Aladdin and Company Part 4

"I wish Alice had come," said I, noting the flutter of skirts in a group of people in the corridor; and then, as I came near, the press divided, and I saw something which drew my eyes as to a sight in which lay mystery to be unraveled.

Facing me stood a stout farmer in a dark suit of common cut and texture.

He seemed, somehow, not entirely strange; but the pet.i.te figure of the girl whose back was turned to me was what fixed my attention.

She wore a smart traveling-gown of some pretty gray fabric, and bore herself gracefully and with the air of dominating the group of commission men among whom she stood. I noted the incurved spine, the deep curves of the waist, and the liberal slope of the hips belonging to a shapely little woman in whom slimness was mitigated in adorable ways, which in some remote future bade fair to convert it into matronliness.

Under a broad hat there showed a wealth of red-brown hair, drawn up like a sunburst from a slender little neck.

"I have provided a box at Hooley's," said the head of a great commission firm. "Mrs. Johnson will be with us. We may count upon you?"

"I think so," said the girl, "if papa hasn't made any engagements."

The stout farmer blushed as he looked down at his daughter.

"Engagements, eh? No, sir!" he replied. "She runs things after the steers is unloaded. Whatever the little gal says goes with me."

They turned, and as they came on down the hall, still chatting, I saw her face, and knew it. It was the Empress! But even in that glimpse I saw the change which years had brought. Now she ruled instead of submitting; her voice, still soft and low, had lost its rustic inflections; and in spite of the change in the surroundings,--the leap from the art gallery to the Stock Yards,--there was more of the artist now, and less of the farmer's la.s.s. They turned into a suite of offices and disappeared.

"Well, Mr. Barslow," said my friend, coming up. "Glad to see you. I've been hunting for you."

"Who is that girl and her father?" I asked.

"One of the Johnson Commission Company's s.h.i.+ppers," said he, "Prescott, from Lattimore; I wish I could get his s.h.i.+pments."

"No!" said I, "Not Lattimore!"

"Prescott of Lattimore," he repeated. "Know anything of him?"

"N-no," said I. "I have friends in that town."

"I wish I had," was the reply; "I'd try to get old Prescott's business."

"There's destiny in this," said Alice, when I told her of my encounter with the Empress and her father. "Her living in Lattimore is not an accident."

"I doubt," said I, "if anybody's is."

"She looked nice, did she?" Alice went on, "and dressed well?" and without waiting for an answer added: "Let's leave Chicago. I'm anxious to get to Lattimore!"

CHAPTER V.

We Reach the Atoll.

So we journeyed on to Duluth, to St. Paul and Minneapolis, and to the cities on the Missouri. It was at one of those recurrent periods when the fever of material and industrial change and development breaks out over the whole continent. The very earth seemed to send out tingling shocks of some occult stimulus; the air was charged with the ozone of hope; and subtle suggestions seemed to pa.s.s from mind to mind, impelling men to dare all, to risk all, to achieve all. In every one of these young cities we were astonished at the changes going on under our very eyes. Streets were torn up for the building of railways, viaducts, and tunnels. Buildings were everywhere in course of demolition, to make room for larger edifices. Excavations yawned like craters at street-corners.

Steel pillars, girders, and trusses towered skyward,--skeletons to be clothed in flesh of brick and stone.

Suburbs were sprouting, almost daily, from the mould of the market-gardens in the purlieus. Corporations were contending for the possession of the natural highway approaches to each growing city.

Street-railway companies pushed their charters to pa.s.sage at midnight sessions of boards of aldermen, seized streets in the night-time, and extended their metallic tentacles out into the fields of dazed farmers.

On the frontiers, counties were organized and populated in a season.

Every one of them had its two or three villages, which aped in puny fas.h.i.+on the achievements of the cities. New pine houses dotted prairies, unbroken save for the mile-long score of the delimiting plow. Long trains of emigrant-cars moved continually westward. The world seemed drunk with hope and enthusiasm. The fulfillment of Jim's careless prophecy had burst suddenly upon us.

Such things as these were fresh in our memories when we reached Lattimore. I had wired Elkins of our coming, and he met us at the station with a carriage. It was one sunny September afternoon when he drove us through the streets of our future home to the princ.i.p.al hotel.

