CHAPTER VII.

We make our Landing.

Had I known how cordially our neighbors would greet our return, or how

many of them would view our departure with apparently sincere regret, I

might have been slower in giving Jim my promise. I proceeded, however,

to carry it out; but it was nearly six months before I could pull myself

and my little fortune out of the place into which we had grown.

Mr. Elkins kept me well informed regarding Lattimore affairs; and the

_Herald_ followed me home. Jim's letters were long typewritten

communications, dictated at speed, and mailed, sometimes one a day, at

other times at intervals of weeks.

"This is a sure-enough 'winter of our discontent,'" one of these letters

runs, "but the scope of our operations will widen as the frost comes out

of the ground. We're now confined to the psychical field. Subjectively

speaking, though, the plot thickens. Captain Tolliver is in the

secondary stages of real-estate dementia, and spreads the contagion

daily. There's no quarantine regulation to cover the case, and Lattimore

seems doomed to the acme of prosperity. This is the age of great cities,

saith the Captain, and that Lattimore is not already a town of 150,000

people is one of the strangest, one of the most inexplicable things in

the world, in view of the distance we are lag of the country about us,

so far as development is concerned. And as our beginning has been tardy,

so will our progress be rapid, even as waters long dammed up rush out to

devour the plains, etc., etc.

"In this we are all agreed. We want a good, steady, natural growth--and

no boom.

"When a boom recognizes itself as such, it's all over, and the stuff

off. The time for letting go of a great wheel is when it starts down

hill. But our wheels are all going up--even if they are all in our

heads, as yet.

"You will remember the railway connection of which I spoke to you? Well,

that thing has assumed, all of a sudden, a concreteness as welcome as it

is unexpected. Ballard showed me a telegram yesterday from lower

Broadway (the heart of Darkest N. Y.) which tends to prove that people

there are ready to finance the deal. It would have amused you to see the

horizontality of the coat-tails of the management of the Lattimore &

Great Western, as they flaxed round getting up a directors' meeting, so

as to have a real, live directorate of this great transcontinental line

for the wolves of Wall Street to do business with! Things like this are

what you miss by hibernating there, instead of dropping everything and

applying here for your pro rata share of the gayety of nations and the

concomitant scads.

"I was elected president of the road, and as soon as we get a little

track, and an engine, I expect to obtain an exchange of passes with all

my fellow monopolists in North America. I at once fired back an answer

to Ballard's telegram, which must have produced an impression upon the

Gould and Vanderbilt interests--if they got wind of it. If the L. & G.

W. should pass the paper stage next summer, it will do a whole lot

towards carrying this burg beyond the hypnotic period of development.

"The Angus Falls branch is going to build in next summer, I am

confident, and that means another division headquarters and, probably,

machine-shops. I'm working with some of the trilobites here to form a

pool, and offer the company grounds for additional yards and a

roundhouse and shops. Captain Tolliver interviewed General Lattimore

about it, and got turned down.

"'He told me, suh,' reported the Captain, in a fine white passion, 'that

if any railway system desiahs to come to Lattimore, it has his

puhmission! That the Injuns didn't give him any bonus when he came; and

that he had to build his own houses and yahds, by gad, at his own

expense, and defend 'em, too, and that if any railroad was thinkin' of

comin' hyah, it was doubtless because it was good business fo' 'em to

come; and that if they wanted any of his land, were willing to pay him

his price, there wouldn't be any difficulty about theiah getting it. And

that if there should arise any difference, which he should deeply

regret, but would try to live through, the powah of eminent domain with

which railways ah clothed will enable the company to get what land is

necessary by legal means.

"'I could take these observations,' said the Captain, 'as nothing except

a gratuitous insult to one who approached him, suh, in a spirit of pure

benevolence and civic patriotism. It shows the kind of tyrants who

commanded the oppressors of the South, suh! Only his gray hairs

protected him, suh, only his gray hairs!'"

