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Mr. Crewe's Career — Complete

by Winston Churchill · English · Gutenberg #3684 · 954,477 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mr. Crewe's Career — Complete

Author: Winston Churchill


        
Release date: October 16, 2004 [eBook #3684]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3684

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. CREWE'S CAREER — COMPLETE ***



Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger





MR. CREWE'S CAREER, Complete

By Winston Churchill




BOOK 1.




CHAPTER I. THE HONOURABLE HILARY VANE SITS FOR HIS PORTRAIT

I may as well begin this story with Mr. Hilary Vane, more frequently
addressed as the Honourable Hilary Vane, although it was the gentleman's
proud boast that he had never held an office in his life. He belonged
to the Vanes of Camden Street,--a beautiful village in the hills near
Ripton,--and was, in common with some other great men who had made
a noise in New York and the nation, a graduate of Camden Wentworth
Academy. But Mr. Vane, when he was at home, lived on a wide,
maple-shaded street in the city of Ripton, cared for by an elderly
housekeeper who had more edges than a new-fangled mowing machine.
The house was a porticoed one which had belonged to the Austens for a
hundred years or more, for Hilary Vane had married, towards middle age,
Miss Sarah Austen. In two years he was a widower, and he never tried it
again; he had the Austens' house, and that many-edged woman, Euphrasia
Cotton, the Austens' housekeeper.

The house was of wood, and was painted white as regularly as leap year.
From the street front to the vegetable garden in the extreme rear it was
exceedingly long, and perhaps for propriety's sake--Hilary Vane lived
at one end of it and Euphrasia at the other. Hilary was sixty-five,
Euphrasia seventy, which is not old for frugal people, though it is
just as well to add that there had never been a breath of scandal about
either of them, in Ripton or elsewhere. For the Honourable Hilary's
modest needs one room sufficed, and the front parlour had not been used
since poor Sarah Austen's demise, thirty years before this story opens.

In those thirty years, by a sane and steady growth, Hilary Vane had
achieved his present eminent position in the State. He was trustee for I
know not how many people and institutions, a deacon in the first
church, a lawyer of such ability that he sometimes was accorded
the courtesy-title of “Judge.” His only vice--if it could be called
such--was in occasionally placing a piece, the size of a pea, of a
particular kind of plug tobacco under his tongue,--and this was not
known to many people. Euphrasia could not be called a wasteful person,
and Hilary had accumulated no small portion of this world's goods, and
placed them as propriety demanded, where they were not visible to the
naked eye: and be it added in his favour that he gave as secretly, to
institutions and hospitals the finances and methods of which were known
to him.

As concrete evidence of the Honourable Hilary Vane's importance, when
he travelled he had only to withdraw from his hip-pocket a book in which
many coloured cards were neatly inserted, an open-sesame which permitted
him to sit without payment even in those wheeled palaces of luxury known
as Pullman cars. Within the limits of the State he did not even have
to open the book, but merely say, with a twinkle of his eyes to the
conductor, “Good morning, John,” and John would reply with a bow and a
genial and usually witty remark, and point him out to a nobody who sat
in the back of the car. So far had Mr. Hilary Vane's talents carried
him.

The beginning of this eminence dated back to the days before the Empire,
when there were many little principalities of railroads fighting among
themselves. For we are come to a changed America. There was a time, in
the days of the sixth Edward of England, when the great landowners found
it more profitable to consolidate the farms, seize the common lands, and
acquire riches hitherto undreamed of. Hence the rising of tailor Ket and
others, and the leveling of fences and barriers, and the eating of many
sheep. It may have been that Mr. Vane had come across this passage in
English history, but he drew no parallels. His first position of trust
had been as counsel for that principality known in the old days as the
Central Railroad, of which a certain Mr. Duncan had been president, and
Hilary Vane had fought the Central's battles with such telling
effect that when it was merged into the one Imperial Railroad, its
stockholders--to the admiration of financiers--were guaranteed ten per
cent. It was, indeed, rumoured that Hilary drew the Act of Consolidation
itself. At any rate, he was too valuable an opponent to neglect, and
after a certain interval of time Mr. Vane became chief counsel in the
State for the Imperial Railroad, on which dizzy height we now behold
him. And he found, by degrees, that he had no longer time for private
practice.

It is perhaps gratuitous to add that the Honourable Hilary Vane was
a man of convictions. In politics he would have told you--with some
vehemence, if you seemed to doubt--that he was a Republican. Treason to
party he regarded with a deep-seated abhorrence, as an act for which
a man should be justly outlawed. If he were in a mellow mood, with the
right quantity of Honey Dew tobacco under his tongue, he would perhaps
tell you why he was a Republican, if he thought you worthy of his
confidence. He believed in the gold standard, for one thing; in the
tariff (left unimpaired in its glory) for another, and with a wave of
his hand would indicate the prosperity of the nation which surrounded
him,--a prosperity too sacred to tamper with.

One article of his belief, and in reality the chief article, Mr. Vane
would not mention to you. It was perhaps because he had never formulated
the article for himself. It might be called a faith in the divine right
of Imperial Railroads to rule, but it was left out of the verbal
creed. This is far from implying hypocrisy to Mr. Vane. It was his
foundation-rock and too sacred for light conversation. When he allowed
himself to be bitter against various “young men with missions” who
had sprung up in various States of the Union, so-called purifiers of
politics, he would call them the unsuccessful with a grievance, and
recommend to them the practice of charity, forbearance, and other
Christian virtues. Thank God, his State was not troubled with such.

In person Mr. Hilary Vane was tall, with a slight stoop to his
shoulders, and he wore the conventional double-breasted black coat,
which reached to his knees, and square-toed congress boots. He had a
Puritan beard, the hawk-like Vane nose, and a twinkling eye that spoke
of a sense of humour and a knowledge of the world. In short, he was no
man's fool, and on occasions had been more than a match for certain New
York lawyers with national reputations.

It is rare, in this world of trouble, that such an apparently ideal
and happy state of existence is without a canker. And I have left the
revelation of the canker to the last. Ripton knew it was there, Camden
Street knew it, and Mr. Vane's acquaintances throughout the State; but
nobody ever spoke of it. Euphrasia shed over it the only tears she
had known since Sarah Austen died, and some of these blotted the only
letters she wrote. Hilary Vane did not shed tears, but his friends
suspected that his heart-strings were torn, and pitied him. Hilary Vane
fiercely resented pity, and that was why they did not speak of it. This
trouble of his was the common point on which he and Euphrasia touched,
and they touched only to quarrel. Let us out with it--Hilary Vane had a
wild son, whose name was Austen.

Euphrasia knew that in his secret soul Mr. Vane attributed this
wildness, and what he was pleased to designate as profligacy, to the
Austen blood. And Euphrasia resented it bitterly. Sarah Austen had been
a young, elfish thing when he married her,--a dryad, the elderly and
learned Mrs. Tredway had called her. Mr Vane had understood her about
as well as he would have understood Mary, Queen of Scots, if he had been
married to that lady. Sarah Austen had a wild, shy beauty, startled,
alert eyes like an animal, and rebellious black hair that curled about
her ears and gave her a faun-like appearance. With a pipe and the
costume of Rosalind she would have been perfect. She had had a habit of
running off for the day into the hills with her son, and the conventions
of Ripton had been to her as so many defunct blue laws. During her brief
married life there had been periods of defiance from her lasting a week,
when she would not speak to Hilary or look at him, and these periods
would be followed by violent spells of weeping in Euphrasia's arms,
when the house was no place for Hilary. He possessed by matrimony and
intricate mechanism of which his really admirable brain could not grasp
the first principles; he felt for her a real if uncomfortable
affection, but when she died he heaved a sigh of relief, at which he was
immediately horrified.

Austen he understood little better, but his affection for the child may
be likened to the force of a great river rushing through a narrow gorge,
and he vied with Euphrasia in spoiling him. Neither knew what they were
doing, and the spoiling process was interspersed with occasional and
(to Austen) unmeaning intervals of severe discipline. The boy loved
the streets and the woods and his fellow-beings; his punishments were
a series of afternoons in the house, during one of which he wrecked
the bedroom where he was confined, and was soundly whaled with an old
slipper that broke under the process. Euphrasia kept the slipper, and
once showed it to Hilary during a quarrel they had when the boy was
grown up and gone and the house was silent, and Hilary had turned away,
choking, and left the room. Such was his cross.

To make it worse, the boy had love his father. Nay, still loved him. As
a little fellow, after a scolding for some wayward prank, he would throw
himself into Hilary's arms and cling to him, and would never know how
near he came to unmanning him. As Austen grew up, they saw the world in
different colours: blue to Hilary was red to Austen, and white, black;
essentials to one were non-essentials to the other; boys and girls, men
and women, abhorred by one were boon companions to the other.

Austen made fun of the minister, and was compelled to go church twice
on Sundays and to prayer-meeting on Wednesdays. Then he went to Camden
Street, to live with his grandparents in the old Vane house and
attend Camden Wentworth Academy. His letters, such as they were, were
inimitable if crude, but contained not the kind of humour Hilary Vane
knew. Camden Wentworth, principal and teachers, was painted to the life;
and the lad could hardly wait for vacation time to see his father, only
to begin quarreling with him again.

I pass over escapades in Ripton that shocked one half of the population
and convulsed the other half. Austen went to the college which his
father had attended,--a college of splendid American traditions,--and
his career there might well have puzzled a father of far greater
tolerance and catholicity. Hilary Vane was a trustee, and journeyed more
than once to talk the matter over with the president, who had been his
classmate there.

“I love that boy, Hilary,” the president had said at length, when
pressed for a frank opinion,--“there isn't a soul in the place, I
believe, that doesn't,--undergraduates and faculty,--but he has given me
more anxious thought than any scholar I have ever had.”

“Trouble,” corrected Mr. Vane, sententiously.

“Well, yes, trouble,” answered the president, smiling, “but upon my
soul, I think it is all animal spirits.”

“A euphemism for the devil,” said Hilary, grimly; “he is the animal part
of us, I have been brought up to believe.”

The president was a wise man, and took another tack.

“He has a really remarkable mind, when he chooses to use it. Every once
in a while he takes your breath away--but he has to become interested.
A few weeks ago Hays came to me direct from his lecture room to tell me
about a discussion of Austen's in constitutional law. Hays, you know, is
not easily enthused, but he declares your son has as fine a legal brain
as he has come across in his experience. But since then, I am bound to
admit,” added the president, sadly, “Austen seems not to have looked at
a lesson.”

“'Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,'” replied Hilary.

“He'll sober down,” said the president, stretching his conviction a
little, “he has two great handicaps: he learns too easily, and he is
too popular.” The president looked out of his study window across the
common, surrounded by the great elms which had been planted when Indian
lads played among the stumps and the red flag of England had flown
from the tall pine staff. The green was covered now with students of a
conquering race, skylarking to and fro as they looked on at a desultory
baseball game. “I verily believe,” said the president, “at a word from
your son, most of them would put on their coats and follow him on any
mad expedition that came into his mind.”

Hilary Vane groaned more than once in the train back to Ripton. It meant
nothing to him to be the father of the most popular man in college.

“The mad expedition” came at length in the shape of a fight with the
townspeople, in which Austen, of course, was the ringleader. If he had
inherited his mother's eccentricities, he had height and physique from
the Vanes, and one result was a week in bed for the son of the local
plumber and a damage suit against the Honourable Hilary. Another
result was that Austen and a Tom Gaylord came back to Ripton on a long
suspension, which, rumour said, would have been expulsion if Hilary were
not a trustee. Tom Gaylord was proud of suspension in such company. More
of him later. He was the son of old Tom Gaylord, who owned more lumber
than any man in the State, and whom Hilary Vane believed to be the
receptacle of all the vices.

Eventually Austen went back and graduated--not summa cum laude, honesty
compels me to add. Then came the inevitable discussion, and to please
his father he went to the Harvard Law School for two years. At the end
of that time, instead of returning to Ripton, a letter had come from him
with the postmark of a Western State, where he had fled with a classmate
who owned ranch. Evidently the worldly consideration to be derived from
conformity counted little with Austen Vane. Money was a medium only--not
an end. He was in the saddle all day, with nothing but the horizon to
limit him; he loved his father, and did not doubt his father's love for
him, and he loved Euphrasia. He could support himself, but he must see
life. The succeeding years brought letters and quaint, useless presents
to both the occupants of the lonely house,--Navajo blankets and Indian
jeweler and basket-work,--and Austen little knew how carefully these
were packed away and surreptitiously gazed at from time to time. But to
Hilary the Western career was a disgrace, and such meagre reports of
it as came from other sources than Austen tended only to confirm him in
this opinion.

It was commonly said of Mr. Paul Pardriff that not a newspaper fell from
the press that he did not have a knowledge of its contents. Certain
it was that Mr. Pardriff made a specialty of many kinds of knowledge,
political and otherwise, and, the information he could give--if he
chose--about State and national affairs was of a recondite and cynical
nature that made one wish to forget about the American flag. Mr.
Pardriff was under forty, and with these gifts many innocent citizens of
Ripton naturally wondered why the columns of his newspaper, the Ripton
Record, did not more closely resemble the spiciness of his talk in the
office of Gales' Hotel. The columns contained, instead, such efforts as
essays on a national flower and the abnormal size of the hats of certain
great men, notably Andrew Jackson; yes, and the gold standard; and in
times of political stress they were devoted to a somewhat fulsome praise
of regular and orthodox Republican candidates,--and praise of any one
was not in character with the editor. Ill-natured people said that the
matter in his paper might possibly be accounted for by the gratitude
of the candidates, and the fact that Mr. Pardriff and his wife and his
maid-servant and his hired man travelled on pink mileage books, which
could only be had for love--not money. On the other hand, reputable
witnesses had had it often from Mr. Pardriff that he was a reformer, and
not at all in sympathy with certain practices which undoubtedly existed.

Some years before--to be exact, the year Austen Vane left the law
school--Mr. Pardriff had proposed to exchange the Ripton Record with
the editor of the Pepper County Plainsman in afar Western State. The
exchange was effected, and Mr. Pardriff glanced over the Plainsman
regularly once a week, though I doubt whether the Western editor ever
read the Record after the first copy. One day in June Mr. Pardriff was
seated in his sanctum above Merrill's drug store when his keen green
eyes fell upon the following:--“The Plainsman considers it safe to say
that the sympathy of the people of Pepper County at large is with Mr.
Austen Vane, whose personal difficulty with Jim Blodgett resulted
so disastrously for Mr. Blodgett. The latter gentleman has long made
himself obnoxious to local ranch owners by his persistent disregard
of property lines and property, and it will be recalled that he is at
present in hot water with the energetic Secretary of the Interior for
fencing government lands. Vane, who was recently made manager of Ready
Money Ranch, is one of the most popular young men in the county. He was
unwillingly assisted over the State line by his friends. Although he has
never been a citizen of the State, the Plainsman trusts that he may soon
be back and become one of us. At last report Mr. Blodgett was resting
easily.”

This article obtained circulation in Ripton, although it was not copied
into the Record out of deference to the feelings of the Honourable
Hilary Vane. In addition to the personal regard Mr. Pardriff professed
to have for the Honourable Hilary, it maybe well to remember that
Austen's father was, among other, things, chairman of the State
Committee. Mr. Tredway (largest railroad stockholder in Ripton) pursed
his lips that were already pursed. Tom Gaylord roared with laughter. Two
or three days later the Honourable Hilary, still in blissful ignorance,
received a letter that agitated him sorely.

“DEAR FATHER: I hope you don't object to receiving a little visit from a
prodigal, wayward son. To tell the truth, I have found it convenient
to leave the Ready Money Ranch for a while, although Bob Tyner is good
enough to say I may have the place when I come back. You know I often
think of you and Phrasie back in Ripton, and I long to see the dear old
town again. Expect me when you see me.

“Your aff. son,

“AUSTEN.”




CHAPTER II. ON THE TREATMENT OF PRODIGALS

While Euphrasia, in a frenzy of anticipation, garnished and swept the
room which held for her so many memories of Austen's boyhood, even
beating the carpet with her own hands, Hilary Vane went about his
business with no apparent lack of diligence. But he was meditating. He
had many times listened to the Reverend Mr. Weightman read the parable
from the pulpit, but he had never reflected how it would be to be the
father of a real prodigal. What was to be done about the calf? Was there
to be a calf, or was there not? To tell the truth, Hilary wanted a calf,
and yet to have one (in spite of Holy Writ) would seem to set a premium
on disobedience and riotous living.

Again, Austen had reached thirty, an age when it was not likely he would
settle down and live an orderly and godly life among civilized beings,
and therefore a fatted calf was likely to be the first of many follies
which he (Hilary) would live to regret. No, he would deal with justice.
How he dealt will be seen presently, but when he finally reached this
conclusion, the clipping from the Pepper County Plainsman had not yet
come before his eyes.

It is worth relating how the clipping did come before his eyes, for no
one in Ripton had the temerity to speak of it. Primarily, it was because
Miss Victoria Flint had lost a terrier, and secondarily, because she
was a person of strong likes and dislikes. In pursuit of the terrier she
drove madly through Leith, which, as everybody knows, is a famous colony
of rich summer residents. Victoria probably stopped at every house
in Leith, and searched them with characteristic vigour and lack of
ceremony, sometimes entering by the side door, and sometimes by the
front, and caring very little whether the owners were at home or not.
Mr. Humphrey Crewe discovered her in a boa-stall at Wedderburn,--as his
place was called,--for it made little difference to Victoria that Mr.
Crewe was a bachelor of marriageable age and millions. Full, as ever, of
practical suggestions, Mr. Crewe proposed to telephone to Ripton and put
an advertisement in the Record, which--as he happened to know--went to
press the next day. Victoria would not trust to the telephone, whereupon
Mr. Crewe offered to drive down with her.

“You'd bore me, Humphrey,” said she, as she climbed into her runabout
with the father and grandfather of the absentee. Mr. Crewe laughed as
she drove away. He had a chemical quality of turning invidious remarks
into compliments, and he took this one as Victoria's manner of saying
that she did not wish to disturb so important a man.

Arriving in the hot main street of Ripton, her sharp eyes descried the
Record sign over the drug store, and in an astonishingly short time she
was in the empty office. Mr. Pardriff was at dinner. She sat down in the
editorial chair and read a great deal of uninteresting matter, but at
last found something on the floor (where the wind had blown it) which
made her laugh. It was the account of Austen Vane's difficulty with Mr.
Blodgett. Victoria did not know Austen, but she knew that the Honourable
Hilary had a son of that name who had gone West, and this was what
tickled her. She thrust the clipping in the pocket of her linen coat
just as Mr. Pardriff came in.

Her conversation with the editor of the Record proved so entertaining
that she forgot all about the clipping until she had reached Fairview,
and had satisfied a somewhat imperious appetite by a combination of
lunch and afternoon tea. Fairview was the “summer place” of Mr. Augustus
P. Flint, her father, on a shelf of the hills in the town of Tunbridge,
equidistant from Leith and Ripton: and Mr. Flint was the president of
the Imperial Railroad, no less.

Yes, he had once been plain Gus Flint, many years ago, when he used to
fetch the pocket-handkerchiefs of Mr. Isaac D. Worthington of Brampton,
and he was still “Gus” to his friends. Mr. Flint's had been the
brain which had largely conceived and executed the consolidation of
principalities of which the Imperial Railroad was the result and, as
surely as tough metal prevails, Mr. Flint, after many other trials and
errors of weaker stuff, had been elected to the place for which he was
so supremely fitted. We are so used in America to these tremendous
rises that a paragraph will suffice to place Mr. Flint in his Aladdin's
palace. To do him justice, he cared not a fig for the palace, and he
would have been content with the farmhouse under the hill where his
gardener lived. You could not fool Mr. Flint on a horse or a farm, and
he knew to a dot what a railroad was worth by travelling over it. Like
his governor-general and dependent, Mr. Hilary Vane, he had married a
wife who had upset all his calculations. The lady discovered Mr.
Flint's balance in the bank, and had proceeded to use it for her own
glorification, and the irony of it all was that he could defend it from
everybody else. Mrs. Flint spent, and Mr. Flint paid the bills; for the
first ten years protestingly, and after that he gave it up and let her
go her own gait.

She had come from the town of Sharon, in another State, through which
Mr. Flint's railroad also ran, and she had been known as the Rose
of that place. She had begun to rise immediately, with the kite-like
adaptability of the American woman for high altitudes, and the leaden
weight of the husband at the end of the tail was as nothing to her. She
had begun it all by the study of people in hotels while Mr. Flint was
closeted with officials and directors. By dint of minute observation and
reasoning powers and unflagging determination she passed rapidly through
several strata, and had made a country place out of her husband's farm
in Tunbridge, so happily and conveniently situated near Leith. In winter
they lived on Fifth Avenue.

One daughter alone had halted, for a minute period, this progress,
and this daughter was Victoria--named by her mother. Victoria was now
twenty-one, and was not only of another generation, but might almost
have been judged of another race than her parents. The things for which
her mother had striven she took for granted, and thought of them not at
all, and she had by nature that simplicity and astonishing frankness of
manner and speech which was once believed to be an exclusive privilege
of duchesses.

To return to Fairview. Victoria, after sharing her five o'clock luncheon
with her dogs, went to seek her father, for the purpose (if it must
be told) of asking him for a cheque. Mr. Flint was at Fairview on the
average of two days out of the week during the summer, and then he was
nearly always closeted with a secretary and two stenographers and a
long-distance telephone in two plain little rooms at the back of the
house. And Mr. Hilary Vane was often in consultation with him, as he was
on the present occasion when Victoria flung open the door. At sight of
Mr. Vane she halted suddenly on the threshold, and a gleam of mischief
came into her eye as she thrust her hand into her coat pocket. The two
regarded her with the detached air of men whose thread of thought has
been broken.

