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"DO YOU BEGIN TO SUSPECT THINGS?" SHE ASKED.]
THEGRAFTERS
BYFRANCIS LYNDE
ILLUSTRATED BYARTHUR I. KELLER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I ASHES OF EMPIRE II A MAN OF THE PEOPLE III THE BOSTONIANS IV THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT V JOURNEYS END-- VI OF THE MAKING OF LAWS VII THE SENTIMENTALISTS VIII THE HAYMAKERS IX THE SHOCKING OF HUNNICOTT X WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY XI THE LAST DITCH XII THE MAN IN POSSESSION XIII THE WRECKERS XIV THE GERRYMANDER XV THE JUNKETERS XVI SHARPENING THE SWORD XVII THE CONSPIRATORS XVIII DOWN, BRUNO! XIX DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS XX THE WINNING LOSER XXI A WOMAN INTERVENES XXII A BORROWED CONSCIENCE XXIII THE INSURRECTIONARIES XXIV INTO THE PRIMITIVE XXV DEAD WATER AND QUICK XXVI ON THE HIGH PLAINS XXVII BY ORDER OF THE COURTXXVIII THE NIGHT OF ALARMS XXIX THE RELENTLESS WHEELS XXX SUBHI SADIK
TO MY GOOD FRIENDMR. EDWARD YOUNG CHAPIN
THE GRAFTERS
I
ASHES OF EMPIRE
In point of age, Gaston the strenuous was still no more than a lustyinfant among the cities of the brown plain when the boom broke and thejunto was born, though its beginnings as a halt camp ran back to the daysof the later Mormon migrations across the thirsty plain; to that day whenthe advanced guard of Zophar Smith's ox-train dug wells in the damp sandsof Dry Creek and called them the Waters of Merom.
Later, one Jethro Simsby, a Mormon deserter, set up his rod and staff onthe banks of the creek, home-steaded a quarter-section of the sage-brushplain, and in due time came to be known as the Dry Creek cattle king. Andthe cow-camp was still Simsby's when the locating engineers of the WesternPacific, searching for tank stations in a land where water was scarce andhard to come by, drove their stakes along the north line of thequarter-section; and having named their last station Alphonse, christenedthis one Gaston.
From the stake-driving of the engineers to the spike-driving of thetrack-layers was a full decade. For hard times overtook the WesternPacific at Midland City, eighty miles to the eastward; while the Statecapital, two days' bronco-jolting west of Dry Creek, had railroad outletsin plenty and no inducements to offer a new-comer.
But, with the breaking of the cloud of financial depression, the WesternPacific succeeded in placing its extension bonds, and a little later theearth began to fly on the grade of the new line to the west. Within aSundayless month the electric lights of the night shift could be seen,and, when the wind was right, the shriek of the locomotive whistle couldbe heard at Dry Creek; and in this interval between dawn and daylightJethro Simsby sold his quarter-section for the nominal sum of two thousanddollars, spot cash, to two men who buck-boarded in ahead of thetrack-layers.
This purchase of the "J-lazy-S" ranch by Hawk and Guilford marked themodest beginning of Gaston the marvelous. By the time the temporarysidings were down and the tank well was dug in the damp sands, it washeralded far and wide that the Western Pacific would make the city on thebanks of Dry Creek--a city consisting as yet only of the Simsby ranchshacks--its western terminus. Thereupon followed one of the senselessrushes that populate the waste places of the earth and give theprofessional city-builder his reason for being. In a fortnight after thedriving of the silver spike the dusty plain was dotted with theblack-roofed shelters of the Argonauts; and by the following spring theplow was furrowing the cattle ranges in ever-widening circles, and Gastonhad voted a bond loan of three hundred thousand dollars to pave itsstreets.
Then under the forced draft of skilful exploitation, three years of highpressure passed quickly; years named by the promoters the period ofdevelopment. In the Year One the very heavens smiled and the rainfallbroke the record of the oldest inhabitant. Thus the region round aboutlost the word "arid" as a qualifying adjective, and the picturesquefictions of the prospectus makers were miraculously justified. In Year Twothere was less rain, but still an abundant crop; and Jethro Simsby,drifting in from some unnamed frontier of a newer cow-country, saw what hehad missed, took to drink, and shot himself in the lobby of theMid-Continent Hotel, an ornate, five-storied, brick-and-terra-cottastructure standing precisely upon the site of the "J-lazy-S" brandingcorral.
It was in this same Year Two, the fame of the latest of western Meccas foryoung men having penetrated to the provincial backgrounds of NewHampshire, that David Kent came.
By virtue of his diploma, and three years of country practice in the NewHampshire county town where his father before him had read Blackstone andChitty, he had his window on the fourth floor of the Farquhar Buildinglettered "Attorney and Counselor at Law"; but up to the day in the latterpart of the fateful Year Three, when the overdue crash came, he was bestknown as a reckless plunger in real estate--this, mind you, at a momentwhen every third man counted his gains in "front feet", and was shoutinghimself hoarse at the daily brass-band lot sales.