"It's a little hard to separate the General from the Captain, in this

report of the committee on railway extensions," said my wife.

"The only thing that's clear about it," said I, "is that Jim is having a

good deal of fun with the Captain."

This became clearer as the correspondence went on.

"Tolliver thinks," said he, in another letter, "that the Angus Falls

extension can be pulled through. However, I recall that only yesterday

the Captain, in private, denounced the citizens of Lattimore as beneath

the contempt of gentlemen of breadth of view. 'I shall dispose of my

holdin's hyah,' said he, with a stately sweep indicative of their

extent, 'at any sacrifice, and depaht, cuhsin' the day I devoted myself

to the redemption of such cattle.'

"But, at that particular moment, he had just failed in an attempt to

sell Bill Trescott a bunch of choice outlying gold bricks, and was

somewhat heated with wine. This to the haughty Southron was ample

excuse for confiding to me the round, unvarnished truth about us

mudsills.

"Josie and I often talk of you and your wife. I don't know what I'd do

out here if it weren't for Josie. She refuses to enthuse over our

'natural, healthy growth,' which we look for; but I guess that's because

she doesn't care for the things that the rest of us are striving for.

But she's the only person here with whom one can really converse. You'd

be astonished to see how pretty she is in her furs, and set like a jewel

in my new sleigh; but I'm becoming keenly aware of the fact."

We were afterwards told that the trilobites had shaken off their

fossilhood, and that the Angus Falls extension, with the engine-house

and machine-shops, had been "landed."

"This," he wrote, "means enough new families to make a noticeable

increase in our population. Things will be popping here soon. Come on

and help shake the popper; hurry up with your moving, or it will all be

over, including the shouting."

We were not entirely dependent upon Jim's letters for Lattimore news.

Mrs. Barslow kept up a desultory correspondence with Miss Trescott,

begun upon some pretext and continued upon none at all. In one of these

letters Josie (for so we soon learned to call her) wrote:

"Our little town is changing so that it no longer seems familiar. Not

that the change is visible. Beyond an unusual number of strangers or

recent comers, there is nothing new to strike the eye. But the talk

everywhere is of a new railroad and other improvements. One needs only

to shut one's eyes and listen, to imagine that the town is already a

real city. Mr. Elkins seems to be the center of this new civic

self-esteem. The air is full of it, and I admit that I am affected by

it. I have

"'A feeling, as when eager crowds await,

Before a palace gate,

Some wondrous pageant.'

"You are indebted to Captain Tolliver for the quotation, and to Mr.

Elkins for the idea. The Captain induced me to read the book in which I

found the lines. He stigmatizes the preference given to the Northern

poets--Longfellow, for instance--over Timrod as 'the crowning infamy of

American letters.' He has taken the trouble to lay out a course of study

for me, the object of which is to place me right in my appreciation of

the literary men of the South. It includes Pollard's 'Lost Cause' and

the works of W. G. Simms. I have not fully promised to follow it to the

end. Timrod, however, is a treat."

That last quiet winter will always be set apart in my memory, as a time

like no other. It was a sitting down on a milestone to rest. Back of us

lay the busy past--busy with trivial things, it seemed to me, but full

of varied activity nevertheless. A boy will desire mightily to finish a

cob-house; and when it is done he will smilingly knock it about the barn

floor. So I was tearing down and leaving the fabric of relationship

which I had once prized so highly.

The life upon which I expected to enter promised well. In fact, to a man

of medium ability, only, and no training in large affairs, it promised

exceedingly well. I knew that Jim was strong, and that his old regard

for me had taken new life and a firm hold upon him. But when, removed

from his immediate influence, I looked the situation in the face, the

future loomed so mysteriously bizarre that I shrank from it. All his

skimble-skamble talk about psychology and hypnotism, and that other

rambling discourse of pirate caves and buccaneering cruises, made me

feel sometimes as if I were about to form a partnership with Aladdin, or

the King of the Golden Mountain. If he had asked me, merely, to come to

Lattimore and go into the real estate and insurance business with him, I

am sure I should have had none of this mental vertigo. Yet what more had

he done?

