendent as well as engineer. I wish
you'd try to clear up this puzzle."

"Oh, it's simple enough. The railroad people won't furnish us cars
enough. I could ship a hundred carloads to-morrow if I had the cars, but
I haven't got 'em, and I can't get 'em."

"Do you mean that you are offering coal as freight to this railroad, and
the road is refusing it?"

"Yes, that's about it. I've asked for cars and can't get 'em, except a
few each day."

"Do the other mines along this little branch railroad have the same
trouble?"

"There is only one other mine on this line."

"Well, does it encounter the same difficulty in marketing its coal?"

"No--at least not to so great an extent. You see somebody there is
standing in with the railroad people. I suppose they've had a little
block of stock given to them--the railroad people, I mean. So the
Quentin mines get all the cars they want, and we get only their
leavings."

"Well, now, Mr. Davidson, I give you this order: Set to work at once and
bring out every ton of coal you've got ready in the mine. There'll be
cars here to haul it when you get it ready. Good-night, Mr. Davidson.
I'll talk with you another time about the other matters. I have a good
deal to do to-night, so I can't talk further with you now."

Davidson went out after a grudging "good-night." Duncan did not yet know
or suspect, though he was presently to find out, that to Davidson, also,
the proprietors of the rival mine were paying a little tribute, as a
reward for silence and for making trouble.

Duncan sat for an hour writing letters. The typewriting machine had not
been invented at that time, and even if it had been Duncan would have
preferred to write these letters himself.

One of them was addressed to the General Freight Agent of the little
railroad on which the mine was situated. It read as follows:

     Within six days I shall have one hundred car loads of coal at the
     mouth of this mine, ready for shipment upon orders. After that time
     I shall have about sixty car loads ready for shipment each day.
     Please see to it that an adequate supply of cars to move this
     freight are side-tracked here on time.

Duncan signed that letter with all needed circumspection. The signature
read:

     For the Redwood Coal and Iron Company; Guilford Duncan, Manager and
     Attorney at Law and in Fact for the Company.

That subscription was intended as an intimation.

When on the next afternoon the General Freight Agent, who had several
times met Duncan at Captain Hallam's house, read the letter, his
attention was at once attracted--precisely as Guilford Duncan had
intended that it should be, by the elaborate formality of the signature.

"So Hallam's got that smart young man of his at work, has he?" the
Freight Agent muttered. "Well, we'll see what we can do with him." But
he deliberately waited till nine o'clock that night before responding.
Then opening the telegraph key at his elbow, he called Duncan, and
Duncan, who had learned telegraphing, as he had learned many other
things, as a part of his equipment for work, promptly went to his key
and answered the call. The General Freight Agent spelled out this
message:

"Simply impossible to furnish cars you ask. Haven't got them."

Duncan responded:

"The Quentin mine gets all cars needed. We demand our share and I shall
insist upon the demand."

The reply came:

"I tell you we can't do it. I'll run down to your place to-morrow or
next day and explain."

"Don't want explanations," answered Duncan. "I want the cars."

"But we simply can't furnish them."

"But you simply must."

"What if I refuse?"

"Then I'll adopt other measures. But you won't refuse."

"Why not?"

"Because I know too much," answered Duncan. "I shall send to you by
special messenger, on the train that will pass here within an hour, a
letter makin

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