Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford
by George Randolph Chester · English · Gutenberg #37010 · 523,274 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford
Author: George Randolph Chester
Release date: August 9, 2011 [eBook #37010]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37010
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GET-RICH-QUICK WALLINGFORD ***
Produced by Roger Frank, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
GET-RICH-QUICK WALLINGFORD
A cheerful account of the rise and fall of an American Business
Buccaneer
By GEORGE RANDOLPH CHESTER
Author of "The Making of Bobby Burnit," "The Cash Intrigue," Etc.
WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS
A. L. BURT COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1907, by the Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright, 1908, by the Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright, 1908, by Howard E. Altemus
Published April, 1908
TO THE LIVE BUSINESS MEN OF AMERICA--THOSE
WHO HAVE BEEN "STUNG" AND THOSE WHO
HAVE YET TO UNDERGO THAT PAINFUL
EXPERIENCE--THIS LITTLE TALE IS
SYMPATHETICALLY DEDICATED
[Illustration: "AND THE BATHROOM MUST HAVE A LARGE TUB"]
Contents
CHAPTER I. In Which J. Rufus Wallingford Conceives a
Brilliant Invention 9
CHAPTER II. Wherein Edward Lamb Beholds the Amazing
Profits of the Carpet-tack Industry 21
CHAPTER III. Mr. Wallingford's Lamb Is Carefully Inspired
with a Flash of Creative Genius 33
CHAPTER IV. J. Rufus Accepts a Temporary Accommodation
and Buys an Automobile 45
CHAPTER V. The Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company
Forms Amid Great Enthusiasm 58
CHAPTER VI. In Which an Astounding Revelation Is Made
Concerning J. Rufus 71
CHAPTER VII. Wherein the Great Tack Inventor Suddenly
Decides to Change His Location 93
CHAPTER VIII. Mr. Wallingford Takes a Dose of His Own
Bitter Medicine 111
CHAPTER IX. Mr. Wallingford Shows Mr. Clover How to Do
the Widows and Orphans Good 129
CHAPTER X. An Amazing Combination of Philanthropy and
Profit is Inaugurated 140
CHAPTER XI. Neil Takes a Sudden Interest in the
Business, and Wallingford Lets Go 155
CHAPTER XII. Fate Arranges for J. Rufus an Opportunity
to Manufacture Sales Recorders 171
CHAPTER XIII. Mr. Wallingford Offers Unlimited Financial
Backing to a New Enterprise 187
CHAPTER XIV. Showing How Five Hundred Dollars May Do
the Work of Five Thousand 202
CHAPTER XV. Wallingford Generously Loans The Pneumatic
Company Some of Its Own Money 215
CHAPTER XVI. The Financier Takes a Flying Trip to Europe
on an Affair of the Heart 232
CHAPTER XVII. Wherein a Good Stomach for Strong Drink
is Worth Thousands of Dollars 246
CHAPTER XVIII. The Town of Battlesburg Finds a Private
Railroad Car in Its Midst! 256
CHAPTER XIX. Mr. Wallingford Wins the Town of Battlesburg
by the Toss of a Coin 273
CHAPTER XX. Battlesburg Smells Money and Plunges into
a Mad Orgie of Speculation 293
CHAPTER XXI. In Which the Sheep Are Sheared and Skinned
and Their Hides Tanned 310
CHAPTER XXII. J. Rufus Prefers Farming in America to
Promoting in Europe 330
CHAPTER XXIII. A Corner on Farmers is Formed and It
Beholds a Most Wonderful Vision 347
CHAPTER XXIV. The Farmers' Commercial Association Does
Terrific Things to the Board of Trade 365
CHAPTER XXV. Mr. Fox Solves His Great Problem and Mr.
Wallingford Falls With a Thud 383
CHAPTER XXVI. J. Rufus Scents a Fortune in Smoke and
Lets Mr. Nickel See the Flames 399
CHAPTER XXVII. Mr. Wallingford Gambles a Bit and Picks
Up an Unsolicited Partner 414
CHAPTER XXVIII. Wherein Mr. Wallingford Joins the Largest
Club in the World 431
GET-RICH-QUICK WALLINGFORD
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH J. RUFUS WALLINGFORD CONCEIVES A BRILLIANT INVENTION
The mud was black and oily where it spread thinly at the edges of the
asphalt, and wherever it touched it left a stain; it was upon the
leather of every pedestrian, even the most fastidious, and it bordered
with almost laughable conspicuousness the higher marking of yellow clay
upon the heavy shoes of David Jasper, where he stood at the curb in
front of the big hotel with his young friend, Edward Lamb. Absorbed in
"lodge," talk, neither of the oddly assorted cronies cared much for
drizzle overhead or mire underfoot; but a splash of black mud in the
face must necessarily command some attention. This surprise came
suddenly to both from the circumstance of a cab having dashed up just
beside them. Their resentment, bubbling hot for a moment, was quickly
chilled, however, as the cab door opened and out of it stepped one of
those impressive beings for whom the best things of this world have been
especially made and provided. He was a large gentleman, a suave
gentleman, a gentleman whose clothes not merely fit him but
distinguished him, a gentleman of rare good living, even though one of
the sort whose faces turn red when they eat; and the dignity of his
worldly prosperousness surrounded him like a blessed aura. Without a
glance at the two plain citizens who stood mopping the mud from their
faces, he strode majestically into the hotel, leaving Mr. David Jasper
and Mr. Edward Lamb out in the rain.
The clerk kowtowed to the signature, though he had never seen nor heard
of it before--"J. Rufus Wallingford, Boston." His eyes, however, had
noted a few things: traveling suit, scarf pin, watch guard, ring,
hatbox, suit case, bag, all expensive and of the finest grade.
"Sitting room and bedroom; outside!" directed Mr. Wallingford. "And the
bathroom must have a large tub."
The clerk ventured a comprehending smile as he noted the bulk before
him.
"Certainly, Mr. Wallingford. Boy, key for 44-A. Anything else, Mr.
Wallingford?"
"Send up a waiter and a valet."
Once more the clerk permitted himself a slight smile, but this time it
was as his large guest turned away. He had not the slightest doubt that
Mr. Wallingford's bill would be princely, he was positive that it would
be paid; but a vague wonder had crossed his mind as to who would
regrettingly pay it. His penetration was excellent, for at this very
moment the new arrival's entire capitalized worth was represented by the
less than one hundred dollars he carried in his pocket, nor had Mr.
Wallingford the slightest idea of where he was to get more. This latter
circumstance did not distress him, however; he knew that there was still
plenty of money in the world and that none of it was soldered on, and a
reflection of this comfortable philosophy was in his whole bearing. As
he strode in pomp across the lobby, a score of bellboys, with a
carefully trained scent for tips, envied the cheerfully grinning
servitor who followed him to the elevator with his luggage.
Just as the bellboy was inserting the key in the lock of 44-A, a tall,
slightly built man in a glove-fitting black frock suit, a quite
ministerial-looking man, indeed, had it not been for the startling
effect of his extravagantly curled black mustache and his piercing black
eyes, came down the hallway, so abstracted that he had almost passed Mr.
Wallingford. The latter, however, had eyes for everything.
"What's the hurry, Blackie?" he inquired affably.
The other wheeled instantly, with the snappy alertness of a man who has
grown of habit to hold himself in readiness against sudden surprises
from any quarter.
"Hello, J. Rufus!" he exclaimed, and shook hands. "Boston squeezed dry?"
Mr. Wallingford chuckled with a cumbrous heaving of his shoulders.
"Just threw the rind away," he confessed. "Come in."
Mr. Daw, known as "Blackie" to a small but select circle of gentlemen
who make it their business to rescue and put carefully hoarded money
back into rapid circulation, dropped moodily into a chair and sat
considering his well-manicured finger-nails in glum silence, while his
masterful host disposed of the bellboy and the valet.
"Had your dinner?" inquired Mr. Wallingford as he donned the last few
garments of a fresh suit.
"Not yet," growled the other. "I've got such a grouch against myself I
won't even feed right, for fear I'd enjoy it. On the cheaps for the last
day, too."
Mr. Wallingford laughed and shook his head.
"I'm clean myself," he hastened to inform his friend. "If I have a
hundred I'm a millionaire, but I'm coming and you're going, and we don't
look at that settle-up ceremony the same way. What's the matter?"
"I'm the goat!" responded Blackie moodily. "The original goat! Came
clear out here to trim a sucker that looked good by mail, and have
swallowed so much of that citric fruit that if I scrape myself my skin
spurts lemon juice. Say, do I look like a come-on?"
"If you only had the shaving-brush goatee, Blackie, I'd try to make you
bet on the location of the little pea," gravely responded his friend.
"That's right; rub it in!" exclaimed the disgruntled one. "Massage me
with it! Jimmy, if I could take off my legs, I'd kick myself with them
from here to Boston and never lose a stroke. And me wise!"
"But where's the fire?" asked J. Rufus, bringing the end of his collar
to place with a dexterous jerk.
"This lamb I came out to shear--rot him and burn him and scatter his
ashes! Before I went dippy over two letter-heads and a nice round
signature, I ordered an extra safety-deposit vault back home and came on
to take his bank roll and house and lot, and make him a present of his
clothes if he behaved. But not so! _Not_--so! Jimmy, this whole town
blew right over from out of the middle of Missouri in the last cyclone.
You've got to show everybody, and then turn it over and let 'em see the
other side, and I haven't met the man yet that you could separate from a
dollar without chloroform and an ax. Let me tell you what to do with
that hundred, J. Rufe. Just get on the train and give it to the
conductor, and tell him to take you as far ay-way from here as the money
will reach!"
Mr. Wallingford settled his cravat tastefully and smiled at himself in
the glass.
"I like the place," he observed. "They have tall buildings here, and I
smell soft money. This town will listen to a legitimate business
proposition. What?"
"Like the milk-stopper industry?" inquired Mr. Daw, grinning
appreciatively. "How is your Boston corporation coming on, anyhow?"
"It has even quit holding the bag," responded the other, "because there
isn't anything left of the bag. The last I saw of them, the thin and
feeble stockholders were chasing themselves around in circles, so I
faded away."
"You're a wonder," complimented the black-haired man with genuine
admiration. "You never take a chance, yet get away with everything in
sight, and you never leave 'em an opening to put the funny clothes on
you."
"I deal in nothing but straight commercial propositions that are
strictly within the pale of the law," said J. Rufus without a wink; "and
even at that they can't say I took anything away from Boston."
"Don't blame Boston. You never cleaned up a cent less than five thousand
a month while you were there, and if you spent it, that was your
lookout."
"I had to live."
"So do the suckers," sagely observed Mr. Daw, "but they manage it on
four cents' worth of prunes a day, and save up their money for good
people. How is Mrs. Wallingford?"
"All others are base imitations," boasted the large man, pausing to
critically consider the flavor of his champagne. "Just now, Fanny's in
New York, eating up her diamonds. She was swallowing the last of the
brooch when I left her, and this morning she was to begin on the
necklace. That ought to last her quite some days, and by that time J.
Rufus expects to be on earth again."
A waiter came to the door with a menu card, and Mr. Wallingford ordered,
to be ready to serve in three quarters of an hour, at a choice table
near the music, a dinner for two that would gladden the heart of any
tip-hunter.
"How soon are you going back to Boston, Blackie?"
"To-night!" snapped the other. "I was going to take a train that makes
it in nineteen hours, but I found there is one that makes it in eighteen
and a half, so I'm going to take that; and when I get back where the
police are satisfied with half, I'm not going out after the emerald
paper any more. I'm going to make them bring it to me. It's always the
best way. I never went after money yet that they didn't ask me why I
wanted it."
The large man laughed with his eyes closed.
"Honestly, Blackie, you ought to go into legitimate business
enterprises. That's the only game. You can get anybody to buy stock
when you make them print it themselves, if you'll only bait up with
some little staple article that people use and throw away every day,
like ice-cream pails, or corks, or cigar bands, or--or--or carpet
tacks." Having sought about the room for this last illustration, Mr.
Wallingford became suddenly inspired, and, arising, went over to the
edge of the carpet, where he gazed down meditatively for a moment. "Now,
look at this, for instance!" he said with final enthusiasm. "See this
swell red carpet fastened down with rusty tacks? There's the chance.
Suppose those tacks were covered with red cloth to match the carpet.
Blackie, that's my next invention."
"Maybe there are covered carpet tacks," observed his friend, with but
languid interest.
"What do I care?" rejoined Mr. Wallingford. "A man can always get a
patent, and that's all I need, even if it's one you can throw a cat
through. The company can fight the patent after I'm out of it. You
wouldn't expect me to fasten myself down to the grease-covered details
of an actual manufacturing business, would you?"
"Not any!" rejoined the dark one emphatically. "You're all right, J.
Rufus. I'd go into your business myself if I wasn't honest. But, on the
level, what do you expect to do here?"
"Organize the Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company. I'll begin
to-morrow morning. Give me the list you couldn't use."
"Don't get in bad from the start," warned Mr. Daw. "Tackle fresh ones.
The particular piece of Roquefort, though, that fooled me into a Pullman
compartment and kept me grinning like a drunken hyena all the way here,
was a pinhead by the name of Edward Lamb. When Eddy fell for an inquiry
about Billion Strike gold stock, he wrote on the firm's stationery, all
printed in seventeen colors and embossed so it made holes in the
envelopes when the cancellation stamp came down. From the tone of Eddy's
letter I thought he was about ready to mortgage father's business to buy
Billion Strike, and I came on to help him do it. Honest, J. Rufus,
wouldn't it strike you that Lamb was a good name? Couldn't you hear it
bleat?"
Mr. Wallingford shook silently, the more so that there was no answering
gleam of mirth in Mr. Daw's savage visage.
"Say, do you know what I found when I got here?" went on Blackie still
more ferociously. "I found he was a piker bookkeeper, but with five
thousand dollars that he'd wrenched out of his own pay envelope, a
pinch at a clip; and every time he takes a dollar out of his pocket his
fingers creak. His whole push is like him, too, but I never got any
further than Eddy. He's not merely Johnny Wise--he's the whole Wise
family, and it's only due to my Christian bringing up that I didn't swat
him with a brick during our last little chatter when I saw it all fade
away. Do you know what he wanted me to do? He wanted me to prove to him
that there actually was a Billion Strike mine, and that gold had been
found in it!"
Mr. Wallingford had ceased to laugh. He was soberly contemplating.
"Your Lamb is my mutton," he finally concluded, pressing his finger tips
together. "He'll listen to a legitimate business proposition."
"Don't make me fuss with you, J. Rufus," admonished Mr. Daw. "Remember,
I'm going away to-night," and he arose.
Mr. Wallingford arose with him. "By the way, of course I'll want to
refer to you; how many addresses have you besides the Billion Strike? A
mention of that would probably get me arrested."
"Four: the Mexican and Rio Grande Rubber Company, Tremont Building; the
St. John's Blood Orange Plantation Company, 643 Third Street; the Los
Pocos Lead Development Company, 868 Schuttle Avenue, and the Sierra
Cinnabar Grant, Schuttle Square, all of which addresses will reach me at
my little old desk-room corner in 1126 Tremont Building, Third and
Schuttle Avenues; and I'll answer letters of inquiry on four different
letter-heads. If you need more I'll post Billy Riggs over in the Cloud
Block and fix it for another four or five."
"I'll write Billy a letter myself," observed J. Rufus. "I'll need all
the references I can get when I come to organize the Universal Covered
Carpet Tack Company."
"Quit kidding," retorted Mr. Daw.
"It's on the level," insisted J. Rufus seriously. "Let's go down to
dinner."
CHAPTER II
WHEREIN EDWARD LAMB BEHOLDS THE AMAZING PROFITS OF THE CARPET-TACK
INDUSTRY
There were twenty-four applicants for the position before Edward Lamb
appeared, the second day after the initial insertion of the
advertisement which had been designed to meet his eye alone. David
Jasper, who read his paper advertisements and all, in order to get the
full worth of his money out of it, telephoned to his friend Edward about
the glittering chance.
Yes, Mr. Wallingford was in his suite. Would the gentleman give his
name? Mr. Lamb produced a card, printed in careful imitation of
engraving, and it gained him admission to the august presence, where he
created some surprise by a sudden burst of laughter.
"Ex-cuse me!" he exclaimed. "But you're the man that splashed mud on me
the other night!"
When the circumstance was related, Mr. Wallingford laughed with great
gusto and shook hands for the second time with his visitor. The
incident helped them to get upon a most cordial footing at once. It did
not occur to either of them, at the time, how appropriate it was that
Mr. Wallingford should splash mud upon Mr. Lamb at their very first
meeting.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Lamb?" inquired the large man.
"You advertised----" began the caller.
"Oh, you came about that position," deprecated Mr. Wallingford, with a
nicely shaded tone of courteous disappointment in his voice. "I am
afraid that I am already fairly well suited, although I have made no
final choice as yet. What are your qualifications?"
"There will be no trouble about that," returned Mr. Lamb, straightening
visibly. "I can satisfy anybody." And Mr. Wallingford had the keynote
for which he was seeking.
He knew at once that Mr. Lamb prided himself upon his independence, upon
his local standing, upon his efficiency, upon his business astuteness.
The observer had also the experience of Mr. Daw to guide him, and,
moreover, better than all, here was Mr. Lamb himself. He was a
broad-shouldered young man, who stood well upon his two feet; he dressed
with a proper and decent pride in his prosperity, and wore looped upon
his vest a watch chain that by its very weight bespoke the wearer's
solid worth. The young man was an open book, whereof the pages were
embossed in large type.
"Now you're talking like the right man," said the prospective employer.
"Sit down. You'll understand, Mr. Lamb, that my question was only a
natural one, for I am quite particular about this position, which is the
most important one I have to fill. Our business is to be a large one. We
are to conduct an immense plant in this city, and I want the office work
organized with a thorough system from the beginning. The duties,
consequently, would begin at once. The man who would become secretary of
the Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company, would need to know all about
the concern from its very inception, and until I have secured that exact
man I shall take no steps toward organization."
Word by word, Mr. Wallingford watched the face of Edward Lamb and could
see that he was succumbing to the mental chloroform. However, a man who
at thirty has accumulated five thousand is not apt to be numbed without
struggling.
"Before we go any further," interposed the patient, with deep, deep
shrewdness, "it must be understood that I have no money to invest."
"Exactly," agreed Mr. Wallingford. "I stated that in my advertisement.
To become secretary it will be necessary to hold one share of stock, but
that share I shall give to the right applicant. I do not care for him to
have any investment in the company. What I want is the services of the
best man in the city, and to that end I advertised for one who had been
an expert bookkeeper and who knew all the office routine of conducting a
large business, agreeing to start such a man with a salary of two
hundred dollars a month. That advertisement stated in full all that I
expect from the one who secures this position--his expert services. I
may say that you are only the second candidate who has had the outward
appearance of being able to fulfill the requirements. Actual efficiency
would naturally have to be shown."
Mr. Wallingford was now quite coldly insistent. The proper sleep had
been induced.
"For fifteen years," Mr. Lamb now hastened to advise him, "I have been
employed by the A. J. Dorman Manufacturing Company, and can refer you to
them for everything you wish to know. I can give you other references as
to reliability if you like."
Mr. Wallingford was instant warmth.
"The A. J. Dorman Company, indeed!" he exclaimed, though he had never
heard of that concern. "The name itself is guarantee enough, at least to
defer such matters for a bit while I show you the industry that is to be
built in your city." From his dresser Mr. Wallingford produced a handful
of tacks, the head of each one covered with a bit of different-colored
bright cloth. "You have only to look at these," he continued, holding
them forth, and with the thumb and forefinger of the other hand turning
one red-topped tack about in front of Mr. Lamb's eyes, "to appreciate to
the full what a wonderful business certainty I am preparing to launch.
Just hold these tacks a moment," and he turned the handful into Mr.
Lamb's outstretched palm. "Now come over to the edge of this carpet. I
have selected here a tack which matches this floor covering. You see
those rusty heads? Imagine the difference if they were replaced by
this!"
Mr. Lamb looked and saw, but it was necessary to display his business
acumen.
"Looks like a good thing," he commented; "but the cost?"
"The cost is comparatively nothing over the old steel tack, although we
can easily get ten cents a paper as against five for the common ones,
leaving us a much wider margin of profit than the manufacturers of the
straight tack obtain. There is no family so poor that will use the old,
rusty tinned or bronze tack when these are made known to the trade, and
you can easily compute for yourself how many millions of packages are
used every year. Why, the Eureka Tack Company, which practically has a
monopoly of the carpet-tack business, operates a manufacturing plant
covering twenty solid acres, and a loaded freight car leaves its
warehouse doors on an average of every seven minutes! You cannot buy a
share of stock in the Eureka Carpet Tack Company at any price. It yields
sixteen per cent. a year dividends, with over eighteen million dollars
of undivided surplus--and that business was built on carpet tacks alone!
