The Main Chance Part 9

"Look here, Raridan, I'm afraid it's the girl and not the philosophy of the thing that's worrying you. Why didn't you tell me it was the girl, and not the social fabric generally, that you want to defend?"

Both Saxton and Raridan were a good deal at the Porters'. He knew that Raridan had been a playmate of Evelyn's in their youth, when the elder Porters and Raridans had been friends and neighbors. There existed between them the lighthearted camaraderie that young people carry from youth to maturity, and it had touched Saxton with envy. As a man having no fixed duties, Raridan sometimes went, in the middle of the hot mornings, to the Porter hilltop, where it was pleasant to sit and talk to a pretty girl and look down on the seething caldron below, when every other man of the community was sweltering at the business of earning his daily bread.

"You oughtn't to get so violent about these things," Saxton went on to say. "You will yourself be one of the ornaments of the show, and you will dance before the throne and be glad of the chance. They have a king, don't they? You might get the job. Who's going to be king, by the way?"

"Wheaton, I fancy; the announcement hasn't been made yet."

"Oh," said Saxton, significantly. "Is this a little jealousy? Are we sorry that we're not to wear the royal robes ourself? Well! well, I begin to understand!"

"I don't like that either, if you want to know. It all gets back to the accursed commercial idea. Wheaton's the cas.h.i.+er in Porter's bank. It's very fitting that the president's daughter and the young and brilliant cas.h.i.+er should be identified together in a public function like this. No doubt Wheaton is fixing it up."

"Well, why don't you fix it up? I have been deluding myself with the idea that you were a person of consequence in this town, yet you admit that in a mere trifling social matter you are outwitted, or about to be, by one of these commercial persons you hate so much, or say you do."

He spoke tauntingly, but Raridan was evidently serious in his complaint, and Saxton turned the talk into other channels. The Chinese servant came in presently with a card for Raridan.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "it's Bishop Delafield." He plunged downstairs and returned immediately with a man whose great figure loomed darkly in the doorway.

Raridan made a light.

"We've been doing the dim, religious act here," he said, after introducing Saxton. "The lightning out there has been fine."

"You feel that you can't trust me in the dark," said the bishop; "or perhaps that I won't appreciate the 'dim religious,' as you call it.

Turn down the gas and save my feelings."

Saxton was well acquainted with Warrick's zeal in church matters and was not surprised to find a church dignitary in his friend's rooms. He had never met the Bishop of Clarkson before, and he was a little awestruck at the heroic size of this man who had just given him so masculine a grasp of the hand and so keen a scrutiny.

The bishop extended his vast bulk in Raridan's easiest chair, and accepted a cigar from the box which Warry pa.s.sed to him.

"You've come just in time to save us from fierce contentions," said Raridan, all amiability once more, while the bishop lighted his cigar.

He was very bald, and his head shone so radiantly that Saxton felt that he could still see it in the dark after Warrick had turned down the lights. There was an atmosphere about the man of great physical strength, and his deep-set eyes under their s.h.a.ggy brows were quick and penetrating. Here was a man famous in his church for the energy and sacrifice which he had brought to the work of a missionary in one of the great Western dioceses. He had been bereft, in his young manhood, of his wife and children, and had thereafter offered himself for the roughest work of his church. He was sixty years old and for twenty years had been a bishop, first in a vast region of the farther Northwest, where the diocesan limits were hardly known, and where he had traveled ponyback and muleback until called to be the Bishop of Clarkson. He was famous as a preacher, and when he appeared from time to time in the pulpits of Eastern churches, he swayed men mightily by the vigor and simplicity of his eloquence. He had, in his younger days, been reckoned a scholar, but the study of humanity at close hand had superseded long ago his interest in books and learning. He had a deep, melodious voice and there was charm and magnetism in him, as many people of many sorts and conditions knew.

"What's the subject, gentlemen?" he asked, smoking contentedly. "I'm sure something very serious must be before the house."

"Mr. Raridan has been abusing the commercialism of his neighbors," said Saxton.

"Saxton's a new-comer, Bishop, and doesn't understand the situation here as you and I do. You know that I'm the only native that dares to hold honest opinions. The rest all follow the crowd."

"Reformers always have a hard time of it," said the bishop. "If you're going to make over your fellowmen, you'll have to get hardened to their indifference. But what's the matter with things to-night; and what are you gentlemen doing in town, anyway? Aren't there places to go where it's cool and where there are pretty girls to enchant you?"

Raridan attacked the bishop about some question of ritual that was agitating the English Church. It was worse than Greek to Saxton, but Raridan seemed fully informed about it, and turned up the lights to read a paragraph from an English church paper which was, he protested, rankly heretical. The bishop smoked his cigar calmly until Raridan had finished.

"They tell me," he said, when Raridan had concluded by flinging the whole matter upon his clerical caller with an air of arraigning the entire episcopate, "that you're a pretty fair lawyer, Warry, only you won't work. And I hear occasionally that you're about to embrace the ministry. Now, just think what a time I'd have with you on my hands! You couldn't get the water hot enough for me. Isn't he ungracious"--turning to Saxton--"when I came here for rest and recreation, to put me on trial for my life? You ought to know, young man, that a bishop can be tried only by his peers."

Raridan threw down his paper, and rang for the Chinaman.

"When I embrace the ministry under you, Bishop, you may be sure that I'll be humble enough to be good."

The Chinaman brought a variety of liquids, from which they helped themselves.

