TIME moves rapidly and changes many conceptions—even in so small a place as Springham. Before two months had passed Bert was aware that he had suffered no personal tragedy because his friends could not make a lounging place of his father's store. The business did not hold the romantic possibilities of a grocery shop or a bakery. It could offer neither crackers nor pickles, cake nor cheese. The men's furnishing trade was bleak and barren to youngand glowing imaginations. It was devoid of savory odors and barren to perpetually empty stomachs. There was something monotonous and prosaic, after the first novelty had worn off, in collars, and socks, and garters. Dolf and Bill soon lost interest, and he did not have to hold them off from coming to the place. Thus was his pride salved and saved.
He had vowed, with impetuous anger, that he would have nothing more to do with the store—but that, too, was subject to revision. The store had not disowned him. Now and then people would buy while on their way to the trains, and ask to have the packages sent home. His father called upon him to make these deliveries. He felt awkward and cheap carrying small parcels through the streets.
"I don't see why we can't have an automobile delivery wagon," he grumbled.
"I can't afford it," his father explained. "I must watch pennies. There's enough worry to putting a business on its feet without adding the worry of paying for a car."
The boy was glum. "It takes a long time to walk around with packages."
"How about your bicycle? Say, Bert, why didn't we think of this before? I'll have a carrying tray fitted to the frame. That will help a lot."
Bert was sorry he had spoken. The bicycle had been his very own. Now the tray, to his mind, heralded it as no longer his, but part of a business that was advertising its cheapness. And then he saw the old town cobbler pedaling a bicycle and delivering his jobs, the shoes tied together by their laces and hanging over his shoulders. He took the tray from the bicycle.
"What's the matter?" his father demanded. "Are you ashamed to carry goods for me? You never come near the store unless I ask you to."
His father had noticed—at last. Contentment spread genially through Bert's veins. So he had made his father miss his presence. He felt that he had scored a triumph. His sky brightened. In the satisfaction of the moment he put the carrier back on the bicycle and whistled as he tightened the nuts.
His father went back into the house. "I guess I was a bit rough on him," he said uncomfortably, "but he has been avoiding the place."
Mrs. Quinby's mind dwelt, for an instant, on the evening Bert had been told to stop fooling around the store. She had tried to smooth out the situation then; she said nothing about it now. Instead:
"Why don't you try paying him a dollar a week for making his deliveries?" she asked.
Mr. Quinby turned quickly. "Pay my own son for—"
Her hand fell with soft pressure on his arm. "Not in that spirit—just to make him feel that he has an interest in the business, that he's part of it. When I was a girl dad always gave the boys so much a month for their chores. He said it was part of the farm profits that they had earned. It gave them a feeling that the farm was theirs. Perhaps that is the reason why, with so many country boys going to the city, they have stuck to the old place and made it pay."
"Well," Mr. Quinby said doubtfully, "we'll try it—though there won't be any profits to speak of along Washington Avenue for a while."
Next morning Bert learned of the arrangement. He had a shrewd idea that his mother had had a hand in it; but this thought was swallowed up in the contemplation of one whole dollar a week. Under the inspiration of this good news, his interest in the store was suddenly and rapturously quickened. He saw himself, after a time, receiving two dollars a week, then five dollars, then ten dollars. He built castles in the air with all the reckless ardor of an imaginative boy.
But he learned, before another week was out, that it was one thing to plan a reawakening of interest, and another thing to live it. By the time his first dollar had been earned and paid, the store had again become an uninspiring and dry exhibit of ties on their racks, shirts under polished glass cases, and collars in neatly stacked wooden boxes. The day the dummy had been knocked over something spontaneous had gone from him and could not be called back. He had grown accustomed to being out of the place, and the old charm of family possession could not be revived.
