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Owen Johnson

Making Money, by Owen Johnson

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Title: Making Money

Author: Owen Johnson

Illustrator: James Montgomery Flagg

Release Date: September 19, 2010 [EBook #33761]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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[Illustration: Book Cover]

MAKING MONEY

[Illustration: "'Bojo, you must marry Doris,' she said brokenly"]

MAKING MONEY

BY OWEN JOHNSON

AUTHOR OF "THE SALAMANDER," "STOVER AT YALE," "THE SIXTY-FIRST SECOND," ETC.

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG

[Illustration]

NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1915, by FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE ARRIVAL 1 II FOUR AMBITIONS, AND THREE WAYS TO MAKE MONEY 16 III ON THE TAIL OF A TERRIER 31 IV BOJO'S FATHER 46 V DANIEL DRAKE, THE MULTI-MILLIONAIRE 58 VI BOJO OBEYS HIS GENERAL MANAGER 67 VII UNDER THE TICKER'S TYRANNY 75 VIII THE RETURN OF PATSIE 88 IX THE WEDDING BALL 100 X DRAKE'S GAME 111 XI BOJO BUTTS IN 122 XII SNOW MAGIC 133 XIII BOJO MAKES A DECISION 147 XIV THE CRASH 154 XV SUDDEN WEALTH 165 XVI BOJO BEGINS TO SPEND HIS QUARTER-MILLION 173 XVII PAYING THE PIPER--PLUS 184 XVIII BOJO FACES THE TRUTH 195 XIX A CHIP OF THE OLD BLOCK 207 XX BOJO HUNTS A JOB 213 XXI BOJO IN OVERALLS 222 XXII DORIS MEETS A CRISIS 234 XXIII THE LETTER TO PATSIE 247 XXIV PATSIE APPEALS FOR HELP 259 XXV DRAKE ADMITS HIS DANGER 270 XXVI A FIGHT IN MILLIONS 277 XXVII PATSIE'S SCHEME 288 XXVIII ONE LAST CHANCE 302 XXIX THE DELUGE 309 XXX THE AFTER-YEARS 323

ILLUSTRATIONS

"'Bojo, you must marry Doris,' she said brokenly" Frontispiece FACING PAGE "'Say, you're a judge of muscle, aren't you?'" 40 "'Just you wait; you're going to be one of the big men some day!'" 104 "'Drina, dear child,' he said in a whisper" 144 "The message was the end of hope" 158 "'What does all the rest amount to?' she said breathlessly. 'I want you'" 208 "'He wants to see you now,' she said" 268 "'Your promise. No one is to know what I do'" 292

CHAPTER I

THE ARRIVAL

Toward the close of a pleasant September afternoon, in one of the years when the big stick of President Roosevelt was cudgeling the shoulders of malefactors of great wealth, the feverish home-bound masses which poured into upper Fifth Avenue with the awakening of the electric night were greeted by the strangest of all spectacles which can astound a metropolitan crowd harassed by the din of sounds, the fret and fury of the daily struggle which is the tyranny of New York. A very young man, of clean-cut limbs and boyish countenance, absolutely unhurried amidst the press, without a trace of preoccupation, worry, or painful mental concentration, was swinging easily up the Avenue as though he were striding among green fields, head up, shoulders squared like a grenadier, without a care in the world, so visibly delighted at the novelty of gay crowds, of towering buildings decked in electric garlands, of theatric shop-windows, that more than one perceiving this open enthusiasm smiled with a tolerant amusement.

Now when a young man appears thus on Fifth Avenue, undriven, without preoccupation, without a contraction of the brows and particularly without that strained metropolitan gaze of trying to decide something of importance, either he is on his way to the station with a coveted vacation ahead or he has been in the city less than twenty-four hours. In the present instance the latter hypothesis was true.

Tom Beauchamp Crocker, familiarly known as Bojo, had sent his baggage ahead, eager to enjoy the delights one enjoys at twenty-four, which the long apprenticeship of school and college is ended and the city is waiting with all the mystery of that uncharted dominion--The World. He went his way with long, swinging steps, smiling from the pure delight of being alive, amazed at everything: at the tangled stream of nations flowing past him; at the prodigious number of entrancing eyes which glanced at him from under provoking brims; at the sheer flights of blazing windows, shutting out the feeble stars; at the vigor and vitality on the sidewalks; at the flooded lights from sparkling shop windows; at the rolling procession of incalculable wealth on the Avenue.

Everywhere was the stir of returning crowds, the end of the summer's hot isolation, the reopening of gilded theaters, the thronging of hotels, and the displays of radiant shop fronts, preparing for the winter's campaign. In the crush of the Avenue was the note of home-coming, in taxicabs and coupés piled high with luggage and brown-faced children hanging at the windows, acclaiming familiar landmarks with piping cries. Tradesmen and all the world of little business, all the world that must prepare to feed, clothe, and amuse the winter metropolis, were pouring in.

And in the midst of this feverish awaking of luxury and pleasure one felt at every turn a new generation of young men storming every avenue with high imaginations, eager to pierce the multitudes and emerge as masters. Bojo himself had not woven his way three blocks before he felt this imperative need of a stimulating dream, a career to emulate--a master of industry or a master of men--and, sublimely confident, he imagined that some day, not too distant, he would take his place in the luxurious flight of automobiles, a personage, a future Morgan or a future Roosevelt, to be instantly recognized, to hear his name on a thousand lips, never doubting that life was only a greater game than the games he had played, ruled by the same spirit of fair play with the ultimate prize to the best man.

In the crowd he perceived a familiar figure, a college mate of the class above him, and he hailed him with enthusiasm as though the most amazing and delightful thing in the world was to be out of college on Fifth Avenue and to meet a friend.

"Foster! Hallo there!"

At this greeting the young man stopped, shot out his hand, and rattled off in business manner: "Why, Bojo, how are you? How's it going? Making lots of money?"

"I've just arrived," said Crocker, somewhat taken back.

"That so? You're looking fine. I'm in the devil of a rush--call me up at the club some time. Good luck."

He was gone with purposeful steps, lost in the quick, nervous crowd before Crocker with a thwarted sense of comradeship could recover himself. A little later another acquaintance responded to his greeting, hesitated, and offered his hand.

"Hello, Bojo, how are things? You look prosperous; making lots of money, I suppose. Glad to have seen you--so long."

For a second time he felt a sense of disappointment. Every one seemed in a hurry, oppressed by the hundred details to be crowded into the too short day. He became aware of this haste in the air and in the street. In this speed-driven world even the great stone flights seemed to have risen with the hour. Dazzling electric signs flashed in and out, transferring themselves into bewildering combinations with the necessity of startling this wonder-surfeited city into an instant's recognition. Electricity was in the vibrant air, in the scurrying throngs, in the nervous craving of the crowd for excitement after drudgery, to be out, to be seen in brilliant restaurants, to go with the rushing throngs, keyed to a higher tension, avid of lights and thrumming sounds.

Insensibly he felt the stimulus about him, his own gait adjusted itself to the rush of those who jostled past him. He began to watch for openings, to dart ahead, to slip through this group and that, weaving his way as though there was something precious ahead, an object to be gained by the first arrival. All at once he perceived how unconsciously he had surrendered to the subtle spirit of contention about him, and pulled himself up, laughing. At this moment an arm was slipped through his and he turned to find a classmate, Bob Crowley, at his side.

"Whither so fast?

"Just in. I'm bound for the diggings."

"Fred DeLancy's been asking about you for a week. I saw Marsh and old Granny yesterday. The Big Four still keeping together?

"Yes, we're going to stick together. How are you?"

"Oh, so-so."

"Making money?"

The salutation came like a trick to his lips before he noticed the adoption. Crowley looked rather pleased.

"Thanks, I've got a pretty good thing. If you've got any loose change I can put you on to a cinch. Step into the club a moment. You'll see a lot of the crowd."

At the club, an immense hotel filled with businesslike young men rushing in and rushing out, thronging the grill-room with hats and coats on, an eye to the clock, Bojo was acclaimed with that rapturous campus enthusiasm which greets a returned hero. The tribute pleased him, after the journey through the indifferent multitude. It was something to return as even a moderate-sized frog to the small puddle. He wandered from group to group, ensconced at round tables for a snatched moment before the call of the evening. The vitality of these groups, the conflict of sounds in the low room, bewildered him. Speculation was in the air. The bonanza age of American finance was reaching its climax. Immense corporations were being formed overnight and stocks were mounting by bounds. All the talk in corners was of this tip and that while in the jumble staccato sentences struck his ear.

"A sure thing, Joe-- I'll tell you where I got it."

"They say Harris cleaned up two thousand last week."

"The amalgamation's bound to go through."

"I'm in the bond business now; let me talk to you."

"Two more years in the law school, worse luck."

"At the P. and S."

"They say the Chicago crowd made fifteen millions on the rise--"

"I ran across Bozer last week."

"Hello, Bill, you old scout, they tell me you're making money so fast--"

All the talk was of business and opportunity, among these graduates of a year or two, eager and restless, all keen, all confident of arriving, all watching with vulture-like sharpness for an opportunity for a killing: a stock that was bound to shoot up or to tumble down. Every one seemed to be making money or certain to do so soon, cocksure of his opinion, prognosticating the trend of industry with sure mastery. Bojo was rather dazed by this academic fervor for material success; it gave him the feeling that the world was after all only a postgraduate course. He had left a group, with a beginning of critical amusement, when a hand spun him around and he heard a well-known voice cry:

"Bojo--you old sinner--you come right home!"

It was Roscoe Marsh, chum of chums, rather slight, negligently dressed among these young men of rather precise elegance, but dominating them all by the shock of an aggressive personality that stood out against their factoried types. Just as the generality of men incline to the fashions of conduct, philosophy, and politics of the day, there are certain individualities constituted by nature to be instinctively of the opposition. Marsh, finding himself in a complacent society, became a terrific radical, perhaps more from the necessity of dramatic sensations which was inherent in his brilliant nature than from a profound conviction. His features were irregular, the nose powerful and aquiline, the eyebrows arched with a suggestion of eloquence and imagination, the eyes gray and domineering, the mouth wide and expressive of every changing thought, while the outstanding ears on the thin, curved head completed an accent of oddity and obstinacy which he himself had characterized good-humoredly when he had described himself as looking like a poetical calf. Roscoe Marsh, the father--editor, politician, and capitalist, one of the figures of the last generation--had died, leaving him a fortune.

"What the deuce are you wasting time in this collection of fashion-plates and messenger-boys for?" said Marsh when the greetings were over. "Come out into the air where we can talk sense. When did you come?"

"An hour ago."

"Fred and Granny have been here all summer. You're a pampered darling, Bojo, to get a summer off. What was it--heart interest?"

"Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies," said Bojo with a half laugh and a whirl of his cane. "By George, Roscy, it's good to be here!"

"We'll get you to work."

"Who could help it? I say, is every one making money in this place? I've heard nothing else since I landed."

"On paper, yes, but you don't make money till you hear it chink, as lots will find out," said Marsh with a laugh. "However, this place's a regular mining-camp--every one's speculating. I say, what are you going to do?"

"Oh, I'm going into Wall Street too, I suppose. I spent a month with Dan Drake."

