CHAPTER X
THE BOOMING OF THE WESTERN CROWN
DURING the next few days a veritable cyclone of insurance agents rooting for the Western Crown struck the peaceful city of Spokane and the surrounding inland empire. For Hayes had appointed the two Englishmen and the German as sub-agents. They commenced proceedings by insuring each other for hearty amounts, paying the premiums in notes and turning them over to the company, and mulcting Houghton senior of the cash equivalent of the commission due them in hard-hearted, merciless cash.
The elderly financier smiled his usual auriferous smile.
"Go to it, boys," he said. "Bring along the baggage-train and the munitions, the mounted infantry and the big howitzers. Descend into the lowlands, the low; and climb the highlands, the high. Open up fire under the white flag. Prove that you've learned something about up-to-date warfare, and spare neither women nor children. Open fire on this commonwealth and the smiling, rural landscape which surrounds it. Insure everybody—and God bless you!"
And, cheered up by relays of square meals, the four men responded nobly to the clarion call. They buttonholed strangers in the streets and forced applications and fountain pens into their hands. They approached Siwashes, lumberjacks, blondes, members of Chinese tongs. State Senators, second-story men. Holy Rollers, grocery clerks, free rural delivery letter carriers, and the president of the local B'nai Brith.
In payment of the premiums they took enthusiastically everything in the way of long-term, unsecured notes. They claimed high, low, jack, the joker, a grand slam, his nibs, and big casino, and cleared the board of all insurable people.
Houghton senior was torn between two emotions. For while every new insurance written cost him so and so much cash out of his own pocket for commissions to the agents, the stock of the company, well advertised in the local newspapers, went soaring sky-high. So he went about with the air of an undertaker, but of an optimistic undertaker, who had received authentic news from the United States Health Bureau that a horrible and killing epidemic is due to arrive on the next spring wind.
He had occasional conversations with Ritchie Macdonald, who freely admitted that he was very much interested in the worldly fortunes of the Western Crown, but who still seemed to be waiting for something before he declared himself.
"Yes, yes," he replied. "The company is certainly booming to beat the band; I'm damned glad of it, for your sake, since you own control"—Houghton paled, but cheered up as Macdonald continued—"and also for my own sake. For, you see, next April, promptly on the first, I shall take a more active interest in the affairs of the Western Crown. And now—will you pardon me if I go into executive session with myself?"
Which last meant that he was about to dictate half a dozen unnecessary and very lengthy letters to Emily Steeves, punctuating the dictation with hollow coughs for reasons of local colour, and speculating meanwhile if her grey eyes would light up when she was looking at the man she loved.
Houghton was considering. "By April of next year, promptly on the first," Macdonald had told him. He was wishing both devotedly and profanely that April would come a little sooner. For the commissions he had to pay to Hayes and the three sub-agents were rapidly growing in size.
He was afraid to call the agents off, as he knew that a decrease in the volume of business would cause the stock to slump. So Hayes, Traube, Hillyer, and Graham continued to write insurance. They wrote it as it had never been written before. Their campaign marked an epoch in the history of Northwestern life insurance.
One curious consequence was that it caused the two Englishmen first to take an interest in their work—since it brought easy and profitable returns—and secondly to take a certain amount of pride in the company for which they were working.
Let it be remembered that Graham was Eton, Oxford, and Army, while Hillyer was Harrow and Cambridge, and that they had thus gone through a classic course of education which taught them all about Cliquot, the Cloacaline Floods, and the Curse of Scotland, about Juvenal, Jingoism, and Jockeys, about Bacchus, Bridge-Whist, and Baconian Philosophy; but which on the other hand had achieved the ethical aim of the British pedagogical system by carefully un-training them for the vulgar pastime of the proletariat called Business.
Not even the fried-fish ancestry of Graham could counteract what Brazenose College and the mess-rooms had taught him, and it was the same with his cherub-faced retainer and compatriot, Hillyer.