“Well, Victoria,” said her father, kindly if resignedly, “what is it
now?”

“Money,” replied Victoria, promptly; “I went to Avalon this morning and
bought that horse you said I might have.”

“What horse?” asked Mr. Flint, vaguely. “But never mind. Tell Mr.
Freeman to make out the cheque.”

Mr. Vane glanced at Mr. Flint, and his eyes twinkled. Victoria, who
had long ago discovered the secret of the Honey Dew, knew that he was
rolling it under his tongue and thinking her father a fool for his
indulgence.

“How do you do, Mr. Vane?” she said; “Austen's coming home, isn't he?”
 She had got this by feminine arts out of Mr. Paul Pardriff, to whom she
had not confided the fact of her possession of the clipping.

The Honourable Hilary gave a grunt, as he always did when he was
surprised and displeased, as though some one had prodded him with a
stick in a sensitive spot.

“Your son? Why, Vane, you never told me that,” said Mr. Flint. “I didn't
know that you knew him, Victoria.”

“I don't,” answered Victoria, “but I'd like to. What did he do to Mr.
Blodgett?” she demanded of Hilary.

“Mr. Blodgett!” exclaimed that gentleman. “I never heard of him. What's
happened to him?”

“He will probably recover,” she assured him.

The Honourable Hilary, trying in vain to suppress his agitation, rose to
his feet.

“I don't know what you're talking about, Victoria,” he said, but his
glance was fixed on the clipping in her hand.

“Haven't you seen it?” she asked, giving it to him.

He read it in silence, groaned, and handed it to Mr. Flint, who had been
drumming on the table and glancing at Victoria with vague disapproval.
Mr. Flint read it and gave it back to the Honourable Hilary, who groaned
again and looked out of the window.

“Why do you feel badly about it?” asked Victoria. “I'd be proud of him,
if I were you.”

“Proud of him” echoed Mr. Vane, grimly. “Proud of him!”

“Victoria, what do you mean?” said Mr. Flint.

“Why not?” said Victoria. “He's done nothing to make you ashamed.
According to that clipping, he's punished a man who richly deserved to
be punished, and he has the sympathy of an entire county.”

Hilary Vane was not a man to discuss his domestic affliction with
anybody, so he merely grunted and gazed persistently out of the window,
and was not aware of the fact that Victoria made a little face at him as
she left the room. The young are not always impartial judges of the old,
and Victoria had never forgiven him for carrying to her father the news
of an escapade of hers in Ripton.

As he drove through the silent forest roads on his way homeward
that afternoon, the Honourable Hilary revolved the new and intensely
disagreeable fact in his mind as to how he should treat a prodigal
who had attempted manslaughter and was a fugitive from justice. In the
meantime a tall and spare young man of a red-bronze colour alighted
from the five o'clock express at Ripton and grinned delightedly at the
gentlemen who made the station their headquarters about train time.
They were privately disappointed that the gray felt hat, although
broad-brimmed, was not a sombrero, and the respectable, loose-fitting
suit of clothes was not of buckskin with tassels on the trousers; and
likewise that he came without the cartridge belt and holster which they
had pictured in anticipatory sessions on the baggage-trucks. There could
be no doubt of the warmth of their greeting as they sidled up and
seized a hand somewhat larger than theirs, but the welcome had in it
an ingredient of awe that puzzled the newcomer, who did not hesitate to
inquire:--“What's the matter, Ed? Why so ceremonious, Perley?”

But his eagerness did not permit him to wait for explanations. Grasping
his bag, the only baggage he possessed, he started off at a swinging
stride for Hanover Street, pausing only to shake the hands of the few
who recognized him, unconscious of the wild-fire at his back. Hanover
Street was empty that drowsy summer afternoon, and he stopped under
the well-remembered maples before the house and gazed at it long and
tenderly; even at the windows of that room--open now for the first time
in years--where he had served so many sentences of imprisonment. Then he
went cautiously around by the side and looked in at the kitchen door.
To other eyes than his Euphrasia might not have seemed a safe person to
embrace, but in a moment he had her locked in his arms and weeping. She
knew nothing as yet of Mr. Blodgett's misfortunes, but if Austen
Vane had depopulated a county it would have made no difference in her
affection.

“My, but you're a man,” exclaimed Euphrasia, backing away at last and
staring at him with the only complete approval she had ever accorded to
any human being save one.

“What did you expect, Phrasie?”

“Come, and I'll show you your room,” she said, in a gutter she could not
hide; “it's got all the same pictures in, your mother's pictures, and
the chair you broke that time when Hilary locked you in. It's mended.”

“Hold on, Phrasie,” said Austen, seizing her by the apron-strings, “how
about the Judge?” It was by this title he usually designated his father.

“What about him?” demanded Euphrasia, sharply.

“Well, it's his house, for one thing,” answered Austen, “and he may
prefer to have that room--empty.”

“Empty! Turn you out? I'd like to see him,” cried Euphrasia. “It
wouldn't take me long to leave him high and dry.”

She paused at the sound of wheels, and there was the Honourable Hilary,
across the garden patch, in the act of slipping out of his buggy at the
stable door. In the absence of Luke, the hired man, the chief counsel
for the railroad was wont to put up the horse himself, and he already
had the reins festooned from the bit rings when he felt a heavy, hand on
his shoulder and heard a voice say:--“How are you, Judge?”

If the truth be told, that voice and that touch threw the Honourable
Hilary's heart out of beat. Many days he had been schooling himself
for this occasion: this very afternoon he had determined his course of
action, which emphatically did not include a fatted calf. And now surged
up a dryad-like memory which had troubled him many a wakeful night, of
startled, appealing eyes that sought his in vain, and of the son she had
left him flinging himself into his arms in the face of chastisement. For
the moment Hilary Vane, under this traitorous influence, was unable to
speak. But he let the hand rest on his shoulder, and at length was
able to pronounce, in a shamefully shaky voice, the name of his son.
Whereupon Austen seized him by the other shoulder and turned him round
and looked into his face.

“The same old Judge,” he said.

But Hilary was startled, even as Euphrasia had been. Was this strange,
bronzed, quietly humorous young man his son? Hilary even had to raise
his eyes a little; he had forgotten how tall Austen was. Strange
emotions, unbidden and unwelcome, ran riot in his breast; and Hilary
Vane, who made no slips before legislative committees or supreme courts,
actually found himself saying:--“Euphrasia's got your room ready.”

“It's good of you to take me in, Judge,” said Austen, patting his
shoulder. And then he began, quite naturally to unbuckle the breechings
and loose the traces, which he did with such deftness and celerity that
he had the horse unharnessed and in the stall in a twinkling, and had
hauled the buggy through the stable door, the Honourable Hilary watching
him the while. He was troubled, but for the life of him could find no
adequate words, who usually had the dictionary at his disposal.

“Didn't write me why you came home,” said the Honourable Hilary, as his
son washed his hands at the spigot.

“Didn't I? Well, the truth was I wanted to see you again, Judge.”

His father grunted, not with absolute displeasure, but suspiciously.

“How about Blodgett?” he asked.

“Blodgett? Have you heard about that? Who told you?”

“Never mind. You didn't. Nothing in your letter about it.”

“It wasn't worth mentioning,” replied Austen. “Tyner and the boys liked
it pretty well, but I didn't think you'd be interested. It was a local
affair.”

“Not interested! Not worth mentioning!” exclaimed the Honourable
Hilary, outraged to discover that his son was modestly deprecating an
achievement instead of defending a crime. “Godfrey! murder ain't worth
mentioning, I presume.”

“Not when it isn't successful,” said Austen. “If Blodgett had succeeded,
I guess you'd have heard of it before you did.”

“Do you mean to say this Blodgett tried to kill you?” demanded the
Honourable Hilary.

“Yes,” said his son, “and I've never understood why he didn't. He's a
good deal better shot than I am.”

The Honourable Hilary grunted, and sat down on a bucket and carefully
prepared a piece of Honey Dew. He was surprised and agitated.

“Then why are you a fugitive from justice if you were acting in
self-defence?” he inquired.

“Well, you see there were no witnesses, except a Mexican of Blodgett's,
and Blodgett runs the Pepper County machine for the railroad out there.
I'd been wanting to come East and have a look at you for some time, and
I thought I might as well come now.”

“How did this--this affair start?” asked Mr. Vane.

“Blodgett was driving in some of Tyner's calves, and I caught him. I
told him what I thought of him, and he shot at me through his pocket.
That was all.”

“All! You shot him, didn't you?”

“I was lucky enough to hit him first,” said Austen.

Extraordinary as it may seem, the Honourable Hilary experienced a sense
of pride.

“Where did you hit him?” he asked.

It was Euphrasia who took matters in her own hands and killed the fatted
calf, and the meal to which they presently sat down was very different
from the frugal suppers Mr. Vane usually had. But he made no comment.
It is perhaps not too much to say that he would have been distinctly
disappointed had it been otherwise. There was Austen's favourite pie,
and Austen's favourite cake, all inherited from the Austens, who had
thought more of the fleshpots than people should. And the prodigal did
full justice to the occasion.




CHAPTER III. CONCERNING THE PRACTICE OF LAW

So instinctively do we hark back to the primeval man that there was a
tendency to lionize the prodigal in Ripton, which proves the finished
civilization of the East not to be so far removed from that land of
outlaws, Pepper County. Mr. Paul Pardriff, who had a guilty conscience
about the clipping, and vividly bearing in mind Mr. Blodgett's mishap,
alone avoided young Mr. Vane; and escaped through the type-setting room
and down an outside stairway in the rear when that gentleman called.
It gave an ironical turn to the incident that Mr. Pardriff was at the
moment engaged in a “Welcome Home” paragraph meant to be propitiatory.

Austen cared very little for lionizing. He spent most of his time with
young Tom Gaylord, now his father's right-hand man in a tremendous
lumber business. And Tom, albeit he had become so important, habitually
fell once more under the domination of the hero of his youthful days.
Together these two visited haunts of their boyhood, camping and fishing
and scaling mountains, Tom with an eye to lumbering prospects the while.

After a matter of two or three months bad passed away in this pleasant
though unprofitable manner, the Honourable Hilary requested the presence
of his son one morning at his office. This office was in what had once
been a large residence, and from its ample windows you could look out
through the elms on to the square. Old-fashioned bookcases lined with
musty books filled the walls, except where a steel engraving of a legal
light or a railroad map of the State was hung, and the Honourable Hilary
sat in a Windsor chair at a mahogany table in the middle.

The anteroom next door, where the clerks sat, was also a waiting-room
for various individuals from the different parts of the State who
continually sought the counsel's presence.

“Haven't seen much of you since you've be'n home, Austen,” his father
remarked as an opening.

“Your--legal business compels you to travel a great deal,” answered
Austen, turning from the window and smiling.

“Somewhat,” said the Honourable Hilary, on whom this pleasantry was not
lost. “You've be'n travelling on the lumber business, I take it.”

“I know more about it than I did,” his son admitted.

The Honourable Hilary grunted.

“Caught a good many fish, haven't you?”

Austen crossed the room and sat on the edge of the desk beside his
father's chair.

“See here, Judge,” he said, “what are you driving at? Out with it.”

“When are you--going back West?” asked Mr. Vane.

Austen did not answer at once, but looked down into his father's
inscrutable face.

“Do you want to get rid of me?” he said.

“Sowed enough wild oats, haven't you?” inquired the father.

“I've sowed a good many,” Austen admitted.

“Why not settle down?”

“I haven't yet met the lady, Judge,” replied his son.

“Couldn't support her if you had,” said Mr. Vane.

“Then it's fortunate,” said Austen, resolved not to be the necessary
second in a quarrel. He knew his father, and perceived that these
preliminary and caustic openings of his were really olive branches.

“Sometimes I think you might as well be in that outlandish country, for
all I see of you,” said the Honourable Hilary.

“You ought to retire from business and try fishing,” his son suggested.

The Honourable Hilary sometimes smiled.

“You've got a good brain, Austen, and what's the use of wasting it
chasing cattle and practising with a pistol on your fellow-beings? You
won't have much trouble in getting admitted to the bar. Come into the
office.”

Austen did not answer at once. He suspected that it had cost his father
not a little to make these advances.

“Do you believe you and I could get along, Judge? How long do you think
it would last?”

“I've considered that some,” answered the Honourable Hilary, “but I
won't last a great while longer myself.”

“You're as sound as a bronco,” declared Austen, patting him.

“I never was what you might call dissipated,” agreed Mr. Vane, “but men
don't go on forever. I've worked hard all my life, and got where I am,
and I've always thought I'd like to hand it on to you. It's a position
of honour and trust, Austen, and one of which any lawyer might be
proud.”

“My ambition hasn't run in exactly that channel,” said his son.

“Didn't know as you had any precise ambition,” responded the Honourable
Hilary, “but I never heard of a man refusing to be chief counsel for a
great railroad. I don't say you can be, mind, but I say with work and
brains it's as easy for the son of Hilary Vane as for anybody else.”

“I don't know much about the duties of such a position,” said Austen,
laughing, “but at all events I shall have time to make up my mind how
to answer Mr. Flint when he comes to me with the proposal. To speak
frankly, Judge, I hadn't thought of spending the whole of what might
otherwise prove a brilliant life in Ripton.”

The Honourable Hilary smiled again, and then he grunted.

“I tell you what I'll do,” he said; “you come in with me and agree to
stay five years. If you've done well for yourself, and want to go to New
York or some large place at the end of that time, I won't hinder you.
But I feel it my duty to say, if you don't accept my offer, no son
of mine shall inherit what I've laid up by hard labour. It's against
American doctrine, and it's against my principles. You can go back to
Pepper County and get put in jail, but you can't say I haven't warned
you fairly.”

“You ought to leave your fortune to the railroad, Judge,” said Austen.
“Generations to come would bless your name if you put up a new station
in Ripton and built bridges over Bunker Hill grade crossing and the
other one on Heath Street where Nic Adams was killed last month. I
shouldn't begrudge a cent of the money.”

“I suppose I was a fool to talk to you,” said the Honourable Hilary,
getting up.

But his son pushed him down again into the Windsor chair.

“Hold on, Judge,” he said, “that was just my way of saying if I accepted
your offer, it wouldn't be because I yearned after the money. Thinking
of it has never kept me awake nights. Now if you'll allow me to take a
few days once in a while to let off steam, I'll make a counter proposal,
in the nature of a compromise.”

“What's that?” the Honourable Hilary demanded suspiciously.

“Provided I get admitted to the bar I will take a room in another part
of this building and pick up what crumbs of practice I can by myself. Of
course, sir, I realize that these, if they come at all, will be owing
to the lustre of your name. But I should, before I become Mr. Flint's
right-hand man, like to learn to walk with my own legs.”

The speech pleased the Honourable Hilary, and he put out his hand.

“It's a bargain, Austen,” he said.

“I don't mind telling you now, Judge, that when I left the West I left
it for good, provided you and I could live within a decent proximity.
And I ought to add that I always intended going into the law after I'd
had a fling. It isn't fair to leave you with the impression that this
is a sudden determination. Prodigals don't become good as quick as all
that.”

Ripton caught its breath a second time the day Austen hired a law
office, nor did the surprise wholly cease when, in one season, he was
admitted to the bar, for the proceeding was not in keeping with the
habits and customs of prodigals. Needless to say, the practice did not
immediately begin to pour in, but the little office rarely lacked
a visitor, and sometimes had as many as five or six. There was an
irresistible attraction about that room, and apparently very little law
read there, though sometimes its occupant arose and pushed the visitors
into the hall and locked the door, and opened the window at the top to
let the smoke out. Many of the Honourable Hilary's callers preferred the
little room in the far corridor to the great man's own office.

These visitors of the elder Mr. Vane's, as has been before hinted, were
not all clients. Without burdening the reader too early with a treatise
on the fabric of a system, suffice it to say that something was
continually going on that was not law; and gentlemen came and went--fat
and thin, sharp-eyed and red-faced--who were neither clients nor
lawyers. These were really secretive gentlemen, though most of them
had a hail-fellow-well-met manner and a hearty greeting, but when they
talked to the Honourable Hilary it was with doors shut, and even then
they sat very close to his ear. Many of them preferred now to wait in
Austen's office instead of the anteroom, and some of them were not so
cautious with the son of Hilary Vane that they did not let drop
certain observations to set him thinking. He had a fanciful if somewhat
facetious way of calling them by feudal titles which made them grin.

“How is the Duke of Putnam this morning?” he would ask of the
gentleman of whom the Ripton Record would frequently make the following
announcement: “Among the prominent residents of Putnam County in town
this week was the Honourable Brush Bascom.”

The Honourable Brush and many of his associates, barons and earls,
albeit the shrewdest of men, did not know exactly how to take the son
of Hilary Vane. This was true also of the Honourable Hilary himself, who
did not wholly appreciate the humour in Austen's parallel of the
feudal system. Although Austen had set up for himself, there were many
ways--not legal--in which the son might have been helpful to the father,
but the Honourable Hilary hesitated, for some unformulated reason, to
make use of him; and the consequence was that Mr. Hamilton Tooting and
other young men of a hustling nature in the Honourable Hilary's office
found that Austen's advent did not tend greatly to lighten a certain
class of their labours. In fact, father and son were not much nearer in
spirit than when ode had been in Pepper County and the other in Ripton.
Caution and an instinct which senses obstacles are characteristics of
gentlemen in Mr. Vane's business.

So two years passed,--years liberally interspersed with expeditions
into the mountains and elsewhere, and nights spent in the company of
Tom Gaylord and others. During this period Austen was more than once
assailed by the temptation to return to the free life of Pepper
County, Mr. Blodgett having completely recovered now, and only desiring
vengeance of a corporal nature. But a bargain was a bargain, and Austen
Vane stuck to his end of it, although he had now begun to realize many
aspects of a situation which he had not before suspected. He had long
foreseen, however, that the time was coming when a serious disagreement
with his father was inevitable. In addition to the difference in
temperament, Hilary Vane belonged to one generation and Austen to
another.

It happened, as do so many incidents which tend to shape a life, by
a seeming chance. It was a Tune evening, and there had been a church
sociable and basket picnic during the day in a grove in the town of
Mercer, some ten miles south of Ripton. The grove was bounded on one
side by the railroad track, and merged into a thick clump of second
growth and alders where there was a diagonal grade crossing. The picnic
was over and the people preparing to go home when they were startled by
a crash, followed by the screaming of brakes as a big engine flew past
the grove and brought a heavy train to a halt some distance down the
grade. The women shrieked and dropped the dishes they were washing,
and the men left their horses standing and ran to the crossing and then
stood for the moment helpless, in horror at the scene which met their
eyes. The wagon of one--of their own congregation was in splinters, a
man (a farmer of the neighbourhood) lying among the alders with what
seemed a mortal injury. Amid the lamentations and cries for some one
to go to Mercer Village for the doctor a young man drove up rapidly and
sprang out of a buggy, trusting to some one to catch his horse, pushed,
through the ring of people, and bent over the wounded farmer. In an
instant he had whipped out a knife, cut a stick from one of the alders,
knotted his handkerchief around the man's leg, ran the stick through the
knot, and twisted the handkerchief until the blood ceased to flow. They
watched him, paralyzed, as the helpless in this world watch the capable,
and before he had finished his task the train crew and some passengers
began to arrive.

“Have you a doctor aboard, Charley?” the young man asked.

“No,” answered the conductor, who had been addressed; “my God, not one,
Austen.”

“Back up your train,” said Austen, “and stop your baggage car here. And
go to the grove,” he added to one of the picnickers, “and bring four or
five carriage cushions. And you hold this.”

The man beside him took the tourniquet, as he was bid. Austen Vane drew
a note-book from his pocket.

“I want this man's name and address,” he said, “and the names and
addresses of every person here, quickly.”

He did not lift his voice, but the man who had taken charge of such
a situation was not to be denied. They obeyed him, some eagerly, some
reluctantly, and by that time the train had backed down and the cushions
had arrived. They laid these on the floor of the baggage car and
lifted the man on to them. His name was Zeb Meader, and he was still
insensible. Austen Vane, with a peculiar set look upon his face, sat
beside him all the way into Ripton. He spoke only once, and that was to
tell the conductor to telegraph from Avalon to have the ambulance from
St. Mary's Hospital meet the train at Ripton.

The next day Hilary Vane, returning from one of his periodical trips to
the northern part of the State, invaded his son's office.

“What's this they tell me about your saving a man's life?” he asked,
sinking into one of the vacant chairs and regarding Austen with his
twinkling eyes.

“I don't know what they tell you,” Austen answered. “I didn't do
anything but get a tourniquet on his leg and have him put on the train.”

The Honourable Hilary grunted, and continued to regard his son. Then he
cut a piece of Honey Dew.

“Looks bad, does it?” he said.

“Well,” replied Austen, “it might have been done better. It was bungled.
In a death-trap as cleverly conceived as that crossing, with a down
grade approaching it, they ought to have got the horse too.”

The Honourable Hilary grunted again, and inserted the Honey Dew. He
resolved to ignore the palpable challenge in this remark, which was in
keeping with this new and serious mien in Austen.

“Get the names of witnesses?” was his next question.

“I took particular pains to do so.”

“Hand 'em over to Tooting. What kind of man is this Meagre?”

“He is rather meagre now,” said Austen, smiling a little. “His name's
Meader.”

“Is he likely to make a fuss?”

“I think he is,” said Austen.

“Well,” said the Honourable Hilary, “we must have Ham Tooting hurry
'round and fix it up with him as soon as he can talk, before one of
these cormorant lawyers gets his claw in him.”