As to the boom, I had, as yet, not a particle of objective confidence in

it; but, subconsciously, I felt, as did the town "doomed to prosperity,"

a sense of impending events. In spite of some presentiments and doubts,

it was, on the whole, with high hopes that we, on an aguish spring day,

reached Lattimore with our stuff (as the Scriptures term it), and knew

that, for weal or woe, it was our home.

Jim was again at the station to meet us, and seemed delighted at our

arrival. I thought I saw some sort of absent-mindedness or absorbedness

in his manner, so that he seemed hardly like himself. Josie was there

with him, and while she and Alice were greeting each other, I saw Jim

scanning the little crowd at the station as if for some other arrival.

At last, his eye told me that whatever it was for which he was looking,

he had found it; and I followed his glance. It rested on the last person

to alight from the train--a tall, sinewy, soldierly-built youngish man,

who wore an overcoat of black, falling away in front, so as to reveal a

black frock coat tightly buttoned up and a snowy shirt-front with a

glittering gem sparkling from the center of it. On his head was a

shining silk hat--a thing so rare in that community as to be noticeable,

and to stamp the wearer as an outsider. His beard was clipped close, and

at the chin ran out into a pronounced Vandyke point. His mustaches were

black, heavy, and waxed. His whole external appearance betokened wealth,

and he exuded mystery. He had not taken two steps from the car before

the people on the platform were standing on tiptoe to see him.

"Bus to the Centropolis?" queried the driver of the omnibus.

The stranger looked at the conveyance, filled as it was with a load of

traveling men and casuals; and, frowning darkly, turned to the negro who

accompanied him, saying, "Haven't you any carriage here, Pearson?"

"Yes, sah," responded the servant, pointing to a closed vehicle. "Right

hyah, sah."

My wife stood looking, with a little amused smile, at the picturesque

group, so out of the ordinary at the time and place. Miss Trescott was

gazing intently at the stranger, and at the moment when he spoke she

clutched my wife's arm so tightly as to startle her. I heard Alice make

some inquiry as to the cause of her agitation, and as I looked at her,

I could see in the one glance her face, gone suddenly white as death,

and the dark visage of the tall stranger. And it seemed to me as if I

had seen the same thing before.

Then, the negro pointing the way to the closed carriage, the group

separated to left and right, the stranger passed through to the

carriage, and the picture, and with it my odd mental impression,

dissolved. The negro lifted two or three heavy bags to the coachman,

gave the transfer man some baggage-checks, and the equipage moved away

toward the hotel. All this took place in a moment, during which the

usual transactions on the platform were suspended. The conductor failed

to give the usual signal for the departure of the train. The engineer

leaned from the cab and gazed.

Jim's eye rested on the stranger and his servant for an instant only;

but during that time he seemed to take an observation, come to a

conclusion, and dismiss the whole matter.

"Here, John," said he to the drayman, "take these trunks to the

Centropolis. We'd like 'em this week, too. None of that old trick of

yours of dumping 'em in the crick, you know!"

"They'll be up there in five minutes all right, Mr. Elkins," said John,

grinning at Jim's allusion to some accident, the knowledge of which

appeared to be confined to himself and Mr. Elkins, and to constitute a

bond of sympathy between them. Jim turned to us with redoubled

heartiness, all his absent-mindedness gone.

"I'll drive you to the hotel," said Jim. "You'll--"

"Miss Trescott is ill--" said Alice.

"Not at all," said Josie; "it has passed entirely! Only, when you have

taken Mr. and Mrs. Barslow to the hotel, will you please take me home?

Our little supper-party--I don't feel quite equal to it, if you will

excuse me!"