When the bottom fell out in the autumn of Year Three, Kent fell with it,though not altogether as far or as hard as many another. One of hisprofessional hold-fasts--it was the one that afterward became thebread-tackle in the famine time--was his position as local attorney forthe railway company. By reason of this he was among the first to have ahint of the impending cataclysm. The Western Pacific, after so long apause on the banks of Dry Creek, had floated its second mortgage bonds andwould presently build on to the capital, leaving Gaston to way-stationquietude. Therefore and wherefore----
Kent was not lacking in native shrewdness or energy. He foresaw, not thepitiable bubble-burst which ensued, indeed, but the certain and inevitableend of the speculative era. Like every one else, he had bought chieflywith promises to pay, and his paper in the three banks aggregated a sumequal to a frugal New Hampshire competence.
"How long have I got?" was the laconic wire which he sent to Loring, thesecretary of the Western Pacific Advisory Board in Boston, from whom hishint had come. And when Loring replied that the grading and track-layingcontracts were already awarded, there was at least one "long" on theGaston real estate exchange who wrought desperately night and day to"unload".
As it turned out, the race against time was both a victory and a defeat.On the morning when the _Daily Clarion_ sounded the first note of publicalarm, David Kent took up the last of his bank promises-to-pay, andtransferred his final mortgaged holding in Gaston realty. When it was donehe locked himself in his office in the Farquhar Building and balanced theaccount. On leaving the New Hampshire country town to try the new cast forfortune in the golden West, he had turned his small patrimony intocash--some ten thousand dollars of it. To set over against the bill ofexchange for this amount, which he had brought to Gaston a year earlier,there were a clean name, a few hundred dollars in bank, six lots, boughtand paid for, in one of the Gaston suburbs, and a vast deal of experience.
Kent ran his hands through his hair, opened the check-book and hastilyfilled out a check payable to himself for the remaining few hundreds. Whenhe reached the Apache National on the corner of Colorado and TexasStreets, he was the one hundred and twenty-seventh man in the queue, whichextended around the corner and doubled back and forth in the cross-streetto the stoppage of all traffic. The announcement in the _Clarion_ had doneits work, and the baleful flower of panic, which is a juggler's rose forquick-growing possibilities, was filling the very air of the street withits acrid perfume--the scent of all others that soonest drives men mad.
Major James Guilford, the president of the Apache National, was in thecage with the sweating paying tellers, and it was to him that Kentpresented his check when his turn came.
"What! You, too, Kent?" said the president, reproachfully. "I thought youhad more backbone."
Kent shook his hea
d.
"Gaston has absorbed nine-tenths of the money I brought here; I'll absorbthe remaining tenth myself, if it's just the same to you, Major. Thankyou." And the hundred and twenty-seventh man pocketed his salvage from thewreck and fought his way out through the jam at the doors. Two hoursfarther along in the forenoon the Apache National suspended payment, andthe bank examiner was wired for.
For suddenness and thoroughgoing completeness the Gaston bubble-burstingwas a record-breaker. For a week and a day there was a frantic strugglefor enlargement, and by the expiration of a fortnight the life was prettywell trampled out of the civic corpse and the stench began to arise.
Flight upon any terms then became the order of the day, and if the placehad been suddenly plague-smitten the panicky exodus could scarcely havebeen more headlong. None the less, in any such disorderly up-anchoringthere are stragglers perforce: some left like stranded hulks by the ebbingtide; others riding by mooring chains which may be neither slipped norcapstaned. When all was over there were deserted streets and empty suburbsin ruthless profusion; but there was also a hungry minority of the crewsof the stranded and anchored hulks left behind to live or die as theymight, and presently to fall into cannibalism, preying one upon anotherbetween whiles, or waiting like their prototypes of the Spanish Main forthe stray spoils of any luckless argosy that might drift within grapplingdistance.
Kent stayed partly because a local attorney for the railroad was asnecessary in Gaston the bereaved as in Gaston the strenuous; partly, also,because he was a student of his kind, and the broken city gave himlaboratory opportunities for the study of human nature at its worst.
He marked the raising of the black flag as the Gaston castaways, gettingsorrily afloat one by one, cleared their decks for action. Some Bluebeardadmiral there will always be for such stressful occasions, and David Kent,standing aside and growing cynical day by day, laid even chances on Hawk,the ex-district attorney, on Major Guilford, and on one Jasper G. Bucks,sometime mayor of Gaston the iridescent.
Afterward he was to learn that he had underrated the gifts of the formermayor. For when the famine time was fully come, and there were no moreargosies drifting Gastonward for the bucaneers to sack and scuttle, it wasJasper G. Bucks who called a conference of his fellow werwolves, set forthhis new cast for fortune, and brought the junto, the child of sheerdesperation fiercely at bay, into being.
It was in the autumn of that first cataclysmic year that Secretary Loring,traveling from Boston to the State capital on a mission for the WesternPacific, stopped over a train with Kent. After a rather dispiriting dinnerin the deserted Mid-Continent cafe, and some plowing of the field ofrecollection in Kent's rooms in the Farquhar Building, they took thedeserted street in the golden twilight to walk to the railway station.
