"I should say not," agreed Mr. Nickel emphatically. "He's too big as it is. Why, he pretty near runs this town."

"He can't run the consolidation; I'll tell him that!" declared Mr.

Wallingford with much apparent heat. "It's _my_ project and I'll favor whoever I want to. But about this stock, old man. You think it over, and if you want it let me know by not later than to-day noon. If it isn't spoken for by that time I'll take it myself; but remember, not one word!"

Mr. Nickel promised, on his honor as a man and his self-interest as a favored stockholder, to say nothing, and Wallingford started out. At the door he turned back, however.

"By the way," said he, "when we get going I've made up my mind to push the Nickelfine and the Double Nickel brands. I've been trying those two boxes you gave me and they're great. But don't say anything. Jealousy, you know!"

Mr. Nickel put his finger to his lips and smiled and bowed significantly. Fine man, that Wallingford! Knew a good thing when he saw it, and easy as an old shoe in spite of all his money. Regular howling swell, too.

The regular howling swell was at that very moment on his rubber-tired way to the shop of Alfred Norton, where he made a similar proposition to the one he had made Nickel. In all his manipulating he had kept careful track of the gentlemen who had or who might have money, and now he made it his business to visit each of them in turn, to talk additional stock with them and bind them to inviolate secrecy. For three days he kept this up, and on Friday evening was able to mop his brow in content.

"f.a.n.n.y," he opined, "you have a smart husband."

"That's the only fault I have to find with you, Jim," she retorted smiling. "What have you done this time?"

"I've just tapped Mr. Joseph O. Meers on the solar plexus," he exulted.

"I'll show that gentleman how to horn into my game and take the rake-off that's coming to a real artist! He's dreaming happy dreams just now, but when I leave town with the mezuma he'll wake up."

"I thought you were going to stay here," she objected with a troubled frown.

He understood her at once, and reached over to stroke her hair.

"Never mind, girl," he said. "I'm as anxious now as you are to settle down," and he glanced at the fluffy white sewing in her lap; "but this isn't the town. I had a nice clean business planned here, but the village grafter tried to jiu-jitsu me, so I just naturally had to jolt him one. I'll clean up about a hundred thousand to-morrow, and with that I'll go anywhere you say and into any business you pick out. Suppose we go back to Battlesburg, clear off that mortgage on your house and settle down there?"

"Oh, will you?" she asked eagerly. "But who loses this money, Jim?" she suddenly wanted to know. "I'm more particular than ever about it just now. I don't want to take a dollar that isn't right."

Again he understood.

"Don't worry about that," he replied seriously. "This money is legitimate water that I am sopping up out of a reorganization, just like a Harriman or a Morgan. The drag-down I get is simply my pay as promoter and organizer, and is no bigger percentage than other promoters take when they get a chance."

He had never taken so much pains to justify himself in her eyes, and she felt that this was due to a new tenderness. What if the wonderful influence that was dawning upon their lives should make a permanent change in him?

There came a knock at the door. Wallingford opened it and was confronted by a tall and stoutly built gentleman, who wore a blue helmet and numerous bra.s.s b.u.t.tons upon his clothes.

"Mr. Wallingford," said the caller, with a laborious wink and a broad brogue, "could ye step across to the Court House wid me a few minutes and sign them papers?" and when Wallingford had stepped outside, he added: "'Twas on account of the lady I told ye that, but on the level, I'm after arrestin' yez!"

"What's the charge?" asked Wallingford with a tolerant smile, knowing his entire innocence of wrong.

"Obtainin' money under false pretenses."

Wallingford whistled, and, still unworried, excused himself for a moment. His statement to his wife was characteristic.

"I'll be back in about an hour," he said, "but I don't feel safe with so much wealth in my clothes when I'm out with a policeman," and with a laugh he tossed into her lap practically all the money that he had--an even fifty dollars.

Of course Wallingford sent immediately for Joseph O. Meers, and that gentleman came at once.