Austen said nothing, and after some desultory conversation, in which
he knew how to indulge when he wished to conceal the fact that he was
baffled, the Honourable Hilary departed. That student of human nature,
Mr. Hamilton Tooting, a young man of a sporting appearance and a
free vocabulary, made the next attempt. It is a characteristic of Mr.
Tooting's kind that, in their efforts to be genial, they often use an
awkward diminutive of their friends' names.

“Hello, Aust,” said Mr. Tooting, “I dropped in to get those witnesses in
that Meagre accident, before I forget it.”

“I think I'll keep 'em,” said Austen, making a note out of the Revised
Statutes.

“Oh, all right, all right,” said Mr. Tooting, biting off a piece of his
cigar. “Going to handle the case yourself, are you?”

“I may.”

“I'm just as glad to have some of 'em off my hands, and this looks to me
like a nasty one. I don't like those Mercer people. The last farmer they
ran over there raised hell.”

“I shouldn't blame this one if he did, if he ever gets well enough,”
 said Austen. Young Mr. Tooting paused with a lighted match halfway to
his cigar and looked at Austen shrewdly, and then sat down on the desk
very close to him.

“Say, Aust, it sometimes sickens a man to have to buy these fellows off.
What? Poor devils, they don't get anything like what they ought to get,
do they? Wait till you see how the Railroad Commission'll whitewash that
case. It makes a man want to be independent. What?”

“This sounds like virtue, Ham.”

“I've often thought, too,” said Mr. Tooting, “that a man could make more
money if he didn't wear the collar.”

“But not sleep as well, perhaps,” said Austen.

“Say, Aust, you're not on the level with me.”

“I hope to reach that exalted plane some day, Ham.”

“What's got into you?” demanded the usually clear-headed Mr. Tooting,
now a little bewildered.

“Nothing, yet,” said Austen, “but I'm thinking seriously of having a
sandwich and a piece of apple pie. Will you come along?”

They crossed the square together, Mr. Tooting racking a normally fertile
brain for some excuse to reopen the subject. Despairing of that, he
decided that any subject would do.

“That Humphrey Crewe up at Leith is smart--smart as paint,” he remarked.
“Do you know him?”

“I've seen him,” said Austen. “He's a young man, isn't he?”

“And natty. He knows a thing or two for a millionaire that don't have to
work, and he runs that place of his right up to the handle. You ought
to hear him talk about the tariff, and national politics. I was passing
there the other day, and he was walking around among the flowerbeds.
'Ain't your name Tooting?' he hollered. I almost fell out of the buggy.”

“What did he want?” asked Austen, curiously. Mr. Tooting winked.

“Say, those millionaires are queer, and no mistake. You'd think a
fellow that only had to cut coupons wouldn't be lookin' for another job,
wouldn't you? He made me hitch my horse, and had me into his study, as
he called it, and gave me a big glass of whiskey and soda. A fellow with
buttons and a striped vest brought it on tiptoe. Then this Crewe gave
me a long yellow cigar with a band on it and told me what the State
needed,--macadam roads, farmers' institutes, forests, and God knows
what. I told him all he had to do was to get permission from old man
Flint, and he could have 'em.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He said Flint was an intimate friend of his. Then he asked me a whole
raft of questions about fellows in the neighbourhood I didn't know he'd
ever heard of. Say, he wants to go from Leith to the Legislature.”

“He can go for all I care,” said Austen, as he pushed open the door of
the restaurant.

For a few days Mr. Meader hung between life and death. But he came of
a stock which had for generations thrust its roots into the crevices of
granite, and was not easily killed by steam-engines. Austen Vane called
twice, and then made an arrangement with young Dr. Tredway (one of the
numerous Ripton Tredways whose money had founded the hospital) that he
was to see Mr. Meader as soon as he was able to sustain a conversation.
Dr. Tredway, by the way, was a bachelor, and had been Austen's companion
on many a boisterous expedition.

When Austen, in response to the doctor's telephone message, stood over
the iron bed in the spick-and-span men's ward of St. Mary's, a wave of
that intense feeling he had experienced at the accident swept over him.
The farmer's beard was overgrown, and the eyes looked up at him as from
caverns of suffering below the bandage. They were shrewd eyes, however,
and proved that Mr. Meader had possession of the five senses--nay, of
the six. Austen sat down beside the bed.

“Dr. Tredway tells me you are getting along finely,” he said.

“No thanks to the railrud,” answered Mr. Meader; “they done their best.”

“Did you hear any whistle or any bell?” Austen asked.

“Not a sound,” said Mr. Meader; “they even shut off their steam on that
grade.”

Austen Vane, like most men who are really capable of a deep sympathy,
was not an adept at expressing it verbally. Moreover, he knew enough of
his fellow-men to realize that a Puritan farmer would be suspicious of
sympathy. The man had been near to death himself, was compelled to spend
part of the summer, his bread-earning season, in a hospital, and yet no
appeal or word of complaint had crossed his lips.

“Mr. Meader,” said Austen, “I came over here to tell you that in my
opinion you are entitled to heavy damages from the railroad, and to
advise you not to accept a compromise. They will send some one to
you and offer you a sum far below that which you ought in justice to
receive, You ought to fight this case.”

“How am I going to pay a lawyer, with a mortgage on my farm?” demanded
Mr. Meader.

“I'm a lawyer,” said Austen, “and if you'll take me, I'll defend you
without charge.”

“Ain't you the son of Hilary Vane?”

“Yes.”

“I've heard of him a good many times,” said Mr. Meader, as if to ask
what man had not. “You're railroad, ain't ye?”

Mr. Meader gazed long and thoughtfully into the young man's face, and
the suspicion gradually faded from the farmer's blue eyes.

“I like your looks,” he said at last. “I guess you saved my life.
I'm--I'm much obliged to you.”

When Mr. Tooting arrived later in the day, he found Mr. Meader
willing to listen, but otherwise strangely non-committal. With native
shrewdness, the farmer asked him what office he came from, but did not
confide in Mr. Tooting the fact that Mr. Vane's son had volunteered to
wring more money from Mr. Vane's client than Mr. Tooting offered him.
Considerably bewildered, that gentleman left the hospital to report the
affair to the Honourable Hilary, who, at intervals during the afternoon,
found himself relapsing into speculation.

Inside of a somewhat unpromising shell, Mr. Zeb Meader was a human
being, and no mean judge of men and motives. As his convalescence
progressed, Austen Vane fell into the habit of dropping in from time
to time to chat with him, and gradually was rewarded by many vivid
character sketches of Mr. Meader's neighbours in Mercer and its
vicinity. One afternoon, when Austen came into the ward, he found at
Mr. Meader's bedside a basket of fruit which looked too expensive and
tempting to have come from any dealer's in Ripton.

“A lady came with that,” Mr. Meader explained. “I never was popular
before I was run over by the cars. She's be'n here twice. When she
fetched it to-day, I kind of thought she was up to some, game, and I
didn't want to take it.”

“Up to some game?” repeated Austen.

“Well, I don't know,” continued Mr. Meader, thoughtfully, “the woman
here tells me she comes regular in the summer time to see sick folks,
but from the way she made up to me I had an idea that she wanted
something. But I don't know. Thought I'd ask you. You see, she's
railrud.”

“Railroad!”

“She's Flint's daughter.”

Austen laughed.

“I shouldn't worry about that,” he said. “If Mr. Flint sent his daughter
with fruit to everybody his railroad injures, she wouldn't have time to
do anything else. I doubt if Mr. Flint ever heard of your case.”

Mr. Meader considered this, and calculated there was something in it.

“She was a nice, common young lady, and cussed if she didn't make me
laugh, she has such a funny way of talkin'. She wanted to know all about
you.”

“What did she want to know?” Austen exclaimed, not unnaturally.

“Well, she wanted to know about the accident, and I told her how you
druv up and screwed that thing around my leg and backed the train down.
She was a good deal took with that.”

“I think you are inclined to make too much of it,” said Austen.

Three days later, as he was about to enter the ward, Mr. Meader being
now the only invalid there, he heard a sound which made him pause in
the doorway. The sound was feminine laughter of a musical quality that
struck pleasantly on Austen's ear. Miss Victoria Flint was sated beside
Mr. Meader's bed, and qualified friendship had evidently been replaced
by intimacy since Austen's last visit, for Mr. Meader was laughing, too.

“And now I'm quite sure you have missed your vocation, Mr. Meader,” said
Victoria. “You would have made a fortune on the stage.”

“Me a play-actor!” exclaimed the invalid. “How much wages do they git?”

“Untold sums,” she declared, “if they can talk like you.”

“He kind of thought that story funny--same as you,” Mr. Meader
ruminated, and glanced up. “Drat me,” he remarked, “if he ain't a-comin'
now! I callated he'd run acrost you sometime.”

Victoria raised her eyes, sparkling with humour, and they met Austen's.

“We was just talkin' about you,” cried Mr. Meader, cordially; “come
right in.” He turned to Victoria. “I want to make you acquainted,” he
said, “with Austen Vane.”

“And won't you tell him who I am, Mr. Meader?” said Victoria.

“Well,” said Mr. Meader, apologetically, “that was stupid of me--wahn't
it? But I callated he'd know. She's the daughter of the railrud
president--the 'one that was askin' about you.”

There was an instant's pause, and the colour stole into Victoria's
cheeks. Then she glanced at Austen and bit her lip-and laughed. Her
laughter was contagious.

“I suppose I shall have to confess that you have inspired my curiosity,
Mr. Vane,” she said.

Austen's face was sunburned, but it flushed a more vivid red under
the tan. It is needless to pretend that a man of his appearance and
qualities had reached the age of thirty-two without having listened to
feminine comments of which he was the exclusive subject. In this
remark of Victoria's, or rather in the manner in which she made it, he
recognized a difference.

“It is a tribute, then, to the histrionic talents of Mr. Meader, of
which you were speaking,” he replied laughingly.

Victoria glanced at him with interest as he looked down at Mr. Meader.

“And how is it to-day, Zeb?” he said.

“It ain't so bad as it might be--with sech folks as her and you
araound,” admitted Mr. Meader. “I'd almost agree to get run over again.
She was askin' about you, and that's a fact, and I didn't slander you,
neither. But I never callated to comprehend wimmen-folks.”

“Now, Mr. Meader,” said Victoria, reprovingly, but there were little
creases about her eyes, “don't be a fraud.”

“It's true as gospel,” declared the invalid; “they always got the better
of me. I had one of 'em after me once, when I was young and prosperin'
some.”

“And yet you have survived triumphant,” she exclaimed.

“There wahn't none of 'em like you,” said Mr. Meader, “or it might have
be'n different.”

Again her eyes irresistibly sought Austen's,--as though to share with
him the humour of this remark,--and they laughed together. Her colour,
so sensitive, rose again, but less perceptibly this time. Then she got
up.

“That's unfair, Mr. Meader!” she protested.

“I'll leave it to Austen,” said Mr. Meader, “if it ain't probable. He'd
ought to know.”

In spite of a somewhat natural embarrassment, Austen could not but
acknowledge to himself that Mr. Meader was right. With a womanly
movement which he thought infinitely graceful, Victoria leaned over the
bed.

“Mr. Meader,” she said, “I'm beginning to think it's dangerous for me to
come here twice a week to see you, if you talk this way. And I'm not a
bit surprised that that woman didn't get the better of you.”

“You hain't a-goin'!” he exclaimed. “Why, I callated--”

“Good-by,” she said quickly; “I'm glad to see that you are doing
so well.” She raised her head and looked at Austen in a curious,
inscrutable way. “Good-by, Mr. Vane,” she said; “I--I hope Mr. Blodgett
has recovered.”

Before he could reply she had vanished, and he was staring at the empty
doorway. The reference to the unfortunate Mr. Blodgett, after taking his
breath away, aroused in him an intense curiosity betraying, as it did,
a certain knowledge of past events in his life in the hitherto unknown
daughter of Augustus interest could she have in him? Such a Flint. What
question, from similar sources, has heightened the pulse of young men
from time immemorial.




CHAPTER IV. “TIMEO DANAOS”

The proverbial little birds that carry news and prophecies through the
air were evidently responsible for an official-looking letter which
Austen received a few mornings later. On the letter-head was printed
“The United Northeastern Railroads,” and Mr. Austen Vane was informed
that, by direction of the president, the enclosed was sent to him in
an entirely complimentary sense. “The enclosed” was a ticket of red
cardboard, and its face informed him that he might travel free for the
rest of the year. Thoughtfully turning it over, he read on the back the
following inscription:--“It is understood that this pass is accepted by
its recipient as a retainer.”

Austen stared at it and whistled. Then he pushed back his chair, with
the pass in his hand, and hesitated. He seized a pen and wrote a few
lines: “Dear sir, I beg to return the annual pass over the Northeastern
Railroads with which you have so kindly honoured me”--when he suddenly
changed his mind again, rose, and made his way through the corridors
to his father's office. The Honourable Hilary was absorbed in his daily
perusal of the Guardian.

“Judge,” he asked, “is Mr. Flint up at his place this week?”

The Honourable Hilary coughed.

“He arrived yesterday on the three. Er--why?”

“I wanted to go up and thank him for this,” his son answered, holding up
the red piece of cardboard. “Mr. Flint is a very thoughtful man.”

The Honourable Hilary tried to look unconcerned, and succeeded.

“Sent you an annual, has he? Er--I don't know as I'd bother him
personally, Austen. Just a pleasant note of acknowledgment.”

“I don't flatter myself that my achievements in the law can be
responsible for it,” said Austen. “The favour must be due to my
relationship with his eminent chief counsel.”

Hilary Vane's keen eyes rested on his son for an instant. Austen was
more than ever an enigma to him.

“I guess relationship hasn't got much to do with business,” he replied.
“You have be'n doing--er--better than I expected.”

“Thank you, Judge,” said Austen, quietly. “I don't mind saying that
I would rather have your approbation than--this more substantial
recognition of merit.”

The Honourable Hilary's business was to deal with men, and by reason of
his ability in so doing he had made a success in life. He could judge
motives more than passably well, and play upon weaknesses. But he left
Austen's presence that morning vaguely uneasy, with a sense of having
received from his own son an initial defeat at a game of which he was
a master. Under the excuse of looking up some precedents, he locked his
doors to all comers for two hours, and paced his room. At one moment he
reproached himself for not having been frank; for not having told Austen
roundly that this squeamishness about a pass was unworthy of a strong
man of affairs; yes, for not having revealed to him the mysteries
of railroad practice from the beginning. But frankness was not an
ingredient of the Honourable Hilary's nature, and Austen was not the
kind of man who would accept a hint and a wink. Hilary Vane had formless
forebodings, and found himself for once in his life powerless to act.

The cost of living in Ripton was not so high that Austen Vane could not
afford to keep a horse and buggy. The horse, which he tended himself,
was appropriately called Pepper; Austen had found him in the hills, and
he was easily the finest animal in Ripton: so good, in fact, that Mr.
Humphrey Crewe (who believed he had an eye for horses) had peremptorily
hailed Austen from a motorcar and demanded the price, as was Mr. Crewe's
wont when he saw a thing he desired. He had been somewhat surprised and
not inconsiderably offended by the brevity and force of the answer which
he had received.

On the afternoon of the summer's day in which Austen had the
conversation with his father just related, Pepper was trotting at a
round clip through the soft and shady wood roads toward the town of
Tunbridge; the word “town” being used in the New England sense, as a
piece of territory about six miles by six. The fact that automobiles
full of laughing people from Leith hummed by occasionally made no
apparent difference to Pepper, who knew only the master hand on the
reins; the reality that the wood roads were climbing great hills the
horse did not seem to feel. Pepper knew every lane and by-path within
twenty miles of Ripton, and exhibited such surprise as a well-bred horse
may when he was slowed down at length and turned into a hard, blue-stone
driveway under a strange granite arch with the word “Fairview” cut in
Gothic letters above it, and two great lamps in wrought-iron brackets
at the sides. It was Austen who made a note of the gratings over the
drains, and of the acres of orderly forest in a mysterious and seemingly
enchanted realm. Intimacy with domains was new to him, and he began
to experience an involuntary feeling of restraint which was new to him
likewise, and made him chafe in spite of himself. The estate seemed to
be the visible semblance of a power which troubled him.

Shortly after passing an avenue neatly labelled “Trade's Drive” the road
wound upwards through a ravine the sides of which were covered with a
dense shrubbery which had the air of having always been there, and yet
somehow looked expensive. At the top of the ravine was a sharp curve;
and Austen, drawing breath, found himself swung, as it were, into space,
looking off across miles of forest-covered lowlands to an ultramarine
mountain in the hazy south,--Sawanec. As if in obedience to a telepathic
command of his master, Pepper stopped.

Drinking his fill of this scene, Austen forgot an errand which was not
only disagreeable, but required some fortitude for its accomplishment.
The son had this in common with the Honourable Hilary--he hated heroics;
and the fact that the thing smacked of heroics was Austen's only
deterrent. And then there was a woman in this paradise! These gradual
insinuations into his revery at length made him turn. A straight avenue
of pear-shaped, fifteen-year-old maples led to the house, a massive
colonial structure of wood that stretched across the shelf; and he
had tightened the reins and started courageously up the avenue when
he perceived that it ended in a circle on which there was no sign of a
hitching-post. And, worse than this, on the balconied, uncovered porch
which he would have to traverse to reach the doorway he saw the sheen
and glimmer of women's gowns grouped about wicker tables, and became
aware that his approach was the sole object of the scrutiny of an
afternoon tea party.

As he reached the circle it was a slight relief to learn that Pepper
was the attraction. No horse knew better than Pepper when he was being
admired, and he arched his neck and lifted his feet and danced in the
sheer exhilaration of it. A smooth-faced, red-cheeked gentleman in
gray flannels leaned over the balustrade and made audible comments in
a penetrating voice which betrayed the fact that he was Mr. Humphrey
Crewe.

“Saw him on the street in Ripton last year. Good hock action, hasn't
he?--that's rare in trotters around here. Tried to buy him. Feller
wouldn't sell. His name's Vane--he's drivin' him now.”

A lady of a somewhat commanding presence was beside him. She was perhaps
five and forty, her iron-gray hair was dressed to perfection, her figure
all that Parisian art could make it, and she was regarding Austen with
extreme deliberation through the glasses which she had raised to a
high-bridged nose.

“Politics is certainly your career, Humphrey,” she remarked, “you have
such a wonderful memory for faces. I don't see how he does it, do you,
Alice?” she demanded of a tall girl beside her, who was evidently her
daughter, but lacked her personality.

“I don't know,” said Alice.

“It's because I've been here longer than anybody else, Mrs. Pomfret,”
 answered Mr. Crewe, not very graciously, “that's all. Hello.” This last
to Austen.

“Hello,” said Austen.

“Who do you want to see?” inquired Mr. Crewe, with the admirable tact
for which he was noted.

Austen looked at him for the first time.

“Anybody who will hold my horse,” he answered quietly.

By this time the conversation had drawn the attention of the others at
the tables, and one or two smiled at Austen's answer. Mrs. Flint, with
a “Who is it?” arose to repel a social intrusion. She was an overdressed
lady, inclining to embonpoint, but traces of the Rose of Sharon were
still visible.

“Why don't you drive 'round to the stables?” suggested Mr. Crewe,
unaware of a smile.

Austen did not answer. He was, in fact, looking towards the doorway,
and the group on the porch were surprised to see a gleam of mirthful
understanding start in his eyes. An answering gleam was in Victoria's,
who had at that moment, by a singular coincidence, come out of the
house. She came directly down the steps and out on the gravel, and held
her hand to him in the buggy, and he flushed with pleasure as he grasped
it.

“How do you do, Mr. Vane?” she said. “I am so glad you have called.
Humphrey, just push the stable button, will you?”

Mr. Crewe obeyed with no very good grace, while the tea-party went back
to their seats. Mrs. Flint supposed he had come to sell Victoria the
horse; while Mrs. Pomfret, who had taken him in from crown to boots,
remarked that he looked very much like a gentleman.

“I came to see your father for a few moments--on business,” Austen
explained.

She lifted her face to his with a second searching look.

“I'll take you to him,” she said.

By this time a nimble groom had appeared from out o a shrubbery path
and seized Pepper's head. Austen alighted and followed Victoria into
a great, cool hallway, and through two darkened rooms, bewilderingly
furnished and laden with the scent of flowers, into a narrow passage
beyond. She led the way simply, not speaking, and her silence seemed to
betoken the completeness of an understanding between them, as of a long
acquaintance.

In a plain white-washed room, behind a plain oaken desk, sat Mr.
Flint--a plain man. Austen thought he would have known him had he seen
him on the street. The other things in the room were letter-files, a
safe, a long-distance telephone, and a thin private secretary with
a bend in his back. Mr. Flint looked up from his desk, and his face,
previously bereft of illumination, lighted when he saw his daughter.
Austen liked that in him.

“Well, Vic, what is it now?” he asked.

“Mr. Austen Vane to see you,” said Victoria, and with a quick glance at
Austen she left him standing on the threshold. Mr. Flint rose. His
eyes were deep-set in a square, hard head, and he appeared to be taking
Austen in without directly looking at him; likewise, one felt that Mr.
Flint's handshake was not an absolute gift of his soul.

“How do you do, Mr. Vane? I don't remember ever to have had the pleasure
of seeing you, although your father and I have been intimately connected
for many years.”

So the president's manner was hearty, but not the substance. It came,
Austen thought, from a rarity of meeting with men on a disinterested
footing; and he could not but wonder how Mr. Flint would treat the
angels in heaven if he ever got there, where there were no franchises
to be had. Would he suspect them of designs upon his hard won harp
and halo? Austen did not dislike Mr. Flint; the man's rise, his
achievements, his affection for his daughter, he remembered. But he was
also well aware that Mr. Flint had thrown upon him the onus of the first
move in a game which the railroad president was used to playing every
day. The dragon was on his home ground and had the choice of weapons.