They saw that the business of the Western Crown was increasing rapidly and that the stock was soaring. They did not realise that there was as much difference between unsecured, long-term notes and cash, as there was between a package of green-goods printed for the Arkansas R.F.D. routes and a certificate of U.S. Steel common stock.
"My word," Graham said one day, "I wish I had a slice of this Western Crown stock!"
"Rather! Not half! Regular bloomin' bonanza!" Hillyer agreed. "But what's the good of wishing? It's like asking a chap for change of a quid which he hasn't got and don't look ever like getting. Why—" he pointed at the local stock report of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, "the shares were up to four hundred and seventeen yesterday."
"If I only hadn't done my guv'nor so much in the past," Graham sighed, "I might—"
Hillyer looked up with a gleam of hope in his pale-blue eyes.
"I say, old chap. Let's try it; sort of a long shot, you know, but do let's try it. I'll write to my guv'nor and you write to yours. Let's do the Pater Peccavi act; sob stuff; violins and a harpsichord in the orchestra, and all that sort of thing. Turned over a new leaf, don't you know; see the error of our former ways and learned our bloomin' lesson here in America; goin' to stick to business in the future; what d'you say?"
"All right," Graham agreed. "Let's try. It'll only cost us a five-cent stamp."
So they wrote home.
Meanwhile Macdonald kept faithfully the promise he had given to himself. The club saw him only at lunch-time. He attended strictly to business, and, by dint of trying hard, he discovered in his cranium a brand-new, though slightly rusty set of business ability and diligence of whose existence he had not hitherto been aware. He did some shrewd trading in real estate and acquired a seat on the local mining-stock exchange, doing there so well and withal so honestly, that the members hailed him as a new prophet arisen in Israel.
Gradually he learned to love the prosaic serenity of the daily task that gives bread, whose main reward is not the money involved and made, but the perfect love of the work itself. Battling and working successfully for the future and the welfare of the girl whom he loved, he proved the inner worth of his soul, the tempered edge of his steel, the quality of his energy, the secret truth of his laughing pretences not only to himself, but also to others.
The girl frankly admired him. He had told her himself, that day in the barber shop, that he had less than a year to live; that, according to the doctor, he had already one foot in the grave. And yet, in spite of these dire prospects, he was always good-natured. He was kindness personified to her as well as to the two men in his employ.
She knew that he was comfortably well-off; yet he kept on working with a tremendous energy and pluck, doubly admirable in a man whose days were numbered. Only a few days back, though he had so little time to live and enjoy the fruits of his labour, he had taken over a large piece of residential property near Lincoln Park, paying a substantial amount in cash and the rest in mortgages; and now he was busily engaged in subdividing the property and selling it in building-lots.
She felt very, very sorry for him.
"Mr. Macdonald, isn't there anything in the wide world that'll save your life, prolong it?" she asked him one day impetuously, as he was looking over her shoulder at a letter which she was typing.
For a moment Macdonald felt ashamed of himself. Hang it all, the girl was worrying about him. He appeared to himself in the light of a super-cannibal, delighting in tender, red-lipped human emotions and pink-cheeked, girlish sorrow. He felt as utterly ashamed of himself as a professional witness for a traction company. But he managed to tone his voice to a blending of self pity and plucky nonchalance.
"No, Miss Emily, I'm afraid there's nothing I can do. Why? Do you care?" But immediately he was sorry for his last words, and he added: "I beg your pardon. That wasn't a fair question."
The girl had blushed scarlet, but she went on without flinching.
"Yes. I do care. Why don't you try a change of climate—Alaska, or the Arrow Lakes up in British Columbia; surely you're working too hard for a man who is—who is—"
"Don't trouble to pick out tactful or soothing words, Miss Emily," Macdonald interrupted. "You're sixty-seven varieties of a brick. You're a dear. As a stenographer you're like that perfect apple known to the vulgar as pippin.' And some day you'll be some good man's good wife. But don't bother about me. You see, I am dippy nuts on ducats. My ear is chromatically attuned to the harsh clash of the silver dollars, the delicate tinkle-tinkle of the double-eagles, the eerie rustling of the yellow-backs. I'm money-mad! That's why I am desecrating my last year on earth by biting big business men in the chest. That's why I am going tooth and nail after this new real estate venture of mine."
