Damascus was hit between the eyes by Burnett's big flop. He had been a sort of institution, a notable property in the town's assets. The town and the man now would be linked in the public thought like handcuffed prisoners, both equally disgraced, no matter for the entire innocence of one. The monetary loss was incidental, but their pride suffered a terrible jolt.
Several small banks in the range country which held Burnett's paper went out like popped peanut bags. In the midst of these financial funerals Judge Waters, president of the Damascus bank, walked about in his gander-like dignity, his lean figure and flabby vest not distended the thickness of a hair, for all the satisfaction that was in him and the public praise that attended his steps. Burnett never had been able to borrow a dollar at the Damascus bank; his paper found no market inside Judge Waters' door.
Out of regard for the disordered state of her soul, Dr. Hall avoided Mrs. Charles' table for his evening meal the day the big news broke. He was sorry for Mary, although the bold-tongued creature was undeserving of any sympathy, he knew. It would seem rather ungallant, he considered, to appear in the elation of justification before Mary, remembering her sharp words on the day he advised against the investment.
Hall took his medical case along to give the desertion a color of excuse, went to Pink Fergus' many-sided place of business and dined satisfactorily on fried chicken, which Pink cooked after the Indiana style, not surpassed in the culinary prescriptions of the earth.
Pink was full of gossip about the town's tragedy. She had not been caught, but Old Doc Ross had lost five hundred dollars. He had changed to his drinking clothes. When he was on a bender he didn't eat, she said. He had gone two weeks at a time and never shown his face inside her door for as much as a cup of coffee.
Pink reported Jim Justice rippin' and snortin', parading around with his old cap and ball gun buckled on, telling what he would do if Burnett ever showed his face above the rim of the earth again. Kraus had lost something, and was morose and glum; the lumberman had been pinched, and served him right, in Pink's opinion. She catalogued all the losers, with the amounts set opposite their names, with comment that would not have been a very soothing salve to the victims' pride if they had been by to hear. Pink had not been comforted by much charity in her life as she had gone her rocky way; she was giving as she had received.
She was sorry for the woman and two little children Burnett had left behind, as only a woman who has suffered humiliation and pain and shame at the hands of a man can feel for another left alone and unfended, shuddering naked in her misery before a sneering world. Hall never had seen Mrs. Burnett, not having been called in when the latest heir to this paternal disgrace arrived. Pink said she was a scared, pale, little woman, all eyes, with an old way about her, although she was very young. Burnett had finished the house he had left her in but a few weeks before. It was a conventional cattleman's house, with a cupola and turned posts in the porch, the date of its construction and the owner's name painted in white against the green roof, where it could be read from passing trains.
Hall did not have any more sympathy for the losers in general than Pink Fergus, sheltered under her bob-tailed iran-gray hair, with her row of artificial bangs, somewhat younger, pinned on in front. He was aloof from the turmoil and concern, an outsider who had come hopefully looking for his chance in that country west of Dodge, and had not found it. He was about confirmed in the belief that there was no chance for a man there, as the old-timers had said, except it might be a rogue's chance, such as Burnett had played.
Next morning the Kansas City papers arrived, giving the story of Burnett's downward plunge from his high importance. The amount he had managed to get away with was only speculative, the bankers having shut up tighter than canned beans. Detectives had followed the fugitive to Mexico, where he was insolent and defiant, there being no treaty between the two nations in those days covering his offense.
That same morning Pete Farley's car was set in on the siding at Damascus. Out of it a company of engineers descended and began surveying the site for a roundhouse and the long-promised shops. Compensation came to Damascus that way, close on the heels of its disaster.
Before the day was over other cars were set in: a steam shovel and a piledriver, with men to manipulate them. Justice had his hotel full of these new workmen, of a class strange to that town. The importance of Damascus had more than doubled overnight. It was equal to a rain and cool wind to the despondent spirits bent down by the plundering they had suffered at a respected citizen's hands.
Little Jack Ryan stopped at Hall's office that afternoon, carrying two switch lanterns in each hand, his corncob pipe in the slit nature had provided for that purpose. His big chin was blue with close-cut stubble, as it always appeared the first few hours after shaving. By the next day it would be darker; after that, quite black. Dr. Hall could tell within five hours of Jack's last shave by the color of his chin.