And he had grown accustomed to spending his evenings with Dolf and Bill, and no longer missed his father. Nights when there was nothing to deliver he and his friends would roam the town, speaking boastfully of the things that they would do when they were men, keeping to the dark or the lighted streets as the spirit moved them. Sometimes they went out to Camel-back Hill and saw the construction gangs, the pick and shovel men, rushing the work of laying the network of tracks that would form the spider web of a railroad junction yard. Under the white glare and the black shadows of the are lights, the workmen seemed gigantic and unreal. Work cars, behind puffing engines, rolled up and down the grade, and brakemen, waving their lanterns, lightly swung on and off while the wheels were in motion.
"I'll bet we could do that," Bert said suddenly.
Dolf was doubtful. "Getting on might not be so hard, but how about swinging off?"
"The engine always slows down before it gets to the top of the hill. It scarcely crawls. That's the time to swing off."
Bill Harrison cocked his head to one side and surveyed the scene. "I'm going to try that some night," he drawled.
They knew that he was fooling. And yet, as the days passed, they began to speak about it, conjuring up the sensation of swinging aboard, feeling the air sweep past them as they clung to the step and the hand rods, imagining themselves dropping off with the ease of the trainmen. The risk began to wear the garb of enticing adventure.
Snow came about this time, sixteen inches of it in one fall. The spreading railroad yard was buried under a soggy blanket, and the boys ceased to go there and ceased to talk about the prospect of riding the cars. The weather left little to do, and Bert turned to his school books. In truth, they had been neglected of late and the monthly report he brought home that same week ran mostly to 70's and 75's. His father studied it and was frankly displeased.
"This is bad," he said without preamble.
The boy thought that the wisest course was to say nothing.
"You had been getting around go in everything. Now you're just missing the line of failure. What's the trouble?"
Bert saw that he would have to make a defense. "Well, you used to help. . . ."
"That's a poor excuse," his father interrupted. "It's a sign of weakness. If I were the richest man in the world I could buy you houses, motor cars, yachts, jewelry, clothes, the watchful care of servants, but there would be one thing my money could not get you—knowledge. You've got to dig that out for yourself. Don't tell me you failed because I did not help you. You haven't been studying. Isn't that right?"
"I. . . . Yes," said the boy. He had suddenly decided to tell the truth about studying, anyway. Yet he felt that there was another angle over which he had had no control. If the evenings around the reading lamp had continued. . . .
"Why couldn't Bert bring his books to the store now and then?" his mother asked.
He flashed her a glance and knew, instinctively, that she understood.
"No reason in the world why he can't," said his father.
Yet other interests called—Bill Harrison was erecting a wireless—and four nights passed before he took some of his books down to Washington Avenue. His father, intently reading a trade paper, lifted absorbed eyes as the door opened, nodded a greeting as he saw who entered, and promptly went back to the printed page. Bert waited. By and by a customer came in, and on his heels a second. They held his father in conversation until almost nine o'clock. After that Mr. Quinby busied himself with checking up the day's sales.
Bert walked down to the door and stood there staring out moodily at the street. Across the way a light was burning in Old Man Clud's office, and a huge figure was blackly outlined on the drawn shade. But Bert was not thinking of the lender of money. His father had forgotten the nature of his errand. He might have reasoned that his father's mind had been centered on something else; it would have been simple to have called his attention to the lapse. Instead, with a sort of hurt obstinacy common to boys, Bert elected to remain silent and to view himself as one who had been wronged.
"Time to close up," said his father's voice.
They walked home together. The man was still held by some sober problem of his business and did not notice his son's silence. In the house Mrs. Quinby asked in a low voice:
"Did your father find time to help you?"
Bert gave her a glance and went up to his room.
He still held to his impression of martyrdom. Half undressed, he suddenly paused and got out his books, stubbornly resolved to fight his way without help. "I'll show them," he vowed, and plunged into the work. It gave him a sort of perverse satisfaction, a sorrow for himself, to think that he had to labor thus. It was long after eleven o'clock when he finished and went to bed.
