_ CHAPTER XXVI. The End--and a Beginning
As to our desperate run from Lattimore to the place where it came to an end in a junk-heap which had been once an engine, a car reduced to matchwood, a broken trestle, and a chaos of crushed hopes, and of the return to our homes thereafter, no further details need be set forth. The papers in Lattimore were filled with the story for a day or two, and I believe there were columns about it in the Associated Press reports. I doubt not that Mr. Pendleton and Mr. Cornish each read it in the morning papers, and that the latter explained it to the former in Chicago. From these reports the future biographer may glean, if he happens to come into being and to care about it, certain interesting facts about the people of this history. He will learn that Mr. Barslow, having (with truly Horatian swimming powers) rescued President Elkins from a watery grave, waited with his unconscious derelict in great danger from freezing, until they were both rescued a second time by a crew of hand-car men who were near the trestle on special work connected with the flood and its ravages. That President Elkins was terribly injured, having sustained a broken arm and a dangerous wound in the forehead. Moreover, he was threatened with pneumonia from his exposure. Should this disease really fasten itself upon him, his condition would be very critical indeed. That Mr. Barslow, the hero of the occasion, was uninjured. And I am ashamed to say that such student of history will find in an inconspicuous part of the same news-story, as if by reason of its lack of importance, the statement that O. Hegvold, fireman, and J. J. Corcoran, conductor of the wrecked train, escaped with slight injuries. And that Julius Schwartz, the engineer, living at 2714 May Street, and the oldest engineer on the L. & G. W., being benumbed by the cold, sank like a stone and was drowned. Poor Schwartz! Magnificent Schwartz! No captain ever went down, refusing to leave the bridge of his sinking ship, with more heroism than he; who, clad in greasy overalls, and sapped of his strength by the icy hurricane, finding his homely duty inextricably entangled with death, calmly took them both, and went his way.
This mine for the historian will also disclose to him the fact that the rescued crew and passengers were brought home by a relief-train in charge of General Manager Kittrick, and that Mr. Elkins was taken directly to the home of Mr. Barslow, where he at once became subject to the jurisdiction of physicians and nurses and "could not be seen." But as to the reasons for the insane dash in the dark the historian will look in vain. I am disposed now to think that our motives were entirely creditable; but for them we got no credit.
Much less than a nine days' wonder, however, was this tragedy of the Elk Fork trestle, for other sensations came tumbling in an army upon its very heels. Times of war, great public calamities, and panic are the harvest seasons of the newspapers; and these were great days for the newspapers in Lattimore. Not that they learned or printed all the news. I received a telegram, for instance, the day after the accident, which merely entered up judgment on the verdict of the day before. It was a message from Mr. Pendleton in Chicago.
"In matter of Lattimore & Great Western," this telegram read, "directors refuse to ratify contract. This sent to save you trip to Chicago."
"No news in that," said I to Mr. Hinckley; "I wonder that he bothered to send it."
But, in the era of slug heads which set in about three days after, and while Jim was still helpless up at my house, it would have received recognition as news--although they did very well without it.
"Great Failure!" said the
Times. "Grain Belt Trust Company Goes to the Wall! Business Circles Convulsed! Receiver Appointed at Suit of Charles Harper of Chicago! Followed by Assignment of Hinckley & Macdonald, Bankers! Western Portland Cement Company Assigns! Atlas Power Company Follows Suit! Reason, Money Tied up in Banks and Trust Company. Where will it Stop? A Veritable Black Friday!"
Thus the headlines. In the news report itself the
Times remarked upon the intimate connection of Mr. Elkins and myself with all the failed concerns. The firm of Elkins & Barslow, being primarily a real-estate and insurance agency, would not assign. As to the condition of the business of James R. Elkins & Company, whose operations in bonds and debentures had been enormous, nothing could be learned on account of the critical illness of Mr. Elkins.
"It is not thought," said the
Herald, "that the failures will carry down any other concerns. The run on the First National Bank was one of those panicky symptoms which are dangerous because so unreasoning. It is to be hoped that it will not be renewed in the morning. The banks are not involved in the operations of the Grain Belt Trust Company, the failure of which, it must be admitted, is sure to cause serious disturbances, both locally and elsewhere, wherever its wide-spread operations have extended."