Jack put the lanterns down, sighing in his way of weary oppression, wiping his forehead as if he had been relieved of responsibility for at least that division of the railroad for a little while. There was a satisfied twinkle in his sorrowful eyes, a cheerful look in his face for a man who lately had stood a loss so heavy.
That was the first visit Jack had made to Dr. Hall's door since the news of Burnett's plundering had reached Damascus. Jack had dodged meeting the doctor, skulking around as if ashamed of his simplicity in being so easily misled. Whatever his feelings had been, he appeared to have overcome them. He was his confident, well-satisfied self again, proud of the oily job he had, although ready to disparage it and chant of its hardships at every chance.
"Well," said Jack, "the caark blowed out of 'er."
"Pretty much of an explosion, they say, Jack. But you don't look very sad for a ruined man."
"I guess I can pocket me loss and be wiser. It's not so hard on me as some of these poor fellys that has nothing, not the big-innin' of hardship compared to the loss Herself has to bear. The poor soul, puttin' her all into the blarneyin' felly's pot, and him savin' it up for the day he had planned to roon off with it like a dog with a bone. I have a praperty any day I'm ready to give up me job and go to it."
"Lucky man, Jack! Has somebody left you a farm?"
"Me woman, you know, she's Injen. She has land over in the Nation. It's good land, it has ile innunther it, the whole of it the gover'mint has set aside for them Creeks has ile innunther it. One of these days, when ile takes a stir and comes to be wort' money in place of bein' an ixpinse to dhrill it out as it is now, we'll go down and take our land."
"No wonder you're not worrying, you old millionaire!"
Jack was pleased at the compliment, as a poor person invariably is flattered by being rated above his means. There is something peculiarly pleasant to the average mind in these misapplications of financial ratings and designations of consequence. There are laymen who distend and grow warm around the gills when somebody mistakenly calls them doctor. A gas-meter reader has been known to set his hat at a different angle all the rest of his life after having been mistaken for a newspaper reporter.
"It was a knock that took me wind for a while," Jack confessed. "I've been a careful man, I've never put me arnins on the gamin' table. So along comes this man with the gift of gab on his tongue, pourin' his handful of glittherin' glass—I can't belave, for me soul, they were diamints any more—and careful old Jack's money is charmed out of his hand like a bird flyin' to a whussle. Well, a hoondred days is a hoondred dollars, as the old jerry said. I can make it up if I live long enough, barrin' the ile farm I'll retrate to when I'm old and stiff."
"Some of the lads in town are hard losers," Hall said. "Kraus is as blue as a mackerel, and Old Doc Ross has gone on a tear to pickle his sorrow."
"There was some n'ise comin' out of the boardin'-train, too," Jack said, without much sympathy for those who scoffed at his oily job. "She sounded like the keeners I used to hear when I was a b'y in Ireland, howlin' over the dead."
"She lost five thousand dollars, all her savings for years," Hall said, rebuking Jack for his unfeeling words.
"Sure," said Jack cheerfully; "sure she did. I got the accoutremints of it down to the other ind of the yaard. Of course, a woman would tear on about it where a man would hide his head in the ile-house out of shame for bein' so aisy. I'll own to you, Dochter, I was groanin' in me soul till the joke of it struck me. Then I put out me chist and laughed. I've been laughin' ever since the p'int of the blarneyin' felly's joke struck me brain."
"This town is notable for its jokers," Hall said, greatly interested in this view of Burnett's roguery, "but I'll bet a brass dollar you've got it over the funniest man in town if you can see the joke in that."
Jack filled his pipe with a viscid, black, repellent mess of tobacco that he took out of a paper pouch, cramming it down with his oily thumb, winking his eye knowingly, his head tilted a little, a grin on him in the relish of his own shrewdness and the p'int of the joke he was hiding, to be revealed in his own comfortable way.
"Ye'll remimber," said Jack, puffing hard to get her going, taking her up a link, as the railroaders say, after a little, proceeding at ease; "ye'll remimber the promise Burnett made to us, the thing that caught us be the tails and puhlled us in. That was, on the oath and honor of him, he'd turn every dollar we invisted along of him into two, come Christmas or before."
"I remember."
"Sure you do. He's done it; he's made good on his word. But little good it'll do me and the rest of them."
"How do you mean he's made good on his promise to double your money, Jack? I don't get the joke."
"No," said Jack, easily. "I've not come to it. You saw in the papers the man's gone to Mexico?"
"That's what they say."