Why, sir, if we wished to do so, within two months after we had started
our factory wheels rolling we could sell out to the Eureka Company for
two million dollars; or a profit of more than one thousand per cent. on
the investment that we are to make."
For once Mr. Lamb was overwhelmed. Only three days before he had been
beset by Mr. Daw, but that gentleman had grown hoarsely eloquent over
vast possessions that were beyond thousands of miles of circumambient
space, across vast barren reaches where desert sands sent up constant
streams of superheated atmosphere, with the "hot air" distinctly to be
traced throughout the conversation; but here was something to be seen
and felt. The points of the very tacks that he held pricked his palm,
and his eyes were still glued upon the red-topped one which Mr.
Wallingford held hypnotically before him.
"Who composes your company?" he managed to ask.
"So far, I do," replied Mr. Wallingford with quiet pride. "I have not
organized the company. That is a minor detail. When I go searching for
capital I shall know where to secure it. I have chosen this city on
account of its manufacturing facilities, and for its splendid
geographical position as a distributing center."
"The stock is not yet placed, then," mused aloud Mr. Lamb, upon whose
vision there already glowed a pleasing picture of immense profits.
Why, the thing was startling in the magnificence of its opportunity!
Simple little trick, millions and millions used, better than anything of
its kind ever put upon the market, cheaply manufactured, it was marked
for success from the first!
"Stock placed? Not at all," stated Mr. Wallingford. "My plans only
contemplate incorporating for a quarter of a million, and I mean to
avoid small stockholders. I shall try to divide the stock into, say,
about ten holdings of twenty-five thousand each."
Mr. Lamb was visibly disappointed.
"It looks like a fine thing," he declared with a note of regret.
"Fine? My boy, I'm not much older than you are, but I have been
connected with several large enterprises in Boston and elsewhere--if any
one were to care to inquire about me they might drop a line to the
Mexican and Rio Grande Rubber Company, the St. John's Blood Orange
Plantation Company, the Los Pocos Lead Development Company, the Sierra
Cinnabar Grant, and a number of others, the addresses of which I could
supply--and I never have seen anything so good as this. I am staking my
entire business judgment upon it, and, of course, I shall retain the
majority of stock myself, inasmuch as the article is my invention."
This being the psychological moment, Mr. Wallingford put forth his hand
and had Mr. Lamb dump the tacks back into the large palm that had at
first held them. He left them open to view, however, and presently Mr.
Lamb picked out one of them for examination. This particular tack was
of an exquisite apple-green color, the covering for which had been
clipped from one of Mr. Wallingford's own expensive ties, glued to its
place and carefully trimmed by Mr. Wallingford's own hands. Mr. Lamb
took it to the window for closer admiration, and the promoter, left to
himself for a moment, stood before the glass to mop his face and head
and neck. He had been working until he had perspired; but, looking into
the glass at Mr. Lamb's rigid back, he perceived that the work was well
done. Mr. Lamb was profoundly convinced that the Universal Covered
Carpet Tack Company was an entity to be respected; nay, to be revered!
Mr. Lamb could already see the smoke belching from the tall chimneys of
its factory, the bright lights gleaming out from its myriad windows
where it was working overtime, the thousands of workmen streaming in at
its broad gates, the loaded freight cars leaving every seven minutes!
"You're not going home to dinner, are you, Mr. Lamb?" asked Mr.
Wallingford suddenly. "I owe you one for the splash, you know."
"Why--I'm expected home."
"Telephone them you're not coming."
"We--we haven't a telephone in the house."
"Telephone to the nearest drug store and send a messenger over."
Mr. Lamb looked down at himself. He was always neatly dressed, but he
did not feel equal to the glitter of the big dining room downstairs.
"I am not--cleaned up," he objected.
"Nonsense! However, as far as that goes, we'll have 'em bring a table
right here." And, taking the matter into his own hands, Mr. Wallingford
telephoned for a waiter.
From that moment Mr. Lamb strove not to show his wonder at the heights
to which human comfort and luxury can attain, but it was a vain attempt;
for from the time the two uniformed attendants brought in the table with
its snowy cloth and began to place upon it the shining silver and
cut-glass service, with the centerpiece of red carnations, he began to
grasp at a new world--and it was about this time that he wished he had
on his best black suit. In the bathroom Mr. Wallingford came upon him as
he held his collar ruefully in his hand, and needed no explanation.
"I say, old man, we can't keep 'em clean, can we? We'll fix that."
The bellboys were anxious to answer summons from 44-A by this time. Mr.
Wallingford never used money in a hotel except for tips. It was
scarcely a minute until a boy had that collar, with instructions to get
another just like it.
"How are the cuffs? Attached, old man? All right. What size shirt do you
wear?"
Mr. Lamb gave up. He was now past the point of protest. He told Mr.
Wallingford the number of his shirt. In five minutes more he was
completely outfitted with clean linen, and when, washed and refreshed
and spotless as to high lights, he stepped forth into what was now a
perfectly appointed private dining room, he felt himself gradually
rising to Mr. Wallingford's own height and able to be supercilious to
the waiters, under whose gaze, while his collar was soiled, he had
quailed.
It was said by those who made a business of dining that Mr. Wallingford
could order a dinner worth while, except for the one trifling fault of
over-plenty; but then, Mr. Wallingford himself was a large man, and it
took much food and drink to sustain that largeness. Whatever other
critics might have said, Mr. Lamb could have but one opinion as they
sipped their champagne, toward the end of the meal, and this opinion was
that Mr. Wallingford was a genius, a prince of entertainers, a master of
finance, a gentleman to be imitated in every particular, and that a man
should especially blush to question his financial standing or
integrity.
They went to the theater after dinner--box seats--and after the theater
they had a little cold snack, amounting to about eleven dollars,
including wine and cigars. Moreover, Mr. Lamb had gratefully accepted
the secretaryship of the Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company.
CHAPTER III
MR. WALLINGFORD'S LAMB IS CAREFULLY INSPIRED WITH A FLASH OF CREATIVE
GENIUS
The next morning, in spite of protests and warnings from his employer,
Mr. Lamb resigned his position with the A. J. Dorman Company, and,
jumping on a car, rode out to the far North Side, where he called at
David Jasper's tumble-down frame house. On either side of this were
three neat houses that David had built, one at a time, on land he had
bought for a song in his younger days; but these were for renting
purposes. David lived in the old one for exactly the same reason that he
wore the frayed overcoat and slouch hat that had done him duty for many
years--they made him as comfortable as new ones, and appearances fed no
one nor kept anybody warm.
Wholesome Ella Jasper met the caller at the door with an inward
cordiality entirely out of proportion to even a close friend of the
family, but her greeting was commonplaceness itself.
"Father's just over to Kriegler's, getting his glass of beer and his
lunch," she observed as he shook hands warmly with her. Sometimes she
wished that he were not quite so meaninglessly cordial; that he could be
either a bit more shy or a bit more bold in his greeting of her.
"I might have known that," he laughed, looking at his watch. "Half-past
ten. I'll hurry right over there," and he was gone.
Ella stood in the doorway and looked after him until he had turned the
corner of the house; then she sighed and went back to her baking. A
moment later she was singing cheerfully.
It was a sort of morning lunch club of elderly men, all of the one
lodge, the one building association, the one manner of life, which met
over at Kriegler's, and "Eddy" was compelled to sit with them for nearly
an hour of slow beer, while politics, municipal, state and national, was
thoroughly thrashed out, before he could get his friend David to
himself.
"Well, what brings you out so early, Eddy?" asked the old harness maker
on the walk home. "Got a new gold-mining scheme again to put us all in
the poorhouse?"
Eddy laughed.
"You don't remember of the kid-glove miner taking anybody's money away,
do you?" he demanded. "I guess your old chum Eddy saw through the
grindstone that time, eh?"
Mr. Jasper laughed and pounded him a sledge-hammer blow upon the
shoulder. It was intended as a mere pat of approval.
"You're all right, Eddy. The only trouble with you is that you don't get
married. You'll be an old bachelor before you know it."
"So you've said before," laughed Eddy, "but I can't find the girl that
will have me."
"I'll speak to Ella for you."
The younger man laughed lightly again.
"She's my sister," he said gayly. "I wouldn't lose my sister for
anything."
David frowned a little and shook his head to himself, but he said
nothing more, though the wish was close to his heart. He thought he was
tactful.
"No, I've got that new job," went on young Lamb. "Another man from
Boston, too. I'm in charge of the complete office organization of a
brand-new manufacturing business that's to start up here. Two hundred
dollars a month to begin. How's that?"
"Fine," said David. "Enough to marry on. But it sounds too good. Is he a
sharper, too?"
"He don't need to be. He seems to have plenty of money, and the article
he's going to start manufacturing is so good that it will pay him
better to be honest than to be crooked. I don't see where the man could
go wrong. Why, look here!" and from his vest pocket he pulled an
orange-headed tack. "Carpet tack--covered with any color you want--same
color as your carpet so the tacks don't show--only cost a little bit
more than the cheap ones. Don't you think it's a good thing?"
David stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and put on his spectacles to
examine the trifle critically.
"Is that all he's going to make--just tacks?"
"Just tacks!" exclaimed the younger man. "Why, Dave, the Eureka Tack
Company, that has a practical monopoly now of the tack business in this
country, occupies a plant covering twenty acres. It employs thousands of
men. It makes sixteen per cent. a year dividends, and has millions of
dollars surplus in its treasury--undivided profits! Long freight trains
leave its warehouses every day, loaded down with nothing but tacks; and
that's all they make--just tacks! Why, think, Dave, of how many millions
of tacks are pulled out of carpets and thrown away every spring!"
Mr. Jasper was still examining the tack from head to point with deep
interest. Now he drew a long breath and handed it back.
"It's a big thing, even if it is little," he admitted. "Watch out for
the man, though. Does he want any money?"
"Not a cent. Why, any money I've got he'd laugh at. I couldn't give him
any. He's a rich man, and able to start his own factory. He's going to
organize a quarter of a million stock company and keep the majority of
the stock himself."
"It might be pretty good stock to buy, if you could get some of it,"
decided Dave after some slow pondering.
"I wish I could, but there is no chance. What stock he issues is only to
be put out in twenty-five-thousand-dollar lots."
Again David Jasper sighed. Sixteen per cent. a year! He was thinking now
of what a small margin of profit his houses left him after repairs and
taxes were paid.
"It looks to me like you'd struck it rich, my boy. Well, you deserve it.
You have worked hard and saved your money. You know, when I got married
I had nothing but a set of harness tools and the girl, and we got
along."
"Look here, Dave," laughed his younger friend, whose thirty years were
unbelievable in that he still looked so much like a boy, "some of these
days I will hunt up a girl and get married, just to make you keep still
about it, and if I have any trouble I'll throw it up to you as long as
you live. But what do you think of this chance of mine? That's what I
came out for--to get your opinion on it."
"Well," drawled Dave, cautious now that the final judgment was to be
pronounced, "you want to remember that you're giving up a good job that
has got better and better every year and that will most likely get still
better every year; but, if you can start at two hundred a month, and are
sure you're going to get it, and the man don't want any money, and he
isn't a sharper, why, it looks like it was too good to miss."
"That's what I think," rejoined Mr. Lamb enthusiastically. "Well, I must
go now. I want to see Mr. Lewis and John Nolting and one or two of the
others, and get their advice," and he swung jubilantly on a car.
It was a pleasant figment this, Eddy Lamb's plan of consulting his older
friends. He always went to them most scrupulously to get their advice,
and afterward did as he pleased. He was too near the soil, however--only
one generation away--to make many mistakes in the matter of caution,
and so far he had swung his little financial ventures with such great
success that he had begun to be conceited.
He found Mr. Wallingford at the hotel, but not waiting for him by any
means. Mr. Wallingford was very busy with correspondence which, since
part of it was to his wife and to "Blackie" Daw, was entirely too
personal to be trusted to a public stenographer, and he frowningly
placed his caller near the window with some new samples of tacks he had
made that morning; then, for fifteen minutes, he silently wrote straight
on, a course which allowed Mr. Lamb the opportunity to reflect that he
was, after all, not entitled to have worn that air of affable
familiarity with which he had come into the room. In closing his letter
to Mr. Daw the writer added a postscript: "The Lamb is here, and I am
now sharpening the shears."
His letters finished and a swift boy called to despatch them, Mr.
Wallingford drew a chair soberly to the opposite side of the little
table at which he had seated Mr. Lamb. Like every great captain of
finance, he turned his back to the window so that his features were in
shadow, while the wide-set, open eyes of Mr. Lamb, under their good,
broad brow, blinked into the full light of day, which revealed for
minute study every wrinkle of expression in his features.
"I forgot to warn you of one thing last night, and I hope you have not
talked too much," Mr. Wallingford began with great seriousness. "I
reposed such confidence in you that I did not think of caution, a
confidence that was justified, for from such inquiries as I have made
this morning I am perfectly satisfied with your record--and, by the way,
Mr. Lamb, while we are upon this subject, here is a list of references
to some of whom I must insist that you write, for my own satisfaction if
not for yours. But now to the main point. The thing I omitted to warn
you about is this," and here he sank his voice to a quite confidential
tone: "I have not yet applied for letters patent upon this device."
"You have not?" exclaimed Mr. Lamb in surprise. The revelation rather
altered his estimate of Mr. Wallingford's great business ability.
"No," confessed the latter. "You can see how much I trust you, to tell
you this, because, if you did not know, you would naturally suppose that
the patent was at least under way, and I would be in no danger whatever;
but I am not yet satisfied on one point, and I want the device perfect
before I make application. It has worried me quite a bit. You see, the
heads of these tacks are too smooth to retain the cloth. It is very
difficult to glue cloth to a smooth metal surface, and if we send out
our tacks in such condition that a hammer will pound the cloth tops off,
it will ruin our business the first season. I have experimented with
every sort of glue I can get, and have pounded thousands of tacks into
boards, but the cloth covering still comes off in such large percentage
that I am afraid to go ahead. Of course, the thing can be solved--it is
merely a question of time--but there is no time now to be lost."
From out the drawer of the table he drew a board into which had been
driven some dozens of tacks. From at least twenty-five per cent. of them
the cloth covering had been knocked off.
"I see," observed the Lamb, and he examined the board thoughtfully; then
he looked out of the window at the passing traffic in the street.
Mr. Wallingford tilted back his chair and lit a fat, black cigar, the
barest twinkle of a smile playing about his eyes. He laid a mate to the
cigar in front of the bookkeeper, but the latter paid no attention
whatever to it. He was perfectly absorbed, and the twinkles around the
large man's eyes deepened.
"I say!" suddenly exclaimed Mr. Lamb, turning from the window to the
capitalist and throwing open his coat impatiently, as if to get away
from anything that encumbered his free expression, "why wouldn't it do
to roughen the heads of the tacks?"
His eyes fairly gleamed with the enthusiasm of creation. He had found
the answer to one of those difficult problems like: "What bright genius
can supply the missing letters to make up the name of this great
American martyr, who was also a President and freed the slaves? L-NC-LN.
$100.00 in GOLD to be divided among the four million successful solvers!
_Send no money_ until afterwards!"
Mr. Wallingford brought down the legs of his chair with a thump.
"By George!" he ejaculated. "I'm glad I found you. You're a man of
remarkable resource, and I must be a dumbhead. Here I have been puzzling
and puzzling with this problem, and it never occurred to me to roughen
those tacks!"
It was now Mr. Lamb's turn to find the fat, black cigar, to light it, to
lean back comfortably and to contemplate Mr. Wallingford with
triumphantly smiling eyes. The latter gentleman, however, was in no
contemplative mood. He was a man all of energy. He had two bellboys at
the door in another minute. One he sent for a quart of wine and the
other to the hardware store with a list of necessities, which were
breathlessly bought and delivered: a small table-vise, a heavy hammer,
two or three patterns of flat files and several papers of tacks. Already
in one corner of Mr. Wallingford's room stood a rough serving table
which he had been using as a work bench, and Mr. Lamb could not but
reflect how everything needed came quickly to this man's bidding, as if
he had possessed the magic lamp of Aladdin. He was forced to admire,
too, the dexterity with which this genius screwed the small vise to the
table, placed in its jaws a row of tacks, and, pressing upon them the
flat side of one of the files, pounded this vigorously until, upon
lifting it up, the fine, indented pattern was found repeated in the hard
heads of the tacks. The master magician went through this operation
until he had a whole paper of them with roughened heads; then, glowing
with fervid enthusiasm which was quickly communicated to his helper, he
set Mr. Lamb to gluing bits of cloth upon these heads, to be trimmed
later with delicate scissors, an extra pair of which Mr. Wallingford
sent out to get. When the tacks were all set aside to dry the coworkers
addressed themselves to the contents of the ice pail; but, as the host
was pulling the cork from the bottle, and while both of them were
perspiring and glowing with anticipated triumph in the experiment, Mr.
Wallingford's face grew suddenly troubled.
"By George, Eddy"--and Mr. Lamb beamed over this early adoption of his
familiar first name--"if this experiment succeeds it makes you part
inventor with me!"
Eddy sat down to gasp.
CHAPTER IV
J. RUFUS ACCEPTS A TEMPORARY ACCOMMODATION AND BUYS AN AUTOMOBILE
The experiment was a success. Immediately after lunch they secured a
fresh pine board and pounded all the tacks into it. Not one top came
off. The fact, however, that Mr. Lamb was part inventor, made a vast
difference in the proposition.
"Now, we'll talk cold business on this," said Mr. Wallingford. "Of
course, the main idea is mine, but the patent must be applied for by
both as joint inventors. Under the circumstances, I should say that
about one fourth of the value of the patent, which we shall sell to the
company for at least sixty thousand dollars, would be pretty good for
your few minutes of thought, eh?"
Mr. Lamb, his head swimming, agreed with him thoroughly.
"Very well, then, we'll go right out to a lawyer and have a contract
drawn up; then we'll go to a patent attorney and get the thing under
way at once. Do you know of a good lawyer?"
Mr. Lamb did. There was a young one, thoroughly good, who belonged to
Mr. Lamb's lodge, and they went over to see him. There is no expressing
the angle at which Mr. Lamb held his head as he passed out through the
lobby of the best hotel in his city. If his well-to-do townsmen having
business there wished to take notice of him, well and good; if they did
not, well and good also. He needed nothing of them.
It was with the same shoulder-squared self-gratification that he ushered
his affluent friend into Carwin's office. Carwin was in. Unfortunately,
he was always in. Practice had not yet begun for him, but Lamb was
bringing fortune in his hand and was correspondingly elated. He intended
to make Carwin the lawyer for the corporation. Mr. Carwin drew up for
them articles of agreement, in which it was set forth, with many a
whereas and wherein, that the said party of the first part and the said
party of the second part were joint inventors of a herein described new
and improved carpet tack, the full and total benefits of which were to
accrue to the said parties of the first part and the second part, and to
their heirs and assigns forever and ever, in the proportion of one
fourth to the said party of the first part and three fourths to the said
party of the second part.
Mr. Carwin, as he saw them walk out with the precious agreement, duly
signed, attested and sealed, was too timid to hint about his fee, and
Mr. Lamb could scarcely be so indelicate as to call attention to the
trifle, even though he knew that Mr. Carwin was gasping for it at that
present moment. The latter had hidden his shoes carefully under his desk
throughout the consultation, and had kept tucking his cuffs back out of
sight during the entire time. There were reasons, however, why Mr.
Wallingford did not pay the fee. In spite of the fact that everything
was charged at his hotel, it did take some cash for the bare necessities
of existence, and, in the past three days, he had spent over fifty
dollars in mere incidentals, aside from his living expenses.
Mr. Lamb did not know a patent lawyer, but he had seen the sign of one,
and he knew where to go right to him. The patent lawyer demanded a
preliminary fee of twenty-five dollars. Mr. Lamb was sorry that Mr.
Christopher had made such an unfortunate "break," for he felt that the
man would get no more of Mr. Wallingford's business. The latter drew
out a roll of bills, however, paid the man on the spot and took his
receipt.
"Will a ten-dollar bill help hurry matters any?" he asked.
"It might," admitted the patent lawyer with a cheerful smile.
His office was in a ramshackle old building that had no elevator, and
they had been compelled to climb two flights of stairs to reach it. Mr.
Wallingford handed him the ten dollars.
"Have the drawings and the application ready by to-morrow. If the thing
can be expedited we shall want you to go on to Washington with the
papers."
Mr. Christopher glowed within him. Wherever this man Wallingford went he
left behind him a trail of high hopes, a glimpse of a better day to
dawn. He was a public benefactor, a boon to humanity. His very presence
radiated good cheer and golden prospects.
As they entered the hotel, said Mr. Wallingford:
"Just get the key and go right on up to the room, Eddy. You know where
it is. Make yourself at home. Take your knife and try the covering on
those last tacks we put in. I'll be up in five or ten minutes."
