Otherwise Phyllis Part 6

"Tom, as I remember, you made a report on that scheme before the bonds were sold. Do you mind telling me whether that was for the same crowd that finally took it up?"

"Yes; but they cut down the amount they undertook to float. Sam Holton sold a lot of the bonds along the line; a good many of them are held right here in this county."

"They are, indeed. It seemed a plausible thing for the home folks to own the securities of a company that was going to do so much for the town; they pulled that string hard. It was a scheme to draw the coin out of the old stocking under the fireplace. If it was good for widows and orphans out in Seattle and Bangor, why wasn't it good for 'em at home?

And it _is_ good for the people at home if it's played straight. I've had an idea that these cross-country trolleys will have about the same history the steam roads had,--a good many of 'em will bust and the original investors will see their securities shrink; and there will be smash-ups and shake-downs and then in time the lines will pay. Just what's the trouble here, Tom, if you don't mind?"

"There's an apprehension that the November interest won't be paid. The company's had some hard luck--a wreck that's piled up a lot of damage suits, for one thing; and in one or two counties the commissioners are trying to make them pay for new bridges--a question of the interpretation of the franchise. I gave warning of that possibility."

"Thunder! I hope it won't come to the worst. I didn't know you were keeping track of it."

"One of my old cla.s.smates at Williams is counsel for the Desbrosses Trust and Guaranty Company which is the trustee for the bondholders. I pa.s.sed on the mortgage for them as to its local aspects. I'm going over to Indianapolis to meet him in a few days to determine what to do in event the interest is defaulted. The management has been unsatisfactory, and after five years the replacements are running ahead of the estimates."

"I wonder--" began Amzi; then he paused and rubbed his scalp. "I suppose my neighbor Bill is already out from under."

"I don't know," said Kirkwood soberly. "It was Sam who was the chief promoter."

"Sam was a smooth proposition. Thunder! I lost money when Sam died. I'd made a bet with myself that they'd pin something on him before he got through, but he died just out of spite to make me lose. Thunder! Bill makes strong statements."

The strength of the statements made by the First National Bank did not, however, seem to disturb Amzi. What he had learned from Kirkwood had not been in the nature of fresh information, but it had confirmed certain suspicions touching the Sycamore Traction Company. The Bartletts and Phil were talking quietly in a corner. Amzi rose and pulled down his percale waistcoat and b.u.t.toned the top b.u.t.ton of his cutaway coat, in which he looked very much like a fat robin. He advanced toward the group in the corner.

"Nan," he said, "you didn't buy a Sycamore bond that time I told you not to, did you?"

Rose beat time for her sister mockingly, and they answered in singsong.

"We did not! We did not! But," Nan added, dropping her hands to her sides tragically, "but if we had, oh, sir!"

"If you had I should have bought it of you at a premium. It's hard work being a banker for women: they all want ten per cent a month."

"Paul Fosd.i.c.k's things were all guaranteed ten per cent a year,"

remarked Rose.

They all waited for the explosion that must follow the mention of this particular brother-in-law. Nowhere else in town would any one have dared to bring Fosd.i.c.k, who was believed to be his pet abomination, into a conversation. Even in Hastings he found a kind of joy; the presence of a retired Hamlet among the foliage of the family tree was funny now that he had got used to it; and Amzi had a sense of humor. This little company expected him to explode and he must not disappoint them. The color mounted to his bald dome and his eyes bulged.

"Thunder! Rose, play that jiggly funeral march of a marionette!"

"I refuse," said Rose, spreading her skirts on the divan, "to do anything so cruel!"

"And besides," said Nan, "I bought a share of stock in his brickyard."

"Nan Bartlett," said Amzi, planting himself before her, "I will give you a peck of parsnips for that share."

"Couldn't take advantage of you, Amzi; and we never eat parsnips.

They're bad for the complexion."

"Thunder!" he snorted contemptuously.