The physical system adjusts itself to any permanent lesion in the body, and finally ceases even to send out its complaining messages of pain. So we in Lattimore, who a few weeks ago had been ready to sacrifice anything for the keeping of our good name; who by stealth justly foreclosed mortgages justly due, lest the world should wonder at their nonpayment; who so greatly had rejoiced in our own strength; who had felt that, surely, we who had wrought such wonders could not now fail:--even we numbly came to regard receiverships and assignments as quite the thing to be expected. The fact that, all over the country, panic, ruin, and business stagnation were spreading like a pestilence, from just such centers of contagion as Lattimore, made it easier for us. Surely, we felt, nobody could justly blame us for being in the path of a tempest which, like a tropic cyclone, ravaged a continent.
This may have been weak self-justification; but, even yet, when I think of the way we began, and how the wave of "prosperity" rose and rose, by acts in themselves, so far as we could see, in every way praiseworthy; how with us, and with people engaged in like operations everywhere, the most powerful passions of society came to aid our projects; how the winds from the unknown, the seismic throbbings of the earth, and the very stars in their courses fought for us; and when, at last, these mightinesses turned upon us the cold and evil eye of their displeasure, how the heaped-up sea came pouring over here, trickling through there, and seeping under yonder, until our great dike toppled over in baleful tumult, "and all the world was in the sea"; how business, east, west, north, and south, went paralyzed with fear and distrust, and old concerns went out like strings of soap-bubbles, and shocks of pain and disease went round the world, and everywhere there was that hellish and portentous thing known to the modern world only, and called a "commercial panic": when I broadly consider these things, I am not vain enough seriously to blame myself.
These thoughts are more than ever in my mind to-day, as I look back over the decade of years which have elapsed since our Waterloo at the Elk Fork trestle. I look out from the same library in which I once felt a sense of guilt at the expense of building it, and see the solid and prosperous town, almost as populous as we once saw it in our dreams. I am regarded locally as one of the creators of the city; but I know that this praise is as unmerited as was that blame of a dozen years ago. We rode on the crest of a wave, and we weltered in the trough of the sea; but we only seemed to create or control. I hold in my hand a letter from Jim, received yesterday, and eloquent of the changes which have taken place.
"I am sorry," says he, "to be unable to come to your business men's banquet. The building of a great auditorium in Lattimore is proof that we weren't so insane, after all. I suppose that the ebb and flow of the tide of progress, which yearly gains upon the shore, is inevitable, as things are hooked up; but, after the ebb, it's comforting to see your old predictions as to gain coming true, even if you do find yourself in the discard. It would be worth the trip only to see Captain Tolliver, and to hear him eliminate the
r's from his mother tongue. Give the dear old secesh my dearest love!
"But I can't come, Al. I must be in Washington at that time on business of the greatest (presumptive) importance to the cattle interests of the buffalo-grass country. I could change my own dates; but my wife has arranged a tryst for a day certain with some specialists in her line in New York. She's quite the queen of the cattle range--in New York: and, to be dead truthful, she comes pretty near it out here. It is rumored that even the sheepmen speak well of her.
"These Eastern trips are great things for her and the children. I'm riding the range so constantly, and get so much fun out of it, that I feel sort of undressed and embarrassed out of the saddle. In Washington I'm pointed out as a typical cowboy, the descendant of a Spanish vaquero and a trapper's daughter. This helps me to represent my constituents in the sessions of the Third House, and to get Congressional attention to the ax I want ground. I am looked upon as in line for the presidency of the Amalgamated Association of American Ax-grinders.
"If we can make it, we'll look in on you on our way back; but we don't promise. With cattle scattered over two counties of buttes and canyons, we feel in a hurry when we get started home, after an absence sure to have been longer than we intended. Then, you know how I feel;--I wish the old town well, but I don't enjoy
every incident of my visits there.
"We expect to see the Cecil Barr-Smiths in New York. Cecil is the whole thing now with their companies--a sort of professional president in charge of the American properties; and Mrs. Cecil is as well known in some mighty good circles in London as she used to be in Lynhurst Park.
"I am glad to know that things are going toward the good with you. Personally, I never expect to be a seven-figure man again, and don't care to be. I prefer to look after my few thousands of steers, laying on four hundred pounds each per year, far from the madding crowd. You know Riley's man who said that the little town of Tailholt was good enough for him? Well, that expresses my view of the 'J-Up-and-Down' Ranch as a hermitage. It'll do quite well. But these Eastern interests of Mrs. Jim are just now menacing to life in any hermitage. She has specifically stated on two or three occasions lately that this is no place to bring up a family. Think of a rough-rider like me in the wilds of New York! I can see plenty of ways of amusing myself down there, but not such peaceful ways as putting on my six-shooters and going out after timber wolves or mountain lions, or our local representative of the clan of the Hon. Maverick Brander. The future lowers dark with the multitudinous mouths of avenues of prosperity!"