“I do not wish to bother you long,” said Austen.

“No bother,” answered Mr. Flint, “no bother to make the acquaintance of
the son of my old friend, Hilary Vane. Sit down--sit down. And while I
don't believe any man should depend upon his father to launch him in
the world, yet it must be a great satisfaction to you, Mr. Vane, to have
such a father. Hilary Vane and I have been intimately associated for
many years, and my admiration for him has increased with every year. It
is to men of his type that the prosperity, the greatness, of this nation
is largely due,--conservative, upright, able, content to confine himself
to the difficult work for which he is so eminently fitted, without
spectacular meddling in things in which he can have no concern.
Therefore I welcome the opportunity to know you, sir, for I understand
that you have settled down to follow in his footsteps and that you will
make a name for yourself. I know the independence of young men--I was
young once myself. But after all, Mr. Vane, experience is the great
teacher, and perhaps there is some little advice which an old man can
give you that may be of service. As your father's son, it is always at
your disposal. Have a cigar.”

The thin secretary continued to flit about the room, between the
letter-files and the desk. Austen had found it infinitely easier to
shoot Mr. Blodgett than to engage in a duel with the president of the
United Railroad.

“I smoke a pipe,” he said.

“Too many young men smoke cigars--and those disgusting cigarettes,” said
Mr. Flint, with conviction. “There are a lot of worthless young men in
these days, anyhow. They come to my house and loaf and drink and smoke,
and talk a lot of nonsense about games and automobiles and clubs, and
cumber the earth generally. There's a young man named Crewe over
at Leith, for instance--you may have seen him. Not that he's
dissipated--but he don't do anything but talk about railroads and the
stock market to make you sick, and don't know any more about 'em than my
farmer.”

During this diatribe Austen saw his opening growing smaller and smaller.
If he did not make a dash for it, it would soon be closed entirely.

“I received a letter this morning, Mr. Flint, enclosing me an annual
pass--”

“Did Upjohn send you one?” Mr. Flint cut in; “he ought to have done so
long ago. It was probably an oversight that he did not, Mr. Vane. We try
to extend the courtesies of the road to persons who are looked up to
in their communities. The son of Hilary Vane is at all times welcome to
one.”

Mr. Flint paused to light his cigar, and Austen summoned his resolution.
Second by second it was becoming more and more difficult and seemingly
more ungracious to return a gift so graciously given, a gift of no
inconsiderable intrinsic value. Moreover, Mr. Flint had ingeniously
contrived almost to make the act, in Austen's eyes, that of a picayune
upstart. Who was he to fling back an annual pass in the face of the
president of the Northeastern Railroads?

“I had first thought of writing you a letter, Mr. Flint,” he said, “but
it seemed to me that, considering your relations with my father, the
proper thing to do was to come to you and tell you why I cannot take the
pass.”

The thin secretary paused in his filing, and remained motionless with
his body bent over the drawer.

“Why you cannot take it, Mr. Vane?” said the railroad president. “I'm
afraid I don't understand.”

“I appreciate the--the kindness,” said Austen, “and I will try to
explain.” He drew the red cardboard from his pocket and turned it over.
“On the back of this is printed, in small letters, 'It is understood
that this pass is accepted by the recipient as a retainer.'”

“Well,” Mr. Flint interrupted, smiling somewhat blandly, “how much money
do you think that pass would save an active young lawyer in a year?
Is three hundred dollars too much? Three hundred dollars is not an
insignificant sum to a young man on the threshold of his practice, is
it?”

Austen looked at Mr. Flint.

“Any sum is insignificant when it restricts a lawyer from the acceptance
of just causes, Mr. Flint. As I understand the matter, it is the custom
of your railroad to send these passes to the young lawyers of the State
the moment they begin to give signs of ability. This past would prevent
me from serving clients who might have righteous claims against your
railroads, and--permit me to speak frankly--in my opinion the practice
tends to make it difficult for poor people who have been injured to get
efficient lawyers.”

“Your own father is retained by the railroad,” said Mr. Flint.

“As their counsel,” answered Austen. “I have a pride in my profession,
Mr. Flint, as no doubt you have in yours. If I should ever acquire
sufficient eminence to be sought as counsel for a railroad, I should
make my own terms with it. I should not allow its management alone to
decide upon the value of my retainer, and my services in its behalf
would be confined strictly to professional ones.”

Mr. Flint drummed on the table.

“What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

“I mean that I would not engage, for a fee or a pass, to fight the
political battles of a railroad, or undertake any political manipulation
in its behalf whatever.”

Mr. Flint leaned forward aggressively.

“How long do you think a railroad would pay dividends if it did not
adopt some means of defending itself from the blackmail politician of
the State legislatures, Mr. Vane? The railroads of which I have the
honour to be president pay a heavy tag in this and other States. We
would pay a much heavier one if we didn't take precautions to protect
ourselves. But I do not intend to quarrel with you, Mr. Vane,” he
continued quickly, perceiving that Austen was about to answer him,
“nor do I wish to leave you with the impression that the Northeastern
Railroads meddle unduly in politics.”

Austen knew not how to answer. He had not gone there to discuss this
last and really great question with Mr. Flint, but he wondered whether
the president actually thought him the fledgling he proclaimed. Austen
laid his pass on Mr. Flint's desk, and rose.

“I assure you, Mr. Flint, that the spirit which prompted my visit was
not a contentious one. I cannot accept the pass, simply because I do not
wish to be retained.”

Mr. Flint eyed him. There was a mark of dignity, of silent power, on
this tall scapegrace of a son of Hilary Vane that the railroad president
had missed at first--probably because he had looked only for the
scapegrace. Mr. Flint ardently desired to treat the matter in the
trifling aspect in which he believed he saw it, to carry it off
genially. But an instinct not yet formulated told the president that
he was face to face with an enemy whose potential powers were not to be
despised, and he bristled in spite of himself.

“There is no statute I know of by which a lawyer can be compelled to
accept a retainer against his will, Mr. Vane,” he replied, and overcame
himself with an effort. “But I hope that you will permit me,” he added
in another tone, “as an old friend of your father's and as a man of
some little experience in the world, to remark that intolerance is
a characteristic of youth. I had it in the days of Mr. Isaac D.
Worthington, whom you do not remember. I am not addicted to flattery,
but I hope and believe you have a career before you. Talk to your
father. Study the question on both sides,--from the point of view of
men who are honestly trying, in the face of tremendous difficulties, to
protect innocent stockholders as well as to conduct a corporation in the
interests of the people at large, and for their general prosperity. Be
charitable, young man, and judge not hastily.”

Years before, when poor Sarah Austen had adorned the end of his table,
Hilary Vane had raised his head after the pronouncement of grace to
surprise a look in his wife's eyes which strangely threw him into
a white heat of anger. That look (and he at intervals had beheld it
afterwards) was the true presentment of the soul of the woman whose
body was his. It was not--as Hilary Vane thought it--a contempt for the
practice of thanking one's Maker for daily bread, but a contempt for
cant of one who sees the humour in cant. A masculine version of that
look Mr. Flint now beheld in the eyes of Austen Vane, and the enraging
effect on the president of the United Railroads was much the same as
it had been on his chief counsel. Who was this young man of three and
thirty to agitate him so? He trembled, though not visibly, yet took
Austen's hand mechanically.

“Good day, Mr. Vane,” he said; “Mr. Freeman will help you to find your
horse.”

The thin secretary bowed, and before he reached the door into the
passage Mr. Flint had opened another at the back of the room and stepped
out on a close-cropped lawn flooded with afternoon sunlight. In the
passage Austen perceived a chair, and in the chair was seated patiently
none other than Mr. Brush Bascom--political Duke of Putnam. Mr. Bascom's
little agate eyes glittered in the dim light.

“Hello, Austen,” he said, “since when have you took to comin' here?”

“It's a longer trip from Putnam than from Ripton, Brush,” said Austen,
and passed on, leaving Mr. Bascom with a puzzled mind. Something very
like a smile passed over Mr. Freeman's face as he led the way silently
out of a side entrance and around the house. The circle of the drive was
empty, the tea-party had gone--and Victoria. Austen assured himself that
her disappearance relieved him: having virtually quarrelled with her
father, conversation would have been awkward; and yet he looked for her.

They found the buggy and Pepper in the paved courtyard of the stables.
As Austen took the reins the secretary looked up at him, his mild blue
eyes burning with an unsuspected fire. He held out his hand.

“I want to congratulate you,” he said.

“What for?” asked Austen, taking the hand in some embarrassment.

“For speaking like a man,” said the secretary, and he turned on his heel
and left him.

This strange action, capping, as it did, a stranger experience, gave
Austen food for thought as he let Pepper take his own pace down the
trade's road. Presently he got back into the main drive where it clung
to a steep, forest-covered side hill, when his attention was distracted
by the sight of a straight figure in white descending amidst the
foliage ahead. His instinctive action was to pull Pepper down to a walk,
scarcely analyzing his motives; then he had time, before reaching the
spot where their paths would cross, to consider and characteristically
to enjoy the unpropitious elements arrayed against a friendship with
Victoria Flint.

She halted on a flagstone of the descending path some six feet above the
roadway, and stood expectant. The Rose of Sharon, five and twenty years
before, would have been coy--would have made believe to have done it by
accident. But the Rose of Sharon, with all her beauty, would have had
no attraction for Austen Vane. Victoria had much of her mother's good
looks, the figure of a Diana, and her clothes were of a severity and
correctness in keeping with her style; they merely added to the
sum total of the effect upon Austen. Of course he stopped the buggy
immediately beneath her, and her first question left him without any
breath. No woman he had ever known seized the essentials as she did.

“What have you been doing to my father?” she asked.

“Why?” exclaimed Austen.

“Because he's in such a bad temper,” said Victoria. “You must have put
him in it. It can't be possible that you came all the way up here to
quarrel with him. Nobody ever dares to quarrel with him.”

“I didn't come up to quarrel with him,” said Austen.

“What's the trouble?” asked Victoria.

The humour of this question was too much for him, and he laughed.
Victoria's eyes laughed a little, but there was a pucker in her
forehead.

“Won't you tell me?” she demanded, “or must I get it out of him?”

“I am afraid,” said Austen, slowly, “that you must get it out of him--if
he hasn't forgotten it.”

“Forgotten it, dear old soul!” cried Victoria. “I met him just now
and tried to make him look at the new Guernseys, and he must have been
disturbed quite a good deal when he's cross as a bear to me. He really
oughtn't to be upset like that, Mr. Vane, when he comes up here to rest.
I am afraid that you are rather a terrible person, although you look so
nice. Won't you tell me what you did to him?”

Austen was non-plussed.

“Nothing intentional,” he answered earnestly, “but it wouldn't be fair
to your father if I gave you my version of a business conversation that
passed between us, would it?”

“Perhaps not,” said Victoria. She sat down on the flagstone with
her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and looked at him
thoughtfully. He knew well enough that a wise general would have
retreated--horse, foot, and baggage; but Pepper did not stir.

“Do you know,” said Victoria, “I have an idea you came up here about Zeb
Meader.”

“Zeb Meader!”

“Yes. I told my father about him,--how you rescued him, and how you went
to see him in the hospital, and what a good man he is, and how poor.”

“Oh, did you!” exclaimed Austen.

“Yes. And I told him the accident wasn't Zeb's fault, that the train
didn't whistle or ring, and that the crossing was a blind one.”

“And what did he say?” asked Austen, curiously.

“He said that on a railroad as big as his something of the kind must
happen occasionally. And he told me if Zeb didn't make a fuss and act
foolishly, he would have no cause to regret it.”

“And did you tell Zeb?” asked Austen.

“Yes,” Victoria admitted, “but I'm sorry I did, now.”

“What did Zeb say?”

Victoria laughed in spite of herself, and gave a more or less exact
though kindly imitation of Mr. Meader's manner.

“He said that wimmen-folks had better stick to the needle and the
duster, and not go pokin' about law business that didn't concern 'em.
But the worst of it was,” added Victoria, with some distress, “he won't
accept any more fruit. Isn't he silly? He won't get it into his head
that I give him the fruit, and not my father. I suspect that he actually
believes my father sent me down there to tell him that.”

Austen was silent, for the true significance of this apparently obscure
damage case to the Northeastern Railroads was beginning to dawn on him.
The public was not in the best of humours towards railroads: there was
trouble about grade crossings, and Mr. Meader's mishap and the manner of
his rescue by the son of the corporation counsel had given the accident
a deplorable publicity. Moreover, if it had dawned on Augustus Flint
that the son of Hilary Vane might prosecute the suit, it was worth while
taking a little pains with Mr. Meader and Mr. Austen Vane. Certain small
fires have been known to light world-wide conflagrations.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Victoria. “It isn't at all polite
to forget the person you are talking to.”

“I haven't forgotten you,” said Austen, with a smile. How could
he--sitting under her in this manner?

“Besides,” said Victoria, mollified, “you haven't an answered my
question.”

“Which question?”

She scrutinized him thoughtfully, and with feminine art made the kind of
an attack that rarely fails.

“Why are you such an enigma, Mr. Vane?” she demanded. “Is it because
you're a lawyer, or because you've been out West and seen so much of
life and shot so many people?”

Austen laughed, yet he had tingling symptoms because she showed enough
interest in him to pronounce him a riddle. But he instantly became
serious as the purport of the last charge came home to him.

“I suppose I am looked upon as a sort of Jesse James,” he said. “As it
happens, I have never shot but one man, and I didn't care very much for
that.”

Victoria got up and came down a step and gave him her hand. He took
it, nor was he the first to relinquish the hold; and a colour rose
delicately in her face as she drew her fingers away.

“I didn't mean to offend you,” she said.

“You didn't offend me,” he replied quickly. “I merely wished you to know
that I wasn't a brigand.”

Victoria smiled.

“I really didn't think so--you are much too solemn. I have to go now,
and--you haven't told me anything.”

She crossed the road and began to descend the path on the other side.
Twice he glanced back, after he had started, and once surprised her
poised lightly among the leaves, looking over her shoulder.




CHAPTER V. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

The next time Austen visited the hospital Mr. Meader had a surprise in
store for him. After passing the time of day, as was his custom, the
patient freely discussed the motives which had led him to refuse any
more of Victoria's fruit.

“I hain't got nothing against her,” he declared; “I tried to make that
plain. She's as nice and common a young lady as I ever see, and I don't
believe she had a thing to do with it. But I suspicioned they was up
to somethin' when she brought them baskets. And when she give me the
message from old Flint, I was sure of it.”

“Miss Flint was entirely innocent, I'm sure,” said Austen, emphatically.

“If I could see old Flint, I'd tell him what I thought of him usin'
wimmen-folks to save 'em money,” said Mr. Meader. “I knowed she wahn't
that kind. And then that other thing come right on top of it.”

“What other thing?”

“Say,” demanded Mr. Meader, “don't you know?”

“I know nothing,” said Austen.

“Didn't know Hilary Vane's be'n here?”

“My father!” Austen ejaculated.

“Gittin' after me pretty warm, so they be. Want to know what my price is
now. But say, I didn't suppose your fayther'd come here without lettin'
you know.”

Austen was silent. The truth was that for a few moments he could not
command himself sufficiently to speak.

“He is the chief counsel for the road,” he said at length; “I am not
connected with it.”

“I guess you're on the right track. He's a pretty smooth talker, your
fayther. Just dropped in to see how I be, since his son was interested.
Talked a sight of law gibberish I didn't understand. Told me I didn't
have much of a case; said the policy of the railrud was to be liberal,
and wanted to know what I thought I ought to have.”

“Well?” said Austen, shortly.

“Well,” said Mr. Mender, “he didn't git a mite of satisfaction out of
me. I've seen enough of his kind of folks to know how to deal with 'em,
and I told him so. I asked him what they meant by sending that slick Mr.
Tooting 'raound to offer me five hundred dollars. I said I was willin'
to trust my case on that crossin' to a jury.”

Austen smiled, in spite of his mingled emotions.

“What else did Mr. Vane say?” he asked.

“Not a great sight more. Said a good many folks were foolish enough
to spend money and go to law when they'd done better to trust to the
liberality of the railrud. Liberality! Adams' widow done well to trust
their liberality, didn't she? He wanted to know one more thing, but I
didn't give him any satisfaction.”

“What was that?”

“I couldn't tell you how he got 'raound to it. Guess he never did,
quite. He wanted to know what lawyer was to have my case. Wahn't none of
his affair, and I callated if you'd wanted him to know just yet, you'd
have toad him.”

Austen laid his hand on the farmer's, as he rose to go.

“Zeb,” he said, “I never expect to have a more exemplary client.”

Mr. Mender shot a glance at him.

“Mebbe I spoke a mite too free about your fayther, Austen,” he said;
“you and him seem kind of different.”

“The Judge and I understand each other,” answered Austen.

He had got as far as the door, when he stopped, swung on his heel, and
came back to the bedside.

“It's my duty to tell you, Zeb, that in order to hush this thing up they
may offer you more than you can get from a jury. In that case I should
have to advise you to accept.”

He was aware that, while he made this statement, Zeb Meader's eyes were
riveted on him, and he knew that the farmer was weighing him in the
balance.

“Sell out?” exclaimed Mr. Meader. “You advise me to sell out?”

Austen did not get angry. He understood this man and the people from
which he sprang.

“The question is for you to decide--whether you can get more money by a
settlement.”

“Money!” cried Zeb Meader, “I have found it pretty hard to git, but
there's some things I won't do for it. There's a reason why they want
this case hushed up, the way they've be'n actin'. I ain't lived in
Mercer and Putnam County all my life for nothin'. Hain't I seen 'em run
their dirty politics there under Brush Bascom for the last twenty-five
years? There's no man has an office or a pass in that county but what
Bascom gives it to him, and Bascom's the railrud tool.” Suddenly Zeb
raised himself in bed. “Hev' they be'n tamperin' with you?” he demanded.

“Yes,” answered Austen, dispassionately. He had hardly heard what Zeb
had said; his mind had been going onward. “Yes. They sent me an annual
pass, and I took it back.”

Zeb Meader did not speak for a few moments.

“I guess I was a little hasty, Austen,” he said at length.

“I might have known you wouldn't sell out. If you're' willin' to take
the risk, you tell 'em ten thousand dollars wouldn't tempt me.”

“All right, Zeb,” said Austen.

He left the hospital and struck out across the country towards the
slopes of Sawanec, climbed them, and stood bareheaded in the evening
light, gazing over the still, wide valley northward to the wooded ridges
where Leith and Fairview lay hidden. He had come to the parting of the
ways of life, and while he did not hesitate to choose his path, a Vane
inheritance, though not dominant, could not fail at such a juncture to
point out the pleasantness of conformity. Austen's affection for Hilary
Vane was real; the loneliness of the elder man appealed to the son, who
knew that his father loved him in his own way. He dreaded the wrench
there.

And nature, persuasive in that quarter, was not to be stilled in a field
more completely her own. The memory and suppliance of a minute will
scarce suffice one of Austen's temperament for a lifetime; and his eyes,
flying with the eagle high across the valley, searched the velvet folds
of the ridges, as they lay in infinite shades of green in the level
light, for the place where the enchanted realm might be. Just what the
state of his feelings were at this time towards Victoria Flint is too
vague--accurately to be painted, but he was certainly not ready to give
way to the attraction he felt for her. His sense of humour intervened if
he allowed himself to dream; there was a certain folly in pursuing
the acquaintance, all the greater now that he was choosing the path of
opposition to the dragon. A young woman, surrounded as she was, could
be expected to know little of the subtleties of business and political
morality: let him take Zeb Meader's case, and her loyalty would
naturally be with her father,--if she thought of Austen Vane at all.

And yet the very contradiction of her name, Victoria joined with Flint,
seemed to proclaim that she did not belong to her father or to the
Rose of Sharon. Austen permitted himself to dwell, as he descended the
mountain in the gathering darkness, upon the fancy of the springing of a
generation of ideals from a generation of commerce which boded well for
the Republic. And Austen Vane, in common with that younger and travelled
generation, thought largely in terms of the Republic. Pepper County and
Putnam County were all one to him--pieces of his native land. And as
such, redeemable.

It was long past the supper hour when he reached the house in Hanover
Street; but Euphrasia, who many a time in days gone by had fared
forth into the woods to find Sarah Austen, had his supper hot for him.
Afterwards he lighted his pipe and went out into the darkness, and
presently perceived a black figure seated meditatively on the granite
doorstep.

“Is that you, Judge?” said Austen.

The Honourable Hilary grunted in response.

“Be'n on another wild expedition, I suppose.”

“I went up Sawanec to stretch my legs a little,” Austen answered,
sitting down beside his father.

“Funny,” remarked the Honourable Hilary, “I never had this mania for
stretchin' my legs after I was grown.”

“Well,” said Austen, “I like to go into the woods and climb the hills
and get aired out once in a while.”

“I heard of your gettin' aired out yesterday, up Tunbridge way,” said
the Honourable Hilary.

“I supposed you would hear of it,” answered Austen.

“I was up there to-day. Gave Mr. Flint your pass did you?”

“Yes.”

“Didn't see fit to mention it to me first--did you? Said you were going
up to thank him for it.”

Austen considered this.

“You have put me in the wrong, Judge,” he replied after a little. “I
made that remark ironically. I I am afraid we cannot agree on the motive
which prompted me.”

“Your conscience a little finer than your father's--is it?”

“No,” said Austen, “I don't honestly think it is. I've thought a good
deal in the last few years about the difference in our ways of
looking at things. I believe that two men who try to be honest may
conscientiously differ. But I also believe that certain customs have
gradually grown up in railroad practice which are more or less to be
deplored from the point of view of the honour of the profession. I think
they are not perhaps--realized even by the eminent men in the law.”