"--And daughter."

"And daughters," said Bojo, smiling. "I think I'll have a good opening there--after I learn the ropes, of course."

"Drake, eh," said Marsh reflectively, naming one of the boldest manipulators of the day. "Well, you ought to get plenty of excitement out of that. No use my tempting you with a newspaper job, then. But how about your Governor?"

Bojo became quiet, whistling to himself. "I've got a bad half-hour there," he said solemnly. "I've got to fight it out with the old man as soon as he arrives. You know what he thinks of Wall Street."

"I like your Governor."

"So do I. The trouble is we're too much alike."

"So you've made up your mind?"

"I have; no mills and drudgery for me."

"Well, if you've made up your mind, you've made it up," said Marsh a little anxiously.

In college the saying was that Marsh would sputter but Crocker would stick, and this byword expressed the difference between them. One attacked and the other entrenched. Crocker had an intense admiration for Marsh, for whom he believed all things possible. As they walked side by side, Bojo was the more agreeable to the eye; there was an instinctive sense of pleasing about him. He liked most men, so genuinely interested in their problems and point of view that few could resist his good nature. Mentally and in the knowledge of the world he was much the younger. There was a boyishness and an unsophistication about him that was in the clear forehead and laughing brown eyes, in the spontaneous quality of his smile, the spring in his feet, the general enthusiasm for all that was new or difficult. But underneath this easy manner there was a dangerous obstinacy ready to flare up at an instant's provocation, which showed in the lower jaw slightly undershot, which gave the lips a look of being pugnaciously compressed. He was implacable in a hatred or a fight, blind to the faults of a friend, and stubborn in his opinions.

"What sort of quarters have we got?" asked Bojo, who had left the detail to his three friends.

"The queerest spot in New York--the cave of Ali Baba. Wait till you see it--you'd never believe it. Hidden as safe as a needle in a haystack. No more than a stone's throw from here, and you'd never guess it."

He stopped, for at this moment they entered Times Square under the shadow of the incredible tower, dazzled by the sudden ambuscade of lights which flamed about them. Marsh, who could never brook waiting, without having altered his pace made a wide detour amid a jam of automobiles, dodged two surface cars and a file of trucks, and arrived at the opposite curb considerably after Crocker, who had waited for the direct route. Neither perceived how characteristic of their divergent temperaments this incident had been. But Marsh, whose spirit was irreverence, exclaimed contemptuously:

"The Great White Way. What a sham!" He extended his arm with an extravagant gesture, as much as to say, "I could change all that," and continued: "Look at it. There are not ten buildings on it that will last five years. Take away the electric advertisements and you'll see it as it is--a main street in a mining town. All the rest is shanty civilization, that will come tumbling down like a pack of cards. Look at it; a few hidden theaters with an entrance squeezed between a cigar-store and a haberdashery, restaurants on one floor, and the rest advertisements."

"Still it gives you quite a feeling," said Bojo in dissent, caught in the surging currents of automobiles and the mingled throngs of late workers and early pleasure-seekers. "There's an exhilaration about it all. It does wake you up."

"Think of a city of five thousand millionaires that can build a hundred business cathedrals a year, that has an opera house with the front of a warehouse and calls a row of squatty booths luxury. Well, never mind; here we are. Rub your eyes."

They had left the roar and brilliancy of the curiously blended mass behind, plunging down a squalid side street with tenements in the dark distances, when Marsh came to a stop before two green pillars, above which a swaying sign announced--

WESTOVER COURT BACHELOR APARTMENTS

Before Bojo could recover from his astonishment, he found himself conducted through a long, irregular monastic hall flooded with mellow lights and sudden arches, and as bewilderingly introduced, in a sort of Arabian Nights adventure, into an oasis of quiet and green things. They were in an inner court shut in from the outer world by the rise of a towering wall at one end and at the other by the blazing glass back of a great restaurant. In the heart of the noisiest, vilest, most brutal struggle of the city lay this little bit of the Old World, decked in green plots, with vine-covered fountain and a stone Cupid perched on tip-toe, and above a group of dream trees filling the lucent yellow and green enclosure with a miraculous foliage. Lights blazed in a score of windows above them, while at four medieval entrances, of curved doorways under sloping green aprons, the suffused glow of iron lanterns seemed like distant signals lost in a fog. Everything about them was so remote from the stress and fury out of which they had stepped, that Bojo exclaimed in astonishment:

"Impossible!"

"Isn't it bully?" said Marsh enthusiastically. "Ali Baba Court I call it. That's what a touch of imagination can do in New York. I say, look over here. What do you think of this for a quiet pipe at night?"

He drew him under the trees, where a table and comfortable chairs were waiting. Above the low roofs high against the blue-black sky the giant city came peeping down upon them from the regimented globes of fire on the Astor roof. A milky flag drifted lazily across an aigrette of steam. To the right, the top of the Times Tower, divorced from all the ugliness at its feet, rose like an historic campanile played about by timid stars. Over the roof-tops the hum of the city, never stilled, turned like a great wheel, incessantly, with faint, detached sounds pleasantly audible: a bell; a truck moving like a shrieking shell; the impertinent honk of taxis; urchins on wheels; the shattering rush of distant iron bodies tearing through the air; an extra cried on a shriller note; the ever-recurring pipe of a police whistle compelling order in the confusion; fog horns from the river, and underneath something more elusive and confused, the churning of great human masses passing and repassing.

Marsh gave a peculiar whistle and instantly at a window on the second floor a shadowy figure appeared, the sash went up with a bang, and a cheery voice exclaimed:

"Hello, below there! Is that Bojo with you? Come up and show your handsome map!"

"Coming, Freddie, coming," said Bojo with a laugh, and, plunging into a swinging entrance, he found himself in a cozy den, almost thrown off his feet by the greetings of a little fellow who dived at him with the frenzy of a faithful dog.

"Well, old fashion-plate, how are you?" Bojo said at last, flinging him across the room. "Been into any more trouble?"

"Nope. That is, not lately," said DeLancy, picking himself up. "Haven't a chance, living with two policemen. What kept you all this time? Fallen in love?"

"None of your damned business. By George, this looks homelike," said Bojo to turn the conversation. On the walls were a hundred mementoes of school and college, while a couple of lounges and several great chairs were indolently grouped about the fireplace, where a fire was laid. "I say, Roscy, has the infant really been behaving?"

"Well, we haven't bailed, him out yet," said Marsh meditatingly.

Fred DeLancy had been in trouble all his life and out of it as easily. Trouble, as he himself expressed it, woke up the moment he went out. He had been suspended and threatened with expulsion for one scrape after another more times than he could remember. But there was something that instantly disarmed anger in the odd star-pointing nose, the twinkly eyes, and the wide mouth set at a perpetual grin. One way or another he wriggled through regions where angels fear to tread, assisted by much painful effort on the part of his friends.

"I'm getting frightfully serious," he said with mock contrition. "I'm getting to be an old man; the cares of life and all that sort of stuff."

He broke off and flung himself at the piano, where he started an improvisation:

"The cares of life, This dreadful strife, I'll take a wife-- No, change the rhyme I haven't time For matrimony--O! Leave that to handsome Bojo Bojo's in love, Blush like a dove--

"No, doves don't blush," he said, swinging around. "Do they or don't they? Anyhow, a dove in love might-- To continue:

"Bojo's in love, Blush like a dove, Won't tell her name, I'll guess the same--"

But at this moment, just as a pillow came hurtling through the air, the doorway was ruled with a great body and George Granning came crowding into the room, hand out, a smile on his honest, open face.

"Hello, Tom, it's good to see you again."

"The government can go on," said DeLancy joyfully. "We're here!"

As the four sat grouped about the room they presented one of those strange combinations of friendship which could only result from the process of American education. Four more dissimilar individualities could not have been molded together except by the curious selective processes of an academic society system. The Big Four, as they had been dubbed (there is always a Big Four in every school and college), had come from Andover linked by the closest ties, and this intimacy had never relaxed, despite all the incongruous opposition of their beginnings.

Marsh was a New Yorker, an aristocrat by inheritance and by force of fortune; Crocker a Yankee, son of a keen, self-made father, who had fought his way up to a position of mastery in the woolen mills of New England; DeLancy from Detroit, of more modest means, son of a small business man, to whom his education had meant a genuine sacrifice; while George Granning, older by many years than the rest, was evidence of that genius for evolution that stirs in the American mass. They knew but little of his history beyond what he had chosen to confide in his silent, reserved way.

He had the torso of a stevedore, the neck and hands of the laborer, while the boulder-like head, though devoid of the lighter graces of imagination and wit, had certain immovable qualities of persistence and determination in the strongly hewn jaw and firm, high-cheekbones. He was tow-headed and blue-eyed, of unfailing good humor, like most men of great strength. Only once had he been known to lose his temper, and that was in a football match in his first year in the varsity. His opponent, doubtless hoping to intimidate the freshman, struck him a blow across the face under cover of the first scrimmage. Before the half was over the battering he had received from the enraged Granning was so terrific that he had to be transferred to the other side of the line.

Granning had worked his way through Andover by menial service at the beginning, gradually advancing by acquiring the agencies for commercial fields and doing occasional tutoring. His summers had been given over to work in foundries and in preparation for the business career he had chosen long ago. He was deeply religious in a quiet, unostentatious way. That there had been stormy days in the beginning, tragedies perhaps, the friends divined; besides, there were lines in his face, stern lines of pain and hardship, that had been softened but could never disappear.

CHAPTER II

FOUR AMBITIONS, AND THREE WAYS TO MAKE MONEY

They dined that night on the top of the Astor roof, where in the midst of aërial gardens one forgot that another city waited toiling below. Their table was placed by an embrasure from which they could scan the dark reaches toward the west where the tenements of the city, broken by the occasional uprising of a blatant sign, mathematically divided into squares by rows of sentinel lights, rolled somberly toward the river. To the south, vaguely defined by the converging watery darkness, the city ran down to flaming towers in the glistening haze that seemed a luminous vapor rising from dazzling avenues.

Wherever the eye could see myriad lights were twinkling: brooding and fraught with the dark mystery of lonely, distant river banks; red, green and golden on the rivers, crossing busily on a purposeful way; intruding and bewildering in the service of industry from steel skeletons against the sky; magic and dreamlike on the fairy spread of miraculous bridges; winking and dancing with the spirit of gaiety from the theaters below and the roof gardens above; that in the summer, suddenly spread a new and brilliant city of the night above the tired metropolis of the day. Looking down on these myriad points of light one seemed to have suddenly come upon the nesting of the stars; where planets and constellations germinated and took flight toward the swarming firmament.

The incomparable drama of the spectacle affected the four young men on the threshold of life in a different way. Bojo, to whom the sensation was new, felt a sort of prophetic stimulation as though in the glittering sweep below lay the jewel which he was to carry off. Granning, who had broken into the monastic routine of his life to make an exception of this gathering of the clans, looked out in reverence, stirred to deeper questionings of the spirit. Marsh, more dramatically attuned, felt a sensation of weakness, as though suddenly confronted with the gigantic scheme of the multitude; he felt the impotence of single effort. While DeLancy, who dined thus every night, seeing no further than the festooned gardens, the brilliant splashes of color, the faces of women flushed in the yellow glow of candle-lights, hearing only the pleasant thrumming sounds of a hidden orchestra, rattled on in his privileged way.