This letter was a disappointment to Mr. Giddings. His special edition of the
Herald commemorative of the opening of our Auditorium must now be deprived of its James R. Elkins feature, so far as his being the guest of honor goes. But there will be Jim's photograph on the first page, and a half-tone reproduction of a picture of the wreck at the Elk Fork trestle.
"It is a matter of the deepest regret," said the
Herald this morning, "that Mr. Elkins cannot be with us on this auspicious occasion. He was the head of that most remarkable group of men who laid the foundations of Lattimore's greatness. Only one of them, Mr. Barslow, still lives in Lattimore, where he has devoted his life, since the crash of many years ago, to the reorganization of the failed concerns, and especially the Grain Belt Trust Company, and to the salving of their properties in the interests of the creditors. His present prominence grows out of the signal skill and ability with which he has done this work; and he must prove a great factor in the city's future development, as he has been in its past. Mr. Hinckley, the third member of the syndicate, now far advanced in years, is living happily with his daughter and her husband. The fourth, Mr. Cornish, resides in Paris, where he is well known as a daring and successful financial operator. He, of all the syndicate, retired from the Lattimore enterprises rich.
"There have been years when the names of these men were not held in the respect and esteem they deserve. The town was going backward. People who had been rich were, many of them, in absolute distress for the necessaries of life. And these men, in a vague sort of way, were blamed for it. Now, however, we can begin to see the wisdom of their plans and the vastness of the scope of their combinations. Nothing but the element of time was wanting, abundantly to vindicate their judgment and sagacity. The industries they founded succeeded as soon as they were divorced from the real-estate speculation which unavoidably entered into their management at the outset. It is regrettable that their founders could not share in their success."
"Nothing but the element of time," said I to Captain Tolliver, who sat by me in the car as I read this editorial, "prevents the hot-air balloon from carrying its load over the Rockies."
"Nothing but luck," said the Captain, "evah could have beaten us. It was the Fleischmann failure, and it was nothing else. As to the great qualities of Mr. Elkins, suh, the editorial puts it too mild by fah. He was a Titan, suh, a Titan, and we shall not look upon his like again. This town at this moment is vegetating fo' the want of some fo'ceful Elkins to put life into it. The trilobites, as he so well dubbed them, ah in control again. What's this Auditorium we've built? A good thing fo' the city, cehtainly, a ve'y good thing: but see the difficulty, the humiliatin' difficulty we had, in gettin' togethah the paltry and trivial hundred and fifty thousand dolla's! Why in that elder day, in such a cause, we'd have called a meetin' in that old office of Elkins & Barslow's, and made it up out of ouah own funds in fifteen minutes. It's the so't of cattle we've got hyah as citizens that's handicappin' us; but in spite of this, suh, ouah unsuhpassed strategical position is winnin' fo' us. We ah just now on the eve of great developments, Barslow, great developments! All my holdin's ah withdrawn from mahket until fu'theh notice. Foh, as we ah so much behind the surroundin' country in growth, we must soon take a great leap fo'wahd. We ah past the boom stage, I thank God, and what we ah now goin' to get is a rathah brisk but entiahly healthy growth. A good, healthy growth, Barslow, and no boom!"
The disposition to moralize comes on with advancing middle age, and I could not help philosophizing on this perennial optimism of the Captain's. He had used these very words when, so long ago, we had begun our "cruise." The financial cycle was complete. The world had passed from hope to intoxication, from intoxication to panic, from panic to the depths, from this depression, ascending the long slope of gradual recovery, to the uplands of hope once more. Now, as twenty years ago, this feeling covered the whole world, was most pronounced in the newer and more progressive lands, and was voiced by Captain Tolliver, the grizzled swashbuckler of the land market. In it I recognized the ripple on the sands heralding the approach of another wave of speculation, which must roll shoreward in splendor and might, and, like its predecessors, must spend itself in thunderous ruin.
I often think of what General Lattimore was accustomed to say about these matters, and how Josie echoed his words as to the evil of fortunes coming to those who never earned them. Some time, I hope, we shall grow wise enough to--
I humbly beg your pardon, Madam, and thank you. That charming gesture of impatience was the one thing needful to admonish me that lectures are dull, and that the time has come to write
finis. The rest of the story? Cornish--Jim--Josie--Antonia? Oh, this proneness of the business man to talk shop! Left to myself, I should have allowed their history to remain to the end of time, unresolved as to entanglements, and them unhealed as to bruises, bodily and sentimental. And, yet, those were the things which most filled our minds in the dark days after we missed connection with the Pendleton special.