"Lovely place to find your old college chum," the prisoner cheerfully remarked. "I wish you'd go find out what this charge is all about and get me out of this, Meers. It might hurt the consolidation if it becomes known. There's a mistake some place."

"Oh, is there?" Mr. Meers wanted to know. "I'll bet there ain't a mistake, because I'm the baby that secured the warrant, and I'm going to send you over. Tried to double cross me, didn't you?" he asked pleasantly. "Well, it can't be done. Any grafter that tries to hand me the worst of it is going to find himself sucking at the sour end of a lemon,----quick. So I was to be the mark, eh? Just because there wasn't a paper signed between us to show that I was ent.i.tled to half that surplus stock, you was going to sell the bunch of it and make a quick get-away. I was to be the fall guy for that nice little futurity check, too! You remember that little old hundred, don't you? Well, it got you.

I was hep to you day before yesterday, but your date didn't run out on that check till to-day, so I waited; and I'm going to send you over the road for as long a stretch as a good lawyer can hand you. Now stay here and rot!" and Joseph O. Meers, highly pleased with himself, walked out.

Jail! Mr. J. Rufus Wallingford, to whom tufted carpets and soft leather chairs were not luxuries but necessities, looked around him with the nearest subst.i.tute for a "game" grin that he could muster, and the prophetic words of Blackie Daw occurred to him:

"Our turn's next!"

"It's a fine joke I played on myself," he mused. "Me that a few weeks ago had a million in sight and that two hours ago had a hundred thousand cinched for to-morrow, to lose out like this; _and for a hundred dollars_!"

That was the rub! To think that after all these years, during which he had conducted his pleasant and legally safe financial recreations with other people's money upon a scale large enough to live like a gentleman, his first introduction to a jail should be because of a miserable, contemptible hundred dollars! _Why_ had he forgotten that check? _Why_ had he been fool enough to think he could swear a lot of spineless jelly fish to secrecy? _Why_ hadn't he been content with half? It served him right, he admitted, and unless Meers relented, the penitentiary yawned its ugly mouth very close to him. At any rate, he was now a full-fledged member of the largest organization in the world--the Down and Out Club.

It was queer that in all this thought there came no trace of regret for what he had done; there came only regret for the consequences, only self-revilement that he had "overlooked a bet." His "conscience" did not reproach him at all, except for failure; for, monstrous as it may seem, to his own mind he had done no wrong! Nor had he meant any wrong! With no sense of moral obligation whatever--and no more to be blamed for that than another man is for being born hunchbacked--he merely looked upon himself as smarter than most men, doing just what they would have done had they been blessed with the ability. Only at last he had been unfortunate! Well, the joke was on him, and he must be a good loser.

The humor of the situation rather wore off when, after a night upon a hard pallet and a breakfast of dry bread and weak coffee, he sent a message to Ed Nickel and learned from that indignantly virtuous citizen that he would have nothing to do with swindlers! Then he sent word to his wife and the answer he got to that message was the last straw. Mrs.

Wallingford had quitted the hotel early that morning! He was sure of her, however. She would turn up again in her own good time, but what could she do? Nothing! For the first time in his life, the man who had never thought to have need of a friend outside a few moral defectives of his own cla.s.s, realized what it is to be absolutely friendless. There was no one left in all this wide world upon whom he could make any demand of loyalty. Blackie Daw a fugitive, Billy Riggs a convict, all the old clan scattered far and wide, either paying their penalty, or, having transgressed the law, fleeing from it, the universe had come to an end.