"Well, now that the Big Four is together again, let's divide up the city." He sent a sweeping gesture toward the stenciled stretch of blocks below and continued: "Boscy, what'll you have? Take your choice. I'll have a couple of hotels, a yacht and a box at the opera. Next bidder, please!"

But Bojo without attention to this chatter said:

"Remember the night before we went to college and we picked out what we intended to make. Came pretty close to it too, didn't we?"

Marsh looked up quickly, seized by a sudden dramatic suggestion.

"Well, here we are again. I'll tell you what we'll do. Let's tell the truth--no buncombe--just what each expects to get out of life."

"But will we tell the truth?" said Bojo doubtfully.

"I will."

"Of course we all want to make a million first," said Fred DeLancy, laughing. "Roscy's got his, so I suppose he wants ten. First place, is it admitted each of us wants a million? Every properly brought up young American ought to believe in that, oughtn't he?"

"Freddie, behave yourself," said Bojo severely. "Be serious."

"Serious," said DeLancy, with an offended air. "I'll be more serious than any of you and I'll tell more of the truth and when I do you won't believe me."

"Go on, Roscy, start first."

"Freddie's right in one respect. I intend to treble what I've got in ten years or go bankrupt," said Marsh instantly. He flung the stub of his cigar out into the night, watched it a moment in earthbound descent, and then leaned forward over the table, elbows down, hands clasped, the lights laying deep shadows about the hollowed eyes, the outstanding ears accentuating the irregularity and oddity of the head. "I'm not sure but that would be the best thing for me. If I had to start at the bottom I believe I'd do something. I mean something big."

A half-concealed smile passed about the group, accustomed to the speaker's dramatic instincts.

"Well, I've got to start at life in a different way. The trouble is, in this American scheme I have no natural place unless I make one. Abroad I could settle down to genteel loafing and find a lot of other congenial loafers, who would gamble, hunt, fish, race, globe-trot, beat up Africa in search of big sport, or drift around fashionable capitals for a bit of amusement; either that or if I wanted to develop along the line of brains there's a career in politics or a chance at diplomacy. Here we are developing millionaires as fast as we can turn them out and never thinking how we can employ them. What's the result? The daughters of great fortunes marry foreign titles as fast as they get the chance in order to get the opportunity to enjoy their wealth to the fullest, because here there is no class so limited and circumscribed without national significance as our so-called Four Hundred; the sons either become dissipated loafers, professional amateurs of sport, or are condemned to piling more dollars on dollars, which is an absurdity."

"I grieve for the millionaire," interjected DeLancy flippantly.

"And yet you want to triple what you've got," said Bojo with a smile.

"I'm coming to that--wait. Now the idea of money grubbing is distasteful to me. What I want is a great opportunity which only money can give. I have, I suppose, if a conservative estimate could be made, pretty close to two million dollars--which means around one hundred thousand a year. Now if I want to settle down and marry, that's a lot; but if I want to go in and compete with other men, the leaders, that's nothing at all. Now the principal interest I've got ahead is the Morning Post; it's not all mine, but the controlling share is. It's a good conservative nursery rocking-horse. It can go rocking on for another twenty years, satisfied with its little rut. Now do you understand why I want more money? I want a million clear to throw into it. I don't want it to be a profitable high-class publication--I want it to be the paper in New York."

"But are you willing to go slow, to learn every rope first?" said Granning with a shake of his head.

"You know I am," said Marsh impatiently. "I've plugged at it harder than any one on the paper this summer and last too."

"Yes, you work hard--and play hard too," Granning admitted.

Marsh accepted the admission with a pleased smile and continued enthusiastically:

"Exactly. Win or lose, play the limit! That's my motto, and there's something glorious in it. I'm going to work hard, but I'm going to play just as hard. I want to live life to its fullest; I want to get every sensation out of it. And when I'm ready I'm going to make the paper a force, I'm going to make myself feared. I want to round myself out. I want to touch everything that I can, but above all I want to be on the fighting line. After this period of financial buccaneering there's going to come a great period--a radical period, the period of young men."

"Roscy, you want to be noticed," said DeLancy.

"I admit it. If you had what I have, wouldn't you? I repeat, I want the sensation of living in the big way. Granning shakes his head-- I know what he's thinking."

"Roscy, you're a gambler," said Granning, but without saying all he thought.

"I am, but I'm going to gamble for power, which is different, and that's the first step to-day; that's what they all have done."

"You haven't told us what your ambition is," said Bojo.

"I want to make of the Morning Post not simply a great paper but a great institution," said Marsh seriously. "I believe the newspaper can be made the force that the church once was. Now the church was dominant only as it entered into every side of the life of the community; when it was not simply the religious and political force, but greater still, the social force. I believe the newspaper will become great as it satisfies every need of the human imagination. There are papers that print a Sunday sermon. I would have a religious page every day, just as you print a woman's page and a children's page. I'd run a legal bureau free or at nominal charges, and conduct aggressive campaigns against petty abuses. I'd organize the financial department so as to make it personal to every subscriber, with an investment bureau which would offer only a carefully selected list for conservative investors and would refuse to deal in seven per cent. bonds and fifteen per cent. shares. I would have a great auditorium where concerts and plays would be given at no higher price than fifty cents."

"Hold up! How could you get plays on such conditions?" said DeLancy, who had been held breathless by this Utopian scheme.

"Any manager in the city with a sense of publicity would jump at the chance of giving an afternoon performance, expenses paid, under such conditions, especially as the list would be guaranteed. Then, above all, I'd give the public fiction, the best I could get and first hand. What do you think gives Le Petit Parisien and Le Petit Journal a circulation of about a million each and all over France? Serial novels. Do you know the circulation of papers in New York? There are only three over a hundred thousand and the greatest has hardly a quarter of a million. However, I won't go on. You see my ideas make an institution--the modern institution, replacing and absorbing all past institutions."

"And what else do you want?" said Bojo, laughing.

"I want that by the time I'm thirty-five. I want ten millions and I want to be at forty either senator or ambassador to Paris or London. I want to build a yacht that will defend the American cup and to own a horse that will win the derby.

"And will you marry?"

"The most beautiful woman in America."

The four burst into laughter simultaneously, none more heartily than Marsh, who added:

"Remember, we're to tell the truth, and that's what I'd like to do." He concluded: "Win or lose, play the limit. Never mind, Granny; when I'm broke, you'll give me a job. Up to you. Confess."

Granning began diffidently, for he was always slow at speech and the fluency of Marsh's recital intimidated him.

"I don't know that there's anything so interesting in my future," he began, turning the menu nervously in his hands and fixing a spot on the tablecloth where a wine stain broke the white monotony. "You see, I'm different from you fellows. You're facing life in a different sort of way. I'm not sure but what there's more danger in it than you think, but the fact is you're all looking for the gamble. You want what you want, Roscy, by the time you're thirty-five. Bojo and Fred want a million by the time they're thirty. You're looking for the easy way--the quick way. You may get it and then you may not. You've got friends, opportunities--perhaps you will."

"That's where you'll never learn, you old fossil," said Marsh. "If you'd get out and meet people, why, some time you'd strike a man with a nice fat contract in his pocket looking for just the reliable--" he stopped, not wishing to add, "old plodder that you are."

Granning shook his head emphatically. Among these boyish types he seemed of another generation, a rather roughly hewn type of a district leader of fixed purpose and irresistible momentum.

"Not for me," he said decisively. "There's one thing I've got strong, where I have the start over you and a good thing it is, too: I know my limitations. I'm not starting where you are. My son will; I'm not. Hold up; it's the truth, and the truth is what we're telling. You can gamble with life--you've got something to fall back on. I'm the fellow who's got to build. Yes, I'll be honest. I want to make a million, too, I suppose, as Fred said, like every American does. After all, if you're out to make money, it's a good thing to try for something high. There isn't much chance for romance in what I'm doing. I've got to go up step by step, but it means more to me to get a fifty-dollar raise than that next million can mean to you, Roscy. That's because I look back, because I remember."

He stopped and the memories of the existence out of which he had dragged himself, of which he never spoke, threw thoughtful shadows over the broad forehead. All at once, taking a knife, he drew a long straight line on the table, inclining upward like the slope of a hill, with a cross at the bottom and one at the top, while the others looked on, puzzled.

"You see there's not much banging of drums or dancing in what I've got ahead and not much to tell until I get there. You know how a mole travels; well, that's me." He laid his finger on the cross at the bottom and then shifted it to the cross at the top. "Here's where I go in and here's where I come out. In between doesn't count."

"And what besides that?" said Bojo.

"Well," said Granning simply, "I don't know what else. I'd like to get off for a couple of months and see Europe and what they're doing over in France and Germany in the steel line."

"But all that'll happen. What would you really like to get out of life?" said Marsh, smiling--"you old unimaginative bear!"

"I'd like to go into politics in the right sort of way; I think every man ought. Perhaps I'll marry, have a home and all that sort of thing some day. I think what I'd like best would be to get a chance to run a factory along certain lines I've thought out--a cooperative arrangement in a way. There's so much to be worked out along the lines of organization and efficiency." He thought over the situation a moment and then concluded with sudden diffidence as though surprised at the daring of his self-confession. "That's about all there is to it, I guess."

When he had ended thus clumsily, DeLancy took up immediately, but without that spirit of good-humored raillery which was characteristic. When he spoke in matter-of-fact, direct phrases, the three friends looked at him in astonishment, realizing all at once an undivined intent underneath all the lightness of that attitude by which they had judged him.

"One thing Granning said strikes at me--knowing your limitations," he said with a certain defiance, as though aware that he was going to shock them. "I suppose you fellows think of me as a merry little jester, an amusing loafer, happy-go-lucky and all that sort of stuff. Well, you're mistaken. I know my limitations, I know what I can do and what I can't. I'm just as anxious to get ahead as any of you, and you can bet I don't fool myself. I don't sit down and say, 'Freddie, you've got railroads in your head--you're an organizer--you'd shine at the bar--you'd push John Rockefeller off the map,' or any of that rot. No, sir! I know where I stand. On a straight out-and-out proposition I wouldn't be worth twenty dollars a week to any one. But just the same I'm going to have my million and my automobile in five years. Dine with me five years from this date and you'll see."

"Well, Fred, what's the secret? How are you going to do it?" said Bojo, a little suspicious of his seriousness.

But DeLancy as though still aware of the necessity of further explanations before his pronouncement continued:

"I said I didn't fool myself and I don't. I haven't got ability like Granning over here, who's entirely too modest and who'll end by being an old money-bags--see if he doesn't. I haven't got a bunch of greenbacks left me or behind me like Roscy or Bojo. My old dad's a brick; he's scraped and pinched to put me through college on the basis of you fellows. Now it's up to me. I haven't got what you fellows have got, but I've got some very valuable qualities, very valuable when you keep in mind what you can do with them. I have a very fine pair of dancing legs, I play a good game of bridge and a better at poker, I can ride other men's horses and drive their automobiles in first-rate style, I wear better clothes than my host with all his wad, and you bet that impresses him. I know how to gather in friends as fast as you can drum up circulation, I can liven up any party and save any dinner from going on the rocks, I can amuse a bunch of old bores until they get to liking themselves; in a word, I know how to make myself indispensable in society and the society that counts."