When Mr. Wallingford came in Mr. Lamb was testing the tack covers with
great gratification. They were all solid, and they could scarcely be dug
off with a knife. He looked up to communicate this fact with glee, and
saw a frowning countenance upon his senior partner. Mr. J. Rufus
Wallingford was distinctly vexed.
"Nice thing!" he growled. "Just got a notice that there is an overdraft
in my bank. Now, I'll have to order some bonds sold at a loss, with the
market down all around; but that will take a couple of days and here I
am without cash--without cash! Look at that! Less than five dollars!"
He threw off his coat and hat in disgust and loosened his vest. He
mopped his face and brow and neck. Mr. Wallingford was extremely vexed.
He ordered a quart of champagne in a tone which must have made the
telephone clerk feel that the princely guest was dissatisfied with the
house. "Frappe, too!" he demanded. "The last I had was as warm as tea!"
Mr. Lamb, within the past day, had himself begun the rise to dizzy
heights; he had breathed the atmosphere of small birds and cold bottles
into his nostrils until that vapor seemed the normal air of heaven; the
ordinary dollar had gradually shrunk from its normal dimensions of a
peck measure to the size of a mere dot, and, moreover, he considered how
necessary pocket money was to a man of J. Rufus Wallingford's rich
relationship with the world.
"I have a little ready cash I could help you out with, if you will let
me offer it," he ventured, embarrassed to find slight alternate waves of
heat flushing his face. The borrowing and the lending of money were not
unknown by any means in Mr. Lamb's set. They asked each other for fifty
dollars with perfect nonchalance, got it and paid it back with equal
unconcern, and no man among them had been known to forget. Mr.
Wallingford accepted quite gracefully.
"Really, if you don't mind," said he, "five hundred or so would be quite
an accommodation for a couple of days."
Mr. Lamb gulped, but it was only a sort of growing pain that he had. It
was difficult for him to keep up with his own financial expansion.
"Certainly," he stammered. "I'll go right down and get it for you. The
bank closes at three. I have only a half hour to make it."
"I'll go right with you," said Mr. Wallingford, asking no questions, but
rightly divining that his Lamb kept no open account. "Wait a minute.
I'll make you out a note--just so there'll be something to show for it,
you know."
He hurriedly drew a blank from his pocket, filled it in and arose from
the table.
"I made it out for thirty days, merely as a matter of business form,"
stated Mr. Wallingford as they walked to the elevator, "but, as soon as
I put those bonds on the market, I'll take up the note, of course. I
left the interest in at six per cent."
"Oh, that was not necessary at all," protested Mr. Lamb.
The sum had been at first rather a staggering one, but it only took him
a moment or two to get his new bearings, and, if possible, he held his
head a trifle higher than ever as he walked out through the lobby. On
the way to the bank the capitalist passed the note over to his friend.
"I believe that's the right date; the twenty-fifth, isn't it?"
"The twenty-fifth is right," Mr. Lamb replied, and perfunctorily opened
the note. Then he stopped walking. "Hello!" he said. "You've made a
mistake. This is for a thousand."
"Is that so? I declare! I so seldom draw less than that. Well, suppose
we let it go at a thousand."
Time for gulping was passed.
"All right," said the younger man, but he could not make the assent as
sprightly as he could have wished. In spite of himself the words
drawled.
Nevertheless, at his bank he handed in his savings-book and the check,
and, thoroughly permeated by the atmosphere in which he was now moving,
he had made out the order for eleven hundred dollars.
"I needed a little loose change myself," he explained, as he put a
hundred into his own pocket and passed the thousand over to Mr.
Wallingford.
Events moved rapidly now. Mr. Wallingford that night sent off one
hundred and fifty dollars to his wife.
"Cheer up, little girl," he wrote her. "Blackie came here and reported
that this was a grouch town. I've been here three days and dug up a
thousand, and there's more in sight. I've been inquiring around this
morning. There is a swell little ten-thousand-dollar house out in the
rich end of the burg that I'm going to buy to put up a front, and you
know how I'll buy it. Also I'm going over to-morrow and pick out an
automobile. I need it in my business. You ought to see what long, silky
wool the sheep grow here."
The next morning was devoted entirely to pleasure. They visited three
automobile firms and took spins in four machines, and at last Mr.
Wallingford picked out a five-thousand-dollar car that about suited him.
"I shall try this for two weeks," he told the proprietor of the
establishment. "Keep it here in your garage at my call, and, by that
time, if I decide to buy it, I shall have my own garage under way. I
have my eye on a very nice little place out in Gildendale, and if they
don't want too much for it I'll bring on Mrs. Wallingford from Boston."
"With pleasure, Mr. Wallingford," said the proprietor.
Mr. Lamb walked away with a new valuation of things. Not a penny of
deposit had been asked, for the mere appearance of Mr. Wallingford and
his air of owning the entire garage were sufficient. In the room at the
hotel that afternoon they made some further experiments on tacks, and
Mr. Wallingford gave his young partner some further statistics
concerning the Eureka Company: its output, the number of men it
employed, the number of machines it had in operation, the small start
it had, the immense profits it made.
"We've got them all beat," Mr. Lamb enthusiastically summed up for him.
"We're starting much better than they did, and with, I believe, the best
manufacturing proposition that was ever put before the public."
It was not necessary to supply him with any further enthusiasm. He had
been inoculated with the yeast of it, and from that point onward would
be self-raising.
"The only thing I am afraid of," worried Mr. Wallingford, "is that the
Eureka Company will want to buy us out before we get fairly started,
and, if they offer us a good price, the stockholders will want to
stampede. Now, you and I must vote down any proposition the Eureka
Company make us, no matter what the other stockholders want, because, if
they buy us out before we have actually begun to encroach upon their
business, they will not give us one fifth of the price we could get
after giving them a good scare. Between us, Eddy, we'll hold six tenths
of the stock and we must stand firm."
Eddy stuck his thumbs in his vest pocket and with great complacency
tapped himself alternately upon his recent luncheon with the finger
tips of his two hands.
"Certainly we will," he admitted. "But say; I have some friends that I'd
like to bring into this thing. They're not able to buy blocks of stock
as large as you suggested, but, maybe, we could split up one lot so as
to let them in."
"I don't like the idea of small stockholders," Mr. Wallingford objected,
frowning. "They are too hard to handle. Your larger investors are
business men who understand all the details and are not raising eternal
questions about the little things that turn up; but since we have this
tack so perfect I've changed my plan of incorporation, and consequently
there is a way in which your friends can get in. We don't want to
attract any attention to ourselves from the Eureka people just now, so
we will only incorporate at first for one thousand dollars, in ten
shares of one hundred dollars each--sort of a dummy corporation in which
my name will not appear at all. If you can find four friends who will
buy one share of stock each you will then subscribe for the other six
shares, for which I will pay you, giving you one share, as I promised.
These four friends of yours then, if they wish, may take up one block of
twenty-five thousand when we make the final corporation, which we will
do by increasing our capital stock as soon as we get our corporation
papers. These friends of yours would, necessarily, be on our first board
of directors, too, which will hold for one year, and it will be an
exceptional opportunity for them."
"I don't quite understand," said Mr. Lamb.
"We incorporate for one thousand only," explained Mr. Wallingford,
slowly and patiently, "ten shares of one hundred dollars each,
all fully paid in. The Eureka Company will pay no attention to a
one-thousand-dollar company. As soon as we get our corporation papers,
we original incorporators will, of course, form the officers and board
of directors, and we will immediately vote to increase our
capitalization to one hundred thousand dollars, in one thousand shares
of one hundred dollars each. We will vote to pay you and I as inventors
sixty thousand dollars or six hundred shares of stock for our
patents--applied for and to be applied for during a period of five years
to come--in carpet-tack improvements and machinery for making the same.
We will offer the balance of the forty thousand dollars stock for sale,
to carry us through the experimental stage--that is, until we get our
machinery all in working order. Then we will need one hundred thousand
dollars to start our factory. To get that, we will reincorporate for a
three-hundred-thousand capital, taking up all the outstanding stock and
giving to each stockholder two shares at par for each share he then
holds. That will take up two hundred thousand dollars of the stock and
leave one hundred thousand for sale at par. You, in place of fifteen
thousand dollars' worth of stock as your share for the patent rights,
will have thirty thousand dollars' worth, or three hundred shares, and
if, after we have started operating, the Eureka Company should buy us
out at only a million, you would have a hundred thousand dollars net
profit."
A long, long sigh was the answer. Mr Lamb saw. Here was real
financiering.
"Let's get outside," he said, needing fresh air in his lungs after this.
"Let's go up and see my friend, Mr. Jasper."
In ten minutes the automobile had reported. Each man, before he left the
room, slipped a handful of covered carpet tacks into his coat pocket.
CHAPTER V
THE UNIVERSAL COVERED CARPET TACK COMPANY FORMS AMID GREAT ENTHUSIASM
The intense democracy of J. Rufus Wallingford could not but charm David
Jasper, even though he disapproved of diamond stick-pins and
red-leather-padded automobiles as a matter of principle. The manner in
which the gentleman from Boston acknowledged the introduction, the fine
mixture of deference due Mr. Jasper's age and of cordiality due his
easily discernible qualities of good fellowship, would have charmed the
heart out of a cabbage.
"Get in, Dave; we want to take you a ride," demanded Mr. Lamb.
David shook his head at the big machine, and laughed.
"I don't carry enough insurance," he objected.
Mr. Wallingford had caught sight of a little bronze button in the lapel
of Mr. Jasper's faded and threadbare coat.
"A man who went through the battle of Bull Run ought to face anything,"
he laughed back.
The shot went home. Mr. Jasper _had_ acquitted himself with honor in the
battle of Bull Run, and without further ado he got into the invitingly
open door of the tonneau, to sink back among the padded cushions with
his friend Lamb. As the door slammed shut, Ella Jasper waved them adieu,
and it was fully three minutes after the machine drove away before she
began humming about her work. Somehow or other, she did not like to see
her father's friend so intimately associated with rich people.
They had gone but a couple of blocks, and Mr. Lamb was in the early
stages of the enthusiasm attendant upon describing the wonderful events
of the past two days--especially his own share in the invention, and the
hundred thousand dollars that it was to make him within the year--when
Mr. Wallingford suddenly halted the machine.
"You're not going to get home to dinner, you know, Mr. Jasper," he
declared.
"Oh, we have to! This is lodge night, and I am a patriarch. I haven't
missed a night for twenty years, and Eddy, here, has an office, too--his
first one. We've got ten candidates to-night." "I see," said Mr.
Wallingford gravely. "It is more or less in the line of a sacred duty.
Nevertheless, we will not go home to dinner. I'll get you at the lodge
door at half past eight. Will that be early enough?"
Mr. Jasper put his hands upon his knees and turned to his friend.
"I guess we can work our way in, can't we, Eddy?" he chuckled, and Eddy,
with equally simple pleasure, replied that they could.
"Very well. Back to the house, chauffeur." And, in a moment more, they
were sailing back to the decrepit little cottage, where Lamb jumped out
to carry the news to Ella. She was just coming out of the kitchen door
in her sunbonnet to run over to the grocery store as Edward came up the
steps. He grabbed her by both shoulders and dragged her out.
"Come on; we're going to take you along!" he threatened, and she did not
know why, but, at the touch of his hands, she paled slightly. Her eyes
never faltered, however, as she laughed and jerked herself away.
"Not much, you don't! I'm worried enough as it is with father in
there--and you, of course."
He told her that they would not be home to supper, and, for a second
time, she wistfully saw them driving away in the big red machine.
Mr. Wallingford talked with the chauffeur for a few moments, and then
the machine leaped forward with definiteness. Once or twice Mr.
Wallingford looked back. The two in the tonneau were examining the
cloth-topped tacks, and both were talking volubly. Mile after mile they
were still at it, and the rich man felt relieved of all responsibility.
The less he said in the matter the better; he had learned the invaluable
lesson of when not to talk. So far as he was concerned, the Universal
Covered Carpet Tack Company was launched, and he was able to turn his
attention to the science of running the car, a matter which, by the time
they had reached their stopping point, he had picked up to the great
admiration of the expert driver. For the last five miles the big man ran
the machine himself, with the help of a guiding word or two, and when
they finally stopped in front of the one pretentious hotel in the small
town they had reached, he was so completely absorbed in the new toy that
he was actually as nonchalant about the new company as he would have
wished to appear. His passengers were surprised when they found that
they had come twenty miles, and Mr. Wallingford showed them what a man
who knows how to dine can do in a minor hotel. He had everybody busy,
from the proprietor down. The snap of his fingers was as potent here as
the clarion call of the trumpet in battle, and David Jasper, though he
strove to disapprove, after sixty years of somnolence woke up and
actually enjoyed pretentious luxury.
There were but five minutes of real business conversation following the
meal, but five minutes were enough. David Jasper had called his friend
Eddy aside for one brief moment.
"Did he give you any references?" he asked, the habit of caution
asserting itself.
"Sure; more than half a dozen of them."
"Have you written to them?"
"I wrote this morning."
"I guess he wouldn't give them to you if he wasn't all right."
"We don't need the references," urged Lamb. "The man himself is
reference enough. You see that automobile? He bought it this morning and
didn't pay a cent on it. They didn't ask him to."
It was a greater recommendation than if the man had paid cash down for
the machine; for credit is mightier than cash, everywhere.
"I think we'll go in," said Dave. Think he would go in! It was only his
conservative way of expressing himself, for he was already in with his
whole heart and soul. In the five minutes of conversation between the
three that ensued, David Jasper agreed to be one of the original
incorporators, to go on the first board of directors, and to provide
three other solid men to serve in a like capacity, the preliminary
meeting being arranged for the next morning. Mr. Wallingford passed
around his black cigars and lit one in huge content as he climbed into
the front seat with the chauffeur, to begin his task of urging driver
and machine back through the night in the time that he had promised.
That was a wonderful ride to the novices. Nothing but darkness ahead,
with a single stream of white light spreading out upon the roadway,
which, like a fast descending curtain, lowered always before them; a rut
here, a rock there, angle and curve and dip and rise all springing out
of the night with startling swiftness, to disappear behind them before
they had given even a gasp of comprehension for the possible danger they
had confronted but that was now past. Unconsciously they found
themselves gripping tightly the sides of the car, and yet, even to the
old man, there was a strange sense of exhilaration, aided perhaps by
wine, that made them, after the first breathless five miles, begin to
jest in voices loud enough to carry against the wind, to laugh
boisterously, and even to sing, by-and-by, a nonsensical song started by
Lamb and caught up by Wallingford and joined by the still firm voice of
David Jasper. The chauffeur, the while bent grimly over his wheel,
peered with iron-nerved intensity out into that mysterious way where the
fatal snag might rise up at any second and smite them into lifeless
clay, for they were going at a terrific pace. The hoarse horn kept
constantly hooting, and every now and then they flashed by trembling
horses drawn up at the side of the road and attached to "rigs," the
occupants of which appeared only as one or two or three fish-white faces
in the one instant that the glow of the headlight gleamed upon them.
Once there was a quick swerve out of the road and back into it again,
where the rear wheel hovered for a fraction of a second over a steep
gully, and not until they had passed on did the realization come to them
that there had been one horse that had refused, either through
stubbornness or fright, to get out of the road fast enough. But what is
a danger past when a myriad lie before, and what are dangers ahead when
a myriad have been passed safely by? The exhilaration became almost an
intoxication, for, in spite of those few moments when mirth and gayety
were checked by that sudden throb of what might have been, the songs
burst forth again as soon as a level track stretched ahead once more.
"Five minutes before the time I promised you!" exclaimed Mr. Wallingford
in jovial triumph, jumping from his seat and opening the door of the
tonneau for his passengers just in front of the stairway that led to
their lodge-rooms.
They climbed out, stiff and breathless and still tingling with the
inexplicable thrill of it all.
"Eleven o'clock in the morning, remember, at Carwin's," he reminded them
as they left him, and afterward they wondered why such a simple exertion
as the climbing of one flight of stairs should make their hearts beat so
high and their breath come so deep and harsh. It would have been
curious, later that night, to see Edward Lamb buying a quart of
champagne for his friends, and protesting that it was not cold enough!
Mr. Wallingford stepped back to the chauffeur. "What's your first
name?" he inquired.
"Frank, sir."
"Well, Frank, when you go back to the shop you tell them that you're to
drive my machine hereafter when I call for it, and when I get settled
down here I want you to work for me. Drive to the hotel now and wait."
Before climbing into the luxury of the tonneau he handed the chauffeur a
five-dollar bill.
"All right, sir," said Frank.
At the hotel, the man of means walked up to the clerk and opened his
pocketbook.
"I have a little more cash than I care to carry around. Just put this to
my credit, will you?" and he counted out six one-hundred-dollar bills.
As he turned away the clerk permitted himself that faint trace of a
smile once more. His confidence was justified. He had known that
somebody would pay Mr. Wallingford's acrobatic bill. His interesting
guest strode out to the big red automobile. The chauffeur was out in a
second and had the tonneau open before the stately but earnestly willing
doorman of the hotel could perform the duty.
"Now, show us the town," said Wallingford as the door closed upon him,
and when he came in late that night his eyes were red and his speech
was thick; but there were plenty of eager hands to see safely to bed the
prince who had landed in their midst with less than a hundred dollars in
his possession.
He was up bright and vigorous the next morning, however. A cold bath, a
hearty breakfast in his room, a half hour with the barber and a spin in
the automobile made him elastic and bounding again, so that at eleven
o'clock he was easily the freshest man among the six who gathered in Mr.
Carwin's office. The incorporators noted with admiration, which with
wiser men might have turned to suspicion, that Mr. Wallingford was
better posted on corporation law than Mr. Carwin himself, and that he
engineered the preliminary proceedings through in a jiffy. With the
exception of Lamb, they were all men past forty, and not one of them had
known experience of this nature. They had been engaged in minor
occupations or in minor business throughout their lives, and had
gathered their few thousands together dollar by dollar. To them this new
realm that was opened up was a fairyland, and the simple trick of
watering stock that had been carefully explained to them, one by one,
pleased them as no toy ever pleased a child. They had heard of such
things as being vague and mysterious operations in the realms of
finance and had condemned them, taking their tone from the columns of
editorials they had read upon such practices; but, now that they were
themselves to reap the fruits of it, they looked through different
spectacles. It was a just proceeding which this genius of commerce
proposed; for they who stood the first brunt of launching the ship were
entitled to greater rewards than they who came in upon an assured
certainty of profits, having waited only for the golden cargo to be in
the harbor.
As a sort of sealing of their compact and to show that this was to be a
corporation upon a friendly basis, rather than a cold, grasping business
proposition, Mr. Wallingford took them all over to a simple lunch in a
private dining room at his hotel. He was careful not to make it too
elaborate, but careful, too, that the luncheon should be notable, and
they all went away talking about him: what a wonderful man he was, what
a wonderful business proposition he had permitted them to enter upon,
what wonderful resources he must have at his command, what wonderful
genius was his in manipulation, in invention, in every way.
There was a week now in which to act, and Mr. Wallingford wasted no
time. He picked out his house in the exclusive part of Gildendale, and
when it came to paying the thousand dollars down, Mr. Wallingford
quietly made out a sixty-day note for the amount.
"I beg your pardon," hesitated the agent, "the first payment is supposed
to be in cash."
"Oh, I know that it is supposed to be," laughed Mr. Wallingford, "but we
understand how these things are. I guess the house itself will secure
the note for that length of time. I am going to be under pretty heavy
expense in fitting up the place, and a man with any regard for the
earning power of money does not keep much cash lying loose. Do you want
this note or not?" and his final tone was peremptory.
"Oh, why, certainly; that's all right," said the agent, and took it.
Upon the court records appeared the sale, but even before it was so
entered a firm of decorators and furnishers had been given _carte
blanche_, following, however, certain artistic requirements of Mr.
Wallingford himself. The result that they produced within the three days
that he gave them was marvelous; somewhat too garish, perhaps, for
people of good taste, but impressive in every detail; and for all this
he paid not one penny in cash. He was accredited with being the owner of
a house in the exclusive suburb, Gildendale. On that accrediting the
furnishing was done, on that accrediting he stocked his pantry shelves,
his refrigerator, his wine cellar, his coal bins, his humidors, and had
started a tailor to work upon half a dozen suits, among them an
automobile costume. He had a modest establishment of two servants and a
chauffeur by the time his wife arrived, and on the day the final
organization of the one-thousand-dollar company was effected, he gave a
housewarming for his associates of the Universal Covered Carpet Tack
Company. Where Mr. Wallingford had charmed, Mrs. Wallingford fascinated,
and the five men went home that night richer than they had ever dreamed
of being; than they would ever be again.