"So he's made good on his promise to turn every dollar into two," Jack declared. "In Mexico every American dollar is wort' two of the kind they have in that place. So, you see, Burnett had it in mind all the time to do it. That was the joke the sly felly had up his sleeve to shake out on us like a mouse."
With the appreciation of a true humorist, Jack did not weaken his joke by enlargement or further comment. He gathered up his lanterns and went on his business, his rolling, comfortable waddle indicative of a mind at ease.
Hall looked after him with a respect and admiration he never had felt for the oily philosopher before. That was a heavy loss for Ryan, let him cover the hurt of it as he would under his prospect of coming into a kingdom of oil by and by. Ten years of hard savings, at least, were contributed to the making of Burnett's joke by the oily hand of Little Jack Ryan. If an appreciation of humor could save a man's spirits and prop up his courage in a crisis like that, then appreciation of humor ought to be made a course in every college in the land.
There was something more than humor behind Little Jack Ryan's twinkling eyes and sly grin. It was the result of a life out on the edge of things that the man had lived so long; a life where all things come hard, its tragedies sudden and appalling, its rewards so scant as to be in the main despised. Life itself was its own reward to a man who had spent so many of his years on the bare edges of the world. If he came through the day with that, rounded out the year with nothing more, he counted himself a winner, and was glad.
Ryan's interpretation of Burnett's big joke had gone out through some chink, and spread over town like a cupful of the lamp-tender's oil by evening. It was such a rare joke, in the opinion of Damascus, that the town appeared to take it as full compensation for the loss and humiliation it had felt so harshly before.
Jim Justice stopped at Hall's office to tell it, as something springing out of his own deep well of humor; the lumberman stopped him on his way to the livery barn, to give his version of it, and pass it along as a bit of sardonic comedy that had sprouted between the crevices of his close-planked business mind.
Kraus was looking brighter than Hall ever had seen him. He came weaving up in his bearish gait while Hall was saddling his horse to give it a little exercising jaunt, pulling his long yellow face apart in a grin. He repeated the joke in his way, with his unavoidable vulgarisms, taking credit for it as originating out of his own cogitations and profound horse sense.
As Hall rode through town, heading into the sunset, groups of lesser humorists whose standing in the community was not sufficient to give them any credence for originality, were smoking their after-supper pipes and having their laugh over this funniest thing that ever happened in that famously funny town. These waved friendly greetings as Hall trotted by. The women and children had caught the point of the tremendous joke; trills of laughter sounded from groups of them as they stood talking over fences, many of them looking up to flip little greetings as the railroad doctor rode by, his horse's feet plopping up little spurts of dust.
Hall rode on, passing the gray sod house with its blinded windows, a gust of sadness, a pang of loneliness, bending down his spirits like snow upon a bough. He stopped at the crest of a hill, miles beyond Damascus, when dusk was deepening. The sun had gone down in clouds; there was a range of them, standing across the background of that shadowy, gray land, the rosy afterglow on their summits, cold, deep canyons on their nearer side, where lightning leaped, so far away across the sweep of unobstructed plain their thunder was not even a murmur in the silence of sinking day.
Back there the town lights were twinkling from the windows. There were so many more of them, he reflected, than when he came to the country west of Dodge only a little while ago. It seemed as if the seed of light must have been blown up by the southwest wind, and sown on the naked prairie. Those people had been building in their confidence of the town's future since the county seat was made secure. A framework would rise one day, a family would be sheltered there the next.
They were laughing away their losses down there in town this evening, an excellent way to adjust them if people had the heart. It had something admirable about it; they must have heroic qualities which he had not seen beneath their commonplace. He had not given them credit for so much originality, or such a peculiar courage.
It had seemed more comfortable to him passing through town that evening than ever before. In the past he had gone about with a certain degree of constraint, self-consciousness, in spite of his sublime egotism. He always had been attended by the feeling that they were laughing at him, holding him to be a kind of exclusive fool. Had he been wrong? Or had they come down to this public confession that they were just about as big fools as anybody, and admitted him unreservedly to their fellowship by the act? It was inexplicable, but he had felt a friendliness surrounding him, following him, that evening that had made him feel at home for the first time in Damascus.
Strange, he reflected, as he rode slowly back to town, a cool wind from the mountain-range of clouds attending him like one of his new-found friends. Could it be that he had made his place there, that his chance was opening before him in the country west of Dodge?