"What the deuce is he driving at?" Marsh broke in with a puzzled expression.

"Why am I sitting down in a broker's office drawing fifty dollars a week, just to smoke long black cigars? Because I know a rap what's going on? No. Because I know people, because I'm a cute little social runner who brings custom into the office; because my capital is friends and I capitalize my friends."

"Oh, come now, Fred, that's rather hard," said Bojo, feeling the note of bitterness in this cynical self-estimate.

"It's the truth. What do you think that old fraud of a Runker, my boss, said to me last week when I dropped in an hour late? 'Young man, what do you come to the office for--for afternoon tea?' And what did I answer? I said 'Boss, you know what you've got me here for, and do you want me to tell you what you ought to say? You ought to say, "Mr. DeLancy, you've been working very hard in our interest these nights and though we can't give you an expense account, you must be more careful of your health. I don't want to see you burning the candle at both ends. Sleep late of mornings."' And what did he say, the old humbug? He burst out laughing and raised my salary. He knew I was wise."

"Well, what's the point of all this?" said Granning after the laugh. "Never heard you take so long coming to the point before."

"The point is this: there're three ways of making money and only three: to have it left you like Roscy, to earn it like Granning, and to marry it--"

"Like you!"

"Like me!"

The others looked at him with constraint, for at that period there was still a prejudice against an American man who made a marriage of calculation. Finally Granning said:

"You won't do that, Freddie!"

"Indeed I will," said DeLancy, but with a nervous acceleration. "My career is society. Oh, I don't say I'm going to marry for money and nothing else. It's much easier than that. Besides, there's the patriotic motive, you know. I'm saving an American fortune for American uses, American heiresses for American men. Sounds like American styles for American women," he added, trying to take the edge off the declaration with a laugh. "After all, there's a lot of buncombe about it. A broken-down foreigner comes over here with a reputation like a Sing-Sing favorite, and because he calls himself Duke he's going to marry the daughter of Dan Drake to pay up his debts and the Lord knows for what purposes in the future--and do you fellows turn your back on him and raise your eyebrows as you did a moment ago? Not at all. You're tickled to death to go up and cling to his ducal finger. Am I right, Roscy?"

"Yes, but--"

"But I'm an American and will make a damned sight better husband, and American children will inherit the money instead of its being swallowed up by a rotten aristocracy. There's the answer."

"It's the way you say it, Fred," said Bojo uneasily.

"Because I have the nerve to say it. This is all I'm worth and this is the only way to get what we all want."

"You'll never do it," said Granning with decision; "not in the way you say it."

"Granning, you're a babe in the woods. You don't know what life is," said DeLancy, laughing boisterously. "After all, what are you going to do? You're going to put away the finest days of your life to come out with a pile when you're middle-aged and then what good will it do you? I knew I'd shock you. Still there it is--that's flat!" He drew back, lighting a cigar to cover his retreat and said: "Bojo next. I dare you to be as frank."

Bojo, thus interrogated, took refuge in an evasive answer. The revelations he had listened to gave him a keen sense of change. On this very evening when they had come together for the purpose of celebrating old friendship, it seemed to him that the parting of their ways lay clearly before him.

"I don't know what I shall do," he said at last. "No, I'm not dodging; I don't know. Much depends on certain circumstances." He could not say how vividly their different announced paths represented to him the difficulties of his choice. "I'd like to do something more than just make money, and yet that seems the most natural thing, I suppose. Well, I'd like a chance to have a year or two to think things over, see all kinds of men and activities--but I don't know, by next week I may be at the bottom--striking out for myself and glad of a chance."

He stopped and they did not urge him to continue. After DeLancy's flat exposition each had a feeling of the danger of disillusionment. Besides, Fred and Roscoe were impatient to be off, Fred to a roof garden, Marsh to the newspaper. Bojo declined DeLancy's invitation, alleged the necessity of unpacking, in reality rather desirous of being alone or of a quieter talk with Granning in the new home.

"Here's to us, then," said Marsh, raising his glass. "Whatever happens the old combination sticks together."

Bojo raised his glass thoughtfully, feeling underneath that there was something irrevocably changed. The city was outside sparkling and black, but there was a new feeling in the night below, and the more he felt the multiplicity of its multifold expressions the more it came to him that what he would do he would do alone.

CHAPTER III

ON THE TAIL OF A TERRIER

When he returned with Granning into the court and upstairs to their quarters a telegram greeted him from the floor as he opened the door. It was from his father, brief and businesslike.

Arrive to-morrow. Wish to see you at three at office. Important.

J. B. CROCKER.

He stood by the fireplace tearing it slowly to pieces, feeling the approach of reality in his existence, a little frightened at its imminence.

"Not bad news," said Granning, settling his great bulk on the couch and reaching for a pipe from the rack. But at this instant a smiling Japanese valet ushered in the trunks.

"This is Sweeney," said Granning with an introductory wave. "He's one of four. We gave up trying to remember their names, so Fred rechristened them. The others are Patsy, O'Rourke, and Houlahan. Sweeney speaks perfect English, if you ask him for a telephone book he'll rush out and bring you a taxicab. Understand, eh, Sweeney?"

"Velly well, yes, sir," said Sweeney, smiling a pleased smile.

"How the deuce do you work it then?" said Bojo, prying open his trunk.

"Oh, it's quite simple. Fred discovered the combination. All you have to remember is that no matter what you ask for Sweeney always gets a taxi, Patsy brings in the breakfast, Houlahan starts for the tailor, and O'Rourke produces the scrubwoman. Just remember that and you'll have no trouble. But for the Lord's sake don't get em mixed up." He broke off. "What's the matter? You look serious."

"I'm wondering how I'll feel this time to-morrow," said Bojo with his arms full of shirts and neckties. "I've got a pleasant little interview with the Governor ahead." He filled a drawer of the bureau and returned into the sitting-room, and as Granning, with his usual discretion, ventured no question he added, looking out at the court where three blazing windows of the restaurant were flinging pools of light across the dark green plots: "He'll want me to chuck all this,--shoot up to a hole in the mud; bury myself in a mill town for four or five years. Pleasant prospect."

It did seem a bleak prospect, indeed, standing there in the commodious bay window, seeing the flooded sky, hearing all the distant mingled songs of the city. From the near-by wall the orchestra of the theater sent the gay beats of a musical comedy march feebly out through open windows, while from the adjoining wall of the Times Annex, beyond the brilliant busy windows, the linotype machines were clicking out the news of the world that came throbbing in. The theater, the press, that world of imagination and hourly sensation, the half-opened restaurant with glimpses of gay tables and the beginnings of the nightly cabaret, the blazing court itself filled with ardent young men at the happy period of the first great ventures, all were brought so close to his own eager curiosity that he turned back rebelliously:

"By heavens, I won't do it, whatever happens! I won't be starved out for the sake of more dollars. Well, would you in my place--now?"

He took a pair of shoes and flung them scudding across the floor into the room and then stood looking down at the noncommittal figure of his friend.

"Granning, you don't approve of us, do you? Stop looking like a sphinx. Answer or I'll dump the tray over you. You don't approve, do you? Besides, I watched your face to-night when Fred was spouting all that ridiculous stuff."

"He meant it."

"Do you think so?" He sat down thoughtfully. "I wonder."

"What worried you?" said Granning directly, with a sharp look.

"I was sort of upset," Bojo admitted. "You know when you got through and Fred got through, I thought after all you were right--we are gamblers. We want things quick and easily. It's the excitement, the living on a high tension."

"I always sort of figured out you'd want to do something different," said Granning slowly.

"So I would," he said moodily. "I wish I had Roscy's brains. I wonder what I could do if I had to shift for myself."

"So that's the idea, is it?"

He nodded.

"The old Dad's stubborn as blazes. Had an up-and-down row with Jack, my older brother, and turned him out. Lord knows what's become of him. Dad's got as much love for the Wall Street game as your pesky old self. Thinks they're a lot of loafers and confidence men."

"I didn't say it," said Granning with a short laugh.

"No, but you think it."

Granning rose as the clock struck ten and shouldered off to his bedroom according to his invariable custom. When Bojo finally turned in it was to sleep by fits and starts. The weight of the decision which he would have to make on the morrow oppressed him. It was all very well to announce that he would start at the bottom rather than yield, but the world had opened up to him in a different light since the dinner of confidences. He saw the two ways clearly--the long, slow plodding way of Granning, and the other way, the world of opportunities through friends, the world of quick results to those privileged to be behind the scenes. If the end were the same, why take the way of toil and deprivation? Besides, there were other reasons, sentimental reasons, that urged him to the easier choice. If he could only make his father see things rationally--but he had slight hope of making an impression upon that direct and adamant will.

"Well, if everything goes smash, I'll make Roscy give me a job on the paper," he thought as he turned restlessly in his bed.

The white gleam of a shifting electric sign, high above the roofs, played over the opposite wall. At midnight he heard dimly two sounds which were destined from now on to dispute the turning of the night with their contending notes of work and pleasure--the sound of great presses beginning to rumble under the morning edition and from the restaurant an inconscient chorus welcoming the midnight with jingling rhythm.

You want to cry, You want to die, But all you do is laugh, Hi! Hi! You've got the High Jinks! That's why!

When he awoke the next morning it was to the sound of Roscoe Marsh in the adjoining sitting-room telephoning for breakfast. The sun was pouring over his coverlet and the clock stood reproachfully at nine o clock. He slipped into a dressing-gown and found Marsh yawning over the papers. Granning had departed at seven o'clock to the works on the Jersey shore. DeLancy presently staggered out, tousled and sleepy, resplendent in a blazing red satin dressing-gown, announcing:

"Lord, but this brokerage business is exacting work."

"Late party, eh?" said Bojo, laughing.

"Where the devil is the coffee?" said DeLancy for all answer.

Marsh, too, had been of the party after the night work had been completed, though he showed scarcely a trace of the double strain. Breakfast over, Bojo finished unpacking, killing time until noon arrived, when, after a solicitous selection of shirts and neckties, he went off by appointment to meet Miss Doris Drake.

To-day the thoughts of that other interview with his father were too present in his imagination to permit of the usual zest such a meeting usually drew forth. The attachment, for despite the insinuations of DeLancy and Marsh it was hardly more than that, had been of long standing. There had been a period toward the end of boarding-school when he had been tremendously in love and had corresponded with extraordinary faithfulness and treasured numerous tokens of feminine reciprocation with a sentimental devotion. The infatuation had cooled, but the devotion had remained as a necessary romantic outlet. She had been his guest as a matter of course at all the numerous gala occasions of college life, at the football match, the New London race, and the Prom. He was tremendously proud to have her on his arm, so proud that at times he temporarily felt a return of that bitter-sweet frenzy when at school he turned hot and cold with the expectancy of her letters. At the bottom he was perhaps playing at love, a little afraid of her with that spirit of cautious deliberation which, had he but known it, abides not with romance.