CHAPTER VI
IN WHICH AN ASTOUNDING REVELATION IS MADE CONCERNING J. RUFUS
The first stockholders' meeting of the Tack Company was a cheerful
affair, held around a table that was within an hour or so to have a
cloth; for whenever J. Rufus Wallingford did business, he must,
perforce, eat and drink, and all who did business with him must do the
same. The stockholders, being all present, elected their officers and
their board of directors: Mr. Wallingford, president; Mr. Lamb,
secretary; Mr. Jasper, treasurer; and Mr. Lewis, David Jasper's nearest
friend, vice president, these four and Mr. Nolting also constituting the
board of directors. Immediately after, they adopted a stock, printed
form of constitution, voted an increase of capitalization to one hundred
thousand dollars, and then adjourned.
The president, during the luncheon, made them a little speech in which
he held before them constantly a tack with a crimson top glued upon a
roughened surface, and alluded to the invaluable services their young
friend, Edward Lamb, had rendered to the completion of the company's now
perfect and flawless article of manufacture. He explained to them in
detail the bigness of the Eureka Tack Manufacturing Company, its
enormous undivided profits, its tremendous yearly dividends, the
fabulous price at which its stock was quoted, with none for sale; and
all this gigantic business built upon a simple tack!--Gentlemen, not
nearly, not _nearly_ so attractive and so profitable an article of
commerce as this perfect little convenience held before them. The
gentlemen were to be congratulated upon a bigger and brighter and better
fortune than had ever come to them; they were all to be congratulated
upon having met each other, and since they had been kind enough, since
they had been trusting enough, to give him their confidence with but
little question, Mr. Wallingford felt it his duty to reassure them, even
though they needed no reassurance, that he was what he was; and he
called upon his friend and their secretary, Mr. Lamb, to read to them
the few letters that he understood had been received from the Mexican
and Rio Grande Rubber Company, the St. John's Blood Orange Plantation
Company, the Los Pocos Lead Development Company, the Sierra Cinnabar
Grant, and others.
Mr. Lamb--Secretary Lamb, if you please--arose in self-conscious
dignity, which he strove to taper off into graceful ease.
"It is hardly worth while reading more than one, for they're all alike,"
he stated jovially, "and if anybody questions our president, send him to
his friend Eddy!" Whereupon he read the letters.
According to them, Mr. Wallingford was a gentleman of the highest
integrity; he was a man of unimpeachable character, morally and
financially; he was a genius of commerce; he had been sought, for his
advice and for the tower of strength that his name had become, by all
the money kings of Boston; he was, in a word, the greatest boon that had
ever descended upon any city, and all of the gentlemen who were lucky
enough to be associated with him in any business enterprise that he
might back or vouch for, could count themselves indeed most fortunate.
The letters were passed around. Some of them had embossed heads; most of
them were, at least, engraved; some of them were printed in two or three
rich colors; some had beautifully tinted pictures of vast Mexican
estates, and Florida plantations, and Nevada mining ranges. They were
impressive, those letter-heads, and when, after passing the round of the
table, they were returned to Mr. Lamb, four pairs of eyes followed them
as greedily as if those eyes had been resting upon actual money.
In the ensuing week the committee on factories, consisting of Mr.
Wallingford, Mr. Lamb and Mr. Jasper, honked and inspected and lunched
until they found a small place which would "do for the first year's
business," and within two days the factory was cleaned and the office
most sumptuously furnished; then Mr. Wallingford, having provided work
for the secretary, began to attend to his purely personal affairs, one
of which was the private consulting of the patent attorney. Upon his
first visit Mr. Christopher met him with a dejected air.
"I find four interferences against your application," he dolefully
stated, "and they cover the ground very completely."
"Get me a patent," directed Mr. Wallingford shortly.
Mr. Christopher hesitated. Not only was his working jacket out at the
elbows, but his street coat was shiny at the seams.
"I am bound to tell you," he confessed, after quite a struggle, "that,
while I _might_ get you some sort of a patent, it would not hold
water."
"I don't care if it wouldn't hold pebbles or even brickbats," retorted
Mr. Wallingford. "I'm not particular about the mesh of it. Just you get
me a patent--any sort of a patent, so it has a seal and a ribbon on it.
I believe it is part of your professional ethics, Mr. Christopher, to do
no particular amount of talking except to your clients.
"Well, yes, sir," admitted Mr. Christopher.
"Very well, then; I am the only client you know in this case, and I
say--get a patent! After all, a patent isn't worth as much as a dollar
at the Waldorf, except to form the basis of a lawsuit," whereat Mr.
Christopher saw a great white light and his conscience ceased to bother
him.
Meanwhile the majestic wheels of state revolved, and at the second
meeting of the board of directors the secretary was able to lay before
them the august permission of the Commonwealth to issue one hundred
thousand dollars of stock in the new corporation. In fact, the secretary
was able to show them a book of especially printed stock certificates,
and a corporate seal had been made. Their own seal! Each man tried it
with awe and pride. This also was a cheerful board meeting, wherein the
directors, as one man, knowing beforehand what they were to do, voted to
Mr. Wallingford and Mr. Lamb sixty thousand dollars in stock, for all
patents relating to covered carpet tacks or devices for making the same
that should be obtained by them for a period of five years to come. The
three remaining members of the board of directors and the one
stockholder who was allowed to be present by courtesy then took up five
thousand dollars' worth of stock each and guaranteed to bring in, by the
end of the week, four more like subscriptions, two of which they
secured; and, thirty thousand dollars of cash having been put into the
treasury, a special stockholders' meeting was immediately called. When
this met it was agreed that they should incorporate another company
under the name of the Universal Covered Tack Company, dropping the word
"Carpet," with an authorized capital of three hundred thousand dollars,
two hundred thousand of which was already subscribed.
It took but a little over a month to organize this new company, which
bought out the old company for the consideration of two hundred thousand
dollars, payable in stock of the new company. With great glee the new
stockholders bought from themselves, as old stockholders, the old
company at this valuation, each man receiving two shares of one hundred
dollars face value for each one hundred dollars' worth of stock that he
had held before. It was their very first transaction in water, and the
delight that it gave them one and all knew no bounds; they had doubled
their money in one day! But their elation was not half the elation of J.
Rufus Wallingford, for in his possession he had ninety thousand dollars'
worth, par value, of stock, the legitimacy of which no one could
question, and the market price of which could be to himself whatever his
glib tongue had the opportunity to make it. In addition to the nine
hundred shares of stock, he had a ten-thousand-dollar house, a
five-thousand-dollar automobile and unlimited credit; and this was the
man who had landed in the city but two brief months before, with no
credit in any known spot upon the globe, and with less than one hundred
dollars in his pocket!
It is a singular commentary upon the honesty of American business
methods that so much is done on pure faith. The standing of J. Rufus
Wallingford was established beyond question. Aside from the perfunctory
inquiries that Edward Lamb had made, no one ever took the trouble to
question into the promoter's past record. So far as local merchants were
concerned, these did not care; for did not J. Rufus own a finely
appointed new house in Gildendale, and did he not appear before them
daily in a fine new automobile? This, added to the fact that he
established credit with one merchant and referred the next one to him,
referred the third to the second, and the fourth to the third, was
ample. If merchant number four took the trouble to inquire of merchant
number three, he was told: "Yes, we have Mr. Wallingford on our books,
and consider him good." Consequently, Mrs. Wallingford was able to go to
any establishment, in her own little runabout that J. Rufus got her
presently, and order what she would; and she took ample advantage of the
opportunity. She, like J. Rufus, was one of those rare beings of earth
for whom earth's most prized treasures are delved, and wrought, and
woven, and sewed; for transcendent beauty demands ever more beauty for
its adornment. In all the city there was nothing too good for either of
them, and they got it without money and without price. The provider of
all this made no move toward paying even a retainer upon his automobile,
for instance; but, when the subtle intuition within him warned that the
dealer would presently make a demand, he calmly went in and selected the
neat little runabout for his wife, and had it added to his bill. After
he had seen the runabout glide away, the dealer was a little aghast at
himself. He had firmly intended, the next time he saw Mr. Wallingford,
to insist upon a payment. In place of that, he had only jeopardized two
thousand dollars more, and all that he had to show for it were half a
dozen covered tacks which J. Rufus had left him to ponder upon. In the
meantime, Lamb's loan of one thousand had been increased, upon plausible
pretext, to two thousand.
There began, now, busy days at the factory. In the third floor of their
building a machine shop was installed. Three thousand dollars went
there. Outside, in a large experimental shop, work was being rapidly
pushed on machinery which would make tacks with cross-corrugated heads.
Genius Wallingford had secretly secured drawings of tack machinery, and
devised slight changes which would evade the patents, adding dies that
would make the roughened tops. A final day came when, set up in their
shop, the first faulty machine pounded out tacks ready for later
covering, and every stockholder who had been called in to witness the
working of the miracle went away profoundly convinced that fortune was
just within his reach. They had their first patent granted now, and the
sight of it, on stiff parchment with its bit of bright ribbon, was like
a glimpse at dividends. It was right at this time, however, that one cat
was let out of the bag. The information came first to Edward Lamb,
through the inquiries of a commercial rating company, that their Boston
capitalist was a whited sepulcher, so far as capital went. He had not a
cent. The secretary, in the privacy of their office, put the matter to
him squarely, and he admitted it cheerfully. He was glad that the
_expose_ had come--it suited his present course, and he would have
brought it about himself before long.
"Who said I had money?" he demanded. "I never said so."
"Well, but the way you live," objected Lamb.
"I have always lived that way, and I always shall. Not only is it a fact
that I have no money, but I must have some right away."
"I haven't any more to lend."
"No, Eddy; I'm not saying that you have. I am merely stating that I have
to have some. I am being bothered by people who want it, and I cannot
work on the covering machine until I get it," and Mr. Wallingford coolly
telephoned for his big automobile to be brought around.
They sat silently in the office for the next five minutes, while Lamb
slowly appreciated the position they were in. If J. Rufus should "lay
down on them" before the covering machine was perfected, they were in a
bad case. They had already spent over twenty thousand dollars in
equipping their office, their machine shop, and perfecting their
stamping machine, and time was flying.
"You might sell a little of your stock," suggested Lamb.
"We have an agreement between us to hold control."
"But you can still sell a little of yours, and stay within that amount.
I'm not selling any of mine."
Mr. Wallingford drew from his pocket a hundred-share stock certificate.
"I have already sold some. Make out fifty shares of this to L. W.
Ramsay, twenty-five to E. H. Wyman, and the other twenty-five to C. D.
Wyman."
Ramsay and the Wyman Brothers! Ramsay was the automobile dealer; Wyman
Brothers were Wallingford's tailors.
"So much? Why didn't you sell them at least part from our extra treasury
stock? There is twenty thousand there, replacing the ten thousand of the
old company."
"Why didn't I? I needed the money. I got twenty-five hundred cash from
Ramsay, and let him put twenty-five on account. I agreed to take one
thousand in trade from Wyman Brothers, and got four thousand cash
there."
The younger man looked at him angrily.
"Look here, Wallingford; you're hitting it up rather strong, ain't you?
This makes six thousand five hundred, besides two thousand you borrowed
from me, that you have spent in three months. You have squandered money
since you came here at the rate of three thousand a month, besides all
the bills I know you owe, and still you are broke. How is it possible?"
"That's my business," retorted Wallingford, and his face reddened with
assumed anger. "We are not going to discuss it. The point is that I need
money and must have it."
The automobile drew up at the door, and J. Rufus, who was in his
automobile suit, put on his cap and riding coat.
"Where are you going?"
"Over to Rayling."
Lamb frowned. Rayling was sixty miles away.
"And you will not be back until midnight, I suppose."
"Hardly."
"Why, confound it, man, you can't go!" exclaimed Lamb. "They're waiting
for you now over at the machine shop, for further instructions on the
covering device."
"They'll have to wait!" announced J. Rufus, and stalked out of the door.
The thing had been deliberately followed up. Mr. Wallingford had come to
the point where he wished his flock to know that he had no financial
resources whatever, and that they would have to support him. It was the
first time that he had departed from his suavity, and he left Lamb in a
panic. He had been gone scarcely more than an hour when David Jasper
came in.
"Where is Wallingford?" he asked.
"Gone out for an automobile trip."
"When will he be back?"
"Not to-day."
Jasper's face was white, but the flush of slow anger was creeping upon
his cheeks.
"Well, he ought to be; his note is due."
"What note?" inquired Lamb, startled.
"His note for a thousand dollars that I went security on."
"You might just as well renew it, or pay it. I had to renew mine," said
Lamb. "Dave, the man is a four-flusher, without a cent to fall back on.
I just found it out this morning. Why didn't you tell me that he was
borrowing money of you?"
"Why didn't you tell me he was borrowing money of you?" retorted his
friend.
They looked at each other hotly for a moment, and then both laughed. The
big man was too much for them to comprehend.
"We are both cutting our eye teeth," Lamb decided. "I wonder how many
more he's borrowed money from."
"Lewis, for one. He got fifteen hundred from him. Lewis told me this
morning, up at Kriegler's."
Lamb began figuring. To the eight thousand five hundred of which he
already knew, here was twenty-five hundred more to be added--eleven
thousand dollars that the man had spent in three months! Some bills, of
course, he had paid, but the rest of it had gone as the wind blew. It
seemed impossible that a man could spend money at the rate of one
hundred and twenty-five dollars a day, but this one had done it, and
that at first was the point which held them aghast, to the forgetting of
their own share in it. They could not begin to understand it until Lamb
recalled one incident that had impressed him. Wallingford had taken his
wife and two friends to the opera one night. They had engaged a private
dining room at the hotel, indulging in a dinner that, with flowers and
wines, had cost over a hundred dollars. Their seats had cost fifty.
There had been a supper afterward where the wine flowed until long past
midnight. Altogether, that evening alone had cost not less than three
hundred dollars--and the man lived at that gait all the time! In his
home, even when himself and wife were alone, seven-course dinners were
served. Huge fowls were carved for but the choicest slices, were sent
away from the table and never came back again in any form. Expensive
wines were opened and left uncorked after two glasses, because some whim
had led the man to prefer some other brand.
Lamb looked up from his figuring with an expression so troubled that his
older friend, groping as men will do for cheering words, hit upon the
idea that restored them both to their equilibrium.
"After all," suggested Jasper, "it's none of our business. The company
is all right."
"That's so," agreed Lamb, recovering his enthusiasm in a bound. "The
tack itself can't be beat, and we are making progress toward getting on
the market. Suppose the man were to sell all his stock. It wouldn't make
any difference, so long as he finishes that one machine for covering the
tack."
"He's a liar!" suddenly burst out David Jasper. "I wish he had his
machinery done and was away from us. I can't sleep well when I do
business with a liar."
"We don't want to get rid of him yet," Lamb reminded him, "and, in the
meantime, I suppose he will have to have money in order to keep him at
work. You'd better get him to give you stock to cover your note and tell
Lewis to do the same. We'll all go after him on that point, and get
protected."
David looked troubled in his turn.
"I can't afford it. When I took up that five thousand dollars' worth of
stock I only had fifteen hundred in the building loan, and I put a
mortgage on one of my houses to make up the amount. If I have to stand
this thousand I'll have to give another mortgage, and I swore I'd never
put a plaster on my property."
"The tack's good for it," urged Lamb, with conviction.
"Yes, the tack's good," admitted Jasper.
That was the thing which held them all in line--the tack! Wallingford
himself might be a spendthrift and a ne'er-do-well, but their faith in
the tack that was to make them all rich was supreme. Lamb picked up one
from his desk and handed it to his friend. The very sight of it, with
its silken covered top, imagination carrying it to its place in a carpet
where it would not show, was most reassuring, and behind it, looming up
like the immense open cornucopia of Fortune herself, was the Eureka
Company, the concern that would buy them out at any time for a million
dollars if they were foolish enough to sell. After all, they had nothing
to worry them.
David Jasper went up to the bank and had them hold the note until the
next day, which they did without comment. David was "good" for anything
he wanted. The next day he got hold of Wallingford to get him to renew
the note and to give him stock as security for it. When J. Rufus came
out of that transaction, in which David had intended to be severe with
him, he had four thousand dollars in his pocket, for he had transferred
to his indorser five thousand dollars of his stock and Jasper had placed
another mortgage on his property. The single tack in his vest pocket had
assumed proportions far larger than his six cottages and his home. It
was the same with Lewis and one of the others, and, for a week, the
inventor struggled with the covering machine.
No one seemed to appreciate the fact that here their genius was
confronting a problem that was most difficult of solution. To them it
meant a mere bit of mechanical juggling, as certain to be accomplished
as the simple process of multiplication; but to glue a piece of cloth to
so minute and irregular a thing as the head of a tack, to put it on
firmly and leave it trimmed properly at the edges, to do this trick by
machinery and at a rate rapid enough to insure profitable operation, was
a Herculean task, and the stockholders would have been aghast had they
known that J. Rufus was in no hurry to solve this last perplexity. He
knew better than to begin actual manufacture. The interference report on
the first patent led him to make secret inquiries, the result of which
convinced him that the day they went on the market would be the day that
they would be disrupted by vigorous suits, backed by millions of
capital. He had been right in stating that a patent is of no value
except as a basis for lawsuits.
There was only one thing which offset his shrewdness in realizing these
conditions, and that was his own folly. Had he been content to devote
himself earnestly to the accomplishment even of his own ends, the many
difficulties into which he had floundered would never have existed.
Always there was the pressing need for money. He was a colossal example
of the fact that easily gotten pelf is of no value. His wife was
shrewder than he. She had no social aspirations whatever at this time.
They were both of them too bohemian of taste and habit to conform to the
strict rules which society imposes in certain directions, even had they
been able to enter the charmed circle. She cared only to dress as well
as the best and to go to such places of public entertainment as the best
frequented, to show herself in jewels that would attract attention and
in gowns that would excite envy; but she did tire of continuous
suspense--and she was not without keenness of perception.
"Jim," she asked, one night, "how is your business going?"
"You see me have money every day, don't you? There's nothing you want,
is there?" was the evasive reply.
"Not a thing, except this: I want a vacation. I don't want to be
wondering all my life when the crash is to come. So far as I have seen,
this looks like a clean business arrangement that you are in now; but,
even if it is, it can't stand the bleeding that you are giving it. If
you are going to get out of this thing, as you have left everything else
you were ever in, get out right away. Realize every dollar you can at
once, and let us take a trip abroad."
"I can't let go just yet," he replied.
She looked up, startled.
"Nothing wrong in this, is there, Jim?"
"Wrong!" he exclaimed. "Fanny, I never did anything in my life that the
law could get me for. The law is a friend of mine. It was framed up
especially for the protection of J. Rufus Wallingford. I can shove
ordinary policemen off the sidewalk and make the chief stand up and
salute when I go past. The only way I could break into a jail would be
to buy one."
She shook her head.
"You're too smart a man to stay out of jail, Jim. The penitentiary is
full of men who were too clever to go there. You're a queer case,
anyhow. If you had buckled down to straight business, with your ability
you'd be worth ten million dollars to-day."
He chuckled.
"Look at the fun I'd have missed, though."
But for once she would not joke about their position.
"No," she insisted, "you're looking at it wrong, Jim. You had to leave
Boston; you had to leave Baltimore; you had to leave Philadelphia and
Washington; you will have to leave this town."
"Never mind, Fanny," he admonished her. "There are fifty towns in the
United States as good as this, and they've got coin in every one of
them. They're waiting for me to come and get it, and when I have been
clear through the list I'll start all over again. There's always a fresh
crop of bait-nibblers, and money is being turned out at the mint every
day."
"Have it your own way," responded Mrs. Wallingford; "but you will be
wise if you take my advice to accumulate some money while you can this
time, so that we do not have to take a night train out in the suburbs,
as we did when we left Boston."
Mr. Wallingford returned no answer. He opened the cellar door and
touched the button that flooded his wine cellar with light, going down
himself to hunt among his bottles for the one that would tempt him most.
Nevertheless, he did some serious thinking, and, at the next
board-of-directors' meeting, he announced that the covering machine was
well under way, showing them drawings of a patent application he was
about to send off.
It was a hopeful sign--one that restored confidence. He must now
organize a selling department and must have a Chicago branch. They
listened with respect, even with elation. After all, while this man had
deceived them as to his financial standing when he first came among
them, he was well posted, for their benefit, upon matters about which
they knew nothing. Moreover, there was the great tack! He went to
Chicago and appointed a Western sales agent. When he came back he had
sold fifteen thousand dollars' worth of his stock through the
introductions gained him by this man.
J. Rufus Wallingford was "cleaning up."
CHAPTER VII
WHEREIN THE GREAT TACK INVENTOR SUDDENLY DECIDES TO CHANGE HIS LOCATION
"In two weeks we will be ready for the market," Wallingford told
inquiring members of the company every two weeks, and, in the meantime,
the model for the covering device, in which change after change was
made, went on very slowly, while the money went very rapidly. A half
dozen of the expensive stamping machines had already been installed, and
the treasury was exhausted. The directors began to look worried.
One morning, while Ella Jasper was at her sweeping in the front room,
the big red automobile chugged up to the gate and J. Rufus Wallingford
got out. He seemed gigantic as he loomed up on the little front porch
and filled the doorway.