“Humph!” said the Honourable Hilary. But he did not press his son for
the enumeration of these customs. After all the years he had disapproved
of Austen's deeds it seemed strange indeed to be called to account by
the prodigal for his own. Could it be that this boy whom he had so often
chastised took a clearer view of practical morality than himself? It was
preposterous. But why the uneasiness of the past few years? Why had
he more than once during that period, for the first time in his life,
questioned a hitherto absolute satisfaction in his position of chief
counsel for the Northeastern Railroads? Why had he hesitated to initiate
his son into many of the so-called duties of a railroad lawyer? Austen
had never verbally arraigned those duties until to-night.

Contradictory as it may seem, irritating as it was to the Honourable
Hilary Vane, he experienced again the certain faint tingling of pride as
when Austen had given him the dispassionate account of the shooting of
Mr. Blodgett; and this tingling only served to stiffen Hilary Vane more
than ever. A lifelong habit of admitting nothing and a lifelong pride
made the acknowledgment of possible professional lapses for the benefit
of his employer not to be thought of. He therefore assumed the same
attitude as had Mr. Flint, and forced the burden of explanation upon
Austen, relying surely on the disinclination of his son to be specific.
And Austen, considering his relationship, could not be expected to
fathom these mental processes.

“See here, Judge,” he said, greatly embarrassed by the real affection
he felt, “I don't want to seem like a prig and appear to be sitting in
judgment upon a man of your experience and position especially since I
have the honour to be your son, and have made a good deal of trouble
by a not irreproachable existence. Since we have begun on the subject,
however, I think I ought to tell you that I have taken the case of Zeb
Meader against the Northeastern Railroads.”

“Wahn't much need of telling me, was there?” remarked the Honourable
Hilary, dryly. “I'd have found it out as soon as anybody else.”

“There was this need of telling you,” answered Austen, steadily,
“although I am not in partnership with you, I bear your name. And
in-as-much as I am to have a suit against your client, it has occurred
to me that you would like me to move--elsewhere.”

The Honourable Hilary was silent for a long time.

“Want to move--do YOU? Is that it?”

“Only because my presence may embarrass you.”

“That wahn't in the contract,” said the Honourable Hilary; “you've got
a right to take any fool cases you've a mind to. Folks know pretty well
I'm not mixed up in 'em.”

Austen did not smile; he could well understand his father's animus in
this matter. As he looked up at the gable of his old home against the
stars, he did not find the next sentence any easier.

“And then,” he continued, “in taking, a course so obviously against your
wishes and judgment it occurred to me--well, that I was eating at your
table and sleeping in your house.”

To his son's astonishment, Hilary Vane turned on him almost truculently.

“I thought the time'd come when you'd want to go off again,--gypsying,”
 he cried.

“I'd stay right here in Ripton, Judge. I believe my work is in this
State.”

The Honour could see through a millstone with a hole in it. The effect
of Austen's assertion on him was a declaration that the mission of the
one was to tear down what the other had so laboriously built up. And yet
a growing dread of Hilary Vane's had been the loneliness of declining
years in that house should Austen leave it again, never to return.

“I knew you had this Meader business in mind,” he said. “I knew you had
fanciful notions about--some things. Never told you I didn't want you
here, did I?”

“No,” said Austen, “but--”

“Would have told you if I hadn't wanted you--wouldn't I?”

“I hope so, Judge,” said Austen, who understood something of the feeling
which underlay this brusqueness. That knowledge made matters all the
harder for him.

“It was your mother's house--you're entitled to that, anyway,” said the
Honourable Hilary, “but what I want to know is, why you didn't advise
that eternal fool of a Meader to accept what we offered him. You'll
never get a county jury to give as much.”

“I did advise him to accept it,” answered Austen.

“What's the matter with him?” the Honourable Hilary demanded.

“Well, judge, if you really want my opinion, an honest farmer like
Meader is suspicious of any corporation which has such zealous and loyal
retainers as Ham Tooting and Brush Bascom.” And Austen thought with a
return of the pang which had haunted him at intervals throughout the
afternoon, that he might almost have added to these names that of Hilary
Vane. Certainly Zeb Meader had not spared his father.

“Life,” observed the Honourable Hilary, unconsciously using a phrase
from the 'Book of Arguments,' “is a survival of the fittest.”

“How do you define 'the fittest?'” asked Austen. “Are they the men who
have the not unusual and certainly not exalted gift of getting money
from their fellow creatures by the use of any and all weapons that may
be at hand? who believe the acquisition of wealth to be exempt from the
practice of morality? Is Mr. Flint your example of the fittest type to
exist and survive, or Gladstone or Wilberforce or Emerson or Lincoln?”

“Emerson!” cried the Honourable Hilary, the name standing out in red
letters before his eyes. He had never read a line of the philosopher's
writings, not even the charge to “hitch your wagon to a star” (not in
the “Book of Arguments”). Sarah Austen had read Emerson in the
woods, and her son's question sounded so like the unintelligible but
unanswerable flashes with which the wife had on rare occasions opposed
the husband's authority that Hilary Vane found his temper getting the
best of him--The name of Emerson was immutably fixed in his mind as the
synonym for incomprehensible, foolish habits and beliefs. “Don't talk
Emerson to me,” he exclaimed. “And as for Brush Bascom, I've known him
for thirty years, and he's done as much for the Republican party as any
man in this State.”

This vindication of Mr. Bascom naturally brought to a close a
conversation which had already continued too long. The Honourable Hilary
retired to rest; but--if Austen had known it--not to sleep until the
small hours of the morning.

It was not until the ensuing spring that the case of Mr. Zebulun Meader
against the United Northeastern Railroads came up for trial in Bradford,
the county-seat of Putnam County, and we do not wish to appear to give
it too great a weight in the annals of the State. For one thing, the
weekly newspapers did not mention it; and Mr. Paul Pardriff, when urged
to give an account of the proceedings in the Ripton Record, said it was
a matter of no importance, and spent the afternoon writing an editorial
about the domestic habits of the Aztecs. Mr. Pardriff, however, had
thought the matter of sufficient interest personally to attend the
trial, and for the journey he made use of a piece of green cardboard
which he habitually carried in his pocket. The editor of the Bradford
Champion did not have to use his yellow cardboard, yet his columns may
be searched in vain for the event.

Not that it was such a great event, one of hundreds of railroad
accidents that come to court. The son of Hilary Vane was the plaintiff's
counsel; and Mr. Meader, although he had not been able to work since his
release from the hospital, had been able to talk, and the interest taken
in the case by the average neglected citizen in Putnam proved that the
weekly newspaper is not the only disseminator of news.

The railroad's side of the case was presented by that genial and able
practitioner of Putnam County, Mr. Nathaniel Billings, who travelled
from his home in Williamstown by the exhibition of a red ticket. Austen
Vane had to pay his own way from Ripton, but as he handed back the
mileage book, the conductor leaned over and whispered something in his
ear that made him smile, and Austen thought he would rather have that
little drop of encouragement than a pass. And as he left the car at
Bradford, two grizzled and hard-handed individuals arose and wished him
good luck.

He needed encouragement,--what young lawyer does not on his first
important case? And he did not like to think of the future if he lost
this. But in this matter he possessed a certain self-confidence which
arose from a just and righteous anger against the forces opposing him
and a knowledge of their tactics. To his mind his client was not Zeb
Meader alone, but the host of victims who had been maimed and bought off
because it was cheaper than to give the public a proper protection.

The court room was crowded. Mr. Zeb Meader, pale but determined, was
surrounded by a knot of Mercer neighbours, many of whom were witnesses.
The agate eyes of Mr. Brush Bascom flashed from the audience, and Mr.
Nat Billings bustled forward to shake Austen's hand. Nat was one of
those who called not infrequently upon the Honourable Hilary in Ripton,
and had sat on Austen's little table.

“Glad to see you, Austen,” he cried, so that the people might hear; and
added, in a confidentially lower tone, “We lawyers understand that these
little things make no difference, eh?”

“I'm willing to agree to that if you are, Nat,” Austen answered. He
looked at the lawyer's fleshy face, blue-black where it was shaven,
and at Mr. Billings' shifty eyes and mouth, which its muscles could not
quite keep in place. Mr. Billings also had nicked teeth. But he did his
best to hide these obvious disadvantages by a Falstaffian bonhomie,--for
Mr. Billings was growing stout.

“I tried it once or twice, my friend, when I was younger. It's noble,
but it don't pay,” said Mr. Billings, still confidential. “Brush is
sour--look at him. But I understand how you feel. I'm the kind of feller
that speaks out, and what I can't understand is, why the old man let you
get into it.”

“He knew you were going to be on the other side, Nat, and wanted to
teach me a lesson. I suppose it is folly to contest a case where the
Railroad Commission has completely exonerated your client,” Austen added
thoughtfully.

Mr. Billings' answer was to wink, very slowly, with one eye; and shortly
after these pleasantries were over, the case was called. A fragrant wind
blew in at the open windows, and Nature outside was beginning to array
herself in myriad hues of green. Austen studied the jury, and wondered
how many points of his argument he could remember, but when he had got
to his feet the words came to him. If we should seek an emblem for King
David's smooth, round stone which he flung at Goliath, we should call it
the truth--for the truth never fails to reach the mark. Austen's opening
was not long, his words simple and not dramatic, but he seemed to charge
them with something of the same magnetic force that compelled people
to read and believe “Uncle Ton's Cabin” and the “Song of the Shirt.”
 Spectators and jury listened intently.

Some twenty witnesses appeared for the plaintiff, all of whom declared
that they had heard neither bell nor whistle. Most of these witnesses
had been in the grove, two or three in the train; two, residents of the
vicinity, testified that they had complained to the Railroad Commission
about that crossing, and had received evasive answers to the effect
that it was the duty of citizens to look out for themselves. On
cross-examination they declared they had no objection to grade crossings
which were properly safeguarded; this crossing was a death-trap.
(Stricken out.) Mr. Billings made the mistake of trying to prove
that one of these farmers--a clear-eyed, full-chested man with a deep
voice--had an animus against the railroad dating from a controversy
concerning the shipping of milk.

“I have an animus, your Honour,” said the witness, quietly. “When the
railrud is represented by the kind of politicians we have in Putnam,
it's natural I should hain't it?”

This answer, although stricken out, was gleefully received.

In marked contrast to the earnestness of young Mr. Vane, who then
rested, Mr. Billings treated the affair from the standpoint of a man of
large practice who usually has more weighty matters to attend to. This
was so comparatively trivial as not to be dignified by a serious mien.
He quoted freely from the “Book of Arguments,” reminding the jury of the
debt of gratitude the State owed to the Northeastern Railroads for
doing so much for its people; and if they were to eliminate all grade
crossings, there would be no dividends for the stockholders. Besides,
the law was that the State should pay half when a crossing was
eliminated, and the State could not afford it. Austen had suggested, in
his opening, that it was cheaper for the railroad as well as the State
to kill citizens. He asked permission to inquire of the learned counsel
for the defence by what authority he declared that the State could not
afford to enter into a policy by which grade crossings would gradually
be eliminated.

“Why,” said Mr. Billings, “the fact that all bills introduced to this
end never get out of committee.”

“May I ask,” said Austen, innocently, “who has been chairman of that
particular committee in the lower House for the last five sessions?”

Mr. Billings was saved the embarrassment of answering this question by a
loud voice in the rear calling out:--“Brush Bascom!”

A roar of laughter shook the court room, and all eyes were turned on
Brush, who continued to sit unconcernedly with his legs crossed and
his arm over the back of the seat. The offender was put out, order was
restored, and Mr. Billings declared, with an injured air, that he failed
to see why the counsel for the plaintiff saw fit to impugn Mr. Bascom.

“I merely asked a question,” said Austere; “far be it from me to impugn
any man who has held offices in the gift of the people for the last
twenty years.”

Another gale of laughter followed this, during which Mr. Billings
wriggled his mouth and gave a strong impression that such tactics and
such levity were to be deplored.

For the defence, the engineer and fireman both swore that the bell
had been rung before the crossing was reached. Austen merely inquired
whether this was not when they had left the station at North Mercer,
two miles away. No, it was nearer. Pressed to name the exact spot, they
could only conjecture, but near enough to be heard on the crossing.
Other witnesses--among them several picnickers in the grove--swore that
they had heard the bell. One of these Austen asked if he was not the
member from Mercer in the last Legislature, and Mr. Billings, no longer
genial, sprang to his feet with an objection.

“I merely wish to show, your Honour,” said Austen, “that this witness
accepted a pass from the Northeastern Railroads when he went to the
Legislature, and that he has had several trip passes for himself and his
family since.”

The objection was not sustained, and Mr. Billings noted an exception.

Another witness, upon whose appearance the audience tittered audibly,
was Dave Skinner, boss of Mercer. He had lived, he said, in the town of
Mercer all his life, and maintained that he was within a hundred yards
of the track when the accident occurred, and heard the bell ring.

“Is it not a fact,” said Austen to this witness, “that Mr. Brush Bascom
has a mortgage on your farm?”

“I can show, your Honour,” Austen continued, when Mr. Billings had
finished his protest, “that this man was on his way to Riverside to pay
his quarterly instalment.”

Mr. Bascom was not present at the afternoon session. Mr. Billings'
summing up was somewhat impassioned, and contained more quotations from
the “Book of Arguments.” He regretted, he said, the obvious appeals to
prejudice against a railroad corporation that was honestly trying to do
its duty-yes, and more than its duty.

Misjudged, misused, even though friendless, it would continue to serve
the people. So noble, indeed, was the picture which Mr. Billings'
eloquence raised up that his voice shook with emotion as he finished.

In the opinion of many of the spectators Austen Vane had yet to learn
the art of oratory. He might with propriety have portrayed the suffering
and loss of the poor farmer who was his client; he merely quoted from
the doctor's testimony to the effect that Mr. Meader would never again
be able to do physical labour of the sort by which he had supported
himself, and ended up by calling the attention of the jury to the
photographs and plans of the crossing he had obtained two days after
the accident, requesting them to note the facts that the public highway,
approaching through a dense forest and underbrush at an angle of
thirty-three degrees, climbed the railroad embankment at that point, and
a train could not be seen until the horse was actually on the track.

The jury was out five minutes after the judge's charge, and gave Mr.
Zebulun Meader a verdict of six thousand dollars and costs,--a popular
verdict, from the evident approval with which it was received in the
court room. Quiet being restored, Mr. Billings requested, somewhat
vehemently, that the case be transferred on the exceptions to the
Supreme Court, that the stenographer write out the evidence, and that he
might have three weeks in which to prepare a draft. This was granted.

Zeb Meader, true to his nature, was self-contained throughout the
congratulations he received, but his joy was nevertheless intense.

“You shook 'em up good, Austen,” he said, making his way to where his
counsel stood. “I suspicioned you'd do it. But how about this here
appeal?”

“Billings is merely trying to save the face of his railroad,” Austen
answered, smiling. “He hasn't the least notion of allowing this case to
come up again--take my word for it.”

“I guess your word's good,” said Zeb. “And I want to tell you one thing,
as an old man. I've been talkin' to Putnam County folks some, and you
hain't lost nothin' by this.”

“How am I to get along without the friendship of Brush Bascom?” asked
Austen, soberly.

Mr. Meader, who had become used to this mild sort of humour, relaxed
sufficiently to laugh.

“Brush did seem a mite disgruntled,” he remarked.

Somewhat to Austen's embarrassment, Mr. Mender's friends were
pushing forward. One grizzled veteran took him by the hand and looked
thoughtfully into his face.

“I've lived a good many years,” he said, “but I never heerd 'em talked
up to like that. You're my candidate for governor.”




CHAPTER VI. ENTER THE LION

It is a fact, as Shakespeare has so tersely hinted, that fame sometimes
comes in the line of duty. To be sure, if Austen Vane had been Timothy
Smith, the Mender case might not have made quite so many ripples in the
pond with which this story is concerned. Austen did what he thought was
right. In the opinion of many of his father's friends whom he met from
time to time he had made a good-sized stride towards ruin, and they
did not hesitate to tell him so--Mr. Chipman, president of the Ripton
National Bank; Mr. Greene, secretary and treasurer of the Hawkeye Paper
Company, who suggested with all kindness that, however noble it may be,
it doesn't pay to tilt at windmills.

“Not unless you wreck the windmill,” answered Austen. A new and very
revolutionary point of view to Mr. Greene, who repeated it to Professor
Brewer, urging that gentleman to take Austen in hand. But the professor
burst out laughing, and put the saying into circulation.

Mr. Silas Tredway, whose list of directorships is too long to print,
also undertook to remonstrate with the son of his old friend, Hilary
Vane. The young lawyer heard him respectfully. The cashiers of some
of these gentlemen, who were younger men, ventured to say--when out of
hearing--that they admired the championship of Mr. Mender, but it would
never do. To these, likewise, Austen listened good-naturedly enough, and
did not attempt to contradict them. Changing the angle of the sun-dial
does not affect the time of day.

It was not surprising that young Tom Gaylord, when he came back from New
York and heard of Austen's victory, should have rushed to his office and
congratulated him in a rough but hearty fashion. Even though Austen
had won a suit against the Gaylord Lumber Company, young Tom would have
congratulated him. Old Tom was a different matter. Old Tom, hobbling
along under the maples, squinted at Austen and held up his stick.

“Damn you, you're a lawyer, ain't you?” cried the old man.

Austen, well used to this kind of greeting from Mr. Gaylord, replied
that he didn't think himself much of one.

“Damn it, I say you are. Some day I may have use for you,” said old Tom,
and walked on.

“No,” said young Tom, afterwards, in explanation of this extraordinary
attitude of his father, “it isn't principle. He's had a row with the
Northeastern about lumber rates, and swears he'll live till he gets even
with 'em.”

If Professor Brewer (Ripton's most clear-sighted citizen) had made the
statement that Hilary Vane--away down in the bottom of his heart--was
secretly proud of his son, the professor would probably have lost his
place on the school board, the water board, and the library committee.
The way the worldly-wise professor discovered the secret was this: he
had gone to Bradford to hear the case, for he had been a dear friend of
Sarah Austen. Two days later Hilary Vane saw the professor on his little
porch, and lingered. Mr. Brewer suspected why, led carefully up to the
subject, and not being discouraged--except by numerous grunts--gave the
father an account of the proceedings by no means unfavourable to the
son. Some people like paregoric; the Honourable Hilary took his without
undue squirming, with no visible effects to Austen.

Life in the office continued, with one or two exceptions, the even tenor
of its way. Apparently, so far as the Honourable Hilary was concerned,
his son had never been to Bradford. But the Honourable Brush Bascom,
when he came on mysterious business to call on the chief counsel, no
longer sat on Austen's table; this was true of other feudal lords and
retainers: of Mr. Nat Billings, who, by the way, did not file his draft
after all. Not that Mr. Billings wasn't polite, but he indulged
no longer in slow winks at the expense of the honourable Railroad
Commission.

Perhaps the most curious result of the Meader case to be remarked in
passing, was upon Mr. Hamilton Tooting. Austen, except when he fled to
the hills, was usually the last to leave the office, Mr. Tooting often
the first. But one evening Mr. Tooting waited until the force had gone,
and entered Austen's room with his hand outstretched.

“Put her there, Aust,” he said.

Austen put her there.

“I've been exercisin' my thinker some the last few months,” observed Mr.
Tooting, seating himself on the desk.

“Aren't you afraid of nervous prostration, Ham?”

“Say,” exclaimed Mr. Tooting, with a vexed laugh, “why are you always
jollying me? You ain't any older than I am.”

“I'm not as old, Ham. I don't begin to have your knowledge of the
world.”

“Come off,” said Mr. Tooting, who didn't know exactly how to take this
compliment. “I came in here to have a serious talk. I've been thinking
it over, and I don't know but what you did right.”

“Well, Ham, if you don't know, I don't know how I am to convince you.”

“Hold on. Don't go twistin' around that way--you make me dizzy.” He
lowered his voice confidentially, although there was no one within
five walls of them. “I know the difference between a gold brick and a
government bond, anyhow. I believe bucking the railroad's going to pay
in a year or so. I got on to it as soon as you did, I guess, but when
a feller's worn the collar as long as I have and has to live, it ain't
easy to cut loose--you understand.”

“I understand,” answered Austen, gravely.

“I thought I'd let you know I didn't take any too much trouble with
Meader last summer to get the old bird to accept a compromise.”

“That was good of you, Ham.”

“I knew what you was up to,” said Mr. Tooting, giving Austen a friendly
poke with his cigar.

“You showed your usual acumen, Mr. Tooting,” said Austen, as he rose to
put on his coat. Mr. Tooting regarded him uneasily.

“You're a deep one, Aust,” he declared; “some day you and, me must get
together.”

Mr. Billings' desire for ultimate justice not being any stronger than
Austen suspected, in due time Mr. Meader got his money. His counsel
would have none of it,--a decision not at all practical, and on the
whole disappointing. There was, to be sure, an influx into Austen's
office of people who had been run over in the past, and it was Austen's
unhappy duty to point out to these that they had signed (at the request
of various Mr. Tootings) little slips of paper which are technically
known as releases. But the first hint of a really material advantage
to be derived from his case against the railroad came from a wholly
unexpected source, in the shape of a letter in the mail one August
morning.

   “DEAR SIR: Having remarked with some interest the verdict for a
   client of yours against the United Northeastern Railroads, I wish
   you would call and see me at your earliest convenience.

   “Yours truly,

   “HUMPHREY CREWE.”

Although his curiosity was aroused, Austen was of two minds whether to
answer this summons, the truth being that Mr. Crewe had not made, on
the occasions on which they had had intercourse, the most favourable of
impressions. However, it is not for the struggling lawyer to scorn any
honourable brief, especially from a gentleman of stocks and bonds and
varied interests like Mr. Crewe, with whom contentions of magnitude are
inevitably associated. As he spun along behind Pepper on the Leith road
that climbed Willow Brook on the afternoon he had made the appointment,
Austen smiled to himself over his anticipations, and yet---being
human-let his fancy play.