During the month on the ranch he had spent in their house-party, he had a hundred times tried to convince himself that the old ardor was there, and when somehow in his own honesty he failed, he would often wonder what was the subtle reason that prevented it. She was everything that the eye could imagine, brilliant, perhaps a little too much so for a young lady of twenty, and sought after by a score of men to whom she remained completely indifferent. He was flattered and yet he remained uneasy, forced to admit to himself that there was something lacking in her to stir his pulses as they had once been stirred. When DeLancy had so frankly announced his intention of making a favorable marriage, something had uneasily stirred his conscience. Was there after all some such unconscious instinct in him at the bottom of this continued intimacy?

When he reached the metropolitan castle of the Drakes on upper Fifth Avenue, he found the salons still covered up in summer trappings, long yellow linens over the furniture, the paintings on the walls still wrapped in cheesecloth. As he was twirling his cane aimlessly before the fireplace, wondering how long it would please Miss Doris to keep him waiting, there came a breathless scamper and rush, accompanied by delighted giggles, and the next moment an Irish terrier, growling and snarling in mock fury, slid over the polished floor, pursued by a young girl who had a firm grip on the stubby tail. The chase ended in the center of the room with a sudden tumble. The dog, liberated, stood quivering with delight at a safe distance, head on one side, tongue out, ready for the next move of his tormenter who was camped in the middle of the floor. But at this moment she perceived Bojo.

"Oh, hello," she said with a start of surprise but no confusion. "Who are you?"

"I'm Crocker, Tom Crocker," he said, laughing back at the flushed oval face, with mischievous eyes dancing somewhere in the golden hair that tumbled in shocks to her shoulder.

She sprang up brightly, advancing with outstretched hand.

"Oh, you're Bojo," she said in correction. "You don't know me. I'm Patsie, the terror of the family. Now don't say you thought I was a child, I'm seventeen--going on eighteen in January."

He shook the hand that was thrust out to him in a direct boyish grip, surprised and a little bewildered at the irresistible youth and spirits of the young lady who stood so naturally before him in short skirt and in simple shirtwaist open at the tanned neck.

"Of course they've told you I'm a terror," she said defiantly. He nodded, which seemed to please her, for she rattled on: "Well, I am. They had to keep me away until Dolly hooked the Duke. Have you seen him? Well, if that's a duke all I've got to say is I think he's a mutt. Of course you're waiting for Doris, aren't you?"

The assumption of his vassalage somehow stirred a little antagonism, but before he could answer she was off again.

"Well, a jolly long wait you'll have, too. Doris is splashing around among the rouge and powder like Romp in a puddle."

Her own cheeks needed no such encouragement, he thought, laughing back at her through the pure infection of her high spirits.

"I like you; you're all right," she said, surveying him with her head on one side like Romp, the terrier, who came sniffing up to him in the friendliest way. "You're not like a lot of these fashion plates that come in on tiptoes. Say, that was a bully tackle you made in that Harvard game."

He was down on one knee rubbing the shaggy coat of the terrier. He looked up.

"Oh you saw that, did you?"

"Yep! I guess there wasn't much left of that fellow! Dad said that was the finest tackle he ever saw."

"It shook me up all right," he said, grinning.

"Well, if Dad likes you and Romp likes you, you must be some account," she continued, camping on the rug and seizing triumphantly the stubby tail. "Dad's strong for you!"

Bojo settled on the edge of the sofa, watching the furious encounter which took place for the possession of the strategic point.

"I suppose you're going to marry Doris," she said in a moment of calm, while Romp made good his escape.

Bojo felt himself flushing under the direct child-like gaze.

"I should be very flattered if Doris--"

"Oh, don't talk that way," she said with a fling of her shoulders. "That's like all the others. Tell me, are all New York men such hopeless ninnies? Lord, I'm going to have a dreary time of it." She looked at him critically. "One thing I like about you; you don't wear spats."

"I suppose you're home for the wedding," he asked curiously, "or are you through with the boarding-school?"

"Didn't you hear about this?" she said with a touch to her shortened hair. "They wanted me to come out and I said I wouldn't come out. And when they said I should come out, I said to myself, I'll just fix them so I can't come out, and I hacked off all my hair. That's why they sent me off to Coventry for the summer. I'd have hacked it off again, but Dad cut up so I let it grow, and now the plaguey old fashion has gotten around to bobbed hair. What do you think of that?"

"So you don't want to come out?" he answered.

"What for? To be nice to a lot of old frumps you don't like, to dress up and drink tea and lean up against a wall and have a crowd of mechanical toys tell you that your eyes are like evening stars and all that rot. I should say not."

"Well, what would you like to do?"

"I'd like to go riding and hunting with Dad, live in a great country house, with lots of snow in winter and tobogganing--" She broke off with a sudden suspicion. "Say, am I boring you?"

"You are not," he said with emphasis.

[Illustration: "'Say, you're a judge of muscle, aren't you?'"]

"You don't like that society flub-dub either, do you?" she continued confidentially. "Lord, these dolled up women make me tired. I'd like to jounce them ten miles over the hills. Say, you're a judge of muscle, aren't you?"

"In a way."

"What do you think of that?" She held out a cool firm forearm for his inspection and he was in this intimate position when Doris came down the great stairway, with her willowy, trailing elegance. She gave a quick glance of her dark eyes at the unconventional group, with Romp in the middle an interested spectator, and said:

"Have I been keeping you hours? I hope this child's been amusing you."

The child, being at this moment perfectly screened, retorted by a roguish wink which almost upset Bojo's equanimity. The two sisters were an absolute contrast. In her two seasons Doris had been converted into a complete woman of the world; she had the grace that was the grace of art, yet undeniably effective; stunning was the term applied to her. Her features were delicate, thinly turned, and a quality of precious fragility was about her whole person, even to the conscious moods of her smile, her enthusiasm, her serious poising for an instant of the eyes, which were deep and black and lustrous as the artfully pleasing masses of her hair. But the charm that was gone was the charm that looked up at him from the unconscious twilight eyes of the younger sister!

"Patsie, you terrible tomboy--will you ever grow up!" she said reprovingly. "Look at your dress and your hair. I never saw such a little rowdy. Now run along like a dear. Mother's waiting."

But Patsie maliciously declined to hurry. She insisted that she had promised to show off Romp and, abetted by Bojo in this deception, she kept her sister waiting while she put the dog through his tricks and--to cap the climax went off with a bombshell.

"My, you two don't look a bit glad to see each other--you look as conventional as Dolly and the Duke."

"Heavens," said Doris with a sigh, "I shall have my hands full this winter. What they'll think of her in society the Lord knows."

"I wouldn't worry about her," said Bojo pensively. "I don't think she's going to have as much trouble as you fear."

"Oh, you think so?" said Doris, glancing up. Then she laid her hand over his with a little pressure. "I'm awfully glad to see you, Bojo."

"I'm awfully glad to see you," he returned with accented enthusiasm.

"Just as glad as ever?"

"Of course."

"We shall have to use the Mercedes; Dolly's off with the Reynier. You don't mind?" she said, flitting past the military footman. "Where are we lunching?"

He named a fashionable restaurant.

"Oh, dear, no; you never see any one you know there. Let's go to the Ritz." And without waiting for his answer she added: "Duncan, the Ritz."

At the restaurant all the personelle seemed to know her. The head waiter himself showed her to a favorite corner, and advised with her solicitously as to the selection of the menu, while Bojo, who had still to eat ten thousand such luncheons, furtively compared his elegant companion with the brilliant women who were grouped about him like rare hot-house plants in a perfumed conservatory. The little shell hat she wore suited her admirably, concealing her forehead and half of her eyes with the same provoking mystery that the eastern veil lends to the women of the Orient. Everything about her dress was soft and beguilingly luxurious. All at once she turned from a fluttered welcome to a distant group and, assuming a serious air, said:

"Have you seen Dad yet? Oh, of course not--you haven't had time. You must right away. He's taken a real fancy to you, and he's promised me to see that you make a lot of money--" she looked up in his eyes and then down at the table with a shy smile, adding emphatically--"soon!"

"So you've made up your mind to that?"

"Yes, indeed. I'm going to make you!"

She nodded, laughing and favoring him with a long contemplation.

"You dress awfully well," she said approvingly. "Clothes seem to hang on you just right--"

"But--" he said, laughing.

"Well, there are one or two things I'd like you to do," she admitted, a little confused. "I wish you'd wear a mustache, just a little one like the Duke. You'd look stunning."

He laughed in a way that disconcerted her, and an impulse came into his mind to try her, for he began to resent the assumption of possession which she had assumed.

"How do you think that would go in a mill town with overalls and a lunch can?"

"What do you mean?

"In a week I expect to be shipped to New England, to a little town, with ten thousand inhabitants; nice, cheery place with two moving-picture houses and rows on rows of factory homes for society."

"For how long?"

"For four or five years."

"Bojo, how horrible! You're not serious!"

"I may be. How would you like to keep house up there?" He caught at the disconsolate look in her face and added: "Don't worry, I know better than to ask that of you. Now listen, Doris, we've been good chums too long to fool ourselves. You've changed and you're going to change a lot more. Do you really like this sort of life?"

"I adore it!"

"Dressing up, parading yourself, tearing around from one function to another." She nodded, her face suddenly clouded over. "Then why in the world do you want me? There are fifty--a hundred men you'll find will play this game better than I can."

He had dropped his tone of sarcasm and was looking at her earnestly, but the questions he put were put to his own conscience.

"Why do you act this way just when you've come back?" she said, frightened at his sudden ascendency.

"Because I sometimes think that we both know that nothing is going to happen," he said directly; "only it's hard to face the truth. Isn't that it?"

"No, that isn't it. I love to be admired, I love pretty things and society and all that. Why shouldn't I? But I do care for you, Bojo; you've always brought out--" she was going to say, "the best in me," but changed her mind and instead added: "I am very proud of you-- I always would be. Don't look at me like that. What have I done?"

"Nothing," he said, drawing a breath. "You can't help being what you are. Really, Doris, in the whole room you're the loveliest here. No one has your style or a smile as bewitching as yours. There is a fascination about you."

She was only half reassured.

"Well, then, don't talk so idiotically."

"Idiotic is exactly the word," he said with a laugh, and the compliments he had paid her in a spirit of self-raillery awakened a little feeling of tenderness after his teasing had shown him that, according to her lights, she cared more than he had thought.

All the same when he rose to hurry downtown, he was under no illusions: if opportunity permitted him to fit into the social scheme of things, well and good; if not-- His thoughts recurred to Fred DeLancy's words:

"There are three ways of making money: to have it left to you, to earn it, and to marry it."

He broke off angrily, troubled with doubts, and for the hundredth time he found himself asking:

"Now why the deuce can't I be mad in love with a girl who cares for me, who's a beauty and has everything in the world! What is it?"

For he had once been very much in love when he was a schoolboy and Doris had been just a schoolgirl, with open eyes and impulsive direct ways, like a certain young lady, with breathless, laughing lips who had come sliding into his life on the comical tail of a scampering terrier.

CHAPTER IV

BOJO'S FATHER

The offices of the Associated Woolen Mills were on the sixteenth floor of a modern office building in the lower city, which towered above the surrounding squalid brownstone houses given over to pedlers and delicatessen shops like a gleaming stork ankle deep in a pool of murky water.