Just then the door opened, and Walsh and the count came into the room. They had changed during the last few weeks. It is true that the former still had the rolling, toes-to-the-front gait of the cattleman and the out-curve at the knees from the saddle grip, while the latter still sported a monocle and waxed his moustache with that aromatic mixture of oleomargarine and lamp-black which delights the female hearts of the Inner Boulevards. But gone were the shabby clothes, the hungry eyes, the general air of pathetic neglect.
They were broke no more.
Walsh was exuberant.
"Say, Mac," he shouted, "roping mavericks is sure swell training for a hustling American real estate man! I sold two of them Lincoln Park lots this morning."
But the count seemed dejected.
"What's the matter, Frenchie?" Macdonald inquired.
The Frenchman dropped into a chair.
"Alas!" he exclaimed. "I saw M. Kenny; I talked, I argued, I cajoled, I objurgated, but he will not buy that lot in Lincoln Park; he says he will not pay cash. He says that the word cash will always remain a stranger to the vocabulary of his business life! He says that perhaps he will trade—"
Walsh pointed a broad thumb at the count.
"Say, Mac," he said, "Frenchie can't help it. He ain't no good at this here real estate game."
"But I try! Mon Dieu, I try!" the Frenchman interjected.
"Sure you do," Walsh remarked soothingly. "But you don't try right. I tell you where you make yer mistake. Take that Kenny party what you saw to-day and what you tried to sell that corner lot to. You goes to him with a meek air, don't yer? As if you was a tax-collector or the lady with the manly voice who demonstrates gas-stoves.
"You know the sort I mean—'Once I useter belong to a A Number One Southern family, but since dad had to sell out all his fifteen thousand slaves and since my brother Jefferson Beauregard Polk took to coming home every night leading a cute little jag by the hand, I gotta work or starve, and so won't yer please buy one of them here stoves and wrap it up in wife's Christmas stockings? I needs the comish."
"I bet that's the line of mush you hand out, don't ye? Well, and of course the Kenny party gives yer a witherin' tornado look, and sits on you, and brands you with a hot iron, and kicks you lightly in the teeth, and tells you to go to hell and stay there and not to bother him again, and to try yer three-card-monte game on some softer gazatz fresh from the East. Ain't that so? Now let me tell you the real way to sell real estate."
Walsh cleared his throat preparatory to a lecture on real estate salesmanship, but Macdonald interrupted him.
He turned to the Frenchman.
"Did Pat Kenny say what sort of a trade he was willing to make?"
"Yes, yes," the other replied. "He said something about stock of the Western Crown." And he blushed guiltily as he mentioned the name of the concern which figured so prominently in Macdonald's suicide compact.
Macdonald laughed.
"All right," he said. "I guess I'll step round to Pat's office and interview him myself. I may do a little trading with him after all."
He left the room.
Walsh sat down across from Miss Steeves.
"Say, Miss Emily," he said, "ain't Mac the swell guy though?"
"Yes," she smiled; and then a pathetic little note crept into her voice. "But isn't it too bad that he's in such wretched health?"
Both the count and the cow-puncher looked up startled.
"Watd'yer mean bad health?" the latter exclaimed.
"Why—don't you know? Hasn't he told you?"
"No."
So she told them. They listened, aghast, dumfounded. A suspicion of the real reasons for Macdonald's stubborn resolve to carry out his part of the suicide compact crept into their understandings. And that night, as they were returning to the Hotel Eslick where they still lived in spite of the change in their fortunes, Walsh turned to his companion with an oath.
"Say!" he exclaimed, "I'll be everlastingly damned and pickled in sulphur and brimstone if that Mac ain't the whitest man in the State of Washington; white clean through to the marrows!"
And the Frenchman so far forgot himself and his usual soft beautiful English as to chime in with a slangy, but fervent:
"You bet your boots, Andy!"