"Where is your father?" he asked her.
"He is over at Kriegler's," she told him, and directed him how to find
the little German saloon where the morning "lunch club" gathered.
Instead of turning, he stood still for a moment and looked her slowly
from head to foot. There was that in his look which made her tremble,
which made her flush with shame, and when at last he turned away she sat
down in a chair and wept.
At Kriegler's, Wallingford found Jasper and two other stockholders, and
he drew them aside to a corner table. For a quarter of an hour he was
jovial with them, and once more they felt the magnetic charm of his
personality, though each one secretly feared that he had come again for
money. He had, but not for himself.
"The treasury is empty," he calmly informed them, during a convenient
pause, "and the Corley Machine Company insist on having their bill paid.
We owe them two thousand dollars, and it will take five thousand more to
complete the covering machine."
"You've been wasting money in the company as you do at home," charged
David, flaring up at once with long-suppressed grievances. "You had
thirty thousand cash to begin with. I was down to the Corley Machine
Company myself, day before yesterday, and I saw a pile of things you had
them make and throw away that they told me cost nearly five thousand
dollars."
"They didn't show you all of it," returned Wallingford coolly. "There's
more. You don't expect to perfect a machine without experimenting, do
you? Now you let me alone in this. I know my business, and no man can
say that I am not going after the best results in the best way. You
fellows figure on expense as if we were conducting a harness shop or a
grocery store," he continued, whereat Jasper and Lewis reddened with
resentment of the sort for which they could not find voice. "Rent,
light, power, and wages eat up money every day," he reminded them, "and
every day's delay means that much more waste. We _must_ have money to
complete this covering machine, and we must have it at once. There is
twenty thousand dollars' worth of treasury stock for sale, aside from
the hundred thousand held in reserve until we are ready to manufacture.
That extra stock must be sold right away! I leave it to you," he
concluded, rising. "I'm not a stock salesman," and with that brazen
statement he left them.
The statement was particularly brazen because that very morning, after
he left these men, he disposed of a five-thousand-dollar block of his
own stock and turned the money over to his wife before he returned to
the office in the afternoon. Lamb received him in a torrent of
impatience.
"I feel like a cheat," he declared. "The Corley people were over here
again, and say that they do not know us. They only know our money, and
they want some at once or they will not proceed with the machinery."
"I have been doing what I could," replied Wallingford. "I put the matter
up to Jasper and Lewis and Nolting this morning. I told them they would
have to sell the extra treasury stock."
"You did!" exclaimed Lamb. "Why did you go to them? Why didn't you go
out and sell the stock yourself?"
"I am not a stock salesman, my boy."
"You have been active enough in selling your private stock," charged
Lamb.
"That's my business," retorted Mr. Wallingford. "I am strictly within my
legal rights in disposing of my own stock. It is my property, to do with
as I please."
"It is obtaining money under false pretenses, for until you have
completed this machinery and made a market for our goods, the stock you
have sold is not worth the paper it is printed on. It represents no
value whatever."
"It represents as much value as treasury stock or any other stock,"
retorted Mr. Wallingford. "By the way, make a transfer of this
fifty-share certificate to Thomas D. Caldwell."
"Caldwell!" exclaimed Lamb. "Why, he is one of the very men we have been
trying to interest in some of this treasury stock. He is of our lodge.
Last week we had him almost in the notion, but he backed out."
"When the right man came along he bought," said Wallingford, and
laughed.
"This money should have gone into our depleted treasury," Lamb declared
hotly. "I refuse to make the transfer."
"I don't care; it's nothing to me. I have the money and I shall turn
over this certificate to Mr. Caldwell. When he demands the transfer you
will have to make it."
"There ought to be some legal way to compel this sale to be made of
treasury stock."
"Possibly," admitted Mr. Wallingford; "but there isn't. You will find,
my boy, that everything I do is strictly within the pale of the law. I
can go into any court and prove that I am an honest man."
Lamb sprang angrily from his chair.
"You're a thief," he charged, his eyes flashing.
"I'm not drawing any salary for it," replied Wallingford, and Lamb
halted his anger with a sickened feeling. The two hundred dollars a
month that he had been drawing lay heavily upon his conscience.
"I'm going to ask for a reduction in my pay at the next meeting," he
declared. "I cannot take the money with a clear conscience."
"That's up to you," replied Wallingford; "but I want to remind you that
unless money is put into this treasury within a day or so the works are
stopped," and he went out to climb into his auto, leaving the secretary
to some very sober thought.
Well, Lamb reflected, what was there to do? But one thing: raise the
money by the sale of treasury stock to replenish their coffers and carry
on the work. He wished he could see his friend Jasper. The wish was like
sorcery, for no more was it uttered than David and Mr. Lewis came in.
They were deeply worried over the condition into which affairs had been
allowed to drift, but Lamb had cooled down by this time. He allowed them
to hold an indignation meeting for a time, but presently he reminded
them that, after all, no matter what else was right or wrong, it would
be necessary to raise money--that the machine must be finished. They
went over to the shop to look at it. The workmen were testing it by hand
when they arrived, and it was working with at least a fair degree of
accuracy. The inspection committee did not know that the device was
entirely impractical. All that they saw was that it produced the result
of a finished tack with a cover of colored cloth glued tightly to its
head, and to them its operation was a silent tribute to the genius of
the man they had been execrating. They came away encouraged. It was Mr.
Lewis who expressed the opinion which was gaining ground with all of
them.
"After all," he declared, "we're bound to admit that he's a big man."
The result was precisely what Wallingford had foreseen. These men, to
save their company, to save the money they had already invested, raised
ten thousand dollars among them. David Jasper put another
five-thousand-dollar mortgage on his property; Mr. Lewis raised two
thousand, and Edward Lamb three thousand, and with this money they
bought of the extra treasury stock to that amount. J. Rufus Wallingford
returned in the morning. The stock lay open for him to sign; there was
ten thousand dollars in the treasury, and a check to the Corley Machine
Company, already signed by the treasurer, was also awaiting his
signature.
The eight thousand dollars that was left went at a surprisingly rapid
rate, for, with a love for polished detail, Wallingford had ordered
large quantities of shipping cases, stamps to burn the company's device
upon them, japanned steel signs in half a dozen colors to go with each
shipment, and many other expensive incidentals, besides the experimental
work. There were patent applications and a host of other accumulating
bills that gave Lamb more worry and perplexity than he had known in all
his fifteen years of service with the Dorman Company. The next
replenishment was harder. To get the remaining ten thousand dollars in
the treasury, the already committed stockholders scraped around among
their friends to the remotest acquaintance, and placed scrip no longer
in blocks of five thousand, but of ten shares, of five shares, even in
driblets of one and two hundred dollars, until they had absorbed all the
extra treasury stock; and in that time Wallingford, by appointing a St.
Louis agent, had managed to dispose of twenty thousand dollars' worth of
his own holdings. He was still "cleaning up," and he brought in his
transfer certificates with as much nonchalance as if he were turning in
orders for tacks.
Rapid as he now was, however, he did not work quite fast enough. He had
still some fifteen thousand dollars' worth of personal stock when, early
one morning, a businesslike gentleman stepped into the office where Lamb
sat alone at work, and presented his card. It told nothing beyond the
mere fact that he was an attorney.
"Well, Mr. Rook, what can I do for you?" asked Lamb pleasantly, though
not without apprehension. He wondered what J. Rufus had been doing.
"Are you an officer of the Universal Covered Tack Company?" inquired Mr.
Rook.
"The secretary; Edward Lamb."
"Quite so. Mr. Lamb, I represent the Invisible Carpet Tack Company, and
I bring you their formal notification to cease using their device;"
whereupon he delivered to Edward a document. "The company assumes that
you are not thoroughly posted as to its article of manufacture, nor as
to its patents covering it," he resumed. "They have been on the market
three years with this product."
From his pocket he took a fancifully embellished package, and, opening
it, he poured two or three tacks into Edward's hand. With dismay the
secretary examined one of them. It was an ordinary carpet tack, such as
they were about to make, but with a crimson-covered top. Dazed, scarcely
knowing what he was doing, he mechanically took his knife from his
pocket and cut the cloth from it. The head was roughened for gluing
precisely as had been planned for their own!
"Assuming, as I say, that you are not aware of the encroachment," the
attorney went on, "the Invisible Company does not desire to let you
invite prosecution, but wishes merely to warn you against attempting to
put an infringement of their goods on the market. They have plenty of
surplus capital, and are prepared to defend their rights with all of it,
if necessary. Should you wish to communicate with me or have your
counsel do so, my address is on that card," and, leaving the paper of
tacks behind him, Mr. Rook left the office.
Without taking the trouble to investigate, Lamb knew instinctively that
the lawyer was right, an opinion which later inquiry all too thoroughly
corroborated. For three years the Invisible Carpet Tack Company had been
supplying precisely the article the Universal Company was then striving
to perfect. What there was of that trade they had and would keep, and a
sickening realization came to the secretary that it meant a total loss
to himself and his friends of practically everything they possessed. The
machinery in which their money was invested was special machinery that
could be used for no other purpose, and was worth but little more than
the price of scrap iron. Every cent that they had invested was gone!
His first thought was for David Jasper. As for himself, he was young
yet. He could stand the loss of five thousand. He could go back to
Dorman's, take his old position and be the more valuable for his ripened
experience, and there was always a chance that a minor partnership might
await him there after a few more years; but as for Jasper, his day was
run, his sun had set. It was a hard task that confronted the secretary,
but he must do it. He called up Kriegler's and asked for David Jasper,
and when David came to the telephone he told him what had happened. Over
and over, carefully and point by point, he had to explain it, for his
friend could not believe, since he could not even comprehend, the blow
that had fallen upon him. Suddenly, Lamb found there was no answer to a
question that he asked. He called anxiously again and again. He could
hear only a confused murmur in the 'phone. There were tramping feet and
excited voices, and he gathered that the receiver was left dangling,
that no one held it, that no one listened to what he said. Hastily
putting on his coat and hat, he locked the office and took a car for the
North Side.
J. Rufus Wallingford himself was busy that morning, and in the North
Side, too. His huge car whirled past the little frame houses that were
covered with mortgages which would never be lifted, and stopped before
the home of David Jasper. His jaw was hanging loosely, his big, red face
was bloated and splotched, and his small eyes were bloodshot, though
they glowed with a somber fire. He had been out all night, and this was
one of the few times he had been indiscreet enough to carry his excesses
over into the morning; usually he was alcohol proof. At first, blinking
and blearing in the sunlight, he had been numb; but an hour's swift ride
in the fresh air of the country had revived him, while the ascending sun
had started into life again the fumes of the wine that he had drunk, so
that all of the evil within him had come uppermost without the
restraining caution that belonged to his sober hours. In his abnormal
condition the thought had struck him that now was the time for the final
coup--that he would dispose of his remaining shares of stock at a
reduced valuation and get away, at last, from the irksome tasks that
confronted him, from the dilemma that was slowly but surely encompassing
him. In pursuance of this idea it had occurred to him, as it never would
have done in his sober moments, that David Jasper could still raise
money and that he could still be made to do so. Lumbering back to the
kitchen door, he knocked upon it, and Ella Jasper opened it. Ella had
finished her morning's work hurriedly, for she intended to go downtown
shopping, and was already preparing to dress. Her white, rounded arms
were bared to the elbow, and her collar was turned in with a "V" at the
throat.
The somber glow in Wallingford's eyes leaped into flame, and, without
stopping to question her, he pushed his way into the kitchen, closing
the door behind him. He lurched suddenly toward her, and, screaming, she
flew through the rooms toward the front door. She would have gained the
door easily enough, and, in fact, had just reached it, when it opened
from the outside, and her father, accompanied by his friend Lewis, came
suddenly in. For half an hour, up at Kriegler's, they had been restoring
David from the numb half-trance in which he had dropped the receiver of
the telephone, and even now he swayed as he walked, so that his
condition could scarcely have been told from that of Wallingford when
the latter had come through the gate. But there was this difference
between them: the strength of Wallingford had been dissipated; that of
Jasper had been merely suspended. It was a mental wrench that had
rendered him for the moment physically incapable. Now, however, when he
saw the author of all his miseries, a hoarse cry of rage burst from him,
and before his eyes there suddenly seemed to surge a red mist. Hale and
sturdy still, a young man in physique, despite his sixty years, he
sprang like a tiger at the adventurer who had wrecked his prosperity and
who now had held his home in contempt.
There was no impact of strained bodies, as when two warriors meet in
mortal combat; as when attacker and defender prepare to measure prowess.
Instead, the big man, twice the size and possibly twice the lifting and
striking strength of David Jasper, having on his side, too, the
advantage of being in what should have been the summit of life, shrank
back, pale to the lips, suddenly whimpering and crying for mercy. It was
only a limp, resistless man of blubber that David Jasper had hurled
himself upon, and about whose throat his lean, strong fingers had
clutched, the craven gurgling still his appeals for grace. Ordinarily
this would have disarmed a man like David Jasper, for disgust alone
would have stayed his hand, have turned his wrath to loathing, his
righteous vengefulness to nausea; but now he was blind, blood-mad, and
he bore the huge spineless lump of moral putty to the floor by the force
of his resistless onrush.
"Man!" Lewis shouted in his ear. "Man, there's a law against that sort
of thing!"
"Law!" screamed David Jasper. "Law! Did it save me my savings? Let me
alone!"
The only result of the interference was to alter the direction of his
fury, and now, with his left hand still gripping the throat of his
despoiler, his stalwart fist rained down blow after blow upon the hated,
fat-jowled face that lay beneath him. It was a brutal thing, and, even
as she strove to coax and pull her father away, Ella was compelled to
avert her face. The smacking impact of those blows made her turn faint;
but, even so, she had wit enough to close the front door, so that morbid
curiosity should not look in upon them nor divine her father's madness.
Just as she returned to him, however, and even while his fist was
upraised for another stroke at that sobbing coward, a spasmodic twitch
crossed his face as he gasped deeply for air, and he toppled to the
floor, inert by the side of his enemy. Age had told at last. In spite of
an abstemious life, the unwonted exertion and the unwonted passion had
wreaked their punishment upon him.
It was David's friend Lewis who, with white, set face, helped
Wallingford to his feet, and, without a word, scornfully shoved him
toward the door, throwing his crumpled hat after him as he passed out.
With blood upon his face and two rivulets of tears streaming down across
it, J. Rufus Wallingford, the suave, the gentleman for whom all good
things of earth were made and provided, ran sobbing, with downstretched
quivering lips, to his automobile. The chauffeur jumped out for a moment
to get the hat and to dip his kerchief in the stream that he turned on
for a moment from the garden hydrant; coming back to the machine, he
handed the wet kerchief to his master, then, without instructions, he
started home. When his back was thoroughly turned, the chauffeur,
despite that he had been well paid and extravagantly tipped during all
the months of his fat employment, smiled, and smiled, and kept on
smiling, and had all he could do to prevent his shoulders from heaving.
He was gratified--was Frank--pleased in his two active senses of justice
and of humor.
Just as the automobile turned the corner, Edward Lamb came running down
the street from Kriegler's, where he had gone first to find out what had
happened, and he met Mr. Lewis going for a doctor. Without stopping to
explain, Lewis jerked his thumb in the direction of the house, and
Edward, not knocking, dashed in at the door. They had laid David on his
bed in the front room, and his daughter bent over him, bathing his brow
with camphor. David was speechless, but his eyes were open now, and the
gleam of intelligence was in them. As their friend came to the bedside,
Ella looked around at him. She tried to gaze up at him unmoved as he
stood there so young, so strong, so dependable; she strove to look into
his eyes bravely and frankly, but it had been a racking time, in which
her strength had been sorely tested, and she swayed slightly toward
him. Edward Lamb caught his sister in his arms, but when her head was
pillowed for an instant upon his shoulder and the tears burst forth, lo!
the miracle happened. The foolish scales fell so that he could see into
his own heart, and detect what had lain there unnamed for many a long
year--and Ella Jasper was his sister no longer!
"There, there, dear," he soothed her, and smoothed her tresses with his
broad, gentle palm.
The touch and the words electrified her. Smiling through her tears, she
ventured to look up at him, and he bent and kissed her solemnly and
gently upon the lips; then David Jasper, lying there upon his bed, with
all his little fortune gone and all his sturdy vigor vanished, saw, and
over his wan lips there flickered the trace of a satisfied smile.
Hidden that night in a stateroom on a fast train, J. Rufus Wallingford
and his wife, with but such possessions as they could carry in their
suit cases and one trunk, whirled eastward.
CHAPTER VIII
MR. WALLINGFORD TAKES A DOSE OF HIS OWN BITTER MEDICINE
As the lights of the railroad yard, red and white and green, slid by, so
passed out of the ken of these fugitives all those who had contributed
to their luxury through the medium of the Universal Covered Carpet Tack
Company. Lamb, Jasper, Lewis, Nolting, Ella; what were all these people
to them? What were any living creatures except a part of the always
moving panorama which composed the background of their lives? Nomads
always since their marriage, when Mrs. Wallingford as a girl had run
away from home that was no home to join this cheerful knave of fortune,
they had known no resting place, no spot on earth that called to them;
had formed no new ties and made no new friendships. Where all the world
seemed anchored they were ever flitting on, and the faces that they knew
belonged but to the more or less vivid episodes by which the man strove
after such luxurious ideals as he had. Only a few of the dubious
acquaintances which Wallingford had formed in his earlier days of
adventure remained for them to greet as they paused before fresh flights
afield. "Blackie" Daw, who had recently removed his "office" from Boston
to New York, was the most constant of these, and him they entertained in
one of the most exclusive hostelries in the metropolis soon after their
arrival. Mr. Wallingford's face still bore traces of the recent
conflict.
"Fanny's the girl!" he declared with his hand resting affectionately on
his wife's shoulder, after he had detailed to Mr. Daw how he had
squeezed the covered carpet tack dry of its possibilities. "She's little
Mamie Bright, all right. For once we got away with it. I'm a piker, I
know, but twenty-eight thousand in yellow, crinkly boys to the good, all
sewed up in Fanny's skirt till we ripped it out and soused it in a
deposit vault, isn't so bad for four months' work; and now we're on our
way to ruin Monte Carlo."
"You're all to the mustard," admired Blackie; "you're the big noise and
the blinding flash. As I say, I'd go into some legitimate line myself if
I wasn't honest. What bites me, though, is that you got all that out of
my little Lamb and his easy friends."
"Easy! Um--m--m--m," commented Mr. Wallingford frowningly, as he
unconsciously rubbed the tips of his fingers over the black puff under
his right eye. "You've got it wrong. I like to sting the big people
best. They take it like a dentist's pet; but when you tap one of these
pikers for a couple of mean little thousands he howls like a steam
calliope. One old pappy guy started to take it out of my hide, and he
tried so hard it gave him paralysis."
Mr. Daw laughed in sympathy.
"You must have had a lively get-away, to judge from the marks the mill
left on you; but why this trip across the pond? Are they after you?"
"After me!" scorned J. Rufus. "There's no chance! Why, I never did a
thing in my life that stepped outside the law!"
"But you lean way over the fence," charged Blackie with a knowing nod,
"and some of these days the palings will break."
"By that time I'll have enough soft money in front of me to ease my
fall," announced Wallingford confidently. "I'm for that get-rich-quick
game, and you can just bank on me as a winner."
"You'll win all right," agreed Blackie confidently, looking at his
watch, "but you're like the rest of us. You'll have to die real sudden
if you want to leave anything to your widow. That's the trouble with
this quick money. It's lively or you wouldn't catch it on the wing, and
it stays so lively after you get it."
He arose as he concluded this sage observation and buttoned his coat.
"But you're going to stay to dinner with us?" insisted Mrs. Wallingford.
"No," he returned regretfully. "I'd like to, but business is business. I
have an engagement to trim a deacon in Podunk this evening. Give my
regards to the Prince of Monaco."
It was scarcely more than a week afterwards when he somberly turned in
at the bar room of that same hotel, and almost bumped into Wallingford,
who was as somberly coming out. For a moment they gazed at each other in
amazement and then both laughed.
"You must have gone over and back by wireless," observed Blackie. "What
turned up?"
"Stung!" exclaimed J. Rufus with deep self-scorn. "I got an inside tip
on some copper stock the evening you left, and the next morning I looked
up a broker and he broke me. He had just started up in the bucket-shop
business and I was his first customer. He didn't wait for any more.
That's all."
Daw laughed happily, and he was still laughing when they entered the
drawing room of Wallingford's suite.
"It's the one gaudy bet that the biggest suckers of all are the wise
people," he observed. "Here you go out West and trim a bunch of come-ons
for twenty-five thousand, and what do you do next? Oh, just tarry here
long enough to tuck that neat little bundle into the pocket of a
bucket-shop broker that throws away the bucket! You'd think he was the
wise boy, after that, but he'll drop your twenty-five thousand on a
wire-tapping game, and the wire tapper will buy gold bricks with it. The
gold-brick man will give it to the bookies and the bookies will lose it
on stud poker. I'm a Billy goat myself. I clean up ten thousand last
week on mining stock that permits Mr. Easy Mark to mine if he wants to,
and I pay it right over last night for the fun of watching a faro expert
deal from a sanded deck! Me? Cleaned with-_out_ soap!"