Bojo wandered through long mathematical rooms with mathematical young men perched high on desk stools all with the same mathematical curve of the back, past squadrons of clicking typewriters, clicking endlessly as though each human unit had been surrendered into the cogs of a universal machine. He passed one by one a row of glassed-in rooms with names of minor officers displayed, marking them solemnly as though already he saw the long slow future ahead: Mr. Pelton, treasurer; Mr. Spinny, general secretary; Mr. Colton, second vice-president; Mr. Horton, vice-president; Mr. Rhoemer, general manager, until he arrived at the outer waiting-room with its faded red leather sofas and polished brass spittoons, where he had come first as a boy in need of money.

Richardson, an old young man, who walked as though he had never been in a hurry and spoke in a whisper, showed him into the inner office of Jotham B. Crocker, explaining that his father would return presently. Everything was in order; chairs precisely placed, the window shades at the same level, bookcases with filed memoranda, even to the desk, where letters to be read and letters to be signed were arranged in neat packages side by side.

On the wall was extended an immense oil painting fifteen feet by ten, of Niagara Falls in frothy eruption, with a large and brilliant rainbow lost in the mist and several figures in the foreground representing the noble Indians gazing with feelings of awe upon the spectacle of nature. Behind the desk hung a large black and white engraving of Abraham Lincoln, with one hand resting on the Proclamation of Emancipation, flanked by smaller portraits of Henry Ward Beecher and the author of the McKinley tariff. Opposite was an old-time family group done in crayons, representing Mr. and Mrs. Crocker standing side by side, with Jack in long trousers and Tom in short, while on the shining desk amid the papers was a daguerrotype mounted in a worn leather frame, of the wife who had been dead fifteen years.

Bojo selected a cigar from the visitors box and strode up and down, rehearsing in his mind the arguments he would bring to bear against the expected ultimatum. From the window the lower bay expanded below him with its steam insects crawling across the blue-gray surface, its wharf-crowded shores, beyond the ledges on ledges of factories trailing cotton streamers against the brittle sky. Everywhere the empire of industry extended its stone barracks without loveliness or pomp, smoke-grimed, implacable prisons, where multitudes herded under artificial light that humanity might live in terms of millions.

As he looked, he seemed already to have surrendered his individuality, swallowed up in the army of labor, and the revolt arose in him anew. What was the use of money if it could not bring a wider horizon and greater opportunities? And a sort of dull anger moved in him against the parental ambition which limited him to unnecessary drudgery.

Of all the persons he had met the greatest stranger to him was his father. Since his mother's death, when he was but eight years of age, his life had been spent in boarding school and college, in summer camps or on visits to chums. Their relations had been formal. At the beginning and end of each summer he had come down the long avenue of desks, past the glass doors into the private office, to report, to receive money, and to be sped with a few appropriate words of advice. Several times during the year his father would appear on a short warning, stay a few hours, and hurry off. On such occasions Tom had always felt that he was being surveyed and estimated as a lumberman watches the growth of a young forest.

His father was always in a hurry, always in good health, matter of fact, and generous. That his business had prospered and extended he knew, though to what extent his father's activities had multiplied he still was ignorant. Conversation between them had always been difficult in those tours of inspection; but Bojo, instinctively, censored the lithographs on the wall (harmless though they were) and the choice of novels which his father would be sure to examine with a critical eye.

Klondike, the sweep, arranged the room in military order and Fred DeLancy was enjoined to observe a bread-and-milk diet. Bojo had an idea that his father was very stern, rigid, and exact, with the unrelenting attitude toward folly and leisure which had characterized the Crocker family in the days of their seven celebrated divines.

"How are you, Tom?" said a chest-voice behind him. "Turn around. You look in first-class shape. Glad to see you."

"Glad to see you, father," he said hastily, taking the stubby, powerful hand.

"Just a moment--go on with your cigar. Let me straighten out this desk. Train was ten minutes late."

"Now it comes," thought Bojo to himself as he gripped his hands and assumed a determined frown.

As they faced each other they were astonishingly alike and unlike. They had the same squaring of the brows, the same obstinate rise of the head at the back, and the prominent undershot jaw. Years had thickened the frame of the father and written characteristic lines about the mouth and the eyes. He had become so integral a part of the machine he had created that in the process all the finer youthful shades of expression had faded away.

Concentration on a fixed idea, indomitable purpose, decision, self-discipline were there in the strongly sculptured chin and maxillary muscles, under the sparse, close-cropped beard shot with gray; courage and tenacity in the deep eyes, which, like Bojo's, had the disconcerting fixity of the mastiff's; but the quality of dreams which so keenly qualified the tempestuous obstinacy of the son had been discarded as so much superfluous baggage. Life to him was a succession of immediate necessities, a military progress, and his imagination went with difficulty beyond the demands of the hour. He dressed in a pepper-and-salt business suit made of his own product, wore a made-up tie and comfortable square-toed shoes, with a certain aggressive disdain for the fashions as a quality of pretentiousness.

He ran through his correspondence in five minutes while Bojo pricked up his ears at the sums which he flung off without hesitation. Richardson faded from the room, the father shifted a package of memoranda, turned the face of his desk clock so he could follow the time, drew back in his chair, and helped himself to a cigar, shooting a glance at the embattled figure of the son.

"You look all primed up--ready to jump in the ring," he said with a smile, and without waiting for Bojo's embarrassed answer he continued, caging his fingers and adopting a quick, incisive tone.

"Well, Tom, you have now arrived at man's estate and it is right that I should discuss with you your future course in life. But before we come to that I wish to say several things. You've finished your college course very creditably. You have engaged a good deal in different sports, it is true; but you have not allowed it to interfere with your serious work, and I believe on the whole your experience in athletics has been valuable. It has taught you qualities of self-restraint and discipline, and it has given you a sound body. Your record in your studies, while it has not been brilliant, has been creditable. You've kept out of bad company, chosen the right friends-- I am particularly impressed with Mr. Granning--and you've not gone in for dissipation. You've done well and I have no complaint. You've worked hard and you've played hard. You will take a serious view of life."

This discourse annoyed Bojo. It seemed to fling a barrier of conventionality between them, driving them further apart.

"Why the deuce doesn't he talk in a natural way?" he thought moodily. And he felt with a sudden depression the futility of arguing his case. "We're in for a row. There's no way out."

"Now, Tom, lets talk about the future."

"Here it comes," said Bojo to himself, bracing himself to resist.

"What would you like to do?"

"What would I like?" said Tom, completely off his guard.

"Yes, what are your ideas?"

The turn was so unexpected that he could not for the moment assemble his thoughts. He rose, making a pretext of seeking an ash-tray, and returned.

"Why, to tell the truth, sir, I came here expecting that you would demand that I go into this--into the mills."

"I see, and you don't want to do what your father's done. You want something else, something better."

The tone in which this was said aroused the obstinacy in the young man, but he repressed the first answer.

"Well?"

"I don't know, sir, that there's any use of my explaining myself; I don't know what good it'll do," he said slowly.

"On the contrary, I am not making demands on you. I am here to discuss with you." (Bojo repressed a smile at this.) "You've thought about this. What do you suggest?"

"I don't think you'll understand it at all, but I want time."

"Time to do what?"

"To get out and see the world, to meet men who are doing things, to get a chance to develop, to get my ideas straightened out a bit."

"Is that all?"

"No, that's not quite honest," said Bojo suddenly. "The truth is, sir, I don't see why I should begin all over again, the drudgery and the isolation and all. If you wanted me to do only that why did you send me to college? I've made friends and it's only right I should have the opportunity to lead as big a life as they. Money isn't everything, it's what you get out of life, and besides I've got opportunities, unusual opportunities to get ahead here."

"Have you made up your mind, Tom?" said the father slowly.

"I'm afraid I have, sir."

"Let me talk to you. You may see it in a different light. First you speak of opportunities--what opportunities?"

"Mr. Drake has been kind enough--"

"That means Wall Street."

"Yes, sir."

The father thought a moment.

"What is the situation between you and Miss Drake?"

"We are very good friends."

"Would you marry her if you didn't have a cent?"

"I would not."

"I am glad to hear you say that. Very glad. So you re going into Wall Street," he said, after a moment. "Are you going into the banking business?"

"Why, no."

"Or into railroads or any creative industry?"

"Not exactly."

"You're going into Wall Street," said Crocker, "like a great many young men, who've been having an easy, luxurious time at college and who want to go on with it. You're going there as a gambler, hoping to get the inside track through some influence and make a hundred thousand dollars of other people's money in a lucky year."

"That's rather a hard way to put it, sir."

"You don't pretend to be able to earn a hundred thousand dollars in one year or in five, do you, Tom?"

"Let me put it in another way," said Bojo after a moment's indecision. "What you have made and what you have been able to give me have put me in the way of acquiring friends that others can't make, and friends are assets. The higher up you go in society the easier it is to make money; isn't it so? Opportunities are assets also. If I have the opportunity to make a lot of money in a short time, what is the sense of turning my back on the easiest way and taking up the hardest?"

"Tom, do you young fellows ever stop to think that there is such a thing as your own country, and that if you've got advantages you've also got responsibilities?" said Crocker, senior, shaking his head. "You want money like all the rest. What good do you want to do in return? What usefulness do you accomplish in the scheme of things here? You talk of opportunity--you don't know what a real opportunity and a privilege is. Now let me say my say."

Richardson came sliding into the room at this moment and he paused to deny the card, with a curt order against further interruptions. When he resumed it was on a quieter note, with a touch of sadness.

"The trouble is, our points of view are too far apart for us to come together at present. You want something that isn't going to satisfy you and I know isn't going to satisfy you. But I can't make you see it, there's the pity of it. You've got to get your hard knocks yourself. You've got real ambition in you. Now let me tell you something about the mills and you think it over. There's some bigger things in this world than you think, and the biggest is to create something, something useful to the community; to make a monument of it and to pass it down for your son to carry on--family pride. You think there's only drudgery in it. Did you ever think there were thousands and thousands of people depending on how you run your business? Do you realize that every great business to-day means the protection of those thousands; that you've got to study out how to protect them at every point in order to make them efficient; that there's nothing unimportant? You've got to watch over their health and their happiness, see that they get amusement, relaxation; that they're encouraged to buy homes and taught to save money. You've got to see that they get education to keep them out of the hands of ignorant agitators. You've got to make them self-respecting and able intelligently to understand your own business, so that they'll perceive they're getting their just share. Add to that the other side, the competition, the watching of every new invention, the calculating to the last cent, the study of local and foreign conditions of supply and demand, the habits and tastes of different communities. Add also the biggest thing that you've got, a mixed population, that's got to be turned into intelligent, useful American citizens, and you've got as big an opportunity and responsibility as you can place before any young fellow I know. What do you say?"

Bojo had nothing to say--not that he had surrendered, but that his own arguments seemed petty besides these.

The father rose and laid his hands on his son's shoulders.

"Why, Tom, don't you know it's been the dream of my life to hand you down this thing that I've built myself? Don't you know there's a sentiment about it? Why, it isn't dollars and cents: I've got ten times what I want; it's pride. I'm proud of every bit of it. There isn't a new turn, mechanical or social, has come up over the world but what I've adopted it there. I haven't had a strike in fifteen years. I've done things there would open your eyes. You'd be proud. Well, what are you thinking?"