That night's work gave him a sense of independence that was new and intoxicating. The winter was on in earnest, there was cold comfort in roaming the streets, and he turned to his own room as a haven. He deserted the family quarters downstairs. With the door closed the place was his castle and he was its king, even though its possessions of bed, chair, dresser, table and wall pictures were scarcely regal. Here he studied alone. The four walls took on a glamour and a personality he had never noticed before and began to reflect his moods and his humors. If he were gay, the place seemed to enclose happiness. Were he morose, the room grew gray. He reveled in its isolation and its impregnability.
From the start he had saved most of his dollar a week. The time came when he walked into the Springham Savings Bank and opened an account, duly impressed by the importance of the moment. It was characteristic that he should display the bank book to Dolf and to Bill, but should show it to nobody at home.
The day he made his second deposit, Old Man Clud was just ahead of him in the line that ran to the receiving teller's window. The lender's overcoat was buttoned about him, he seemed cold, and yet an almost imperceptible dew of perspiration was faintly beaded on his fat cheeks. He handed in his pass book, and Bert saw the bills on top of it were many. The man's eyes never left the money while the teller counted it. Afterwards he walked as far as the bank lobby, paused, and drew a red memorandum book from his pocket. Into this he copied something from his bank record. It was as though he did not entirely trust the bank, but must have some private reckoning of his own. He was slipping the bank book into a pocket when Bert came along on his way to the street.
"Good afternoon, my young friend," Old Man Clud wheezed. "I see you are following the path of wisdom. The man with money ahead can snap his fingers at the world. He does not go to his bed at night worrying about what will happen in the morning. You may have heard people call me a miser?" Old Man Clud's glance was shrewd.
Bert shook his head. "No, sir."
The man laughed a silent laugh that shook his rolls of soft flesh. "You'll hear it in time. I've noticed that those who call me names are usually the first to come around and whine for loans. The thrifty man is always held up to ridicule, but I have noticed that he has bread in his cupboard when others go hungry. Think of that every time you put away a dollar. And how is your good father's business progressing?"
"All right, sir."
"I rejoice to see industry win its reward. Work brings money; money brings security; security brings respect. People may not want to give you their respect, but they have to. You hold the whip hand. And may I ask how long you have been saving money?"
"Since my father began to pay me for delivering orders."
"Wise youth. He starts to save money the moment he begins to earn. You will go far. I said it the day I spoke to you in front of your father's store. I say it again. Believe me, my young friend, it is a wise course to pay proper respect to a dollar. Good day to you," and the money lender waddled away, all wrapped up in his greatcoat.
Bert was subtly flattered by the attention that had been paid him. Old Man Clud was a rich man—that, to the boy's idea, was established by the greenbacks that had gone through the teller's window. To be treated on terms of equality by a rich man was an experience not calculated to make a boy think any the less of himself. Bert began to picture his fortune growing until in time it would compare favorably with the hoard of the lender. Nevertheless he was not above a boy's penchant for the odds and ends of attractive bargains. When he heard that a school companion had an accordion that could be bought for seventy-five cents, he set out to find the treasure, and viewed it with envious eyes. His fingers itched to hold it and play along its keys. In the end he bought it and took it home, and carried it up to his room. There, with the door closed and locked, he sat with a chair tilted back against the wall and surrendered himself blissfully to the instrument, and made the night hideous with tortured sounds.
By springtime he was able to play the accordion passably well. Then, as abruptly as it had ensnared his interest, its charm was gone. The nights were once more warm, and he, and Dolf, and Bill Harrison resumed their walks and turned their steps toward the railroad yard. It had grown tremendously in size over the winter. Long strings of freight cars ran up to, and down from, Camel-back Hill, and brakemen's lanterns made mysterious signals in the darkness.
"I said last fall that I'd have a go at those trains," Bill drawled. "I've been thinking it over. The last step of the last car is the place to make your try. If you miss there's no car behind to give you fits."
Dolf moved away a step. "Let's get back to town."
"Lets try it," Bill said suddenly. The lazy drawl was gone from his voice.
The challenge sent a thrill along Bert's spine. His blood quickened, and even the hesitating Dolf was stirred. Yet they both held back, eager to try the adventure, lured by the element of danger, daunted by the unaccustomed risk.