Hour after hour he spent in trying to think of some one to whom he could appeal, and the conviction gradually burned itself in upon him that at last he was "up against it." It was a bad mess. He had made no deposit whatever in the local bank upon which he had drawn that check, though he had intended to do so. Moreover, Meers, to prove fraudulent intent, could show his intended bad faith in the other matter between them; and besides all that the alderman cigar dealer had a "pull" of no mean proportions. It had seemed impossible, the night before, that he who had dealt only in thousands and hundreds of thousands should be made a felon for a paltry hundred. It had seemed too absurd to be true, an anomalous situation that a day would clear up and at which he could afterwards laugh. Even now he joked with the turnkey, and that guardian of social recalcitrants was profoundly convinced that in J. Rufus Wallingford he had the swellest prisoner upon whom he had ever slid a bolt. The policeman who arrested him and the judge who next morning remanded him for trial shared that opinion, but it was a very melancholy satisfaction. After his preliminary hearing he went from the city prison to a more "comfortable" cell in the county jail, to think a number of very deep thoughts. Not a friendly eye had been turned on him but that of Joseph O. Meers, who had come around to see the fun. Mr. Meers had been quite jovial with him, had handed him a good cigar and told him the latest developments in the Retail Cigar Dealers' Consolidation. He was reorganizing it himself. It was really a good "stunt," and he thanked J.

Rufus most effusively for having started it. This was "kidding" of a broad-gauge type that Wallingford, for the same reason that a gambler tries to look pleased when he loses his money, was bound to enjoy very much, and with right good wit he replied in kind; but in this exchange of humor he was very much handicapped, for really Meers had all the joke on his side.

Another restless night and another dreary day, and then, just as he had begun to sincerely pity himself as a forlorn castaway upon the barrenest sh.o.r.e of all living things, there came visitors for him, and the turnkey with much deference threw open his cell and led him out to the visitor's cage. His wife! Well, he had expected her, and he had expected, too, since this great new tenderness had come upon her, to find her eyes suffused with bravely suppressed tears as they now were; but he had never expected to see again the man who was with her. E. B. Lott! the man to whom he had once sold rights of way to a traction line which he had never intended to build! one of his most profitable victims!

"So they got you at last, did they, Wallingford?" said Lott briskly, and shook hands with him, positive pleasure in the meeting beaming from his grizzled countenance. "I expected they would. A nice little game you played on me up in Battlesburg, wasn't it? Well, my boy, it was worth the money. You really had a valuable right of way, with valuable franchises and concessions, and the Lewisville, Battlesburg and Elliston Traction Line is doing a ripping business; so I'll forgive you, especially since you're not an individual criminal at all. You're only the logical development of the American tendency to 'get there' no matter how. It is the national weakness, the national menace, and you're only an exaggerated molecule of it. You think that so long as you stay inside the _law_ you're all right, even morally; but a man who habitually shaves so close to the narrow edge is going to slip off some time. Now you've had your dose and I shouldn't wonder but it _might_ make a man of you. Your fine little wife here, who hunted me up the minute she found out your real predicament, swears that it will, but I'm not sure. You're too valuable, though, to coop up in a penitentiary, and I'm going to buy you off. I can use you. I've been in the traction business ever since the first trolley touched a wire, and I never yet have seen a man who could go out and get a right of way for nothing, as you did, nor get it in so short a s.p.a.ce of time, even for money. We expect to open up two thousand miles of lines this coming year and I'm going to put you on the job. I can't fix it to make you such quick riches as you can rake in on crooked deals, but I'll guarantee you will have more in the end. It's a great chance for you, my boy, and just to protect you against yourself I'm going to hire a good man to watch you."

Wallingford had already regained his breadth of chest, and now he began to laugh. His shoulders heaved and the hundred jovial wrinkles about his eyes creased with the humor of the thought that had come to him.

"You'd better hire three," he suggested, "and work them in eight-hour shifts."

Nevertheless there was a bit of moisture in his eyes, and his hand, dropping down, sought his wife's. Perhaps in that moment he vaguely promised himself some effort toward a higher ideal, but the woman at his side, though knowing what she knew, though herself renewed and made over wholly with that great new reason, though detecting the presence of the crippled moral sense that was falling back baffled from its feeble a.s.sault upon his soul, pressed her other palm over his hand protectingly and shook her head--for at last she understood!

Upon thistles grow no roses.

THE END