"You make it very hard, sir," he said slowly. He had not expected this sort of appeal. "If I were older, I don't know--but it's hard now." He could not tell him all the surrender would mean, and though his deeper nature had been reached he still fought on. "I'm not starting where you started, sir; that's the trouble. You went to work when you were twelve. It would be easier if I had, and, if you'll forgive me, it's your fault too that I want what I want now. I suppose I do want to begin on top, but I've been on top all these years, that's all. I couldn't do it now; perhaps later--I don't know. If I went up to the mills now I should eat my heart out. I'm sorry to have to say this to you, but it's the truth."

The father left him abruptly and seated himself at his desk without speaking.

"If I insisted you would refuse," he said slowly.

"I'm afraid I'd have to, sir," said Bojo, with a feeling of dread.

There was another silence, at the end of which Mr. Crocker drew out his check-book and looked at it solemnly.

"Good! Now he's figuring how much he'll give me and cut me off!" thought the son.

"Tom, I don't want to lose you too," said the father slowly. "I'm going to try a different way with you. You're sound and you ring true. The only trouble is you don't know; you've got to learn your lesson. So you think if you had a start you'd clean up a fortune, don't you?--and you believe--" he paused--"in Wall Street friends. Very well; I'm going to give you an opportunity to get your eyes open."

He dipped his pen in the ink and wrote a check with deliberation, while Bojo, puzzled, thought to himself: "What the deuce is he up to now?"

"I'm not going to make a bargain with you. I'm going to trust to experience and to the Crocker in you. I know the stuff you're made of. You'll never make an idler, you'll never stand that life, but you want to try it. Very well. I'm going to give you a check. It's yours. Play with it all you want. You'll get it taken away from you in two years at the most. When that happens come back to me, do you understand, where you belong! Blood's thicker than water, my boy; there's something in father and son sticking together, doing something that counts! Here, take this."

And he placed in his hand a check which read:

Pay to the order of Thomas Beauchamp Crocker Fifty thousand dollars JOTHAM B. CROCKER.

CHAPTER V

DANIEL DRAKE, THE MULTI-MILLIONAIRE

A week after his interview with his father, Tom Crocker entered the great shadowy library of the Drakes in response to an invitation from the father. At this time, when Wall Street was approaching that dramatic phase which is inevitable in social transformations, when dominant and outstanding individualities succumb to the obliterating rise of bureaucracies, there was no more picturesque personality than Daniel Drake. He had come to New York several years before, awaited as a vaulting spirit who played the game recklessly and who would never cease to aspire until he had forced his way to the top or been utterly broken in the attempt.

His career had bordered on the fantastic. As a boy the Wanderlust had driven him over the face of the globe. A shrewd capacity for making money of anything to which he put his hand had carried him through strange professions. He had been a pedler on the Mississippi, cook on a tramp steamer to Australia, boxed in minor professional encounters, exhibited as a trick bicycle rider, served as a soldier of fortune up and down Central America, and returned to his native country to establish a small fortune in the field of the country fairs.

With the acquisition of capital, he became conservative and industrious. Reconciled with his family, he had secured the necessary funds to attempt an operation in the wheat market which, conducted on a reasonable scale, netted him a handsome profit and enlarged his activities. His genius for manipulation and trading, which was soon recognized, brought him into the services of big industries. He made money rapidly, and married impulsively against the advice of his friends a woman of social prominence who cared absolutely nothing about him--a fact which he was the last to perceive.

He next undertook a daring operation, the buying up of the control of a great industry in competition with an eastern group. A friend whom he trusted betrayed the pool he had formed, and the loyalty of his associates, which made him continue, completely bankrupted him. Before the public had even an inkling of the extent of his catastrophe he had mended his fortunes by the brilliant stroke, secured control of one of the subsidiary companies destined for the steel trust, and realized a couple of millions as his share. When he referred to this moment, which he often did, he used to say frankly:

"We went into the meeting bankrupt and came out seven millionaires."

He became the leader of a group of young financiers who acquired and developed with amazing success a chain of impoverished railroads. He played the game, scrupulous to his word, merciless in a fight, generous to a conquered enemy, for the love of the game itself. A big man with a curious atmosphere of amused calm in the midst of the flurry and turmoil he aroused, he enjoyed the turns and twists of fate with the zest of a boy gray-eyed, imperturbable, and magnetic, winning even those who saw in him an ethical and economical danger.

Such was the man who was bending over a great oaken table engrossed in the piecing together of an intricate picture puzzle, as Bojo came through the heavy tapestry portières. Patsie, perched on a corner, was looking on with approving interest at the happy solving of a perplexing group. She sprang down, flung her arms about her father in an impulsive farewell, and came prancing over to Bojo with a laughing warning:

"Whatever you do, never find a piece for him. It makes him madder than a wet hen. He wants to do it all himself. Now I'm running off. Don't worry! Go on, talk your old business."

She went off like the flash of a golden bird while Bojo, slightly intimidated, was wishing she might remain.

"Tom--glad to see you--come in--just a moment--help yourself to a cigar. Confound that piece, I knew it fitted in there!" Drake left the board with a lingering regret, shook hands with a grip that seemed to envelop the young man, and went to the mantel for a match, where a large equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni rose threateningly from the shadows.

"Glad to see you, my boy--my orders are in from the General Manager, and when the General Manager gives orders I know it means hustle!" By this title he designated Doris, whose practical ambitions and perseverance he satirized with an indulgent smile. "Far as I can make out, Doris has determined to make you a millionaire in a couple of years or so, so I suppose the best thing is to sit down and discuss it."

As he stood there gaunt and alert against the bronze background, there was something about him too of the old condottieri, a certain blunt and hardened quality of the grizzled head, as though he too had just hung back a steel helmet and emerged tense and victorious from a bruising scramble.

"Supposing he's figuring out that I'll cost him less than the Duke," thought Tom, conscious of a certain proprietary estimation below all the surface urbanity, and, squaring to the charge, he said: "I'm afraid, sir, you've a pretty poor opinion of me."

"What do you mean?" said Drake, with sudden interest.

"May I talk to you plainly, sir?" said Tom, a little flustered. "I don't know just how I feel about Doris or even just how she feels about me. I certainly have no intention of marrying her until I know what I am worth myself, and I certainly don't intend to come to you, her father, to make money for me."

He stopped with a little fear for his boldness, for this had not been his intention on entering the room. In fact, he had come rather in a state of indecision, after long discussions with Doris, and much serving up of sophistries to his conscience; but Drake's greeting had struck at his young independence, as perhaps it had been meant to do, and an impulsive wave of indignation overruled his calculations. He stood a little apprehensive, watching the older man, wondering how he would receive the defiance.

"That's talking," said Drake, with an approving smile. "Go on."

"Mr. Drake, I can't help feeling that we're going to look at things more and more from a different point of view. Doris cares for me--I suppose so--if she can have me without sacrificing anything. I don't express it very well, but I do feel at times that she's more interested in what she can make out of me than in me, and I don't know if I'll work out the way she wants; in fact, I'm not at all sure," he blurted out pugnaciously. "But I want to work out that way, and if I don't there'll come a smashup pretty soon."

"There's something in what you say," said Drake, nodding, "and I like your coming straight out with it. Now look here, my boy, I'm not going to take hold of you because I expect you to marry Doris, but because I want you to marry her! Get that down. I can control lots of things, but I can't control the women. They beat me every time. I'm pulp. I've given in once, though Lord knows I hope my little girl won't regret it. I've got one decayed foreign title dangling to the totem-pole, and that's enough; that's got to satisfy the missus. I don't want another and I don't want any high-stepping Fifth Avenue dude. I want a man, one of my own kind who can talk my language."

He arose, took a turn, and clapped him on the shoulder. "I want you. I settled that in my own mind long ago. Now I'm going to talk as plain to you. As you get on you'll look at people differently than you do. You'll see how much is due to accident, the parting of the ways, going to the left instead of to the right. Now I know Doris. I've watched her. She's got two sides to her; you appeal to the best. I know it. She knows it. She wouldn't marry you if you were a beggar--women are that way--but she'll stick to you loyal, as a regular, if she marries you; and you're not going to be a beggar."

"Yes, if I consent to close my eyes and let you build--"

"Now don't get huffy. I'm not going to tuck you under my wing," said Drake, grinning. "Furthermore, I wouldn't want you in the family if I didn't know you had stuff in you. Don't you think I want some one I can trust in this cut-throat game? Don't worry, if you're the right sort I can use you. Now quit thinking too much--let things work out. Doris is the kind that belongs at the top; she's bound to be a leader, and we're going to put her there, you and I. Now what do you want to do?"

"I want to stand on my own feet," said Tom, with a last resistance. "I want to see what I'm worth by myself."

"Wall Street, of course," said Drake, grinning again. "Well, why not? You'll learn quicker the things you've got to learn, even if it costs you more."

He flung down in a great armchair, and stared out at the raw recruit as though for an instant rolling back the years to his own beginnings.

"Tom, if you're going in," he said all at once, "go in with your eyes open and make up your mind soon what you want; but when you've made up your mind don't fool yourself. If you want to plod along safe and sane, you can do it just as well in Wall Street as anywhere else. But I reckon that's not what you're after." He chuckled at Bojo's confused acknowledgment of the patness of his surmise and continued:

"Well, then, recognize that what you're going into is war, nothing more nor less. You see, we're a curious people; we haven't had the chance to develop as others. And there's something instinctive about war; in a growing nation it lets off a lot of wild energy. Now there's a group of the big fellows here that ought to have had a chance at being field marshals or admirals, and because they haven't the chance they've developed a special little battlefield of their own to fight each other. And, say, the big fellows don't fool themselves--they know what they're doing! They're under no illusions. But there're a lot of big little men down there who go around hugging delusions to their hearts, who'll sack a railroad or lay siege to a corporation with the idea they're ordained to grab the other fellow's property. Now I don't fool myself: that's my strong point. I'm grabbing as fast as the other fellow, but I know the time's coming when they won't let us grab any more. I do it because I want to, because I love it and because we're founding aristocracies here as the Old World did a couple of centuries ago. Well, to come back to you. I'll see you start in a good firm--"

"I'd rather do it myself."

"As you wish. Got any money?"

"Fifty thousand dollars," said Tom, who then related his father's prediction.

"Ordinarily he's a good guesser," said Drake, laughing. "But we may put one over on him. There's a scheme I've been brewing over for a big combine in the woolen industry that may give him a pleasant surprise. Well, then, start in on your own feet, my boy. Learn all you can of men. Study them--browse around in figures, if you want, but everlastingly keep your eyes on men! It's the man and not the proposition that's gilt-edged or empty. You've got to learn how the other fellow thinks, what he'll do in a given situation, if you're going to think ahead of him, and that's the quality that counts. That's where I've got them guessing, every minute of the day; there isn't one of them can figure out now if I'm twenty millions to the good or ten behind."