"Don't be afraid of the Scotch, Saxton," said Raridan, "the bishop has seen the bottle before."

The bishop, who was pouring seltzer on his lemon juice, smiled tolerantly at Raridan's chatter, with whose temper and quality he had long been familiar, and addressed himself to Saxton. He liked young men, and had an agreeable way of drawing them out and making them talk about themselves. When it was disclosed that Saxton had been in the cattle business, the bishop showed an intimate knowledge of the range and its ways.

"You see, the bishop's ridden over most of the cattle country in his day," explained Raridan.

"And evidently not all in Pullman cars," said Saxton.

"I'm considered a heavy load for a cow pony," said the bishop, smiling down at his great bulk, "so they used sometimes to find a mule for me."

"How are the Porters?" he asked presently of Raridan.

"Very well, and staying on in the heat with the usual Clarkson fort.i.tude."

"Porter's one of the men that never rest," said the bishop. "I've known him ever since I've known the West, and he's taken few vacations in that time."

"Well, he's showing signs of wear," said Raridan. "He's one of the men who begin with a small business where they do all the work themselves, and when the business outgrows them, they never realize that they need help, or that they can have any. Before they made Wheaton cas.h.i.+er, Porter carried the whole bank in his head. He's improving a little, and has a stenographer now; but he's nervous and anxious all the while and terribly fussy over all he does."

"Wheaton ought to be a great help to him," said the bishop. "He seems a steady fellow, hard working and industrious."

"Oh, he's all those things," Raridan answered carelessly. "He'll never steal anybody's money."

The bishop talked directly to Raridan about some work which it seemed the young man had done for him, and rose to go. He had been in town only a few hours, after a business journey to New York, and on reaching his rooms had found a summons calling him to a neighboring jurisdiction, to perform episcopal functions for a brother bishop who was ill. Saxton and Warrick went down to the car with him, carrying the battered suit cases which contained his episcopal robes and personal effects. These cases showed rough usage; they had been to Canterbury and had found lodging many nights in the sod houses of the plains.

"How do you like him?" asked Raridan, as the bishop climbed into a street car headed toward the station.

"He looks like the real thing," said Saxton. "He has a voice and a beard like a prophet."

"He's a fine character,--one of the people that understand things without being told. A few men and women in the world have that kind of instinct. They're put here, I guess, to help those who don't understand themselves."

CHAPTER VIII

TIMOTHY MARGRAVE MAKES A CHOICE

There was a tradition that no one had ever been black-balled in the Knights of Midas, so when Timothy Margrave got Wheaton's signature to an application for members.h.i.+p the cas.h.i.+er was beset by no fear of rejection. The citizens of Clarkson were indebted to Margrave for many schemes for booming their town. He lectured his fellow business men constantly about their lack of enterprise.

"Look at Kansas City," he would say at the club, bending forward ponderously on his fat knees, "they ain't got half the terminal facilities that we have, and there ain't any better country around 'em, but they're bigger than we are and ahead of us because they've got more hustle than we have; and hustle's what makes a town,--look at Chicago!

But we've got a lot of salt mackerel business men here, so pickled in their brine of conservatism that they won't do anything. There's Billy Porter; when we want to raise money to help boom the town, I'm always dead sure that Billy will cough up, but you've got to show 'im;--tell 'im all about it, and he likes to play with you and guy you and rub it in before he puts his name down. Now he may be a safe banker and all that, but I say that there's such a thing as pus.h.i.+ng conservatism too d.a.m.ned far. We're going to be a long time getting over the panic and we've got to give a strong pull and all pull together if we get in the procession." His voice rose as he proceeded. "Look at little Sioux City!

busted wide open and knocked over the ropes, but here they come waltzing up again, as full of sa.s.s as a fox terrier with a flea on his tail. Talk about grit, the time a man wants to show that article's when he's busted. Any fool can be cheerful on a bull market."

Then he would settle himself back with an air of complacency, as if he had done all that he could do to arrest decay in the town; if his fellow citizens failed to rouse themselves it was not his fault. Margrave held no office in the Knights of Midas, but this was because he had learned by political experience that it was much simpler to lurk in the background and manipulate the men he placed in power. It was on this high principle that he built up the order of the Knights of Midas and directed its course from the office of the general manager of the Transcontinental. There was nothing incongruous to him in the annual ball, which was the only public social manifestation of the organization. It was he who directed that twenty members be chosen from the members.h.i.+p list each year, to conduct the purely social functions of the ball, and that these be taken in alphabetical order. Thus the Adamses and the Bakers and the c.u.mmingses, who belonged in different constellations, found themselves in the same orbit. If they were unacquainted or were enemies of long standing, this did not trouble Margrave when the fact was brought to his notice. It was time, he said, that the people of Clarkson got together.

"We may as well get some work out of Jim Wheaton," he remarked to the grand chief of the Knights of Midas. "He's pretty solemn, but Jim was solemn when he was a kid and worked for me. Porter and Thompson have always been too slow for this earth and if we pull Wheaton in, it may wake up the old chaps so they'll do something besides sit on the fence and watch the rest of us hustle."

"See here," said Norton, the grand chief, "what's the matter with shoving him in for the king of the carnival? We've got to make a strong push this year to give tone to the show socially; that's the only way we can keep up the town interest. Having these jays come in from the country won't do any good unless we can hold these eminently respectable people who think they're Clarkson society."