In the first spasm of the crisis I was more concerned for Jim's safety than with the long-feared monetary cataclysm.
That was upon us in such power as to make us helpless; but Jim, wounded and prostrated as he was, his very life in danger, was a concrete subject of anxiety and a comfortingly promising object of care.
"If we can keep this from assuming the character of true pneumonia," said Dr. Aylesbury, "there's no reason why he shouldn't recover."
He had been unconscious and then delirious from the time when he and I had been picked up there by the railroad-dump, until we were well on our way home on Kittrick's relief-train. At last he looked about him, and his eyes rested on Corcoran.
"Hello, Jack!" said he weakly; and as his glance took in Ole, he smiled and said: "A hellufa notion, you tank, do you? Ole, where's Schwartz?"
Ole twisted and squirmed, but found no words.
"We couldn't find Schwartz," said Kittrick. "He was so cold, he went right down with the cab."
"I see," said Jim. "It was bitter cold!"
He said no more. I wondered at this, and almost blamed him, even in his stricken state, for not feeling the peculiar poignancy of our regret for the loss of Schwartz. And then, his face being turned away, I peeped over to see if he slept, and saw where his tears had dropped silently on the piled-up cushions of his couch.
* * * * *
Mrs. Trescott came several times a day to inquire as to Mr. Elkins's welfare; but Josie not at all. Antonia's carriage stopped often at the door; and somebody stood always at the telephone, answering the stream of questions. But when, on that third evening, it became known that the last "battle in the west" had gone against us, that all our great Round Table was dissolved, and that Jim's was a sinking and not a rising sun, public interest suddenly fell off. And the poor fellow whose word but yesterday might have stood against the world, now lay there fighting for very life, and few so poor to do him reverence. I had been so proud of his splendid and dominant strength that this, I think, was the thing that brought the bitterness of failure most keenly home to me. I could not feel satisfied with Josie. There were good reasons why she might have refused to choose between Jim and the man who had ruined him, while there was danger of her choice itself becoming the occasion of war between them. But that was over now, and Cornish was victorious. Gradually the fear grew upon me that we had rated Josie's womanhood higher than she herself held it, and that Cornish was to win her also. He had that magnetism which so attracted her as a girl, but that I had believed incapable of holding her as a woman. And now he had wealth, and Jim was poor, and the whole world stood with its back to us, and Josie held aloof. I was afraid he would speak of it, every time he tried to talk.
That night when the evening papers came out with all their plenitude of bad news (for we had pleased Watson by dying on the evening papers' time), it was a dark moment for us. Jim lay silent and unmoving, as if all his ebullient energy had gone forever. The physician omitted the dressing of his wound, because, he said, he feared the patient was not strong enough to bear it: and this, as well as the strange semi-stupor of the sufferer, frightened me. Jim had said little, and most of his words had been of the trivial things of the sick-room. Only once did he refer to the great affairs in which we had been for so long engrossed.
"What day is this?" he asked.
"Friday," said I, "the twenty-first."
"By this time," said he feebly, "we must be pretty well shot to rags."
"Never mind about that," said I, holding his hands in mine. "Never mind, Jim!"
"Some of those gophers," said he, after a while, "used to learn to ... rub their noses ... in the dirt ... and always stick their heads up--outside the snare!"
"Yes," said I, "I remember. Go to sleep, old man!"
I thought him delirious, and he knew and resented it; being evidently convinced that he had just made a wise remark. It touched me to hear him, even in his extremity, return to those boyhood days when we trapped and hunted and fished together. He saw my pitying look.
"I'm all right," said he; but he said no more.
The nurse came in, and told me that Mrs. Barslow wished to see me in the library. I went down, and found Josie and Alice together.
"I got a letter from--from Mr. Cornish," said she, "telling me that he was returning from Chicago to-night, and was coming to see me. I ran over, because--and told mamma to say that I couldn't see him."
"See him by all means," said I with some bitterness. "You should make it a point to see him. Mr. Cornish is a success. He alone of us all has shown real greatness."
And it dawned upon me, as I said it, what Jim had meant by his reference to the gopher which learns to stick its head up "outside the snare."
"I want to ask you," said Josie, "is it all true--what was in the paper to-night about all of you, Mr. Hinckley and yourself, and--all of you having failed?"