"You don't mean to say you're broke, too?" demanded his host.
"If I had any less they'd arrest me for loitering."
Mr. Wallingford glowered upon his twenty-dollar-a-day apartments with a
sigh. The latest in heavy lace curtains fluttered at him from the
windows, thick rugs yielded to his feet, all the frippery of
Louis-Quinze, while it mocked his bigness, ministered to his
comfort--but waited to be paid for!
"You don't look as good to me as you did a while ago," he declared. "I'd
figured on you for a sure touch, for now it's back to the Rube patch for
us. O Fanny!"
"Yes, Jim," answered a pleasant voice, and Mrs. Wallingford, in a
stunning gown which, supplementing her hair and eyes, made of her a
symphony in brown, came from the adjoining room. She shook hands
cordially with Mr. Daw and sat down with an inquiring look at her
husband.
"It's time for us to take up a collection," said the latter gentleman.
"We're going ay-wye."
"Ya-as, ay-wye from he-_ah_!" supplemented Blackie to no one in
particular.
"Won't your ring and scarf pin do?" his wife inquired anxiously of Mr.
Wallingford. A "collection," in their parlance, meant the sacrifice of a
last resource, and she was a woman of experience.
"You know they won't," he returned in mild reproach. "If I don't keep a
front I know where my ticket reads to; the first tank!"
Without any further objection she brought him a little black leather
case, which he opened. An agreeable glitter sparkled from its velvet
depths, and he passed it to his friend with a smile of satisfaction.
"They'll please Uncle, eh, Blackie?" he observed. "The first thing to
do, after I cash these, is to look at the map and pick out a fresh town
where smart people have money in banks. It always helps a lot to
remember that somewhere in this big United States people have been
saving up coin for years, just waiting for us to come and get it."
The two men laughed, but Mrs. Wallingford did not.
"Honest, I'm tired of it," she confessed. "If this speculation of Jim's
had only turned out luckily I wanted to buy a little house and live
quietly and--and decently for a year or so."
Mr. Daw glanced at her in amusement.
"She wants to be respectable!" he gasped in mock surprise.
"All women do," she said, still earnestly.
"You wouldn't last three months," he informed her. "You'd join the
village sewing circle and the culture club, and paddle around in a giddy
whirl of pale functions till you saw you had to keep your mouth shut all
the time for fear the other women would find out you knew something.
Then you'd quit."
"You talk as if you had been crossed in love," she consoled him.
"That's because I'm in pain," confessed Blackie. "It hasn't been an hour
since I saw a thousand dollars in real money, and the telegraph company
jerked it away from me just as I reached out to bring it home."
"_Is_ there that much money in the world?" inquired Wallingford.
"Not loose," replied Blackie. "I thought I had this lump pried off, but
now it's got a double padlock on it and to-night it starts far, far back
to that dear old metropolis of the Big Thick Water, where the windy
river looks like a fresh-plowed field. But they've coin out there, and
every time I think of Mr. James Clover and his thousand I'm tempted to
go down to his two-dollar hotel and coax him up a dark alley."
"Who does Mr. Clover do?" inquired Wallingford perfunctorily.
Blackie's sense of humor came uppermost to soothe his anguished
feelings.
"He's the Supreme Exalted Ruler of the Noble Order of Friendly Hands,"
he grinned, "and his twenty-six members at three or eleven cents a
month don't turn in the money fast enough; so he took a chance on the
cold-iron cage and brought a chunk of the insurance reserve fund to New
York to double it. I picked myself out to do the doubling for him."
Mr. Wallingford chuckled.
"I know," he said. "To double it you fold the bills when you put them in
your pocket, and when Clover wanted it back you'd have him pinched for a
common thief. But how did it get away? I'm disappointed in you, Blackie.
I thought when you once saw soft money it was yours."
"Man died in his town. If he'd only put it off for one day the whole
burg could have turned into a morgue, for I don't need it. But no! The
man died, and the Supreme Exalted Secretary wired the Supreme Exalted
Ruler. The telegram was brought to his room just when I had the hook to
his gills, and he--went--down--stream! It was perfectly scandalous the
names we called that man for having died, but it takes a long time to
cuss a thousand dollars' worth."
Mr. Wallingford was thoughtful.
"A fraternal insurance company," he mused. "I've never taken a fall out
of that game, and it sounds good. This gifted amateur's going out
to-night? Hustle right down to his hotel and bring him up to dinner.
Tell him I've been thinking of going into the insurance field and might
be induced to buy a share in his business. I've a notion to travel along
with that thousand dollars to-night, no matter where it goes. O Fanny!"
he called again to his wife in the other room. "Suppose you begin to
pack up while I step out and soak the diamonds."
That was how Mr. James Clover came to obtain some startling new ideas
about insurance; also about impressiveness. When Mr. Wallingford in a
dinner coat walked into any public dining room, waiters were instantly
electrified and ordinary mortals felt humble. His broad expanse of white
shirt front awed the most self-satisfied into instant submission, and he
carried himself as one who was monarch of all he surveyed. This was due
to complacency, for though bills might press and cash be scarce, there
never stood any line of worry upon his smooth brow. Worry was for
others--those who would have to pay. Mr. Clover, himself of some bulk
but of no genuine lordliness whatever, no sooner set eyes upon Mr. J.
Rufus Wallingford than he felt comforted. Here was wealth unlimited, and
if this opulent being could possibly be induced to finance the Noble
Order of Friendly Hands, he saw better skies ahead, bright skies that
shone down on a fair, fruitful world where all was prosperity and
plenty. Mr. Clover was a block-like man with a square face and a heavy
fist, with a loud voice and a cultivated oratorical habit of speech
which he meant to be awe-inspiring. Behind him there was a string of
failures that were a constant source of wonderment to him, since he had
not been too scrupulous!
"He'd be a crook if he knew how; but he stumbles over his feet," Blackie
confided to Wallingford. To Clover he said: "Look out for the big man.
He's a pretty smooth article, and you'll miss the gold out of your teeth
if you don't watch him."
It was a recommendation, and a shrewd one. Mr. Clover was prepared by it
to be impressed; he ended by becoming a dazed worshiper, and his
conquest began when his host ordered the dinner. It was not merely what
he ordered, but how, that stamped him as one who habitually dined well;
and to Clover, who had always lived upon a beer basis, the ascent to the
champagne level was dizzying. It was not until they had broached their
second quart of wine that business was brought up for discussion.
"I understand you've just had a bit of hard luck, Mr. Clover," said
Wallingford, laughing as if hard luck were a joke.
Mr. Clover winced within, but put on a cheerful air.
"Merely what was to have been expected," he replied. "You refer, I
suppose, to the death of one of our members, but as our Order now has a
large enrollment we are only averaging with the mortality tables."
"What is your membership?" asked the other with sudden directness.
"At our present rate of progress," began Mr. Clover, eloquently,
squaring his shoulders and looking Mr. Wallingford straight in the eye,
"thousands will have been enrolled upon our books before the end of the
coming year. Already we are perfecting a new and elaborate filing system
to take care of the business, which is increasing by leaps and bounds."
Mr. Wallingford calmly closed one blue orb.
"But in chilly figures, discounting next year, how many?" he asked.
"Live ones, I mean, that cough up their little dues every month."
The Supreme Exalted Ruler squirmed and smiled a trifle weakly.
"You might just as well tell me, you know," insisted Mr. Wallingford,
"because I shall want to inspect your books if I buy in. Have you a
thousand?"
"Not quite," confessed Mr. Clover, in a voice which, in spite of him,
would sound a trifle leaden.
"Have you five hundred?" persisted Mr. Wallingford.
Mr. Clover considered, while the silent Mr. Daw discreetly kept his face
straight.
"Five hundred and seventeen," he blurted, his face reddening.
"That isn't so bad," said Mr. Wallingford encouragingly. "But how do you
clinch your rake-off?"
At this Mr. Clover could smile with smug content; he could swell with
pride.
"Out our way, a little knothole in the regulations was found by yours
truly," he modestly boasted. "Mine is somewhat different from any
insurance order on earth. The members think they vote, but they don't.
If they ever elect another Supreme Exalted Ruler, all he can do is to
wear a brass crown and a red robe; I'll still handle the funds. You see,
we've just held our first annual election, and I had the entire
membership vote 'Yes' on a forever-and-ever contract which puts our
whole income--for safety, of course--into the hands of a duly bonded
company. For ten cents a month from each member this company is to pay
all expenses, to handle, invest and disburse its insurance and other
funds for the benefit of the Order. It's like making a savings bank our
trustee; only it's different, because I'm the company."
His host nodded in approval.
"You have other rake-offs," he suggested.
"Right again!" agreed Clover with gleeful enthusiasm. "Certificate fees,
fines for delinquency, regalia company and all that. But the main
fountain is the little dime. Ten cents seems like a cheap game, maybe,
but when we have two hundred and fifty thousand members, that trifling
ante amounts to twenty-five thousand dollars a month. Bad, I guess!"
"When you get it," agreed the other. "You're incorporated, then. For how
much?"
"Ten thousand."
"I see," said Mr. Wallingford with a smile of tolerance. "You need me,
all right. You ought to _give_ me a half interest in your business."
Mr. Clover's self-assertiveness came back to him with a jerk.
"Anything else?" he asked pleasantly.
Mr. Wallingford beamed upon him.
"I might want a salary, but it would be purely nominal; a hundred a week
or so."
Mr. Clover was highly amused. The only reason on earth that he would
admit another man to a partnership with him was that he must have ready
cash. His shoe soles were wearing out.
"I'm afraid our business wouldn't suit you, anyhow, Mr. Wallingford," he
said with bantering sarcasm. "Our office is very plain, for one thing,
and we have no rug on the floor."
"We'll put rugs down right away, and if the offices are not as swell as
they make 'em we'll move," Wallingford promptly announced. "I might give
you two thousand for a half interest."
Mr. Clover drank a glass of champagne and considered. Two thousand
dollars, at the present stage of his finances, was real money. The Noble
Order of Friendly Hands had been started on a "shoestring" of five
hundred dollars, and the profits of the Friendly Hands Trust Company had
been nil up to the present time. This offer was more than a temptation;
it was a fall.
"Couldn't think of it," he nevertheless coldly replied. "But I'll sell
you half my stock at par. The secretary has ten shares, and dummy
directors four. I hold eighty-six."
"Forty-three hundred dollars!" figured Wallingford. "And you'd charge me
that for a brick with the plating worn thin! You forget the value of my
expert services."
"What do you know about fraternal insurance?" demanded Clover, who had
reddened under fire.
"Not a thing," confessed Mr. Wallingford. "All I know is how to get
money. If I go in with you, the first thing we do is to reorganize on a
two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar basis."
Mr. Clover pounded his fist upon the table until the glasses rang, and
laughed so loudly that the head waiter shivered and frowned. Seeing,
however, that the noise came from Mr. Wallingford's corner, he smiled.
He was venal, was the head waiter, and he remembered the pleasant,
velvety rustle of a bill in his palm.
"That joke's good enough for a minstrel show," Clover declared. "Why,
man, even if that stock could be sold, Gabriel's horn would catch us
still struggling to pay our first dividend."
Mr. Wallingford lit a cigarette and smiled in pity.
"Oh, well, if you figure on staying in the business till you drop dead I
won't wake you up," he stated. "But I thought you wanted money."
Mr. Clover shook his head.
"We have laws in my State, Mr. Wallingford."
"I should hope so," returned that gentleman. "If it wasn't for good,
safe, solid laws I never would make a cent. Why, the law's on my side
all the time, and the police are the best friends I've got. They show me
the way home at night."
Mr. Clover looked incredulous.
"I'm afraid you don't understand the fraternal insurance business," he
insisted. "It takes a lot of hard, patient work to build up an order."
"_You_ don't understand the business," retorted the other. "What, for
instance, are you going to do with that thousand dollars you're taking
back home?"
"Give it to the widow of Mr. Henry L. Bishop, of course," said Mr.
Clover, expanding his chest and pursing his mouth virtuously. "The
widows and orphans who look to the Noble Order of Friendly Hands for
protection shall not look in vain."
"That will look well in a prospectus," admitted Mr. Wallingford with a
knowing twinkle of his eyes; "but I'm not going to take out any
insurance so you could notice it. Suppose I show you how to have Mrs.
Bishop hand you back that thousand with sobs of gratitude? Do I get two
hundred and fifty of it?"
"If you can do that legitimately," said Mr. Clover, leaning forward and
surprised into sudden warm eagerness, "I'll accept your price for a half
interest."
"I'll go with you to-night--if I can get the drawing-room on your
train," decided Wallingford, and arose.
The Supreme Exalted Ruler gazed up at him with profound admiration. He
looked so much like actual cash. He might be a "smooth article," but was
not one Clover also "smooth"? He could guard the gold in his own teeth,
all right.
"You're a wonder, Jim," said Mr. Daw to his friend when they were alone
for a few minutes; "but where are you going to get that two thousand?"
"Out of the business--if I pay it at all," replied Mr. Wallingford.
"Trust your Uncle Rufus."
CHAPTER IX
MR. WALLINGFORD SHOWS MR. CLOVER HOW TO DO THE WIDOWS AND ORPHANS GOOD
Mrs. Bishop, a small, nervous-looking woman of forty-five, with her thin
hair drawn back so tightly from her narrow forehead that it gave one the
headache to look at her, was in her dismal "front room" with her
wrinkled red hands folded in her lap when Mr. Wallingford and Mr. Clover
called. It was only the day after the funeral, and she broke into tears
the moment they introduced themselves.
"Madam," declaimed Mr. Clover in his deepest and most sympathetic voice,
"it is the blessed privilege of the Noble Order of Friendly Hands to dry
the tears of the widows and orphans, and to shed the light of hope upon
their disconsolate pathway. It is our pleasure to bring you, as a
testimonial of your husband's affection and loving care, this check for
one thousand dollars."
Mrs. Bishop took the check and burst into uncontrollable sobs, whereat
Mr. Wallingford looked distinctly annoyed. If he could help it, he
never, by any possibility, looked upon other than the most cheerful
aspects of life.
Mr. Clover cleared his throat.
"But the broad paternal interest of the Noble Order of Friendly Hands
does not stop here," he went on, turning for a glance of earned approval
from J. Rufus Wallingford. "The family of every member of our Order
becomes at once a ward of ours, and they may look to us for assistance,
advice, and benefit in every way possible. We are a group of friends,
banded together for mutual aid in time of trouble and sorrow."
Mr. Wallingford judged this magnificent flight to be a quotation from
the ritual of the Noble Order of Friendly Hands, and he was correct;
but, as Mrs. Bishop had ventured to look up at them, he nodded his head
gravely.
"It is about that thousand dollars you hold in your hand, Mrs. Bishop,"
Clover continued, resuming his oratorical version of the lesson he had
carefully learned from Wallingford; "and we feel it our duty to remind
you that, unless it is wisely used, the plans of your thoughtful husband
for your safe future will not have been carried out. How had you thought
of investing this neat little sum?"
Mrs. Bishop gazed at the check through her tears and tried to comprehend
that it was real money, as it would have been but for the astuteness of
Mr. Wallingford. Mr. Clover had proposed to bring her ten new, crisp
one-hundred-dollar bills, but his monitor had pointed out that if she
ever got that money between her fingers and felt it crinkle she would
never let go of it. A check was so different.
"Well," she faltered, "my daughter Minnie wanted me to get us some
clothes and pay some down on a piano and lay in the winter coal and
provisions and put the rest in a bank for a rainy day. Minnie's my
youngest. She's just quit the High School because she wants to go to a
commercial college. But my oldest daughter, Hattie, wouldn't hear to it.
She says if Minnie'll only take a job in the store where she works they
can run the family, and for me to take this thousand dollars and finish
paying off the mortgage on the house with it. The mortgage costs six per
cent. a year."
"Your daughter Hattie is a very sensible young lady," said Mr.
Wallingford with great gravity. "It would be folly to expend this
thousand dollars upon personal luxuries; but equally wrong to lose its
earning power."
It was the voice of Wall Street, of the Government Mint, of the very
soul and spirit of all financial wisdom, that spoke here, and Mrs.
Bishop felt it with a thrill.
"Madam," orated Mr. Clover, "the Noble Order of Friendly Hands has
provided a way for the safe and profitable investment of the funds left
to the widows and orphans under its protection. It has set aside a
certain amount of high-dividend-bearing stock in the Order itself, or
rather in its operating department, of which, by the way, I am the
president, and of which the eminent capitalist and philanthropist, Mr.
J. Rufus Wallingford, is a leading spirit." His sweeping gesture toward
that benevolent multi-millionaire, and Mr. Wallingford's bow in return,
were sights worth beholding. "The benevolent gentlemen who organized
this generous association have just made possible this further
beneficence to its dependents. The stock should pay you not less than
twelve per cent. a year, and your original capital can be withdrawn at
any time. With this income you can pay the interest on your mortgage,
and have a tidy little sum left at the end of each quarter. Think of it,
madam! Money every three months, and your thousand dollars always
there!"
Mrs. Bishop glanced at him in slow comprehension. The figures that he
gave her did not, as yet, mean so much, but the sight of Mr. Wallingford
did. He was so big, so solid looking, so much like substantial
prosperity itself. A huge diamond glowed from his finger. It must be
worth several hundred dollars. Another one gleamed from his scarf. His
clothing was of the latest cut and the finest material. Even his socks,
in the narrow rim which showed above his low-cut shoes, were silk; she
could see that clear across the room.
The door opened, and a girl of seventeen or eighteen came in. That she
was unusually pretty was attested by the suddenly widening eyes of Mr.
Wallingford.
"And is this your daughter Minnie?" asked the benevolent gentleman, all
his protecting and fostering instincts aroused.
Mrs. Bishop, in a flutter, presented her younger daughter to the
fortune-bringing gentlemen, and Minnie fluttered a bit on her own
account. She knew she was pretty; she read in the eyes of the
wealthy-looking, perfectly groomed Mr. Wallingford that she was pretty;
she saw in the smile of Mr. Clover that she was pretty, and her vanity
was pleased inordinately.
A sudden brilliant idea came to Mr. Wallingford.
"I have the solution to your problem, Mrs. Bishop," he said. "We shall
need more help in our offices, and your daughter shall have the place.
She can soon earn more money than she ever could in a store, and can
secure as good a training as she could in a business college. How would
you like that, Miss Bishop?"
"I think it would be fine," replied the young lady, with a large-eyed
glance toward Mr. Wallingford.
The glance was more of habit than intent. Minnie's mirror and what she
had heard from her boy friends had given her an impulse toward coquetry.
It was pleasant to feel her power, to see what instantaneous impression
she could make upon grown men. Such a friendly party it was! Everybody
was pleased, and in the end Mr. Wallingford and Mr. Clover walked away
from the house with Mrs. Bishop's check and her receipt and her policy
in their pockets.
Mr. Clover was lost in profound admiration.
"It worked, all right!" he said exultantly to Mr. Neil, as soon as they
returned to the dingy little office. "Here's the thousand dollars," and
he threw down the check. "Good Lord! I couldn't believe but that
thousand was gone; and then if another man died he would put us on the
toboggan."
Mr. Neil was a thin young man whose forehead wore the perpetual frown of
slow thought. Also his cuffs were ragged. He was the Supreme Exalted
Secretary.
"Now may I have fifty?" he inquired in an aside to Clover. "My board
bill, you know."
"Certainly not!" declared the Supreme Exalted Ruler with loud rectitude.
"This thousand dollars belongs in the insurance reserve fund."
"Tut, tut," interposed Wallingford. "Your alarm clock is out of order.
You just now paid a death claim with that money, and the reserve fund is
out that much. A private individual, however, just now bought a thousand
dollars' worth of stock in the reorganized Friendly Hands Trust Company,
and you have the pay in advance. Let Mr. Neil have his fifty dollars,
and give me a check for my two hundred and fifty; then we'll go out to
hunt a decent suite of offices and buy the furniture for it."
"There wouldn't be much of the thousand left after that," objected Mr.
Clover, frowning.
"Why not? You don't suppose we are going to pay cash for anything, do
you?" returned Wallingford in surprise. "My credit's good, if yours
isn't."
His credit! He had not been in town four hours! As Mr. Clover looked him
over again, however, he saw where he was wrong. Mr. Wallingford's mere
appearance was as good as a bond. He would not ask for credit; he would
take it. Mr. Clover, in a quick analysis of this thought, decided that
this rich man's resources were so vast that they shone through his very
bearing. Mr. Wallingford, at that same moment, after having paid his
enormous hotel bill in New York and the expenses of his luxurious trip,
had only ten dollars in the world.