"Who'll do it second if I do it first?" Bill demanded.
The challenge could not be ignored. "I will," Bert said recklessly.
Dolf felt that they were looking at him and weighing his courage. His heart sank. "I will, too," he said, and wondered if they guessed how much he was afraid.
The headlight of an advancing locomotive sent silver ribbons of light ahead of it along the steel rails.
"Here comes my chariot," said Bill. He stepped out across the intervening tracks. They saw the engine pass him, saw his body lost in the darker background of the trains, saw the last car of the string approach—and then saw a form swaying on the step and holding to the handrails as the car went past.
"He did it," cried Dolf.
The hazard had been conquered and made to seem easy. Their fears were swept away and they were eager to do the trick themselves, to stand squarely on accomplishment with their companion. Impatiently they waited for another train and for Bill. Bill came first, looming up out of the dark with quick strides.
"Shucks!" he said; "that was easy. You just catch the hand rods, reach for the step with your foot and swing up with the motion of the train. It's no trouble getting off at the top—the train almost comes to a stop. You're next, Bert. I'll ride up with you."
"There's only one last step," said Bert.
"I'm an experienced rider," Bill said whimsically. "I'll grab one of the middle cars. You get the car after me, Bert, and give Dolf the end. Here comes another chariot. We're off. No bumping into each other."
Bert was conscious of Bill above him and Dolf below. The clatter of the train appalled him of a sudden; the speed was greater than he had expected. Yet, as Bill began to run with the train, he ran, too. Acar end overtook him. His hands found their grips. His foot got the step. For one dizzy instant he hung suspended; then he was up, hanging on with a desperate clutch, conscious that he was bumping and swaying, in danger of falling off, and conscious also of the intoxicating sweep of night wind across his face.
He got a firmer grip, a firmer foothold. His heart had ceased to thump. He looked ahead and saw Bill riding on his perch. Behind, Dolf was hanging on and his coat was flapping. They had all made it. Bert gave a shout of exultation and rode up Camel-back like a voyager come to his own.
Bill had told them the truth—at the top the train's speed was down to a crawl. They dropped off and gathered in an eager group. Bert was the first to speak.
"That's what I call sport." His voice shook with excitement. "Are we going to do it again to-morrow night?"
"I am," said Bill. "Some day when I'm president of this railroad you fellows can write a book about how I got my start hanging on to freight cars up Camel-back Hill."
"We want to be quiet about this," Dolf cautioned. "If my father knew about this he'd hammer the tar out of me."
Bill grinned. "I guess I'd get dusted off a bit myself. Make it half-past seven to-morrow night."
They came down the hill and across the tracks. At the yard limits a bulky form blocked their path. Bert caught a faint gleam of brass buttons.
"What you fellows been up to?" demanded a voice of authority.
They had run foul of Patrolman Glynn of the Springham police. Dolf tried to melt into the night and get away, but the same stern voice bid him halt. A flashlight snapped and shot forth a shaft of radiance. The gleam went across their hands, stained with the rust that gathers on iron and steel left exposed to the weather—hand rods, for instance.
"Hooking train rides," said the policeman. They made no denial. The light moved to their faces. They knew that he was identifying them; marking them for future notice. Bert shivered with the dread of possible arrest.
"What's the matter with you kids?" Policeman Glynn demanded. "Lost your senses? Want to get shipped to the undertaker's? Let me catch you down here again and I'll run you in."
So he wasn't going to arrest them, at any rate. Bert swallowed the lump that had tightened his throat and edged away. The light snapped out. He took to his heels and heard the patter of Bill's and Dolf's feet in his rear.
Not until they were safely back in town did they check their pace. For a block or two they walked in silence.
"I guess that ends our rides," Dolf said at last.
"I guess it doesn't," Bill Harrison retorted.
"But he said he'd lock us. . . ."