"It is only a part of the truth," I replied. "We are ruined absolutely."
She said nothing by way of condolence, and uttered no expressions of regret or sympathy. She was apparently in a state of suppressed excitement, and started at sounds and movements.
"Is Mr. Elkins very ill?" said she at length.
"So ill," said Alice, "that unless he rallies soon, we shall look for the worst."
No more at this than at the other ill news did Josie express any regret or concern. She sat with her fingers clasped together, gazing before her at the fire in the grate, as if making some deep and abstruse calculation. But when the door-bell rang, she started and listened attentively, as the servant went to the door, and then returned to us.
"A gentleman, Mr. Cornish, to see Miss Trescott," said the maid. "And he says he must see her for a moment."
"Alice," said Josie, under her breath, "you go, please! Say to him that I cannot see him--now! Oh, why did he follow me here?"
"Josie," said Alice dramatically, "you don't mean to say that you are afraid of this man! Are you?"
"No, no!" said the girl doubtfully and distressfully; "but it's so hard to say 'No' to him! If you only knew all, Alice, you wouldn't blame me--and you'd go!"
"If you're so far gone--under his influence," said Alice, "that you can't trust yourself to say 'No,' Josephine Trescott, go, in Heaven's name, and say 'Yes,' and be the wife of a millionaire--and a traitor and scoundrel!"
As Alice said this she came perilously near the histrionic standard of the tragic stage. Josie rose, looked at her in surprise, in which there seemed to be some defiance, and walked steadily out to the parlor. I was glad to be out of the affair, and went back to Jim. I stood regarding my broken and forsaken friend, in watching whose uneasy sleep I forgot the crisis downstairs, when I was startled and angered by the slamming of the front door, and heard a carriage rattle furiously away down the street.
Soon I heard the rustle of skirts, and looked up, thinking to see my wife. But it was Josie. She came in, as if she were the regularly ordained nurse, and stepped to the bedside of the sleeping patient. The broken arm in its swathings lay partly uncovered; and across his wounded brow was stretched a broad bandage, below which his face showed pale and weary-looking, in the half-stupor of his deathlike slumber: for he had become strangely quiet. His uninjured arm lay inertly on the counterpane beside him.
She took his hand, and, seating herself on the bed, began softly stroking and patting the hand, gazing all the time in his face. He stirred, and, turning his eyes toward her, awoke.
"Don't move, my darling," said she quietly, and as if she had been for a long, long time quite in the habit of so speaking to him; "don't move, or you'll hurt your arm." Then she bent down her head, lower and lower, until her cheek touched his.
"I've come to sit with you, Jim, dear," said she, softly--"if you want me--if I can do you any good."
"I want you, always," said he.
She stooped again, and this time laid her lips lingeringly on his; and his arm stole about the slim waist.
"If you'll just get well," she whispered, "you may have me--always!"
He passed his fingers over her hair, and kissed her again and again. Then he looked at her long and earnestly.
"Where's Al?" said he; "I want Al!"
I came forward promptly. I thought that this violation of the doctor's regulation requiring rest and quiet had gone quite far enough.
"Al," said he, still holding her hand, "do you remember out there by the windmill tower that night, and the petunias and four-o'clocks?"
"Yes, Jim, I remember," said I. "But you mustn't talk any more now."
"No, I won't," said he, and went right on; "but even before that, and ever since, I haven't wanted anything we've been trying so hard to get, half as much as I've wanted Josie; and now--we lost the fight, didn't we? Things have been slipping away from us, haven't they? Gone, aren't they?"
"Go to sleep now, Jim," said I. "Plenty of time for those things when you wake up."
"Yes," said he; "but before I do, I want you to tell me one thing, honest injun, hope to die, you know!"
"Yes," said I; "what is it, Jim?"
"I've been seeing a lot of funny things in the dark corners about here; but this seems more real than any of them," he went on; "and I want you to tell me--
is this really Josie?"
"Really," I assured him, "really, it is."
"Oh, Jim, Jim!" she cried, "have you learned to doubt my reality, just because I'm kind! Why, I'm going to be good to you now, dearest, always, always! And kinder than you ever dreamed, Jim. And I'm going to show you that everything has not slipped away from you, my poor, poor boy; and that, whatever may come, I shall be with you always. Only get well; only get well!"
"Josie," said he, smiling wanly, "you couldn't kill me--now--not with an ax!"
[THE END]
Herbert Quick's Novel: Aladdin & Co., A Romance of Yankee Magic
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