"Thunder" was his favorite, almost his only, expletive, but his thunder was only a single boom without reverberations. His four auditors understood him perfectly, however. Fosd.i.c.k was always "starting"

something. He had even attempted to organize a new cemetery a.s.sociation, which, as Greenlawn was commodious, and as any amount of land adjacent made possible its indefinite expansion, Amzi regarded as an absurd and unholy project. With Fosd.i.c.k, Amzi had no business relations of any kind. He belonged to the Commercial Club, to be sure, but this was a concession on his part; he never attended any of its meetings. And he had, it was said, requested his enterprising brother-in-law to withdraw his patronage from the Montgomery Bank for reasons never wholly clear to the curious. Fosd.i.c.k had talked about it in bitterness of spirit; Amzi had not. Amzi never talked of his business. He rarely lost a customer; and if a citizen transferred his account to the First or the Citizens'

National, it was a.s.sumed that Amzi no longer cared particularly to have that individual on his ledgers. Such a transfer aroused in cautious minds a degree of suspicion, for horses rarely died in Amzi's stable.

"Thunder! It's time to go home. Guess the rain's stopped."

Amzi set out for home with the Kirkwoods. He was in capital spirits, and kept up a steady give and take with Phil. Just before reaching his own gate they pa.s.sed Kirkwood's former home. Amzi's sisters persistently demanded that something be done about the abandoned house, which, with its neglected garden, was a mournful advertis.e.m.e.nt of their sister's ill-doings. It had been a shock to them to discover, a few years after her flight, that it had pa.s.sed from her to Amzi and from him to Kirkwood. The consideration had been adequate; the county records told the story plainly. There was, of course, no reason why Lois should continue to own a house for which she had no use; but there was less reason why her former husband should acquire the property merely, as it seemed, from motives of sentiment. Every weed in the garden--and the crop was abundant--called attention to the blot on the Montgomery 'scutcheon. And if Kirkwood was silly enough to cling to the old home, while living in a rented house in a less agreeable neighborhood, there was no reason why he should refuse to lease it and devote the income to Phil's upbringing.

It was not a cheerful item of the urban landscape and the sorrow of Amzi's sisters that it should remain dolefully at their own thresholds was pardonable. The moon looked down at it soberly through dispersing clouds as though grieved by its disrepair. The venerable forest trees that gave distinction to the "old Montgomery place" had shaken their leaves upon this particular part and parcel of the elder Amzi's acres, and piled them upon the veranda steps. The gate, fastened to the post by a chain and padlock, sagged badly, and bulged upon the public walk.

Amzi stopped and pushed it back, causing the chain to rattle dolorously.

Kirkwood watched him indifferently. Phil lent her uncle a hand. Amzi, panting from his efforts, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed: "Thunder!" and a moment later they bade each other good-night under the gas lamp at his own gate.

CHAPTER IV

A TRANSACTION IN APPLES

Phil was not visible the next morning when at seven o'clock Kirkwood glanced about the house for her. She had indulged herself in the matter of rising since the high-school bell no longer regulated her habits, and her father had hardly expected to see her. There was no morning newspaper to read--he took a Chicago daily at his office--and he opened the windows and doors to admit the air. Domestic affairs interested Thomas Kirkwood little. During the years in which Phil was pa.s.sed from aunt to aunt he had lived at the Morton House, and after establis.h.i.+ng the new home that he might have her with him, one or another of the aunts had supervised his household, and at times, to his discomfiture, all had taken a hand at it.

This rented cottage where the Kirkwoods lived was in the least fas.h.i.+onable part of Main Street, beyond the commercial district and near the railroad. Trains thundered through a cut not far from the rear fence, and the cars of the Sycamore Traction Company rumbled by at intervals. The cottage was old but comfortable, and it was remarked that Kirkwood had probably chosen it for the reason that he could go to and from his office without pa.s.sing his abandoned home. Phil liked living on Main Street. Her devotion to that thoroughfare had been a source of great pain to her aunts. Even as her Uncle Amzi absorbed local color from the steps of his bank, Phil was an alert agent in the field, on nodding terms with the motormen of the interurban cars, and with the jehus, who, cigarette in mouth and hat tipped on one side, drove the village hacks. Captain Joshua Wilson, who had been recorder of his county continuously since he lost a leg at Missionary Ridge, and who wrote a poem every year for the reunion of his regiment, had written certain lines for the "Evening Star" in which "P. K." was addressed as the Diana of Main Street. As to the soundness of his mythology there might be debate, but there was no question as to Phil's thorough identification with Main Street, all the way from her father's house, past the court-house, shops, and banks, out to the old Sugar Creek Bridge where the town became country without any warning whatever.

It was Judge Walters who first called her "Otherwise Phyllis." This was in Phil's school days before she pa.s.sed from her aunts' custody. The judge delighted in Phil's battles with the aunts. Whenever his wife began to recount a day's occurrences at the supper-table, and the recital opened promisingly, it was the judge's habit to cut short her prefaces with, "Otherwise Phyllis--" and bid her hurry on to the catastrophe, sparing no tragic detail.