"We have supper at six, dinner at twelve-thirty, breakfast from seven to ten," said Jim, as we alighted at the hotel. "That's the sort of bucolic munic.i.p.ality you've struck here; we'll shove all these meals several hours down, when we get to doubling our population. You'll have an hour to get freshened up for supper. Afterwards, if Mrs. Barslow feels equal to the exertion, we'll take a drive about the town."

Lattimore was a pretty place then. Low, rounded hills topped with green surrounded it. The river flowed in a broad, straight reach along its southern margin. A clear stream, Brushy Creek, ran in a miniature canyon of limestone, through the eastern edge of the town. On each side of this brook, in lawns of vivid green, amid natural groves of oak and elm, interspersed with cultivated greenery, stood the houses of the well-to-do. Trees made early twilight in most of the streets.

People were out in numbers, driving in the cool autumnal evening. As a handsome girl, a splendid blonde, drove past us, my wife spoke of the excellent quality of the horseflesh we saw. Jim answered that Lattimore was a center of equine culture, and its citizens wise in breeders' lore.

The appearance of things impressed us favorably. There was an air of quiet prosperity about the place, which is unusual in Western towns, where quietude and progress are apt to be thought incompatible. Jim pointed out the town's natural advantages as we drove along.

"What do you think of that, now?" said he, waving his whip toward the winding gorge of Brushy Creek.

"It's simply lovely!" said Alice, "a little jewel of a place."

"A bit of mountain scenery on the prairie," said Jim. "And more than that, or less than that, just as you look at it, it's the source from which inexhaustible supplies of stone will be quarried when we begin to build things."

"But won't that spoil it?" said Alice.

"Well, yes; and down on that bottom we've found as good clay for pottery, sewer-pipes, and paving-brick as exists anywhere. Back there where you saw that bluff along the river--looks as if it's sliding down into the water--remember it? Well, there's probably the only place in the world where there's just the juxtaposition of sand and clay and chalk to make Portland cement. Supply absolutely unlimited! Why, there ought to be a thousand men employed right now in those cement works. Oh, I tell you, things'll hum here when we get these schemes working!"

We laughed at him: his visualization of the cement works was so complete.

"I suppose you know where all the capital is coming from," said I, "to do all these things? For my part, I see no way of getting it except our old plan of buccaneering."

"Exactly my idea!" said he. "Didn't I write you that I'd enroll you as a member of the band? Has Al ever told you, Mrs. Barslow, of our old times, when we, as individuals, were pa.s.sing through our sixteenth-century stage?"

"Often," Alice replied. "He looks back upon his pirate days as a time of Arcadian simplicity, 'Untouched by sorrow, and unsoiled by sin.'"

"I can easily understand," said Jim reflectively, "how piracy might appear in that roseate light after a few years of practical politics.

Now from the moral heights of a life-insurance man's point of view it's different."

So we rode on chatting and chaffing, now of the old time, now of the new; and all the time I felt more and more impressed by the dissolving views which Jim gave us of different parts of his program for making Lattimore the metropolis of "the world's granary," as he called the surrounding country. As we topped a low hill on our way back, he pulled up, to give us a general view of the town and suburbs, and of the great expanse of farming country beyond. Between us and Lattimore was a mile stretch of gently descending road, with grain-fields and farm-houses on each side.

"By the way," said he, "do you see that white house and red barn in the maple grove off to the right? Well, you remember Bill Trescott?"

Neither of us could call such a person to mind.

"Well, it's all right, I suppose," he went on in a tone implying injury forgiven, "but you mustn't let Bill know you've forgotten him. The Trescotts used to live over by the Whitney schoolhouse in Greenwood Towns.h.i.+p,--right on the Pleasant Valley line, you know. He remembers you folks, Al. I'll drive over that way."

There were beds of petunias and four-o'clocks to be seen dimly glimmering in the dusk, as we drove through the broad gate. Men and women were gathered in a group about the base of the windmill, as Jim's loud "whoa" announced our arrival. The women melted away in the direction of the house. The men stood at gaze.

"h.e.l.lo, Bill!" shouted Jim. "Come out here!"

"Oh, it's you, is it, Mr. Elkins," said a deep voice. "I didn't know yeh."