The broad acres of Wedderburn stretched across many highways, but the
manor-house (as it had been called) stood on an eminence whence one
could look for miles down the Yale of the Blue. It had once been a
farmhouse, but gradually the tail had begun to wag the dog, and the
farmhouse became, like the original stone out of which the Irishman made
the soup, difficult to find. Once the edifice had been on the road, but
the road had long ago been removed to a respectful distance, and Austen
entered between two massive pillars built of granite blocks on a musical
gravel drive.

Humphrey Crewe was on the porch, his hands in his pockets, as Austen
drove up.

“Hello,” he said, in a voice probably meant to be hospitable, but which
had a peremptory ring, “don't stand on ceremony. Hitch your beast and
come along in.”

Having, as it were, superintended the securing of Pepper, Mr. Crewe led
the way through the house to the study, pausing once or twice to point
out to Austen a carved ivory elephant procured at great expense in
China, and a piece of tapestry equally difficult of purchase. The study
itself was no mere lounging place of a man of pleasure, but sober and
formidable books were scattered through the cases: “Turner's Evolution
of the Railroad,” “Graham's Practical Forestry,” “Eldridge's Finance”;
while whole shelves of modern husbandry proclaimed that Mr. Humphrey
Crewe was no amateur farmer. There was likewise a shelf devoted to road
building, several to knotty-looking pamphlets, and half a wall of neatly
labelled pigeonholes. For decoration, there was an oar garnished with a
ribbon, and several groups of college undergraduates, mostly either in
puffed ties or scanty attire, and always prominent in these groups, and
always unmistakable, was Mr. Humphrey Crewe himself.

Mr. Crewe was silent awhile, that this formidable array of things might
make the proper impression upon his visitor.

“It was lucky you came to-day, Vane,” he said at length. “I am due in
New York to-morrow for a directors' meeting, and I have a conference in
Chicago with a board of trustees of which I am a member on the third.
Looking at my array of pamphlets, eh? I've been years in collecting
them,--ever since I left college. Those on railroads ought especially to
interest you--I'm somewhat of a railroad man myself.”

“I didn't know that,” said Austen.

“Had two or three blocks of stock in subsidiary lines that had to be
looked after. It was a nuisance at first,” said Mr. Crewe, “but I
didn't shirk it. I made up my mind I'd get to the bottom of the railroad
problem, and I did. It's no use doing a thing at all unless you do
it well.” Mr. Crewe, his hands still in his pockets, faced Austen
smilingly. “Now I'll bet you didn't know I was a railroad man until you
came in here. To tell the truth, it was about a railroad matter that I
sent for you.”

Mr. Crewe lit a cigar, but he did not offer one to Austen, as he had to
Mr. Tooting. “I wanted to see what you were like,” he continued, with
refreshing frankness. “Of course, I'd seen you on the road. But you can
get more of an idea of a man by talkin' to him, you know.”

“You can if he'll talk,” said Austen, who was beginning to enjoy his
visit.

Mr. Crewe glanced at him keenly. Few men are fools at all points of the
compass, and Mr. Crewe was far from this.

“You did well in that little case you had against the Northeastern. I
heard about it.”

“I did my best,” answered Austen, and he smiled again.

“As some great man has remarked,” observed Mr. Crewe, “it isn't what we
do, it's how we do it. Take pains over the smaller cases, and the larger
cases will come of themselves, eh?”

“I live in hope,” said Austen, wondering how soon this larger case was
going to unfold itself.

“Let me see,” said Mr. Crewe, “isn't your father the chief attorney in
this State for the Northeastern? How do you happen to be on the other
side?”

“By the happy accident of obtaining a client,” said Austen.

Mr. Crewe glanced at him again. In spite of himself, respect was growing
in him. He had expected to find a certain amount of eagerness and
subserviency--though veiled; here was a man of different calibre than he
looked for in Ripton.

“The fact is,” he declared, “I have a grievance against the Northeastern
Railroads, and I have made up my mind that you are the man for me.”

“You may have reason to regret your choice,” Austen suggested.

“I think not,” replied Mr. Crewe, promptly; “I believe I know a man when
I see one, and you inspire me with confidence. This matter will have a
double interest for you, as I understand you are fond of horses.”

“Horses?”

“Yes,” Mr. Crewe continued, gaining a little heat at the word, “I
bought the finest-lookin' pair you ever saw in New York this
spring,--all-around action, manners, conformation, everything; I'll show
'em to you. One of 'em's all right now; this confounded railroad injured
the other gettin' him up here. I've put in a claim. They say they
didn't, my man says they did. He tells me the horse was thrown violently
against the sides of the car several times. He's internally injured. I
told 'em I'd sue 'em, and I've decided that you are the man to take the
case--on conditions.”

Austen's sense of humour saved him,--and Mr. Humphrey Crewe had begun to
interest him. He rose and walked to the window and looked out for a few
moments over the flower garden before he replied:--“On what conditions?”

“Well,” said Mr. Crewe, “frankly, I don't want to pay more than the
horse is worth, and it's business to settle on the fee in case you win.
I thought--”

“You thought,” said Austen, “that I might not charge as much as the next
man.”

“Well,” said Mr. Crewe, “I knew that if you took the case, you'd fight
it through, and I want to get even with 'em. Their claim agent had the
impudence to suggest that the horse had been doctored by the dealer in
New York. To tell me that I, who have been buying horses all my life,
was fooled. The veterinary swears the animal is ruptured. I'm a citizen
of Avalon County, though many people call me a summer resident; I've
done business here and helped improve the neighbourhood for years.
It will be my policy to employ home talent Avalon County lawyers, for
instance. I may say, without indiscretion, that I intend from now on to
take even a greater interest in public affairs. The trouble is in this
country that men in my position do not feel their responsibilities.”

“Public spirit is a rare virtue,” Austen remarked, seeing that he
was expected to say something. “Avalon County appreciates the
compliment,--if I may be permitted to answer for it.”

“I want to do the right thing,” said Mr. Crewe. “In fact, I have almost
made up my mind to go to the Legislature this year. I know it would be
a sacrifice of time, in a sense, and all that, but--” He paused, and
looked at Austen.

“The Legislature needs leavening.”

“Precisely,” exclaimed Mr. Crewe, “and when I look around me and see the
things crying to be done in this State, and no lawmaker with sense and
foresight enough to propose them, it makes me sick. Now, for instance,”
 he continued, and rose with an evident attempt to assault the forestry
shelves. But Austen rose too.

“I'd like to go over that with you, Mr. Crewe,” said he, “but I have to
be back in Ripton.”

“How about my case?” his host demanded, with a return to his former
abruptness.

“What about it?” asked Austen.

“Are you going to take it?”

“Struggling lawyers don't refuse business.”

“Well,” said Mr. Crewe, “that's sensible. But what are you going to
charge?”

“Now,” said Austen, with entire good humour, “when you get on that
ground, you are dealing no longer with one voracious unit, but with
a whole profession,--a profession, you will allow me to add, which in
dignity is second to none. In accordance with the practice of the best
men in that profession, I will charge you what I believe is fair--not
what I think you are able and willing to pay. Should you dispute the
bill, I will not stoop to quarrel with you, but, try to live on bread
and butter a while longer.”

Mr. Crewe was silent for a moment. It would not be exact to say
uncomfortable, for it is to be doubted whether he ever got so. But he
felt dimly that the relations of patron and patronized were becoming
somewhat jumbled.

“All right,” said he, “I guess we can let it go at that. Hello! What the
deuce are those women doing here again?”

This irrelevant exclamation was caused by the sight through the open
French window--of three ladies in the flower garden, two of whom were
bending over the beds. The third, upon whose figure Austen's eyes were
riveted, was seated on a stone bench set in a recess of pines, and
looking off into the Yale of the Blue. With no great eagerness, but
without apology to Austen, Mr. Crewe stepped out of the window and
approached them; and as this was as good a way as any to his horse
and buggy, Austen followed. One of the ladies straightened at their
appearance, scrutinized them through the glasses she held in her
hand, and Austen immediately recognized her as the irreproachable Mrs.
Pomfret.

“We didn't mean to disturb you, Humphrey,” she said. “We knew you would
be engaged in business, but I told Alice as we drove by I could not
resist stopping for one more look at your Canterbury bells. I knew
you wouldn't mind, but you mustn't leave your--affairs,--not for an
instant.”

The word “affairs” was accompanied by a brief inspection of Austen Vane.

“That's all right,” answered Mr. Crewe; “it doesn't cost anything to
look at flowers, that's what they're for. Cost something to put 'em in.
I got that little feller Ridley to lay 'em out--I believe I told you.
He's just beginning. Hello, Alice.”

“I think he did it very well, Humphrey,” said Miss Pomfret.

“Passably,” said Mr. Crewe. “I told him what I wanted and drew a rough
sketch of the garden and the colour scheme.”

“Then you did it, and not Mr. Ridley. I rather suspected it,” said
Mrs. Pomfret; “you have such clear and practical ideas about things,
Humphrey.”

“It's simple enough,” said Mr. Crewe, deprecatingly, “after you've seen
a few hundred gardens and get the general underlying principle.”

“It's very clever,” Alice murmured.

“Not at all. A little application will do wonders. A certain definite
colour massed here, another definite colour there, and so forth.”

Mr. Crewe spoke as though Alice's praise irritated him slightly.
He waved his hand to indicate the scheme in general, and glanced at
Victoria on the stone bench. From her (Austen thought) seemed to
emanate a silent but mirthful criticism, although she continued to gaze
persistently down the valley, apparently unaware of their voices. Mr.
Crewe looked as if he would have liked to reach her, but the two ladies
filled the narrow path, and Mrs. Pomfret put her fingers on his sleeve.

“Humphrey, you must explain it to us. I am so interested in gardens I'm
going to have one if Electrics increase their dividend.”

Mr. Crewe began, with no great ardour, to descant on the theory of
planting, and Austen resolved to remain pocketed and ignored no longer.
He retraced his steps and made his way rapidly by another path towards
Victoria, who turned her head at his approach, and rose. He acknowledged
an inward agitation with the vision in his eye of the tall, white figure
against the pines, clad with the art which, in mysterious simplicity,
effaces itself.

“I was wondering,” she said, as she gave him her hand, “how long it
would be before you spoke to me.”

“You gave me no chance,” said Austen, quickly.

“Do you deserve one?” she asked.

Before he could answer, Mr. Crewe's explanation of his theories had
come lamely to a halt. Austen was aware of the renewed scrutiny of Mrs.
Pomfret, and then Mr. Crewe, whom no social manacles could shackle,
had broken past her and made his way to them. He continued to treat the
ground on which Austen was standing as unoccupied.

“Hello, Victoria,” he said, “you don't know anything about gardens, do
you?”

“I don't believe you do either,” was Victoria's surprising reply.

Mr. Crewe laughed at this pleasantry.

“How are you going to prove it?” he demanded.

“By comparing what you've done with Freddie Ridley's original plan,”
 said Victoria.

Mr. Crewe was nettled.

“Ridley has a lot to learn,” he retorted. “He had no conception of what
was appropriate here.”

“Freddie was weak,” said Victoria, “but he needed the money. Don't you
know Mr. Vane?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Crewe, shortly, “I've been talking to him--on business.”

“Oh,” said Victoria, “I had no means of knowing. Mrs. Pomfret, I want to
introduce Mr. Vane, and Miss Pomfret, Mr. Vane.”

Mrs. Pomfret, who had been hovering on the outskirts of this duel,
inclined her head the fraction of an inch, but Alice put out her hand
with her sweetest manner.

“When did you arrive?” she asked.

“Well, the fact is, I haven't arrived yet,” said Austen.

“Not arrived” exclaimed Alice, with a puzzled glance into Victoria's
laughing eyes.

“Perhaps Humphrey will help you along,” Victoria suggested, turning to
him. “He might be induced to give you his celebrated grievance about his
horses.”

“I have given it to him,” said Mr. Crewe, briefly.

“Cheer up, Mr. Vane, your fortune is made,” said Victoria.

“Victoria,” said Mrs. Pomfret, in her most imperial voice, “we ought
to be going instantly, or we shan't have time to drop you at the
Hammonds'.”

“I'll take you over in the new motor car,” said Mr. Crewe, with his air
of conferring a special train.

“How much is gasoline by the gallon?” inquired Victoria.

“I did a favour once for the local manager, and get a special price,”
 said Mr. Crewe.

“Humphrey,” said Mrs. Pomfret, taking his hand, “don't forget you are
coming to dinner to-night. Four people gave out at the last minute, and
there will be just Alice and myself. I've asked old Mr. Fitzhugh.”

“All right,” said Mr. Crewe, “I'll have the motor car brought around.”

The latter part of this remark was, needless to say, addressed to
Victoria.

“It's awfully good of you, Humphrey,” she answered, “but the Hammonds
are on the road to Ripton, and I am going to ask Mr. Vane to drive me
down there behind that adorable horse of his.”

This announcement produced a varied effect upon those who heard it,
although all experienced surprise. Mrs. Pomfret, in addition to an anger
which she controlled only as the result of long practice, was horrified,
and once more levelled her glasses at Austen.

“I think, Victoria, you had better come with us,” she said. “We shall
have plenty of time, if we hurry.”

By this time Austen had recovered his breath.

“I'll be ready in an instant,” he said, and made brief but polite adieus
to the three others.

“Good-by,” said Alice, vaguely.

“Let me know when anything develops,” said Mr. Crewe, with his back to
his attorney.

Austen found Victoria, her colour heightened a little, waiting for him
by the driveway. The Pomfrets had just driven off, and Mr. Crewe was
nowhere to be seen.

“I do not know what you will think of me for taking this for granted,
Mr. Vane,” she said as he took his seat beside her, “but I couldn't
resist the chance of driving behind your horse.”

“I realized,” he answered smilingly, “that Pepper was the attraction,
and I have more reason than ever to be grateful to him.”

She glanced covertly at the Vane profile, at the sure, restraining
hands on the reins which governed with so nice a touch the mettle of the
horse. His silence gave her time to analyze again her interest in this
man, which renewed itself at every meeting. In the garden she had been
struck by the superiority of a nature which set at naught what had been,
to some smaller spirits, a difficult situation. She recognized this
quality as inborn, but, not knowing of Sarah Austen, she wondered where
he got it. Now it was the fact that he refrained from comment that
pleased her most.

“Did Humphrey actually send for you to take up the injured horse case?”
 she asked.

Austen flushed.

“I'm afraid he did. You seem to know all about it,” he added.

“Know all about it Every one within twenty miles of Leith knows about
it. I'm sure the horse was doctored when he bought him.”

“Take care, you may be called as a witness.”

“What I want to know is, why you accepted such a silly case,” said
Victoria.

Austen looked quizzically into her upturned face, and she dropped her
eyes.

“That's exactly what I should have asked myself,--after a while,” he
said.

She laughed with a delicious understanding of “after a while.”

“I suppose you think me frightfully forward,” she said, in a lowered
voice, “inviting myself to drive and asking you such a question when
I scarcely know you. But I just couldn't go on with Mrs. Pomfret,--she
irritated me so,--and my front teeth are too valuable to drive with
Humphrey Crewe.”

Austen smiled, and secretly agreed with her.

“I should have offered, if I had dared,” he said.

“Dared! I didn't know that was your failing. I don't believe you even
thought of it.”

“Nevertheless, the idea occurred to me, and terrified me,” said Austen.

“Why?” she asked, turning upon him suddenly. “Why did it terrify you?”

“I should have been presuming upon an accidental acquaintance, which I
had no means of knowing you wished to continue,” he replied, staring at
his horse's head.

“And I?” Victoria asked. “Presumption multiplies tenfold in a woman,
doesn't it?”

“A woman confers,” said Austen.

She smiled, but with a light in her eyes. This simple sentence seemed to
reveal yet more of an inner man different from some of those with whom
her life had been cast. It was an American point of view--this choosing
to believe that the woman conferred. After offering herself as his
passenger Victoria, too, had had a moment of terror: the action had been
the result of an impulse which she did not care to attempt to define.
She changed the subject.

“You have been winning laurels since I saw you last summer,” she said.
“I hear incidentally you have made our friend Zeb Meader a rich man.”

“As riches go, in the town of Mercer,” Austen laughed. “As for my
laurels, they have not yet begun to chafe.”

Here was a topic he would have avoided, and yet he was curious to
discover what her attitude would be. He had antagonized her father, and
the fact that he was the son of Hilary Vane had given his antagonism
prominence.

“I am glad you did it for Zeb.”

“I should have done it for anybody--much as I like Zeb,” he replied
briefly.

She glanced at him.

“It was--courageous of you,” she said.

“I have never looked upon it in that light,” he answered. “May I ask you
how you heard of it?”

She coloured, but faced the question.

“I heard it from my father, at first, and I took an interest--on Zeb
Meader's account,” she added hastily.

Austen was silent.

“Of course,” she continued, “I felt a little like boasting of an
'accidental acquaintance' with the man who saved Zeb Meader's life.”

Austen laughed. Then he drew Pepper down to a walk, and turned to her.

“The power of making it more than an accidental acquaintance lies with
you,” he said quietly.

“I have always had an idea that aggression was a man's prerogative,”
 Victoria answered lightly. “And seeing that you have not appeared at
Fairview for something over a year, I can only conclude that you do not
choose to exercise it in this case.”

Austen was in a cruel quandary.

“I did wish to come,” he answered simply, “but--the fact that I have
had a disagreement with your father has--made it difficult.” “Nonsense”
 exclaimed Victoria; “just because you have won a suit against his
railroad. You don't know my father, Mr. Vane. He isn't the kind of man
with whom that would make any difference. You ought to talk it over with
him. He thinks you were foolish to take Zeb Meader's side.”

“And you?” Austen demanded quickly.

“You see, I'm a woman,” said Victoria, “and I'm prejudiced--for Zeb
Meader. Women are always prejudiced,--that's our trouble. It seemed to
me that Zeb was old, and unfortunate, and ought to be compensated, since
he is unable to work. But of course I suppose I can't be expected to
understand.”

It was true that she could not be expected to understand. He might not
tell her that his difference with Mr. Flint was not a mere matter of
taking a small damage suit against his railroad, but a fundamental one.
And Austen recognized that the justification of his attitude meant an
arraignment of Victoria's father.

“I wish you might know my father better, Mr. Vane,” she went on, “I wish
you might know him as I know him, if it were possible. You see, I have
been his constant companion all my life, and I think very few people
understand him as I do, and realize his fine qualities. He makes no
attempt to show his best side to the world. His life has been spent in
fighting, and I am afraid he is apt to meet the world on that footing.
He is a man of such devotion to his duty that he rarely has a day to
himself, and I have known him to sit up until the small hours of the
morning to settle some little matter of justice. I do not think I am
betraying his confidence when I say that he is impressed with your
ability, and that he liked your manner the only time he ever talked to
you. He believes that you have got, in some way, a wrong idea of what he
is trying to do. Why don't you come up and talk to him again?”

“I am afraid your kindness leads you to overrate my importance,” Austen
replied, with mingled feelings. Victoria's confidence in her father made
the situation all the more hopeless.

“I'm sure I don't,” she answered quickly; “ever since--ever since I
first laid eyes upon you I have had a kind of belief in you.”

“Belief?” he echoed.

“Yes,” she said, “belief that--that you had a future. I can't describe
it,” she continued, the colour coming into her face again; “one feels
that way about some people without being able to put the feeling into
words. And have a feeling, too, that I should like you to be friends
with my father.”

Neither of them, perhaps, realized the rapidity with which “accidental
acquaintance” had melted into intimacy. Austen's blood ran faster, but
it was characteristic of him that he tried to steady himself, for he
was a Vane. He had thought of her many times during the past year, but
gradually the intensity of the impression had faded until it had been
so unexpectedly and vividly renewed to-day. He was not a man to lose his
head, and the difficulties of the situation made him pause and choose
his words, while he dared not so much as glance at her as she sat in the
sunlight beside him.

“I should like to be friends with your father,” he answered
gravely,--the statement being so literally true as to have its
pathetically humorous aspect.

“I'll tell him so, Mr. Vane,” she said.

Austen turned, with a seriousness that dismayed her.

“I must ask you as a favour not to do that,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“In the first place,” he answered quietly, “I cannot afford to have Mr.
Flint misunderstand my motives. And I ought not to mislead you,” he went
on. “In periods of public controversy, such as we are passing through at
present, sometimes men's views differ so sharply as to make intercourse
impossible. Your father and I might not agree--politically, let us
say. For instance,” he added, with evident hesitation, “my father and I
disagree.”

Victoria was silent. And presently they came to a wire fence overgrown
with Virginia creeper, which divided the shaded road from a wide lawn.

“Here we are at the Hammonds', and--thank you,” she said.

Any reply he might have made was forestalled. The insistent and
intolerant horn of an automobile, followed now by the scream of the
gears, broke the stillness of the country-side, and a familiar voice
cried out--“Do you want the whole road?”

Austen turned into the Hammonds' drive as the bulldog nose of a motor
forged ahead, and Mr. Crewe swung in the driver's seat.

“Hello, Victoria,” he shouted, “you people ought to have ear-trumpets.”

The car swerved, narrowly missed a watering fountain where the word
“Peace” was inscribed, and shot down the hill.

“That manner,” said Victoria, as she jumped out of the buggy, “is a
valuable political asset.”

“Does he really intend to go into politics?” Austen asked curiously.