"It was a decent thing for you to do--stopping over a train with me,Grantham," said the host, when the five squares intervening had been halfmeasured. "I have had all kinds of a time out here in this God-forsakendesert, but never until to-day anything approaching a chummy hour with aman I know and care for."
Kent had not spoken since they had felt their way out of the dark lowerhall of the Farquhar Building. Up to this point the talk had beenpointedly reminiscent; of the men of their university year, of mutualfriends in the far-away "God's country" to the eastward, of the Gastonianepic, of all things save only two--the exile's cast for fortune in theuntamed West, and one other.
"That brings us a little nearer to the things that be--and to yourprospects, David," said the guest. "How are you fixed here?"
Kent shrugged.
"Gaston is dead, as you see; too dead to bury."
"Why don't you get out of it, then?"
"I shall some day, perhaps. Up to date there has been no place to go to,and no good way to arrive. Like some thousands of others, I've made an assof myself here, Loring."
"By coming, you mean? Oh, I don't know about that. You have had some hardknocks, I take it, but if you are the same David Kent I used to know, theyhave made a bigger man of you."
"Think so?"
"I'd bet on it. We have had the Gaston epic done out for us in thenewspapers. No man could live through such an experience as you must havehad without growing a few inches. Hello! What's this?"
A turned corner had brought them in front of a lighted building in TexasStreet with a straggling crowd gathered about the porticoed entrance. AsLoring spoke, there was a rattle of snare drums followed by the _dum-dum_of the bass, and a brass band ramped out the opening measures of acampaign march.
"It is a rally," said Kent, when they had passed far enough beyond thezone of brass-throated clamorings to make the reply audible. "I told youthat the Gaston wolf-pack had gone into politics. We are in the throes ofa State election, and there is to be a political speech-making at theOpera House to-night, with Bucks in the title role. And there is a fairmeasure of the deadness of the town! When you see people flock togetherlike that to hear a brass band play, it means one of two things: that thetown hasn't outgrown the country village stage, or else it has passed thatand all other stages and is well on its way to the cemetery."
"That is one way of putting it," Loring rejoined. "If things are as bad asthat, it's time you were moving on, don't you think?"
"I guess so," was the lack-luster response. "Only I don't know where togo, or what to do when I get there."
They were crossing the open square in front of the wide-eaved passengerstation. A thunderous tremolo, dominating the distant band music, thrilledon the still air, and the extended arm of the station semaphore with itstwo dangling lanterns wagged twice.
"My train," said Loring, quickening his step.
"No," Kent corrected. "It is a special from the west, bringing a Buckscrowd to the political rally. Number Three isn't due for fifteen minutesyet, and she is always late."
They mounted the steps to the station platform in good time to meet thethree-car special as it came clattering in over the switches, andpresently found themselves in the thick of the crowd of debarkingralliers.
It was a mixed masculine multitude, fairly typical of time, place andoccasion; stalwart men of the soil for the greater part, bearded andbronzed and rough-clothed, with here and there a range-rider inpicturesque leathern shaps, sagging pistols and wide-flapped sombrero.
Loring stood aside and put up his eye-glasses. It was his first sight nearat hand of the untrammeled West _in puris naturalibus_, and he was findingthe spectacle both instructive and diverting. Looking to Kent forfellowship he saw that his companion was holding himself stiffly aloof;also, he remarked that none of the boisterous partizans flung a word ofrecognition in Kent's direction.
"Don't you know any of them?" he asked.
Kent's reply was lost in the deep-chested bull-bellow of a cattleman fromthe Rio Blanco.
"Hold on a minute, boys, before you scatter! Line up here, and let's givethree cheers and a tail-twister for next-Governor Bucks! Now,then--_everybody_! Hip, hip----"
The ripping crash of the cheer jarred Loring's eye-glasses from theirhold, and he replaced them with a smile. Four times the ear-splittingshout went up, and as the echoes of the "tiger" trailed off into silencethe stentorian voice was lifted again.
"Good enough! Now, then; three groans for the land syndicates, alienmortgagees, and the Western Pacific Railroad, by grabs! and to hell with'em!"
The responsive clamor was a thing to be acutely remembered--sustained,long-drawn, vindictive; a nerve-wrenching pandemonium of groans, yelpingsand cat-calls, in the midst of which the partizans shuffled into loosemarching order and tramped away townward.
"That answers your question, doesn't it?" said Kent, smiling sourly. "Ifnot, I can set it out for you in words. The Western Pacific is thebest-hated corporation this side of the Mississippi, and I am its localattorney."
"I don't envy you," said Loring. "I had no idea the oppositioncrystallized itself in any such concrete ill will. You must have the wholeweight of public sentiment against you in any railroad litigation."
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"I do," said Kent, simply. "If every complainant against us had the rightto pack his own jury, we couldn't fare worse."
"What is at the bottom of it? Is it our pricking of the Gaston bubble bybuilding on to the capital?"
"Oh, no; it's much more personal to these shouters. As you may, or maynot, know, our line--like every other western railroad with nocompetition--has for its motto, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'and it bleeds the country accordingly. But we are forgetting your train.Shall we go and see how late it is?"
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