"Now then," suggested Mr. Clover as he passed the hypnotically won check
to his new partner, "we might as well conclude our personal business.
I'll make you over half my stock in the company, and take your two
thousand."
"All right," agreed Wallingford very cheerfully, and they both sat down
to write.
Mr. Clover transferred to Mr. Wallingford forty-three shares of stock in
the Friendly Hands Trust Company, Incorporated, and received a
rectangular slip of paper in return. His face reddened as he examined
it.
"Why, this isn't a check!" he said sharply. "It's a note for ninety
days!"
"Sure!" said J. Rufus Wallingford. "In our talk there wasn't a word said
about cash."
"But cash is what I want, and nothing but cash!" exploded the other,
smacking his hairy fist upon his desk.
"How foolish!" chided J. Rufus smilingly. "I see I'll have to teach you
a lot about business. Draw up your chairs and get my plan in detail. If,
after that, Clover, you do not want my note, you may give it back and go
broke in your own way. Here's what we will do. We will organize a new
operating company for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, in
twenty-five-dollar shares. We will buy over the old ten-thousand-dollar
company for one hundred and fifty thousand in stock of the new company.
Dividing this pro rata, you and I, Clover, will each have nearly
twenty-six hundred shares. Mr. Neil, in place of his present ten shares,
will have six hundred, and we shall have left four thousand shares of
treasury stock. These we will sell among your members. We will reduce
your present insurance rate one fourth, and use the hundred thousand
dollars we take in on stock sales to get new members to whom to sell
more stock. In the meantime, we'll see money every day. You and I,
Clover, will each draw a hundred a week, and I think Mr. Neil will be
pretty well satisfied if he drags down fifty."
The pleased expression upon Mr. Neil's face struggled with the deepening
creases on his brow. Fifteen dollars a week was the most he had ever
earned in his life, but he was so full of fraternal insurance figures
that his skin prickled.
"But how about the insurance end of it?" he interposed. "How will we
ever keep up at that ridiculously low rate? That might do for a while,
but as our membership becomes older the death rate will increase on us
and we can't pay it. Why, the mortality tables--" and he reached for the
inevitable facts and figures.
"Who's talking about insurance?" demanded Wallingford. "I'm talking
about how to get money. Put up the little red dope-book. Clover, you get
busy right away and write a lot of circus literature about the grand
work your members will be doing for the widows and orphans by buying
this stock; also how much dividend it will pay them. When the treasury
stock is sold, and we have a big enough organization to absorb it, we
will begin to unload our own shares and get out. If you clean up your
sixty-four thousand dollars in this year, I guess you will be willing
to let the stockholders elect new officers and conduct their own
Friendly Hands Trust Company any way they please, won't you?"
Mr. Clover quietly folded Mr. Wallingford's note and put it in his
pocket.
"Let's go out and rent some new offices," he said.
He came back, at Mr. Neil's call, to write out that fifty-dollar check,
and incidentally made out one for himself in a like amount.
"What do you think of him, anyhow?" asked Neil with a troubled
countenance.
"Think of him?" repeated Clover with enthusiasm. "He's the greatest
ever! If I had known him five years ago I'd be worth a million to-day!"
"But is this scheme on the level?" asked Neil.
"That's the beauty of it," said Clover, exulting like a schoolboy. "The
law can't touch us any place."
"Maybe not," admitted Neil; "but somehow I don't quite like it."
"I guess you'll like your fifty a week when it begins to come in, and
your fifteen thousand when we clean up," retorted Clover.
"You bet!" said Neil, but he began to do some bewildered figuring on his
own account. His head was in a whirl.
CHAPTER X
AN AMAZING COMBINATION OF PHILANTHROPY AND PROFIT IS INAUGURATED
Minnie Bishop came to work for the Noble Order of Friendly Hands on the
day that they moved into offices more in keeping with the magnificence
of Mr. Wallingford, and she was by no means out of place amid the
mahogany desks and fine rugs and huge leather chairs.
"Her smile alone is worth fifty dollars a week to the business," Clover
admitted, but they only paid her five at the start.
She had more to recommend her, however, than white teeth and red lips.
Wallingford himself was surprised to find that, in spite of her
apparently frivolous bent, she had considerable ability and was quick to
learn. From the first he assumed a direct guardianship over her, and his
approaches toward a slightly more than paternal friendship she
considered great fun. At home she mimicked him, and when her older
sister tried to talk to her seriously about it she only laughed the
more. Clover she amused continually, but Neil fell desperately in love
with her from the start, and him she flouted most unmercifully. Really,
she liked him, although she would not admit it even to herself, charging
him with the fatal error of being "too serious."
In the meantime the affairs of the concern progressed delightfully. For
the regulation fee, the Secretary of State, after some perfunctory
inquiries, permitted the "Trust Company" to increase its capitalization
to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Even before the certificates
were delivered from the printer's, however, that month's issue of "The
Friendly Hand" bore the news to the five hundred members of the Order
and to four thousand five hundred prospective members, of the truly
unprecedented combination of philanthropy and profit. Somewhere the
indefatigable Wallingford had secured a copy of a most unusual annual
statement of a large and highly successful insurance company, of the
flat-rate variety and of a similar sounding name. In the smallest type
to be found he had printed over this:
READ THIS REPORT OF THE PROVIDENT FRIENDS TO ITS STOCKHOLDERS
Then followed direct quotations, showing that the Provident Friends had
a membership of a quarter of a million; that it had paid out in death
claims an enormous amount; that it had a surplus fund expressed in a
staggering array of figures; that its enrollment had increased fifty
thousand within the past year. Striking sentences, such as:
WE HAVE JUST DECLARED A THIRTY PER CENT. DIVIDEND
were displayed in big, black type, the whole being spread out in such
form that readers ignorant of such matters would take this to be a sworn
statement of the present condition of the Order of Friendly Hands; and
they were invited to subscribe for its golden stock at the rate of
twenty-five dollars a share! The prudent members who were providing for
their families after death could now also participate in the profits of
this commendable investment during life, and at a rate which, while not
guaranteed, could be expected, in the light of past experience, to pay
back the capital in a trifle over three years, leaving it still intact
and drawing interest.
But this, dear friends and coworkers in a noble cause, was not just a
hard, money-grinding proposition. The revenue derived from the sale of
stock was to be expended in the further expansion of the Order, until
it should blanket the world and carry the blessings of protection to the
widows and orphans throughout the universe! Never before in the history
of finance had it been made possible for men of modest means to further
a charitable work, a noble work, a work appealing to all the highest
aspirations of humanity and creditable to every finest instinct of the
human heart, and at the same time to reap an enormous profit! And the
price was only twenty-five dollars a share--while they lasted!
Wallingford had secured the data and supplied the human frailty ideas
for this flaming announcement, but Clover had put it together, and, as
he examined the proof sheet, the latter gentleman leaned back in his
chair with profound self-esteem.
"That'll get 'em!" he exulted. "If that don't bring in the money to make
this the greatest organization in the business, I don't want a cent!"
"You spread it on too much," objected Neil. "Why can't we do just as
well or better by presenting the thing squarely? It seems to me that any
man who would be caught by the self-evident buncombe of that thing would
be too big a sucker to have any money."
Wallingford looked at him thoughtfully.
"You're right, in a way, Neil," he admitted. "The men who have real
money wouldn't touch it, but the people we're appealing to have stacked
theirs up a cent at a time, and they are afraid of all investments--even
of the banks. When you offer them thirty per cent., however, they are
willing to take a chance; and, after all, I don't see why, with the
money that comes in from this stock sale, we should not be able to
expand our organization to even larger proportions than the Provident
Friends. If we do that, what is to prevent a good dividend to our
stockholders?"
Clover glanced at his partner in surprise. From that overawing bulk
there positively radiated high moral purpose, and Neil shriveled under
it. When they were alone, Clover, making idle marks with his pencil,
looked up at Wallingford from time to time from under shaggy brows, and
finally he laughed aloud.
"You're the limit," he observed. "That's a fine line of talk you gave
Neil."
"Can't we buy him out?" asked Wallingford abruptly.
"What with? A note?" inquired Clover. "Hardly."
"Cash, then."
"Will you put it up?"
"I'll see about it, for if I have him gauged right he will be hunting
for trouble all along the line."
Wallingford went to the window and looked out; then he got his hat. As
he stepped into the hall Neil came from an adjoining room.
"Do you want to sell your stock, Neil?" asked Clover.
"To whom?" asked Neil slowly. Wallingford had shaken his slow
deductions, had suggested new possibilities to ponder, and he was still
bewildered.
"To Wallingford."
"Say, Clover, has he _got_ any money?" demanded Neil.
"If he hasn't he can get it," replied the other. "Come here a minute."
He drew Neil to the window and they looked down into the street.
Standing in front of the office building was a huge, maroon-colored
automobile with a leather-capped chauffeur in front. As they watched,
Mr. Wallingford came out to the curb and the chauffeur saluted with his
finger. Mr. Wallingford took from the rear seat a broad-checked ulster,
put it on, and exchanged his derby for a cap to match. Then he climbed
into the auto and went whirring away.
"That looks like money, don't it?" demanded Clover.
"I give up," said Neil.
"How much do you want for your stock?" inquired Clover, again with a
smile.
"Par!" exclaimed Neil, once more satisfied. "Nothing less!"
"Right you are," agreed Clover. "This man Wallingford is the greatest
ever, I tell you! He's a wonder, a positive genius, and it was a lucky
day for me that I met him. He will make us all rich."
His admiration for Wallingford knew no bounds. He had detected in the
man a genius for chicanery, and so long as he was "in with it"
Wallingford might be as "smooth" as he liked. Were they not partners?
Indeed, yes. Share and share alike!
That night Clover and Neil dined with Mr. and Mrs. Wallingford at their
hotel, and if Neil had any lingering doubts as to Mr. Wallingford's
command of money, those doubts were dispelled by the size of the check,
by the obsequiousness shown them, and by the manner in which Mrs.
Wallingford wore her expensive clothing. After dinner Wallingford took
them for a ride in his automobile, and at a quiet road house, a dozen
miles out of town, over sparkling drinks and heavy cigars, they quite
incidentally discussed a trifling matter of business.
"You fellows go ahead with the insurance part of the game," Wallingford
directed them. "I don't understand any part of that business, but I'll
look after the stock sales. That I know I can handle."
They were enthusiastic in their seconding of this idea, and after this
point had been reached, the host, his business done, took his guests
back to town in the automobile upon which he had not as yet paid a cent,
dropping them at their homes in a most blissful state of content.
Proceeding along the lines of the understanding thus established, within
a few days money began to flow into the coffers of the concern. Mr.
Wallingford's method of procedure was perfectly simple. When an
experimentally inclined member of any one of the out-of-town "Circles"
sent in his modest twenty-five dollars for a share of stock, or even
inquired about it, Wallingford promptly got on a train and went to see
that man. Upon his arrival he immediately found out how much money the
man had and issued him stock to the amount; then he got introductions to
the other members and brought home stock subscriptions to approximately
the exact total of their available cash. There was no resisting him. In
the meantime, with ample funds to urge it forward, the membership of the
organization increased at a rapid enough rate to please even the master
hand. New members meant new opportunities for stock sales, and that
only, to him, and to Clover, the world, at last, was as it should be.
Money was his for the asking, and by means which pleased his sense of
being "in" on a bit of superior cleverness. Quite early in the days of
plenty he saw a side investment which, being questionable, tempted him,
and he came to Wallingford--to borrow money!
"I'll sell some of your stock," offered Wallingford. "I want to sell a
little of my own, anyhow."
In all, he sold for Clover five thousand dollars' worth, and the stock
was promptly reported by the purchasers for transfer on the books of the
company. Some of Wallingford's also came in for transfer, although a
much less amount; sufficient, however, it seemed, for he took the most
expensive apartments in town, filled them with the best furnishings that
were made, and lived like a king. Mrs. Wallingford secured her diamonds
again and bought many more. Clover also "took on airs." Neil worried.
He had made a study of the actual cost of insurance, and the low rate
that they were now receiving filled him with apprehension.
"We're going on the rocks as fast as we can go," he declared to Clover.
"According to the tables we're due for a couple of deaths right now, and
the longer they delay the more they will bunch up on us. Mark what I
say: the avalanche will get you before you have time to get out, if
that's what you plan on doing. I wish the laws governed our rate here as
they do in some of the other States."
"What's the matter with the rate?" Clover wanted to know. "When it's
inadequate we'll raise it."
"That isn't what we're promising to do," insisted Neil. "We're
advertising a permanent flat rate."
"Show me where," demanded Clover.
Neil tried to do so, but everywhere, in their policies, in their
literature, or even in their correspondence, that he pointed out a
statement apparently to that effect, Clover showed him a "joker" clause
contradicting it.
"You see, Neil, you're too hasty in jumping at conclusions," he
expostulated. "You know that the law will not permit us to claim a flat
rate without a sufficient cash provision, under State control, to
guarantee it, and compels us to be purely an assessment company. When
the time comes that we must do so, we will do precisely what other
companies have done before us: raise the rate. If it becomes prohibitive
the company will drop out of business, as so many others have; but we
will be out of it long before then."
"Yes," retorted Neil, "and thousands of people who are too old to get
fresh insurance at any price, and who will have paid for years, will be
left holding the bag."
"The trouble with you, Neil, is that you have a streak of yellow,"
interrupted Clover impatiently. "Don't you like your fifty a week?"
"Yes."
"Don't you like your fifteen thousand dollars' worth of stock?"
"It looks good to me," confessed Neil.
"Then keep still or sell out and get out."
"I'm not going to do that," said Neil deliberately. He had his slow mind
made up at last. "I'm going to stick, and reorganize the company when it
goes broke!"
When Clover reported this to Wallingford that gentleman laughed.
"How is he on ritual work?" he asked.
"Fine! He has a streak of fool earnestness in him that makes him take to
that flubdubbery like a duck to water."
"Then send him out as a special degree master to inaugurate the new
lodges that are formed. He's a nuisance in the office."
In this the big man had a double purpose. Neil was paying entirely too
much attention to Minnie Bishop of late, and Wallingford resented the
interference. His pursuit of the girl was characteristic. He gave her
flowers and boxes of candy in an offhand way, not as presents, but as
rewards. As the business grew he appropriated her services more and more
to his own individual work, seating her at a desk in his private room,
and a neat balance-sheet would bring forth an approving word and an
offhand:
"Fine work. I owe you theater tickets for that."
The next time he came in he would bring the tickets and drop them upon
her desk, with a brusque heartiness that was intended to disarm
suspicion, and with a suggestion to take her mother and sister along.
Moreover, he raised her salary from time to time. The consideration that
he showed her would have won the gratitude of any girl unused to such
attentions and unfamiliar with the ways of the world, but under them she
nevertheless grew troubled and thoughtful. Noticing this, Wallingford
conceived the idea that he had made an impression, whereupon he ventured
to become a shade more personal.
About this time another disagreeable circumstance came to her attention
and plunged her into perplexity. Clover walked into Mr. Wallingford's
room just as the latter was preparing to go out.
"Tag, you're it, Wallingford," said Clover jovially, holding out a piece
of paper. "I've just found out that your note was due yesterday."
"Quit joking with me on Wednesdays," admonished Wallingford, and taking
the note he tore it into little bits and threw them into the waste
basket.
"Here! That's two thousand dollars, and it's mine," Clover protested.
Wallingford laughed.
"You didn't really think I'd pay it, did you? Why, I told you at the
time that it was only a matter of form; and, besides that, you know my
motto: 'I never give up money,'" and, still chuckling, he went out.
"Isn't he the greatest ever?" said Clover admiringly, to Minnie.
But Minnie could not see the joke. If Wallingford "never gave up money,"
and Clover subscribed to that clever idea with such enthusiasm that he
was willing to be laughed out of two thousand dollars, what would become
of her mother's little nest-egg? A thousand dollars was a tragic amount
to the Bishops. That very evening, as Wallingford went out, he ventured
to pinch and then to pat her cheek, and shame crimsoned her face that
she had brought upon herself the coarse familiarities which now she
suddenly understood. Neil, who had come in from a trip that afternoon,
walked into the office just after Wallingford had gone, and found her
crying. The sight of her in tears broke down the reserve that she had
forced upon him, so that he told her many things; told them eloquently,
too, and suddenly she found herself glad that he had come--glad to rely
upon him and confide in him. Naturally, when she let him draw from her
the cause of her distress, he was furious. He wanted to hunt Wallingford
at once and chastise him, but she stopped him with vehement earnestness.
"No," she insisted, "I positively forbid it! When Mr. Wallingford comes
here to-morrow, I want him to find me the same as ever, and I do not
want one word said that will make him think I am any different. But I
want you to walk home with me, if you can spare the time. I want to talk
with you."
CHAPTER XI
NEIL TAKES A SUDDEN INTEREST IN THE BUSINESS AND WALLINGFORD LETS GO
Neil, the next day after his talk with Minnie Bishop, had a great idea,
which was nothing more nor less than a Supreme Circle Conclave, in which
a picked degree team would exemplify the ritual, and to which delegates
from all the local circles should be invited. They had never held a
Supreme Conclave, and they needed it to arouse enthusiasm. Clover fell
in with the idea at once. It would provide him with an opportunity for
one of the spread-eagle speeches he was so fond of making. As this phase
of the business--comprising the insurance and the lodge work--was left
completely in charge of Clover and Neil, Wallingford made no objections,
and, having ample funds for carrying out such a plan, it was accordingly
arranged. Neil went on the road at once about this matter, but letters
between himself and Minnie Bishop passed almost daily. An indefinable
change had come over the girl. She had grown more earnest, for one
thing, but she assumed a forced flippancy with Wallingford because she
found that it was her only defense against him. She turned off his
advances as jests, and her instinct of coquetry, though now she
recognized it and was ashamed of it, made her able to puzzle and hold
uncertainly aloof even this experienced "man of the world." It was
immediately after she had jerked her hand away from under his one
afternoon that, in place of the reproof he had half expected from her,
she turned to him with a most dazzling smile.
"By the way, we've both forgotten something, Mr. Wallingford," she said.
"Quarter day for the Bishops is long past due."
"What is it that is past due?" he asked in surprise.
"When my mother bought her stock, you know, you promised that she should
have twelve per cent. interest on it, payable every three months."
"That's right," he admitted, looking at her curiously, and before she
started home that evening he handed her an envelope with thirty dollars
in it.
She immediately made a note of the amount and dropped it in the drawer
of her desk.
"Never mind entering that in your books," he said hastily, noting her
action; "just keep the memorandum until we arrange for a regular
dividend, then it can all be posted at once. It's--it's a matter that
has been overlooked."
She thanked him for the money and took it home with her. She had been
planning for a week or more upon how to get this thirty dollars. On the
very next day, while he was absorbedly poring over a small account book
that he kept locked carefully in his desk, he found her standing beside
him.
"I'm afraid that I shall have to ask you to buy back mother's stock in
the company," she said. That morning's mail had been unusually heavy in
stock sale possibilities. "We have a sudden pressing need for that
thousand dollars, and we'll just have to have it, that's all."
Wallingford's first impulse was to dissuade her from this idea, but
another thought now came to him as he looked musingly into his roll-top
desk; and as the girl, standing above him, gazed down upon his thick
neck and puffy cheeks, he reminded her of nothing so much as a monstrous
toad.
"Have you the stock certificate with you?" he inquired presently.
No, she had not.
"Well, bring it down to-night," he said, "and I'll give you a check for
it. I'm going away on a little trip to-morrow, and I want you to get me
up a statement out of the books, anyhow."
For an instant the girl hesitated with a sharp intake of breath. Then
she said, "Very well," and went home.
That night, when she returned, she paused in the hall a moment to subdue
her trepidation, then, whether foolish or not, but with such courage as
men might envy, she boldly opened the door and stepped in. She found
Wallingford at his desk, and she had walked up to him and laid at his
elbow the stock certificate, properly released, before he turned his
unusually flushed face toward her. In his red eyes she saw that he had
been dining rather too well, even for him. She had been prepared for
this, however, and her voice was quite steady as she asked:
"Have you the check made out, Mr. Wallingford?"
"There's no hurry about it," he replied a trifle thickly. "There's some
work I want you to do first."
"I'd rather you would make out the check now," she insisted, "so that I
won't forget it."
Laboriously he filled out the blank and signed it, and then blinkingly
watched her smooth, white fingers as she folded it and snapped it into
her purse. Suddenly he swung his great arm about her waist and drew her
toward him. What followed was the surprise of his life, for a very sharp
steel hatpin was jabbed into him in half a dozen indiscriminate places,
and Minnie Bishop stood panting in the middle of the floor.
"I have endured it here for weeks now, longer than I believed it
possible," she shrieked at him, crying hysterically, "because we could
not afford to lose this money: stood it for days when the sight of you
turned me sick! It seems a year ago, you ugly beast, that I made sure
you were a thief, but I wouldn't leave till I knew it was the right time
to ask you for this check!"