“'Intend' is a mild word applied to Humphrey,” she answered;
“'determined' would suit him better. According to him, there is no game
that cannot be won by dynamics. 'Get out of the way' is his motto. Mrs.
Pomfret will tell you how he means to cover the State with good roads
next year, and take a house in Washington the year after.” She held out
her hand. “Good-by,--and I am ever so much obliged to you for bringing
me here.”

He drove away towards Ripton with many things to think about, with a
last picture of her in his mind as she paused for an instant in the
flickering shadows, stroking Pepper's forehead.




CHAPTER VII. THE LEOPARD AND HIS SPOTS

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Mr. Humphrey Crewe, of
his value to the town of Leith, and to the State at large, and in these
pages only a poor attempt at an appreciation of him may be expected. Mr.
Crewe by no means underestimated this claim upon the community, and he
had of late been declaring that he was no summer resident. Wedderburn
was his home, and there he paid his taxes. Undoubtedly, they were less
than city taxes.

Although a young man, Mr. Crewe was in all respects a model citizen, and
a person of many activities. He had built a farmers' club, to which
the farmers, in gross ingratitude, had never gone. Now it was a summer
residence and distinctly rentable. He had a standing offer to erect
a library in the village of Leith provided the town would furnish the
ground, the books, and permit the name of Crewe to be carved in stone
over the doorway. The indifference of the town pained him, and he was
naturally not a little grieved at the lack of proper feeling of
the country people of America towards those who would better their
conditions. He had put a large memorial window in the chapel to his
family.

Mr. Crewe had another standing offer to be one of five men to start a
farming experiment station--which might pay dividends. He, was a church
warden; president of a society for turning over crops (which he had
organized); a member of the State Grange; president of the embryo
State Economic League (whatever that was); and chairman of the Local
Improvement Board--also a creation of his own. By these tokens, and
others too numerous to mention, it would seem that the inhabitants of
Leith would have jumped at the chance to make such a man one of the five
hundred in their State Legislature.

To Whitman is attributed the remark that genius is almost one hundred
per cent directness, but whether or not this applied to Mr. Humphrey
Crewe remains to be seen. “Dynamics” more surely expressed him. It would
not seem to be a very difficult feat, to be sure, to get elected to a
State Legislature of five hundred which met once a year: once in ten
years, indeed, might have been more appropriate for the five hundred.
The town of Leith with its thousand inhabitants had one representative,
and Mr. Crewe had made up his mind he was to be that representative.

There was, needless to say, great excitement in Leith over Mr. Crewe's
proposed venture into the unknown seas of politics. I mean, of course,
that portion of Leith which recognized in Mr. Crewe an eligible
bachelor and a person of social importance, for these qualities were not
particularly appealing to the three hundred odd farmers whose votes were
expected to send him rejoicing to the State capital.

“It is so rare with us for a gentleman to go into politics, that we
ought to do everything we can to elect him,” Mrs. Pomfret went about
declaring. “Women do so much in England, I wonder they don't do more
here. I was staying at Aylestone Court last year when the Honourable
Billy Aylestone was contesting the family seat with a horrid Radical,
and I assure you, my dear, I got quite excited. We did nothing from
morning till night but electioneer for the Honourable Billy, and kissed
all the babies in the borough. The mothers were so grateful. Now, Edith,
do tell Jack instead of playing tennis and canoeing all day he ought to
help. It's the duty of all young men to help. Noblesse oblige, you know.
I can't understand Victoria. She really has influence with these country
people, but she says it's all nonsense. Sometimes I think Victoria has a
common streak in her--and no wonder. The other day she actually drove to
the Hammonds' in a buggy with an unknown lawyer from Ripton. But I told
you about it. Tell your gardener and the people that do your haying,
dear, and your chicken woman. My chicken woman is most apathetic, but do
you wonder, with the life they lead?”

Mr. Humphrey Crewe might have had, with King Charles, the watchword
“Thorough.” He sent to the town clerk for a check-list, and proceeded to
honour each of the two hundred Republican voters with a personal visit.
This is a fair example of what took place in the majority of cases.

Out of a cloud of dust emerges an automobile, which halts, with
protesting brakes, in front of a neat farmhouse, guarded by great
maples. Persistent knocking by a chauffeur at last brings a woman to the
door. Mrs. Jenney has a pleasant face and an ample figure.

“Mr. Jenney live here?” cries Mr. Crewe from the driver's seat.

“Yes,” says Mrs. Jenney, smiling.

“Tell him I want to see him.”

“Guess you'll find him in the apple orchard.”

“Where's that?”

The chauffeur takes down the bars, Mr. Jenney pricks up his ears, and
presently--to his amazement--perceives a Leviathan approaching him,
careening over the ruts of his wood road. Not being an emotional person,
he continues to pick apples until he is summarily hailed. Then he goes
leisurely towards the Leviathan.

“Are you Mr. Jenney?”

“Callate to be,” says Mr. Jenney, pleasantly.

“I'm Humphrey Crewe.”

“How be you?” says Mr. Jenney, his eyes wandering over the Leviathan.

“How are the apples this year?” asks Mr. Crewe, graciously.

“Fair to middlin',” says Mr. Jenney.

“Have you ever tasted my Pippins?” says Mr. Crewe. “A little science
in cultivation helps along. I'm going to send you a United States
government pamphlet on the fruit we can raise here.”

Mr. Jenney makes an awkward pause by keeping silent on the subject of
the pamphlet until he shall see it.

“Do you take much interest in politics?”

“Not a great deal,” answers Mr. Jenney.

“That's the trouble with Americans,” Mr. Crewe declares, “they don't
care who represents 'em, or whether their government's good or bad.”

“Guess that's so,” replies Mr. Jenney, politely.

“That sort of thing's got to stop,” declares Mr. Crewe; “I'm a candidate
for the Republican nomination for representative.”

“I want to know!” ejaculates Mr. Jenney, pulling his beard. One would
never suspect that this has been one of Mr. Jenney's chief topics of
late.

“I'll see that the interests of this town are cared for.”

“Let's see,” says Mr. Jenney, “there's five hundred in the House, ain't
there?”

“It's a ridiculous number,” says Mr. Crewe, with truth.

“Gives everybody a chance to go,” says Mr. Jenney. “I was thar in '78,
and enjoyed it some.”

“Who are you for?” demanded Mr. Crewe, combating the tendency of the
conversation to slip into a pocket.

“Little early yet, hain't it? Hain't made up my mind. Who's the
candidates?” asks Mr. Jenney, continuing to stroke his beard.

“I don't know,” says Mr. Crewe, “but I do know I've done something for
this town, and I hope you'll take it into consideration. Come and see
me when you go to the village. I'll give you a good cigar, and that
pamphlet, and we'll talk matters over.”

“Never would have thought to see one of them things in my orchard,” says
Mr. Jenney. “How much do they cost? Much as a locomotive, don't they?”

It would not be exact to say that, after some weeks of this sort of
campaigning, Mr. Crewe was discouraged, for such writhe vitality with
which nature had charged him that he did not know the meaning of the
word. He was merely puzzled, as a June-bug is puzzled when it bumps up
against a wire window-screen. He had pledged to him his own gardener,
Mrs. Pomfret's, the hired men of three of his neighbours, a few modest
souls who habitually took off their hats to him, and Mr. Ball, of the
village, who sold groceries to Wedderburn and was a general handy man
for the summer people. Mr. Ball was an agitator by temperament and a
promoter by preference. If you were a summer resident of importance and
needed anything from a sewing-machine to a Holstein heifer, Mr. Ball,
the grocer, would accommodate you. When Mrs. Pomfret's cook became
inebriate and refractory, Mr. Ball was sent for, and enticed her to the
station and on board of a train; when the Chillinghams' tank overflowed,
Mr. Ball found the proper valve and saved the house from being washed
away. And it was he who, after Mrs. Pomfret, took the keenest interest
in Mr. Crewe's campaign. At length came one day when Mr. Crewe pulled up
in front of the grocery store and called, as his custom was, loudly
for Mr. Ball. The fact that Mr. Ball was waiting on customers made no
difference, and presently that gentleman appeared, rubbing his hands
together.

“How do you do, Mr. Crewe?” he said, “automobile going all right?”

“What's the matter with these fellers?” said Mr. Crewe. “Haven't I done
enough for the town? Didn't I get 'em rural free delivery? Didn't I
subscribe to the meeting-house and library, and don't I pay more taxes
than anybody else?”

“Certain,” assented Mr. Ball, eagerly, “certain you do.” It did not
seem to occur to him that it was unfair to make him responsible for the
scurvy ingratitude of his townsmen. He stepped gingerly down into the
dust and climbed up on the tool box.

“Look out,” said Mr. Crewe, “don't scratch the varnish. What is it?”

Mr. Ball shifted obediently to the rubber-covered step, and bent his
face to his patron's ear.

“It's railrud,” he said.

“Railroad!” shouted Mr. Crewe, in a voice that made the grocer clutch
his arm in terror. “Don't pinch me like that. Railroad! This town ain't
within ten miles of the railroad.”

“For the love of David,” said Mr. Ball, “don't talk so loud, Mr. Crewe.”

“What's the railroad got to do with it?” Mr. Crewe demanded.

Mr. Ball glanced around him, to make sure that no one was within
shouting distance.

“What's the railrud got to do with anything in this State?” inquired Mr.
Ball, craftily.

“That's different,” said Mr. Crewe, shortly, “I'm a corporation man
myself. They've got to defend 'emselves.”

“Certain. I ain't got anything again' 'em,” Mr. Ball agreed quickly. “I
guess they know what they're about. By the bye, Mr. Crewe,” he added,
coming dangerously near the varnish again, and drawing back, “you hain't
happened to have seen Job Braden, have you?”

“Job Braden!” exclaimed Mr. Crewe, “Job Braden! What's all this mystery
about Job Braden? Somebody whispers that name in my ear every day. If
you mean that smooth-faced cuss that stutters and lives on Braden's
Hill, I called on him, but he was out. If you see him, tell him to come
up to Wedderburn, and I'll talk with him.”

Mr. Ball made a gesture to indicate a feeling divided between respect
for Mr. Crewe and despair at the hardihood of such a proposition.

“Lord bless you, sir, Job wouldn't go.”

“Wouldn't go?”

“He never pays visits,--folks go to him.”

“He'd come to see me, wouldn't he?”

“I--I'm afraid riot, Mr. Crewe. Job holds his comb rather high.”

“Do you mean to say this two-for-a-cent town has a boss?”

“Silas Grantley was born here,” said Mr. Ball--for even the worm will
turn. “This town's got a noble history.”

“I don't care anything about Silas Grantley. What I want to know is, how
this rascal manages to make anything out of the political pickings of a
town like Leith.”

“Well, Job ain't exactly a rascal, Mr. Crewe. He's got a good many of
them hill farmers in a position of--of gratitude. Enough to control the
Republican caucus.”

“Do you mean he buys their votes?” demanded Mr. Crewe.

“It's like this,” explained Mr. Ball, “if one of 'em falls behind in his
grocery bill, for example, he can always get money from Job. Job takes
a mortgage, but he don't often close down on 'm. And Job has been
collectin' credentials in Avalon County for upward of forty years.”

“Collecting credentials?”

“Yes. Gets a man nominated to State and county conventions that can't
go, and goes himself with a bunch of credentials. He's in a position to
negotiate. He was in all them railrud fights with Jethro Bass, and
now he does business with Hilary Vane or Brush Bascom when anything
especial's goin' on. You'd ought to see him, Mr. Crewe.”

“I guess I won't waste my time with any picayune boss if the United
Northeastern Railroads has any hand in this matter,” declared Mr. Crewe.
“Wind her up.”

This latter remark was addressed to a long-suffering chauffeur who
looked like a Sicilian brigand.

“I didn't exactly like to suggest it,” said Mr. Ball, rubbing his hands
and raising his voice above the whir of the machine, “but of course I
knew Mr. Flint was an intimate friend. A word to him from you--”

But by this Mr. Crewe had got in his second speed and was sweeping
around a corner lined with farmers' teams, whose animals were behaving
like circus horses. On his own driveway, where he arrived in incredibly
brief time, he met his stenographer, farm superintendent, secretary,
housekeeper, and general utility man, Mr. Raikes. Mr. Raikes was
elderly, and showed signs of needing a vacation.

“Telephone Mr. Flint, Raikes, and tell him I would like an appointment
at his earliest convenience, on important business.”

Mr. Raikes, who was going for his daily stroll beside the river, wheeled
and made for the telephone, and brought back the news that Mr. Flint
would be happy to see Mr. Crewe the next afternoon at four o'clock.

This interview, about which there has been so much controversy in the
newspapers, and denials and counter-denials from the press bureaus
of both gentlemen,--this now historic interview began at four o'clock
precisely the next day. At that hour Mr. Crewe was ushered into that
little room in which Mr. Flint worked when at Fairview. Like Frederick
the Great and other famous captains, Mr. Flint believed in an iron
bedstead regime. The magnate was, as usual, fortified behind his oak
desk; the secretary with a bend in his back was in modest evidence; and
an elderly man of comfortable proportions, with a large gold watch-charm
portraying the rising sun, and who gave, somehow, the polished
impression of a marble, sat near the window smoking a cigar. Mr. Crewe
approached the desk with that genial and brisk manner for which he was
noted and held out his hand to the railroad president.

“We are both business men, and both punctual, Mr. Flint,” he said, and
sat down in the empty chair beside his host, eyeing without particular
favour him of the watch-charm, whose cigar was not a very good one. “I
wanted to have a little private conversation with you which might be of
considerable interest to us both.” And Mr. Crewe laid down on the desk a
somewhat formidable roll of papers.

“I trust the presence of Senator Whitredge will not deter you,” answered
Mr. Flint. “He is an old friend of mine.”

Mr. Crewe was on his feet again with surprising alacrity, and beside the
senator's chair.

“How are you, Senator?” he said, “I have never had the pleasure of
meeting you, but I know you by reputation.”

The senator got to his feet. They shook hands, and exchanged cordial
greetings; and during the exchange Mr. Crewe looked out of the window,
and the senator's eyes were fixed on the telephone receiver on Mr.
Flint's desk. As neither gentleman took hold of the other's fingers very
hard, they fell apart quickly.

“I am very happy to meet you, Mr. Crewe,” said the senator. Mr. Crewe
sat down again, and not being hampered by those shrinking qualities so
fatal to success he went on immediately:--“There is nothing which I have
to say that the senator cannot hear. I made the appointment with you,
Mr. Flint, to talk over a matter which may be of considerable importance
to us both. I have made up my mind to go to the Legislature.”

Mr. Crewe naturally expected to find visible effects of astonishment
and joy on the faces of his hearers at such not inconsiderable news. Mr.
Flint, however, looked serious enough, though the senator smiled as he
blew his smoke out of the window.

“Have you seen Job Braden, Mr. Crewe?” he asked, with genial jocoseness.
“They tell me that Job is still alive and kicking over in your parts.”

“Thank you, Senator,” said Mr. Crewe, “that brings me to the very point
I wish to emphasize. Everywhere in Leith I am met with the remark,
'Have you seen Job Braden?' And I always answer, 'No, I haven't seen Mr.
Braden, and I don't intend to see him.”'

Mr. Whitredge laughed, and blew out a ring of smoke. Mr. Flint's face
remained sober.

“Now, Mr. Flint,” Mr. Crewe went on, “you and I understand each other,
and we're on the same side of the fence. I have inherited some interests
in corporations myself, and I have acquired an interest in others. I
am a director in several. I believe that it is the duty of property to
protect itself, and the duty of all good men in politics,--such as the
senator here,”--(bow from Mr. Whitredge)--“to protect property. I am
a practical man, and I think I can convince you, if you don't see
it already, that my determination to go to the Legislature is an
advantageous thing for your railroad.”

“The advent of a reputable citizen into politics is always a good thing
for the railroad, Mr. Crewe,” said Mr. Flint.

“Exactly,” Mr. Crewe agreed, ignoring the non-committal quality of this
remark, “and if you get a citizen who is a not inconsiderable property
holder, a gentleman, and a college graduate,--a man who, by study and
predilection, is qualified to bring about improved conditions in the
State, so much the better.”

“So much the better,” said Mr. Flint.

“I thought you would see it that way,” Mr. Crewe continued. “Now a man
of your calibre must have studied to some extent the needs of the State,
and it must have struck you that certain improvements go hand in hand
with the prosperity of your railroad.”

“Have a cigar, Mr. Crewe. Have another, Senator?” said Mr. Flint. “I
think that is safe as a general proposition, Mr. Crewe.”

“To specify,” said Mr. Crewe, laying his hand on the roll of papers
he had brought, “I have here bills which I have carefully drawn up and
which I will leave for your consideration. One is to issue bonds for ten
millions to build State roads.”

“Ten millions!” said Mr. Flint, and the senator whistled mildly.

“Think about it,” said Mr. Crewe, “the perfection of the highways
through the State, instead of decreasing your earnings, would increase
them tremendously. Visitors by the tens of thousands would come in
automobiles, and remain and buy summer places. The State would have its
money back in taxes and business in no time at all. I wonder somebody
hasn't seen it before--the stupidity of the country legislator is
colossal. And we want forestry laws, and laws for improving the
condition of the farmers--all practical things. They are all there,” Mr.
Crewe declared, slapping the bundle; “read them, Mr. Flint. If you have
any suggestions to make, kindly note them on the margin, and I shall be
glad to go over them with you.”

By this time the senator was in a rare posture for him--he was seated
upright.

“As you know, I am a very busy man, Mr. Crewe,” said the railroad
president.

“No one appreciates that more fully than I do, Mr. Flint,” said Mr.
Crewe; “I haven't many idle hours myself. I think you will find the
bills and my comments on them well worth your consideration from the
point of view of advantage to your railroad. They are typewritten, and
in concrete form. In fact, the Northeastern Railroads and myself must
work together to our mutual advantage--that has become quite clear to
me. I shall have need of your help in passing the measures.”

“I'm afraid I don't quite understand you, Mr. Crewe,” said Mr. Flint,
putting down the papers.

“That is,” said Mr. Crewe, “if you approve of the bills, and I am
confident that I shall be able to convince you.”

“What do you want me to do?” asked the railroad president.

“Well, in the first place,” said Mr. Crewe, unabashed, “send word to
your man Braden that you've seen me and it's all right.”

“I assure you,” answered Mr. Flint, giving evidence for the first time
of a loss of patience, “that neither the Northeastern Railroads nor
myself, have any more to do with this Braden than you have.”

Mr. Crewe, being a man of the world, looked incredulous.

“Senator,” Mr. Flint continued, turning to Mr. Whitredge, “you know as
much about politics in this State as any man of my acquaintance,
have you ever heard of any connection between this Braden and the
Northeastern Railroads?”

The senator had a laugh that was particularly disarming.

“Bless your soul, no,” he replied. “You will pardon me, Mr. Crewe, but
you must have been listening to some farmer's tale. The railroad is
the bugaboo in all these country romances. I've seen old Job Braden at
conventions ever since I was a lad. He's a back number, one of the few
remaining disciples and imitators of Jethro Bass: talks like him
and acts like him. In the old days when there were a lot of little
railroads, he and Bijah Bixby and a few others used to make something
out of them, but since the consolidation, and Mr. Flint's presidency,
Job stays at home. They tell me he runs Leith yet. You'd better go over
and fix it up with him.”

A somewhat sarcastic smile of satisfaction was playing over Mr. Flint's
face as he listened to the senator's words. As a matter of fact, they
were very nearly true as regarded Job Braden, but Mr. Crewe may be
pardoned for thinking that Mr. Flint was not showing him quite the
confidence due from one business and corporation man to another. He was
by no means abashed,--Mr. Crewe had too much spirit for that. He merely
became--as a man whose watchword is “thorough” will--a little more
combative.

“Well, read the bills anyway, Mr. Flint, and I'll come and go over them
with you. You can't fail to see my arguments, and all I ask is that you
throw the weight of your organization at the State capital for them when
they come up.”

Mr. Flint drummed on the table.

“The men who have held office in this State,” he said, “have always been
willing to listen to any suggestion I may have thought proper to make to
them. This is undoubtedly because I am at the head of the property
which pays the largest taxes. Needless to say I am chary of making
suggestions. But I am surprised that you should have jumped at a
conclusion which is the result of a popular and unfortunately prevalent
opinion that the Northeastern Railroads meddled in any way with the
government or politics of this State. I am glad of this opportunity of
assuring you that we do not,” he continued, leaning forward and holding
up his hand to ward off interruption, “and I know that Senator Whitredge
will bear me out in this statement, too.”

The senator nodded gravely. Mr. Crewe, who was anything but a fool, and
just as assertive as Mr. Flint, cut in.

“Look here, Mr. Flint,” he said, “I know what a lobby is. I haven't been
a director in railroads myself for nothing. I have no objection to a
lobby. You employ counsel before the Legislature, don't you--”

“We do,” said Mr. Flint, interrupting, “the best and most honourable
counsel we can find in the State. When necessary, they appear before
the legislative committees. As a property holder in the State, and an
admirer of its beauties, and as its well-wisher, it will give me great
pleasure to look over your bills, and use whatever personal influence I
may have as a citizen to forward them, should they meet my approval.
And I am especially glad to do this as a neighbour, Mr. Crewe. As a
neighbour,” he repeated, significantly.

The president of the Northeastern Railroads rose as he spoke these
words, and held out his hand to Mr. Crewe. It was perhaps a coincidence
that the senator rose also.

“All right,” said Mr. Crewe, “I'll call around again in about two weeks.
Come and see me sometime, Senator.” “Thank you,” said the senator, “I
shall be happy. And if you are ever in your automobile near the town of
Ramsey, stop at my little farm, Mr. Crewe. I trust to be able soon to
congratulate you on a step which I am sure will be but the beginning of
a long and brilliant political career.”