"Why, Tom, there was a time when I was stone broke--by golly, even my creditors were broke, which is an awful thing; and everything depended on my getting the right backing on the proposition that saved me. Do you think any one of those sleuth-hounds were on? Not on your life. I was living at the biggest hotel, in the biggest suite, spilling money all over the city--on tick, of course. And, say, in the critical week, when I was dodging my own tailor, I sent the missus (she didn't know anything, either) up to Fifth Avenue to buy a $100,000 necklace. That settled it. The other fellows, the fellows whose brains wind up like clocks, couldn't figure it out. I got my backing."

"But supposing you hadn't," said Bojo involuntarily. He had been listening to this recital open-eyed like a child at a circus. "What would have happened?"

Drake laughed contentedly. "There you are. That's all the other fellow could figure on. Now don't imagine you can do what I did--you can't. I suppose there's no use telling you not to speculate, because you're going to, no matter what you think now. You will; because the young fellow who goes into Wall Street and doesn't think he's a genius in the first three months hasn't been born yet! But the first time it comes over you, throw only a third of your capital out of the window. Do you get me?"

"I won't do that," said Bojo resolutely.

"Go on. Do. You ought. It's cheap at that! I paid seven hundred thousand for the same information," said Drake, giving him his hand. He caught his shoulder in his powerful grip and added: "If you get in too much trouble, come to me! Remember that and good luck!"

CHAPTER VI

BOJO OBEYS HIS GENERAL MANAGER

Three months after his entry into Wall Street, Bojo emerged from his bedroom into the communal sitting-room in a state of tense excitement. The day before he had taken his first plunge into the world of speculation and bought a thousand shares of Indiana Smelter on a twenty per cent. margin. This transaction, which represented to his mind the inevitable challenge at the gates of fortune, had left him in a turmoil through all the restless night. He had taken the decision which was to decide his future only after a long wrestling with his conscience.

At first he had imposed a limit, promising himself that he would not touch a penny of his $50,000 capital until he should know of his own knowledge. Gradually this time limit had contracted. Speculation was in the air, triumphant and insidious. The whole market was sweeping up irresistibly. The times were dramatic. Golden opportunity seemed within every one's grasp. Expansion, development, amalgamation were on every tongue. Roscoe Marsh had made a hundred thousand on paper. Even Fred DeLancy had won several turns which had netted him handsome profits.

Bojo had resisted stubbornly at first, turning heedless ears to the excited arguments of his friends, but the fever of speculation had entered his veins, he dreamed of nothing else, and gradually the thought of his $50,000, so modestly invested in four per cent. bonds obsessed him. What was worse was that each time he had refused to follow a tip of Marsh or DeLancy or a dozen new-found friends, he secretly noted down the speculation; and the thought of these dollars he had refused, which could have been his for the asking, rose up before him in a constant reproach. In the end it was Doris who decided him.

That indefatigable schemer, whom even he now called the General Manager, had a dozen times summoned him for an excited consultation on some rumor which she had caught in passage. At first he had laughed her down, then he had stubbornly refused such an alliance. But Doris, undaunted, returned to the charge, amazing him at times with the pertinency of her information, which she picked up from the wives and daughters, from those who came as suitors, or as mere friends of the family, while just as industriously and cleverly she commandeered her acquaintance and sent Bojo a string of customers which had remarkably affected his progress in the brokerage offices of Hauk, Flaspoller and Forshay.

Finally he had yielded, because for weeks he had been longing to yield as a spectator tires of watching inactive the spectacle of the shifting golden combinations on the green cloth of the gambling table. She had information of the most explicit sort. A great combination of Middle Western Smelters had been held up for several weeks by the refusal of two great companies to enter at the price offered--Indiana Smelter and Rockland Foundry. She knew positively that the matter would be adjusted in the next fortnight.

"Did your father say so?" he asked, really impressed, for Drake was reported as directly interested.

"Not in the first place."

"But where did you get your information?"

"Oh, I have my ways," she said, delighted, "and I keep my secrets too. Just remember if you'd taken my advice what you'd have made."

"It is astounding how right you've been," he said doubtfully.

"Listen, Bojo, this is absolutely correct. I know it. I can't tell you now--I promised--but if I could you wouldn't have the slightest doubt. Can't you trust me just this once? Don't you know that I'm working for you? Oh, it's such an opportunity for us both. Listen, if you won't do it, buy five hundred shares for me with my own money. Oh, how can I convince you!"

He looked away thoughtfully; tempted, convinced, suspecting the source of her information, but wishing to remain ignorant.

"You are determined to buy?" She nodded energetically. "What does your father say?"

She seized his idea, saving him the embarrassment of a direct suggestion.

"If Dad says yes, will that convince you? Wait." She thought a moment, pacing up and down, humming brightly to herself. Suddenly she turned, her eyes sparkling with the delight of her own machinations. "I'll tell you how I'll do it. Next week's my birthday. I'll ask him to give me the tip as a birthday present." She clapped her hands gleefully, adding: "I'll tell him it's for my trousseau. If he says all right you won't refuse."

"No, I won't."

She flung herself joyfully into his arms at this victory won, at this prospect opened.

"Bojo, I do love you and I do want to do so much for you!" she cried, tightening her arms about his neck, with more genuine demonstration than she had shown in months.

"After all, I'd be a fool to refuse," he thought, excited too, and aloud he said, "Yes, Miss General Manager."

"Oh, call me anything you like if you'll only let me manage you!" she said, laughing. "Now sit down and let me tell you all I've planned out for you to do."

That night she told him excitedly over the telephone that her little scheme had succeeded, that her father had given his O. K., but of course no one must know. The next day he had bought five hundred shares for her, and after much hesitation a thousand for his own account at 104-1/2. It was a good risk; the stock had been stable for years; even if the combination did not go through, there was little danger of a rapid fall; and if it went up there was a chance at a thirty- or forty-point rise. He kept the injunction of secrecy, as all such injunctions are kept, to the point of telling only his closest friends, Marsh and DeLancy, who bought at once.

Nevertheless, no sooner had the transaction been completed than he had a sudden revulsion. He had been long enough in Wall Street to have heard a hundred tales of the methods of big manipulators. What if Dan Drake's endorsement was only a clever ruse to conceal his real intentions, quits for reimbursing Doris afterward with a check, according to a famous precedent? Perhaps he even suspected that he, Bojo, had put Doris up to it and was taking this method to read him the lesson that his methods were not to be solved along such lines. At any rate, Tom passed a very bad night, saying to himself that he had plunged ahead on the flimsiest sort of evidence and fully deserved a shearing.

A glorious December morning, with a touch of Indian summer, was pouring through the half-opened window, bearing the distant sounds of steam riveters. Marsh was busily culling half a dozen newspapers, while Fred was yawning over the eggs and coffee, when the mail was brought in by the grinning Oriental who had been dubbed Sweeney. DeLancy, who had the curiosity of a girl, pounced upon the letters, slinging half a dozen at Bojo with a grumbled comment.

"Dog ding him if he isn't more popular than me! Important business letters--Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller asking your advice--society invitations--do honor our humble palace, pink envelope, heavily scented. I say, Bojo, I've gone in deep on your precious stock, two hundred shares--all I could scrape together. Hope you guess right. Anything I hate is work, and 10 per cent. margin ought to be bolstered up by divine revelation."

"Wish the deuce you hadn't," said Bojo, sitting down and opening the formal announcement of his broker's purchase, which struck his eyes like a criminal warrant.

"Cheer up," said Marsh, emerging from the litter of papers. "I've got a tip from another angle, one of the lawyers involved. I'm going in for another couple of thousand shares. Why so glum, Bojo?"

"Wish I hadn't told you fellows."

"Rats; that's all in the game!" said Marsh, but DeLancy did not look so philosophical.

Bojo opened several invitations, a notice from the tailor to call for a fitting, two letters from clients, personal friends, and finally the pink envelope, which was from Doris.

Bojo dear:

Whatever you do don't tell a soul. Dad questioned me terrifically and I told a little fib. How many shares did you buy? Dad made me promise to buy only five hundred, but I know it's all right from the way he acted. Oh, Bojo, I hope you make lots and lots of money! Wouldn't Dad be surprised? He asked me to-night in the funny gruff way he puts on, 'How's that young man of yours getting on? Have they got his hide yet?' Won't it be a joke on him? By the way, I dined with the Morrisons (she's an old school chum of mine) and put in my clever little oar. Don't be surprised if some one else calls you up soon to place a little order. I'm working in another direction too. Don't fail to come up for tea.

With much love, DORIS.

P.S. The Tremaines are awfully influential. Be sure and go to their dance.

He placed the letter in his pocket thoughtfully, not entirely happy. It was a fair sample of a score of letters--enthusiasm, solicitude, ambition, and clever worldly advice, but lacking the one note that something in him craved despite all the purely mental satisfaction the prospect held for him.

DeLancy continuing to loiter, he went out, alone, obsessed with the thought of the opening of the market and the sound of the ticker, and caught the subway for Wall Street, preoccupied and serious.

It had been three months now since the day when he had first come downtown to take up service as a broker's runner, and much had changed within him during that time, much of which he himself was not aware. The first days he had been rather bewildered and resentful of the menial beginning. It did not seem quite a man's work--this messenger service, and the contemplation of those above him, the men at the sheets and the office clerks, inspired him with a distaste. Often he remembered his conversation with his father and talks with Granning, the matter-of-fact; comparing their outlook on the life with his associates much to the disadvantage of the curiously inconsequential throng of young men who, like himself, were willing to go scurrying in the rain and dark on servants' quests, in order to get a peek into the intricate mysteries of Wall Street that held sudden fortunes for those who could see.

He had come out of college with a love of manly qualities and the belief that it was a man's privilege to face difficult and laborious tasks, and the prevalent type among the beginners was not his type. Then, too, the magnitude of the Street overpowered him, the skyscrapers without tops dwarfed him, its jargon mystified him, as the colossal scale of the operations he saw seemed to rob him of the sense of his own individuality. But gradually, being possessed of shrewd native sense and persistence, he began to distinguish in the mob types and among the types figures that stood out in bold relief. He began to see those who would pass and those who would persist.

He began to meet the more rugged type, schooled in earlier tests, shrewd, cautious, and resolved, self-made men who had abrupt ways of speaking their thoughts, who frankly classed him with other fortunate youths and assured him that they were there by right, to take away from them what had been foolishly given and pay them back in experience. He took their chaffing in good humor, seeking their companionship and their points of view by preference, gradually disarming their criticism, secretly resolved that whatever might be the common fate at least he would not prove a foolish lamb for the shearing.

Steeled in this resolution, he began by setting his face against speculation, investing his money temporarily in irreproachable bonds, refusing to listen to all the tips, whispered or openly proffered, which assailed his ears from morning until night, until the day when he should know of his own knowledge of men and things. He worked hard, following Drake's advice, seeking information from men rather than from books, checking up what each told him by what the next man had to say of his last informant, mystified often by the glib psychology of finance, slowly rating men at their just value, no longer lending credulous ear to the frayed prophets of New Street or thrilling with the excitement of a thrice confidential tip.

He had advanced rapidly, but underneath all his delight there was an abiding suspicion that his progress had not been entirely due to his own glaring accomplishments, but that the name of Crocker, senior, his bank account, and the magic touch of Daniel Drake had been for much.