Dazed, he stood nursing his hurts. One of her strokes had been into his
cheek, and as he took his reddened handkerchief away from it a flood of
rage came over him and he took a step forward; but he had miscalculated
her spirit.
"I wish I had killed you!" she cried, and darted out of the door.
For three days after that episode the man was confined to his room under
the care of his wife, whom he told that he had been attacked by a
footpad, "a half-crazy foreigner with a stiletto." For a week more he
was out of town. A peremptory telegram from Clover brought him in from
his stock-drumming transactions, and by the time he reached the city he
was ready for any emergency, though finally attributing the call to the
fact, which he had almost forgotten, that to-morrow was the first day of
the three set apart for the Supreme Circle Conclave of the Noble Order
of Friendly Hands.
He arrived at about eight o'clock in the evening, and as his automobile
rolled past the big building where their offices were located, he
glanced up and saw that lights were blazing brightly from the windows.
Anxious to find out at once the true status of affairs he went up. He
was surprised to find the big reception room full of hard-featured men
who looked uncomfortable in their "best clothes," and among them he
recognized two or three, from surrounding small towns, to whom he had
sold stock. At first, as he opened the door, black looks were cast in
his direction, and a couple of the men half arose from their seats; but
they sat down again as Mr. J. Rufus Wallingford's face beamed with a
cordial smile.
"Good evening, gentlemen," he observed cheerfully, with a special nod
for those he remembered, and then he stalked calmly through the room.
The nights being cool now, Mr. Wallingford wore a fur-lined ulster of
rich material and of a fit which made his huge bulk seem the perfection
of elegance. Upon his feet were shining patent leather shoes; upon his
head was a shining high hat. He carried one new glove in his gloved left
hand; from his right hand gleamed the big diamond. His ulster hung open
in front, displaying his sparkling scarf pin, his rich scarf of the
latest pattern, his fancy waistcoat. He held his head high, and no man
could stand before him nor against him. When the door had closed behind
him they almost sighed in unison. There went money, sacred money, even
the more so that some of it was their own!
In the inner office, Wallingford was surprised to find Minnie Bishop
present and working earnestly upon the books. Looking up she met his
darkening glance defiantly, but even if he had chosen to speak to her
there was no time, for Clover had opened the door of his own private
office and greeted him with a curt nod.
"Come in here," said Clover roughly. "I want to talk to you."
It was the inevitable moment, the one for which Wallingford had long
been prepared.
"Certainly," he said with aggravating cheerfulness, and, walking in, let
Clover close the door behind him. He sat comfortably in the big leather
chair at the side of the desk and lit a cigar, while Clover plumped
himself in his own swivel.
"Who are the Rubes outside?" asked Wallingford, puffing critically at
his half-dollar perfecto.
"Neil's picked degree team," answered Clover shortly. "He had them meet
up here to-night for some instructions, I believe, but he's not here
yet. It's his affair entirely. I want to see you about something else."
"Blaze away," said Wallingford with great heartiness, carefully placing
his silk hat upon a clean sheet of paper. He was still smiling
cheerfully, but in his eyes had come the trace of a glitter.
"I'll blaze away all right, whether I have your invitation or not!"
snapped Clover. "You've been giving me the double cross. For every share
of stock you sold for the company you've sold five of your own and
pocketed the money."
"Why shouldn't I?" inquired Mr. Wallingford calmly, his willingness to
admit it so pleasantly amounting to insolence. "It was my stock, and the
money I got for such of it as I sold was my money."
"_Such_ of it as you sold!" repeated Clover indignantly. "I know how
much you unloaded. You have placed somewhat over twenty thousand for the
company--"
"And five thousand for you," Wallingford reminded him. "I suppose you
went South with the proceeds. If you didn't you're crazy!"
Clover flushed a trifle.
"But you got rid of nearly sixty thousand dollars of your own stock," he
charged bitterly. It still rankled in him that Wallingford had "handed
the lemon" to him. _Him!_ Monstrous that a man should be so
dishonorable! "You played me for a mark. When you handed out my
certificates you instructed every man to send them in for transfer, but
when you peddled your own you said nothing about that, and only the few
yaps who happened to know about such things sent them in. You're nearly
all sold out, and I'm holding the bag."
"Right you are," admitted Wallingford, openly amused. "I have a few
shares left in my desk, though, and I'll make you a present of them. I'm
going out of the company, you know."
"You're not!" exclaimed Clover, smiting his fist upon his desk. "We were
in this thing together, half and half, and I want my share!"
Wallingford laughed.
"I told you once," he informed his irate partner, "that I never give up
any money. My action is strictly legal. Now, don't choke!" he added as
he saw Clover about to make another objection. "You've not a gasp
coming. When I took hold here you were practically on your last legs.
You have had a salary of one hundred dollars a week since that time. In
addition to that I have handed you five thousand dollars, and you have
nearly sixty thousand dollars' worth of stock left. You can do just what
I have been doing: sell your stock and get out. As for me I _am_ out,
and that's all there is to it! I have all I want and I'm going to quit!"
The door had opened and Neil stood on the threshold.
"You bet you're going to quit!" said Neil. His face was pale but his
eyes were blazing and his fists were clenched. "You're both going to
quit, but not the way you think you are! Come out here. Some of my
friends are in the waiting room, and they want to see you right away!"
Clover had turned a sickly, ashen white, but Wallingford rose to his
feet.
"You tell them to go plumb to Hell!" he snarled.
His eyes were widened until they showed the whites. He was fully as much
cowed by the suggestion as Clover, but he would "put up a front" to the
last.
"Come in, boys!" commanded Neil loudly.
They came with alacrity. They crowded into the small room, packing it so
snugly that Neil and Wallingford and Clover, forced into the little
space before Clover's desk, stood touching.
"What does this mean?" demanded Wallingford, glaring at the invaders.
He stood almost head and shoulders above them, and where he met a man's
eyes those eyes dropped. Some of them who had not removed their hats
hastily did so. His lordliness was still potent.
"You can't bluff me!" shrieked Neil, who, standing beside him, shook his
fist in Wallingford's face. The contrast between the sizes of the two
men would have been ludicrous, had it not been for Neil's intensity,
which seemed to expand him, to make him and his passionate purpose
colossal. "I know you, and these men don't!" he went on, his neck chords
swelling with anger. "Why, think of it, gentlemen, in the four months
that he has been here, this man has taken sixty thousand dollars from
the hard-working members of this Order, has stuffed it in his pocket and
is making ready to leave! The little girl out there, who is getting us
up a statement for to-morrow, figured him out for the dog he is while I
was still groping for the facts. He tried to take her for a fool, but
she--she--" His voice broke and he smacked his fist in his palm to
loosen his tongue. "You're a smart man, Mr. Wallingford, but you made a
few mistakes. One of them was in sending me on the road so you could--so
you--" again his voice broke and he sank his nails into his palms for
control. "You thought this meeting was a mere jolly for our members,
didn't you? It's not. These men are here solely as representatives of
the business interests of their friends. We're going to put this Order
back upon a sound basis, and the first thing we're going to do is to cut
out graft. Why, you unclean whelp, you have spent over fourteen
thousand dollars in the four months you have been here, and you have--or
had, up to a week ago--forty-five thousand dollars in the Second
National--all of poor men's money! How do I know? You lost your bank
book which had just been balanced. As for you, Clover, you're a clog
upon the business, too!" Clover had brought this upon himself by darting
at Wallingford a glance of hate, which Neil caught. "Now this is what
_you're_ going to do, James Clover. For having fathered the Order you're
to be allowed to keep the five thousand dollars you got for the sale of
stock. Your remaining stock you're going to transfer over to our
treasury, and then you're going to step down and out. As for you, Mr. J.
Rufus Wallingford, you're going to write a check for forty-five thousand
dollars, payable to the company."
"What you are asking of me is unjust--and absurd," whined Wallingford.
"Write that check!" Neil almost screamed. "We know you're slick enough
to keep your tricks within legal bounds, and that's why these men are
here."
The brow of Wallingford contracted and he tried to look angry, but his
breath was coming short and there was a curious pallor around the edge
of his lips and around his eyes.
"This is coercion!" he charged with dry mouth.
"Put it that way if you want to," agreed Neil hotly.
"We'll break your infernal neck, that's what we'll do!" put in a
spokesman back toward the door, and there was a general pressing
forward. Neil had lashed them into fury, and one rawboned fellow, a
blacksmith, wedged through them with purple face and upraised fist. So
heavily that he knocked the breath out of Clover with his chair back,
Wallingford plumped down at the desk and whipped out his check book.
"I ask one thing of you," he said, as he picked up the pen with a
curious trembling grimace that was almost like a smile, but was not.
"You must leave me at least a thousand dollars to get away from here."
There was a moment of silence.
"That's reasonable," granted Neil, after careful consideration. "Give us
the check for forty-four thousand."
Wallingford wrote it and then he put it in his pocket.
"I have the check ready, gentlemen," he announced, "but I'll give it to
you at the entrance of my home--to a committee consisting of Neil and
any two others you may select. If I hand it to you before I pass out at
that door, some of you are liable to--to lose your heads."
He was positively craven in appearance when he said this, and with an
expression of contempt Neil agreed to it. Wallingford's car was still
waiting on the street below, and into it piled the four. Before the rich
building where J. Rufus had his apartments, Neil and one of the other
men got out first; but if they had anticipated any attempt at escape on
Wallingford's part they were mistaken. Without a word he handed the
check to Neil and waited while they inspected it to see that it was
correctly drawn and signed.
"Now, Mr. Slippery Eel," said Neil exultantly as he put the check in his
pocket, "it won't do any good to try to stop this check, for if I can't
draw it you can't. I shall be there in the morning when the bank opens.
I secured an injunction this afternoon that will tie up your account,"
and his voice swelled with triumph.
Wallingford laughed. With his hand upon the knob he held the vestibule
door open, and he felt safe from violence, which was all he feared.
"Well," said he philosophically, "I see I'm beaten, and there's no use
crying over spilled milk."
Neil looked after him dubiously, as he swaggered into the hall.
"I didn't expect it would be so easy," he said to the men. "I knew the
fellow was a physical coward, but I didn't know he was such a big one.
My lawyer told me he could even beat us on that injunction."
Mr. Wallingford did not go directly to his apartments. He went into the
booth downstairs, instead, and telephoned his wife. Then he went out. He
was gone for about half an hour, and, when he came back, Mrs.
Wallingford, wastefully leaving a number of expensive accumulations that
were too big to be carried as hand luggage, and abandoning the rich
furniture to be claimed by the deluded dealers, had four suit cases
packed.
CHAPTER XII
FATE ARRANGES FOR J. RUFUS AN OPPORTUNITY TO MANUFACTURE SALES RECORDERS
It was not until their train had passed beyond the last suburb that
Wallingford, ensconced in the sleeper drawing room, was able to resume
his accustomed cheerfulness.
"Sure you have that bundle of American passports all right, Fanny?" he
inquired.
"They're perfectly safe, but I'm glad to be rid of them," she answered
listlessly, and opening her hand bag she emptied it of its contents,
then, with a small penknife, loosened the false bottom in it. From
underneath this she drew a flat package of thousand-dollar bills and
handed them to him.
"Forty of them!" gloated Wallingford, counting them over. Then he
pounded upon his knees and laughed. "I can see Starvation Neil when he
has to tell his jay delegates that I drew out every cent the day after I
lost my bank book. I'd been missing too many things that never turned up
again. I fixed them to-night, too. Although I didn't need to do it to
be on the law's safe side, I hustled out before we started and swore to
a notary that I signed that check under coercion; and they'll get that
affidavit before the check and the injunction!"
Mrs. Wallingford did not join him in the shoulder-heaving laugh which
followed.
"I don't like it, Jim," she urged. "You're growing worse all the time,
and some day you'll overstep the bounds. And have you noticed another
thing? Our money never does us any good."
"You'll wake up when we get settled down some place to enjoy ourselves.
I don't believe you know how well you like fine dresses and diamonds,
and to live on the fat of the land. You know what this little bundle of
comfort means? That we're the salt of the earth while it lasts; that for
a solid year we may have not only all the luxuries in the world, but
everybody we meet will try to make life pleasant for us."
To that end Wallingford secured a suite of rooms at two hundred dollars
per week the moment they landed in New York, and began to live at a
corresponding rate. He gave himself no regret for yesterday and no care
for to-morrow, but let each extravagant moment take care of itself. It
was such intervals as this, between her husband's more than doubtful
"business" operations, that reconciled Mrs. Wallingford to their mode of
life, or, rather, that numbed the moral sensibilities which lie dormant
in every woman. While they were merely spending money she was content to
play the _grande dame_, to dress herself in exquisite toilettes and
bedeck herself with brilliant gems, to go among other birds of fine
feathers that congregated at the more exclusive public places, though
she made no friends among them, to be surrounded by every luxury that
money could purchase, to have her every whim gratified by the mere
pressing of a button. As for Wallingford, to be a prince of spenders, to
find new and gaudy methods of display, to have people turn as he passed
by and ask who he might be; these things made existence worth while.
Only one thing--his restless spirit--kept him from pursuing this
uneventful path until all of his forty thousand dollars was gone. After
two months of slothful ease, something more exciting became imperative,
and just then the racing season began and supplied that need. Every
afternoon they drove out to the track, and there Wallingford bet
thousands as another man might bet fives. There could be but one end to
this, but he did not care. What did it matter whether he spent his money
a trifle more or less quickly? There was plenty of it within his broad
hunting grounds, and when what he had was gone he had only to go capture
more; so it was no shock one morning to count over his resources and
find that he had but a fragment left of what he had laughingly termed
his "insurance fund." Upon that same morning an urgent telegram was
delivered to him from "Blackie" Daw. He read it with a whistle of
surprise and passed it over to his wife without comment.
"You're not going?" she asked with much concern, passing the message
back to him.
"Of course I am," he promptly told her. "Blackie's the only man I could
depend upon to get me out of a similar scrape."
"But, Jim," she protested; "you just now said that you have barely over
six thousand left."
"That's all right," he assured her. "I'd have to get out and hustle in
less than a month anyhow, at the rate we're going. I'll just take
Blackie's five thousand, and a couple of hundred over for expenses. You
keep the balance of the money and we'll get out of these apartments at
once. I'll get you nice accommodations at about twenty a week, and
before I come back I'll have something stirred up."
Secretly, he was rather pleased with the turn affairs had taken.
Inaction was beginning to pall upon him, and this message that called
urgently upon him to take an immediate trip out of town was entirely to
his liking. Within an hour he had transferred his wife into comfortable
quarters and was on his way to the train. He had very little margin of
time, but, slight as it was, the grinning Fate which presided over his
destinies had opportunity to arrange a meeting for him. Even as he
pointed out his luggage to a running porter, a fussy little German in
very new-looking clothes which fitted almost like tailor-made, had
rushed back to the gates of the train shed where the conductor stood
with his eyes fixed intently on his watch, his left hand poised ready to
raise.
"I left my umbrella," spluttered the passenger.
"No time," declared the autocrat, not gruffly or unkindly, but in a tone
of virtuous devotion to duty.
The little German's eyes glared through his spectacles, his face puffed
red, his gray mustache bristled.
"But it's my wife's umbrella!" he urged, as if that might make a
difference.
The brass-buttoned slave to duty did not even smile. He raised his hand,
and in a moment more the potent wave of his wrist would have sent Number
Eighteen plunging on her westward way. In that moment, however, the
Pullman conductor, waiting with him, clutched the blue arm of authority.
"Hold her a second," he advised, and with his thumb pointed far up the
platform. "Here comes from a dollar up for everybody. He's rode with me
before."
The captain of Eighteen gave a swift glance and was satisfied.
"Sure. I know him," he said of the newcomer; then he turned to the still
desperately hopeful passenger and relented. "Run!" he directed briefly.
Wallingford, who had secured for Carl Klug this boon, merely by an
opportune arrival, was not hurrying. He was too large a man to hurry, so
a depot porter was doing it for him. The porter plunged on in advance,
springing heavily from one bent leg to the other, weighted down with a
hat box in one hand, a huge Gladstone bag in the other and a suit case
under each arm. The perspiration was streaming down his face, but he
was quite content. Behind him stalked J. Rufus, carrying only a cane and
gloves; but more, for him, would have seemed absurd, for when he moved
the background seemed to advance with him, he was so broad of shoulder
and of chest and of girth. Dignity radiated from his frame and carriage,
good humor from his big face, wealth from every line and crease of his
garments; and it was no matter for wonder that even the rigid schedule
of Number Eighteen was glad to extend to this master of circumstances
its small fraction of elasticity.
One of the Pullman porters from up the train caught a glimpse of his
approach and came running back to snatch up two of the pieces of
luggage. It did not matter to him whether the impressive gentleman was
riding in his coach or not; he was anxious to help on mere general
principles, and was even more so when the depot porter, dropping the
luggage inside the gate, broke into glorious sunrise over the crinkling
green certificate of merit that was handed him. The Pullman conductor
only asked to what city the man was bound, then he too snatched up a
suit case and a bag and raced with the porter to take them on board,
calling out as he ran the car into which the luggage must go. To
Wallingford their activity gave profound satisfaction, and he paused to
hand the conductor a counterpart to the huge black cigar he was then
smoking. It had no band of any sort upon it, but the conductor judged
the cigar by the man. It was not less than three for a dollar, he was
sure.
"Pretty close figuring, old man," observed Wallingford cordially.
The conductor's smile, while gracious enough, was only fleeting, for
this thing of being responsible for Eighteen was an anxious business,
the gravity of which the traveling public should be taught to appreciate
more.
"We're nearly a minute off now," he said, "and I've let myself in to
wait for a Dutchman I let run out when I saw you coming. There he is.
Third car up for you, sir," and he ran up to the steps of the second car
himself.
The missing passenger came tearing through the gates just as Wallingford
went up the car steps. The conductor held his hand aloft, and the
engineer, looking back, impatiently clanged his bell. The porter picked
up his stepping-box and jumped on after his tip, but he looked out to
watch the little German racing with all his might up the platform, and
did not withdraw his head until the belated one, all legs and arms,
scrambled upon the train. Instantly the wheels began to revolve, both
vestibule doors were closed with a slam, and a moment later Carl Klug,
puffing and panting, dropped upon a seat in the smoking compartment,
opposite to the calm J. Rufus Wallingford, without breath--and without
his umbrella.
"_Schrecklich!_" he exploded when he could talk. "They are all thieves
here. I leave my umbrella in the waiting-room five minutes, I go back
and it is gone. Gone! And it was my wife's umbrella!"
Under ordinary circumstances Mr. Klug, whose thirty years of residence
in America had not altogether destroyed certain old-country notions of
caste, would not have ventured to address this lordly-looking stranger,
but at present he was angry and simply must open the vials of his wrath
to some one. He met with no repulse. Mr. Wallingford was not one to
repulse strangers of even modest competence. He only laughed. A score of
jovial wrinkles sprang about his half-closed eyes, and his pink face
grew pinker.
"Right you are," he agreed. "When I'm in this town I keep everything
I've got right in front of me, and if I want to look the other way I
edge around on the other side of my grips."
Mr. Klug digested this idea for a moment, and then he, too, laughed,
though not with the abandon of Mr. Wallingford. He could not so soon
forget his wife's umbrella.
"It is so," he admitted. "I have been here three days, and every man I
had any business with ought to be in _jail_!"
A sudden thought as he came to this last word made Mr. Klug lay almost
shrieking emphasis upon it, and smack both fists upon his knees. He
craned his head forward, his eyes glared through his spectacles, his
cheeks puffed out and his mustache bristled. Wallingford surveyed him
with careful appraisement. The clothing was ready made, but it was a
very good quality of its kind. The man's face was an intelligent one and
told of careful, concentrated effort. His hands were lean and rough, the
fingers were supple and the outer joints bent back, particularly those
of the thumb, which described almost a half circle. The insides of the
fingers were seamed and crossed with countless little black lines. From
all this the man was a mechanic, and a skilled one. Those fingers dealt
deftly with small parts, and years of grimy oil had blackened those
innumerable cuts and scratches.
"Did they sting you?" Wallingford inquired with a dawning interest that
was more than courteous sympathy.
"I guess _not_!" snapped Mr. Klug triumphantly, and the other made quick
note of the fact that the man was familiar with current slang. "I was
too smart for them." Then, after a reflective pause, he added: "Maybe.
They might steal my patent some way."
Patent! Mr. Wallingford's small, thick ears suddenly twitched forward.
"Been trying to sell one?" he asked, pausing with his cigar half way to
his mouth and waiting for the answer.
"Three hundred dollars they offer me!" exploded Mr. Klug, again smiting
both fists on his knees. "Six years I worked on it in my little shop of
nights to get up a machine that was different from all the rest and that
would work right, and when I get it done and get my patent and take it
to them, the
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