“Thanks,” said Mr. Crewe; “by the bye, if you could see your way to drop
a hint to that feller Braden, I should be much obliged.”

The senator shook his head and laughed.

“Job is an independent cuss,” he said, “I'm afraid he'd regard that as
an unwarranted trespass on his preserves.”

Mr. Crewe was ushered out by the stooping secretary, Mr. Freeman; who,
instead of seizing Mr. Crewe's hand as he had Austen Vane's, said not
a word. But Mr. Crewe would have been interested if he could have heard
Mr. Flint's first remark to the senator after the door was closed on
his back. It did not relate to Mr. Crewe, but to the subject under
discussion which he had interrupted; namely, the Republican candidates
for the twenty senatorial districts of the State.

On its way back to Leith the red motor paused in front of Mr. Ball's
store, and that gentleman was summoned in the usual manner.

“Do you see this Braden once in a while?” Mr. Crewe demanded.

Mr. Ball looked knowing.

“Tell him I want to have a talk with him,” said Mr. Crewe. “I've been
to see Mr. Flint, and I think matters can be arranged. And mind you, no
word about this, Ball.”

“I guess I understand a thing or two,” said Mr. Ball. “Trust me to
handle it.”

Two days later, as Mr. Crewe was seated in his study, his man entered
and stood respectfully waiting for the time when he should look up from
his book.

“Well, what is it now, Waters?”

“If you please, sir,” said the man, “a strange message has come over
the telephone just now that you were to be in room number twelve of
the Ripton House to-morrow at ten o'clock. They wouldn't give any name,
sir,” added the dignified Waters, who, to tell the truth, was somewhat
outraged, “nor tell where they telephoned from. But it was a man's voice,
sir.”

“All right,” said Mr. Crewe.

He spent much of the afternoon and evening debating whether or not his
dignity would permit him to go. But he ordered the motor at half-past
nine, and at ten o'clock precisely the clerk at the Ripton House was
bowing to him and handing him, deferentially, a dripping pen.

“Where's room number twelve?” said the direct Mr. Crewe.

“Oh,” said the clerk, and possessing a full share of the worldly wisdom
of his calling, he smiled broadly. “I guess you'll find him up there,
Mr. Crewe. Front, show the gentleman to number twelve.”

The hall boy knocked on the door of number twelve.

“C--come in,” said a voice. “Come in.”

Mr. Crewe entered, the hall boy closed the door, and he found himself
face to face with a comfortable, smooth-faced man seated with great
placidity on a rocking-chair in the centre of the room, between the bed
and the marble-topped table: a man to whom, evidently, a rich abundance
of thought was sufficient company, for he had neither newspaper nor
book. He rose in a leisurely fashion, and seemed the very essence of the
benign as he stretched forth his hand.

“I'm Mr. Crewe,” the owner of that name proclaimed, accepting the
hand with no exaggeration of cordiality. The situation jarred on him a
trifle.

“I know. Seed you on the road once or twice. How be you?”

Mr. Crewe sat down.

“I suppose you are Mr. Braden,” he said.

Mr. Braden sank into the rocker and fingered a waistcoat pocket full of
cigars that looked like a section of a cartridge-belt.

“T--try one of mine,” he said.

“I only smoke once after breakfast,” said Mr. Crewe.

“Abstemious, be you? Never could find that it did me any hurt.”

This led to an awkward pause, Mr. Crewe not being a man who found profit
in idle discussion. He glanced at Mr. Braden's philanthropic and beaming
countenance, which would have made the fortune of a bishop. It was not
usual for Mr. Crewe to find it difficult to begin a conversation, or to
have a companion as self-sufficient as himself. This man Braden had all
the fun, apparently, in sitting in a chair and looking into space that
Stonewall Jackson had, or an ordinary man in watching a performance of
“A Trip to Chinatown.” Let it not be inferred, again, that Mr. Crewe was
abashed; but he was puzzled.

“I had an engagement in Ripton this morning,” he said, “to see about
some business matters. And after I received your telephone I thought I'd
drop in here.”

“Didn't telephone,” said Mr. Braden, placidly.

“What!” said Mr. Crewe, “I certainly got a telephone message.”

“N--never telephone,” said Mr. Braden.

“I certainly got a message from you,” Mr. Crewe protested.

“Didn't say it was from me--didn't say so--did they--”

“No,” said Mr. Crewe, “but--”

“Told Ball you wanted to have me see you, didn't you?”

Mr. Crewe, when he had unravelled this sentence, did not fancy the way
it was put.

“I told Ball I was seeing everybody in Leith,” he answered, “and that I
had called on you, and you weren't at home. Ball inferred that you had a
somewhat singular way of seeing people.”

“You don't understand,” was Mr. Braden's somewhat enigmatic reply.

“I understand pretty well,” said Mr. Crewe. “I'm a candidate for the
Republican nomination for representative from Leith, and I want your
vote and influence. You probably know what I have done for the town, and
that I'm the biggest taxpayer, and an all-the-year-round resident.”

“S--some in Noo York--hain't you?”

“Well, you can't expect a man in my position and with my interests to
stay at home all the time. I feel that I have a right to ask the town
for this nomination. I have some bills here which I'll request you to
read over, and you will see that I have ideas which are of real value
to the State. The State needs waking up-progressive measures. You're a
farmer, ain't you?”

“Well, I have be'n.”

“I can improve the condition of the farmer one hundred per cent, and if
my road system is followed, he can get his goods to market for about a
tenth of what it costs him now. We have infinitely valuable forests
in the State which are being wasted by lumbermen, which ought to be
preserved. You read those bills, and what I have written about them.”

“You don't understand,” said Mr. Braden, drawing a little closer and
waving aside the manuscript with his cigar.

“Don't understand what?”

“Don't seem to understand,” repeated Mr. Braden, confidingly laying his
hand on Mr. Crewe's knee. “Candidate for representative, be you?”

“Yes,” replied Mr. Crewe, who was beginning to resent the manner in
which he deemed he was being played with, “I told you I was.”

“M--made all them bills out before you was chose?” said Mr. Braden.

Mr. Crewe grew red in the face.

“I am interested in these questions,” he said stiffly.

“Little mite hasty, wahn't it?” Mr. Braden remarked equably, “but you've
got plenty of time and money to fool with such things, if you've a mind
to. Them don't amount to a hill of beans in politics. Nobody pays any
attention to that sort of fireworks down to the capital, and if they
was to get into committee them Northeastern Railroads fellers'd bury 'em
deeper than the bottom of Salem pond. They don't want no such things as
them to pass.”

“Pardon me,” said Mr. Crewe, “but you haven't read 'em.”

“I know what they be,” said Mr. Braden, “I've be'n in politics more
years than you've be'n livin', I guess. I don't want to read 'em,” he
announced, his benign manner unchanged.

“I think you have made a mistake so far as the railroad is concerned,
Mr. Braden,” said Mr. Crewe, “I'm a practical man myself, and I don't
indulge in moonshine. I am a director in one or two railroads. I have
talked this matter over with Mr. Flint, and incidentally with Senator
Whitredge.”

“Knowed Whitredge afore you had any teeth,” said Mr. Braden, who did not
seem to be greatly impressed, “know him intimate. What'd you go to Flint
for?”

“We have interests in common,” said Mr. Crewe, “and I am rather a close
friend of his. My going to the Legislature will be, I think, to our
mutual advantage.”

“O--ought to have come right to me,” said Mr. Braden, leaning over until
his face was in close proximity to Mr. Crewe's. “Whitredge told you to
come to me, didn't he?”

Mr. Crewe was a little taken aback.

“The senator mentioned your name,” he admitted.

“He knows. Said I was the man to see if you was a candidate, didn't he?
Told you to talk to Job Braden, didn't he?”

Now Mr. Crewe had no means of knowing whether Senator Whitredge had been
in conference with Mr. Braden or not.

“The senator mentioned your name casually, in some connection,” said Mr.
Crewe.

“He knows,” Mr. Braden repeated, with a finality that spoke volumes for
the senator's judgment; and he bent over into Mr. Crewe's ear, with the
air of conveying a mild but well-merited reproof, “You'd ought to
come right to me in the first place. I could have saved you all that
unnecessary trouble of seein' folks. There hasn't be'n a representative
left the town of Leith for thirty years that I hain't agreed to.
Whitredge knows that. If I say you kin go, you kin go. You understand,”
 said Mr. Braden, with his fingers on Mr. Crewe's knee once more.

Five minutes later Mr. Crewe emerged into the dazzling sun of the Ripton
square, climbed into his automobile, and turned its head towards Leith,
strangely forgetting the main engagement which he said had brought him
to town.




CHAPTER VIII. THE TRIALS OF AN HONOURABLE

It was about this time that Mr. Humphrey Crewe was transformed, by
one of those subtle and inexplicable changes which occur in American
politics, into the Honourable Humphrey Crewe. And, as interesting bits
of news about important people are bound to leak out, it became known in
Leith that he had subscribed to what is known as a Clipping Bureau. Two
weeks after the day he left Mr. Braden's presence in the Ripton
House the principal newspapers of the country contained the startling
announcement that the well-known summer colony of Leith was to be
represented in the State Legislature by a millionaire. The Republican
nomination, which Mr. Crewe had secured, was equivalent to an election.

For a little time after that Mr. Crewe, although naturally an important
and busy man, scarcely had time to nod to his friends on the road.

“Poor dear Humphrey,” said Mrs. Pomfret, “who was so used to dropping
in to dinner, hasn't had a moment to write me a line to thank me for
the statesman's diary I bought for him in London this spring. They're
in that new red leather, and Aylestone says he finds his so useful. I
dropped in at Wedderburn to-day to see if I could be of any help, and
the poor man was buttonholed by two reporters who had come all the way
from New York to see him. I hope he won't overdo it.”

It was true. Mr. Crewe was to appear in the Sunday supplements. “Are
our Millionaires entering Politics?” Mr. Crewe, with his usual gracious
hospitality, showed the reporters over the place, and gave them
suggestions as to the best vantage-points in which to plant their
cameras. He himself was at length prevailed upon to be taken in a rough
homespun suit, and with a walking-stick in his hand, appraising with a
knowing eye a flock of his own sheep. Pressed a little, he consented to
relate something of the systematic manner in which he had gone about to
secure this nomination: how he had visited in person the homes of his
fellow-townsmen. “I knew them all, anyway,” he is quoted as saying; “we
have had the pleasantest of relationships during the many years I have
been a resident of Leith.”

“Beloved of his townspeople,” this part of the article was headed. No,
these were not Mr. Crewe's words--he was too modest for that. When urged
to give the name of one of his townsmen who might deal with this and
other embarrassing topics, Mr. Ball was mentioned. “Beloved of his
townspeople” was Mr. Ball's phrase. “Although a multi-millionaire,
no man is more considerate of the feelings and the rights of his more
humble neighbours. Send him to the Legislature! We'd send him to the
United States Senate if we could. He'll land there, anyway.” Such was
a random estimate (Mr. Ball's) the reporters gathered on their way to
Ripton. Mr. Crewe did not hesitate to say that the prosperity of the
farmers had risen as a result of his labours at Wedderburn where the
most improved machinery and methods were adopted. His efforts to raise
the agricultural, as well as the moral and intellectual, tone of the
community had been unceasing.

Then followed an intelligent abstract of the bills he was to
introduce--the results of a progressive and statesmanlike brain. There
was an account of him as a methodical and painstaking business man whose
suggestions to the boards of directors of which he was a member had
been invaluable. The article ended with a list of the clubs to which he
belonged, of the societies which he had organized and of those of which
he was a member,--and it might have been remarked by a discerning reader
that most of these societies were State affairs. Finally there was a pen
portrait of an Apollo Belvidere who wore the rough garb of a farmer (on
the days when the press was present).

Mr. Crewe's incessant trials, which would have taxed a less rugged
nature, did not end here. About five o'clock one afternoon a
pleasant-appearing gentleman with a mellifluous voice turned up who
introduced himself as ex (State) Senator Grady. The senator was from
Newcastle, that city out of the mysterious depths of which so many
political stars have arisen. Mr. Crewe cancelled a long-deferred
engagement with Mrs. Pomfret, and invited the senator to stay to dinner;
the senator hesitated, explained that he was just passing through
Ripton, and, as it was a pleasant afternoon, had called to “pay his
respects”; but Mr. Crewe's well-known hospitality would accept no
excuses. Mr. Crewe opened a box of cigars which he had bought especially
for the taste of State senators and a particular grade of Scotch
whiskey.

They talked politics for four hours. Who would be governor? The senator
thought Asa Gray would. The railroad was behind him, Mr. Crewe observed
knowingly. The senator remarked that Mr. Crewe was no gosling. Mr.
Crewe, as political-geniuses will, asked as many questions as the
emperor of Germany--pertinent questions about State politics. Senator
Grady was tremendously impressed with his host's programme of bills,
and went over them so painstakingly that Mr. Crewe became more and more
struck with Senator Grady's intelligence. The senator told Mr. Crewe
that just such a man as he was needed to pull the State out of the rut
into which she had fallen. Mr. Crewe said that he hoped to find such
enlightened men in the Legislature as the senator. The senator let it be
known that he had read the newspaper articles, and had remarked that Mr.
Crewe was close to the president of the Northeastern Railroads.

“Such a man as you,” said the senator, looking at the remainder of the
Scotch whiskey, “will have the railroad behind you, sure.”

“One more drink,” said Mr. Crewe.

“I must go,” said Mr. Grady, pouring it out, “but that reminds me. It
comes over me sudden-like, as I sit here, that you certainly ought to be
in the new encyclopeedie of the prominent men of the State. But sure you
have received an application.”

“It is probable that my secretary has one,” said Mr. Crewe, “but he
hasn't called it to my attention.”

“You must get in that book, Mr. Crewe,” said the senator, with an
intense earnestness which gave the impression of alarm; “after what
you've told me to-night I'll see to it myself that you get in. It may be
that I've got some of the sample pages here, if I haven't left them at
home,” said Mr. Grady, fumbling in an ample inside pocket, and drawing
forth a bundle. “Sure, here they are. Ain't that luck for you? Listen!
'Asa P. Gray was born on the third of August, eighteen forty-seven, the
seventh son of a farmer. See, there's a space in the end they left
to fill up when he's elicted governor! Here's another. The Honourable
Hilary Vane comes from one of the oldest Puritan families in the State,
the Vanes of Camden Street--' Here's another. 'The Honourable Brush
Bascom of Putnam County is the son of poor but honourable parents--'
Look at the picture of him. Ain't that a handsome steel-engravin' of the
gentleman?”

Mr. Crewe gazed contemplatively at the proof, but was too busy with
his own thoughts to reflect that there was evidently not much poor or
honourable about Mr. Bascom now.

“Who's publishing this?” he asked.

“Fogarty and Company; sure they're the best publishers in the State, as
you know, Mr. Crewe. They have the State printing. Wasn't it fortunate
I had the proofs with me? Tim Fogarty slipped them into me pocket when
I was leavin' Newcastle. 'The book is goin' to press the day after
eliction,' says he, 'John,' says he, 'you know I always rely on your
judgment, and if you happen to think of anybody between now and then
who ought to go in, you'll notify me,' says he. When I read the bills
to-night, and saw the scope of your work, it came over me in a flash
that Humphrey Crewe was the man they left out. You'll get a good man to
write your life, and what you done for the town and State, and all them
societies and bills, won't you? 'Twould be a thousand pities not to have
it right.”

“How much does it cost?” Mr. Crewe inquired.

“Sure I forgot to ask Tim Fogarty. Mebbe he has it here. I signed one
myself, but I couldn't afford the steelengravin'. Yes, he slipped one
in. Two hundred dollars for a two-page biography, and, three hundred for
the steelengravin'. Five hundred dollars. I didn't know it was so cheap
as that,” exclaimed the senator, “and everybody in the State havin' to
own one in self-protection. You don't happen to have a pen about you?”

Mr. Crewe waved the senator towards his own desk, and Mr. Grady filled
out the blank.

“It's lucky we are that I didn't drop in after eliction, and the book
in press,” he remarked; “and I hope you'll give him a good photograph.
This's for you, I'll take this to Tim myself,” and he handed the pen for
Mr. Crewe to sign with.

Mr. Crewe read over the agreement carefully, as a business man should,
before putting his signature to it. And then the senator, with renewed
invitations for Mr. Crewe to call on him when he came to Newcastle, took
his departure. Afterwards Mr. Crewe remained so long in reflection that
his man Waters became alarmed, and sought him out and interrupted his
revery.

The next morning Mrs. Pomfret, who was merely “driving by” with her
daughter Alice and Beatrice Chillingham, spied Mr. Crewe walking about
among the young trees he was growing near the road, and occasionally
tapping them with his stout stick. She poked her coachman in the back
and cried:--“Humphrey, you're such an important man now that I despair
of ever seeing you again. What was the matter last night?”

“A politician from Newcastle,” answered Mr. Crewe, continuing to tap the
trees, and without so much as a glance at Alice.

“Well, if you're as important as this before you're elected, I can't
think what it will be afterwards,” Mrs. Pomfret lamented. “Poor dear
Humphrey is so conscientious. When can you come, Humphrey?”

“Don't know,” said Mr. Crewe; “I'll try to come tonight, but I may be
stopped again. Here's Waters now.”

The three people in Mrs. Pomfret's victoria were considerably impressed
to see the dignified Waters hurrying down the slope from the house
towards them. Mr. Crewe continued to tap the trees, but drew a little
nearer the carriage.

“If you please, sir,” said Waters, “there's a telephone call for you
from Newcastle. It's urgent, sir.”

“Who is it?”

“They won't give their names, sir.”

“All right,” said Mr. Crewe, and with a grin which spoke volumes for
the manner in which he was harassed he started towards the house--in no
great hurry, however. Reaching the instrument, and saying “Hello” in
his usually gracious manner, he was greeted by a voice with a decided
Hibernian-American accent.

“Am I talkin' to Mr. Crewe?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Humphrey Crewe?”

“Yes--yes, of course you are. Who are you?”

“I'm the president of the Paradise Benevolent and Military Association,
Mr. Crewe. Boys that work in the mills, you know,” continued the voice,
caressingly. “Sure you've heard of us. We're five hundred strong, and
all of us good Republicans as the president. We're to have our annual
fall outing the first of October in Finney Grove, and we'd like to have
you come down.”

“The first of October?” said Mr. Crewe. “I'll consult my engagement
book.”

“We'd like to have a good picture of you in our programme, Mr. Crewe. We
hope you'll oblige us. You're such an important figure in State politics
now you'd ought to have a full page.”

There was a short silence.

“What does it cost?” Mr. Crewe demanded.

“Sure,” said the caressing voice of the president, “whatever you like.”

“I'll send you a check for five dollars, and a picture,” said Mr. Crewe.

The answer to this was a hearty laugh, which the telephone reproduced
admirably. The voice now lost a little of its caressing note and partook
of a harder quality.

“You're a splendid humorist, Mr. Crewe. Five dollars wouldn't pay for
the plate and the paper. A gentleman like you could give us twenty-five,
and never know it was gone. You won't be wanting to stop in the
Legislature, Mr. Crewe, and we remember our friends in Newcastle.”

“Very well, I'll see what I can do. Good-by, I've got an engagement,”
 said Mr. Crewe, and slammed down the telephone. He seated himself in his
chair, and the pensive mood so characteristic (we are told) of statesmen
came over him once more.

While these and other conferences and duties too numerous to mention
were absorbing Mr. Crewe, he was not too busy to bear in mind the
pleasure of those around him who had not received such an abundance
of the world's blessings as he. The townspeople of Leith were about
to bestow on him their greatest gift. What could he do to show his
appreciation? Wrestling with this knotty problem, a brilliant idea
occurred to him,--he would have a garden-party: invite everybody in
town, and admit them to the sanctities of Wedderburn; yes, even of
Wedderburn house, that they might behold with their own eyes the carved
ivory elephants and other contents of glass cabinets which reeked of
the Sunday afternoons of youth. Being a man of action, Mr. Pardriff
was summoned at once from Leith and asked for his lowest price on eight
hundred and fifty invitations and a notice of the party in the Ripton
Record.

“Goin' to invite Democrats, too?” demanded Mr. Pardriff, glancing at the
check-list.

“Everybody,” said Mr. Crewe, with unparalleled generosity. “I won't draw
any distinction between friends and enemies. They're all neighbours.”

“And some of 'em might, by accident, vote the Republican ticket,” Mr.
Pardriff retorted, narrowing his eyes a little.

Mr. Crewe evidently thought this a negligible suggestion, for he did not
reply to it, but presently asked for the political news in Ripton.

“Well,” said Mr. Pardriff, “you know they tried to get Austen Vane to
run for State senator, don't you?”

“Vane Why, he ain't a full-fledged lawyer yet. I've hired him in an
unimportant case. Who asked him to run?”

“Young Tom Gaylord and a delegation.”

“He couldn't have got it,” said Mr. Crewe.

“I don't know,” said Mr. Pardriff, “he might have given Billings a
hustle for the nomination.”

“You supported Billings, I noticed,” said Mr. Crewe.

Mr. Pardriff winked an eye.

“I'm not ready to walk the ties when I go to Newcastle,” he remarked,
“and Nat ain't quite bankrupt yet. The Gaylords,” continued Mr.
Pardriff, who always took the cynical view of a man of the world, “have
had some row with the Northeastern over lumber shipments. I understand
they're goin' to buck 'em for a franchise in the next Legislature, just
to make it lively. The Gaylords ain't exactly poverty-stricken, but they
might as well try to move Sawanec Mountain as the Northeastern.”

It was a fact that young Tom Gaylord had approached Austen Vane with
a “delegation” to request him to be a candidate for the Republican
nomination for the State senate in his district against the railroad
candidate and

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