Kirkwood had never, from the day his wife left him, offered himself in the market-place as an object of sympathy. He had been a man of reserves at all times, and the sudden termination of his married life had merely driven him in further upon himself. If he was broken-hearted, the fragments were well hidden. He felt that he was a failure, and he saw men of less ability pa.s.sing him in the race. Now and then he had roused himself under stress and demonstrated his unusual gifts by striking successes; but after one of these spurts he would relapse into an indifference to which he seemed increasingly ready to yield.

He had risen this morning with a new resolution, attributable to his talk with Nan Bartlett the night before. Even if he did not care for himself, there was always Phil to consider. And Phil was very much to consider. She had decided for herself that the high school had given her all the education she needed. Kirkwood had weighed the matter carefully and decided that she would not profit greatly by a college course--a decision which Phil had stoutly supported. Her aunts favored a year at a finis.h.i.+ng school to tone down her rough edges, but having laid their plan before their brother Amzi that gentleman had sniffed at it. What was the use of spoiling Phil? he demanded. "Thunder!" And there was no reason in the world why Phil should be spoiled.

Phil was not, in any view of the case, an ignorant person. She knew a great many things that were not embraced in the high-school curriculum.

Her father harbored an old-fas.h.i.+oned love of the poets; which is not merely to say that at some time in his life he had run through them, but that he read poetry as one ordinarily reads novels, quite naturally and without shame. Something of his own love of poetry had pa.s.sed to his daughter. He had so trained her that literature meant to Phil not printed pages, but veritable nature and life. Books were a matter of course, to be taken up and put down as the reader pleased, and nothing to grow priggish about. She had caught from him an old habit, formed in his undergraduate days, of a light, whimsical use of historical and literary allusions. She entered zestfully into the spirit of this kind of fooling; and, to his surprise, she had developed an astonis.h.i.+ng knack of imitation and parody. Sometimes Kirkwood without preluding, would utter a line for Phil to cap; they even composed sonnets in this antiphonal fas.h.i.+on and p.r.o.nounced them superior to the average magazine product. Phil had not only learned much from her father, but she had absorbed a great deal of lore at the Bartletts', where everything bookish was vitalized and humanized.

Kirkwood, hearing the creak of the swinging door between the pantry and dining-room,--a familiar breakfast signal,--chose with care a volume of Bagehot and carried it to the table which had been set, he imagined, by the "girl" selected by his sisters-in-law to carry on his establishment during the winter.

He helped himself to grapes, and was eating with his eye on a page of Bagehot when the door swung again and Phil piped a cheerful good-morning. She was an ap.r.o.ned young Phil and her face was flushed from recent proximity to the range. She described her entrance in lines she had fas.h.i.+oned for the purpose:--

"She came While yet the jocund day was young, and fetched In hands but lightly singed upon the stove The coffee-pot, with muddy contents filled--"

Kirkwood, concealing his surprise at seeing her, took his cue:--

"And he, toying meanwhile with fruitage of the vine, To-wit the mellow grape, scarce breathed to see The nut-brown maid, and gasped, 'Where is the cook?'"

"Oh, the cook has went, to come down to the plain prose of it, daddy.

There was one here yesterday, but one's dynastic aunts had picked her for her powers of observation and ready communication, so I fired her hence. And with that careless grace which I hope you find becoming in me I decided to run the shop all by my lonesome for a while. I thought I'd start with breakfast so that any poisons that may creep into the victuals will have time to work while the drug-stores are open. How long do you cook an egg, is it two minutes or two weeks?"

"This will never do," said Kirkwood gravely, watching her pour the coffee. "You shouldn't have discharged one cook until you had another."

"Tut! There's not enough to do in this house for two able-bodied women--and I'm one! Rose taught me how to make coffee yesterday, and toast and eggs are easy. Just look at that coffee! Real amber? It's an improvement for looks on what you've been brewing for yourself in camp.

And I've been watching your winning ways with the camp frying-pan. Rose gave me a cook-book that is full of perfectly adorable ideas. Come up for lunch and I'll show you some real creations."

She slipped away into the kitchen and reappeared with toast and boiled eggs. She had cooked the eggs by the watch as Rose had instructed her.