"Sure; if he catches us. How about going into the yard at a different place and coming out at that place? Shucks, he can't be everywhere at once, can he? He's got only two feet. We don't want to stop just when we've learned how to do this, do we? We'll go down there to-morrow night, and if everything is all right we'll have some more fun."
"Suits me," said Bert, fortified by Bill's logic; and Dolf, after a moment of hesitation, threw in his lot with the others.
Somehow, in the light of another day, Bert found that his faith in Bill Harrison's reasoning was not so strong. Policeman Glynn's brass buttons had an ally known as "The Law." Bert's knowledge of this partnership was vague; but he knew that the law had a long, mysterious, far-reaching arm that nipped evildoers and lodged them in prison cells. He remembered hearing his father say that the law never slept. The more he pondered this the more disturbed he became. He had plenty of time to ponder for this was the day for his mother to entertain the Woman's Improvement Association, and he was glued to the porch with the uncertainty of how much of the layer cake Mrs. Busher might leave uneaten. Even apprehension could not disturb his healthy appetite.
Gladly, now, would he have postponed the night's adventure until sure that Policeman Glynn had ceased to keep a watchful eye on the railroad yards. Yet, in his boyish pride, he would have suffered martyrdom rather than admit that he feared to run the risk. The day shortened; the women left the house. Moodily, after they were gone, he ate almond cake and swallowed lemonade.
"Bert," his mother asked, as the third slice disappeared, "where do you put it all? You'll be so stuffed that you'll have to swallow your supper with the aid of a shoehorn."
Nevertheless, he did ample justice to the evening meal. After his father had gone back to the store he climbed the stairs to his room, took down the accordion, and played it aimlessly with one ear cocked to catch the chime of the parlor clock downstairs. Presently the gong sounded half-past seven, and he put the accordion away.
"I'm going out, Mom," he called.
"Be in by nine," his mother called from the kitchen.
"Yes'm." Out on the porch he adjusted his cap; his hands were cold. And then he saw his father coming hurriedly down the street. One look at his father's face and he was seized with forebodings.
"Where are you going?" Mr. Quinby demanded.
"Out," Bert answered vaguely.
"Out where?"
"With the fellows."
"With the same fellows, I guess, that Officer Glynn saw you with last night. Were you going to the railroad yards? I thought so. Well, you're going in and you're going to stay there." His voice suddenly changed. "Have you gone crazy? Do you want to get killed? Are you trying to worry your mother and me to death?"
Bert squeezed his way back through the door and made for the sanctuary of his room. Downstairs he heard the pitch of his father's voice, his mother's one cry of alarm, and his father's exasperated: "I don't know what's got into the boy. He was never like this before. I ought to flog it out of him." What his mother said in reply to this he could not catch. After an interval his father's step sounded in the lower hall. He held his breath. But the step went on to the porch, creaked on the wooden steps, and died in the distance of the street. So intently did he listen that he did not catch a lighter step behind him. His mother's voice startled him.
"Why did you do it, Bert? Didn't you know the danger?"
He tried to explain how easy it had been, but the look on his mother's face halted him.
"If it is so easy, Bert, why are so many railroad brakemen killed? Didn't you stop to realize how much this might worry us? Why did you do it?"
"I guess we just wanted to have some fun."
"Fun! Bert! Did you think it would be fun for us if anything happened to you?"
Her voice stabbed him with a realization of the folly of his escapade. "I . . . I won't do it again," he said huskily. "Honest, Mom; I won't, I won't even go down to the yards."
He was a chastened boy when his mother left him. Outdoors a gentle spring rain had begun to fall, and he sat at the window and listened to its soft drumming on the porch roof. Almost imperceptibly, a melancholy mood settled over him. He reached for the accordion again, and from its stops drew forth a succession of weird and mournful notes.
A long time he played these aimless whimperings, and then the patter of the rain was drowned by a harsher sound. Somebody was running along the street. A sense of intuition told him that this was a call for him. Before he could reach the stairs his mother, with a catch in her voice, was calling up to him:
"Bert! Bert!"
He took the stairs by twos and by threes. Dolf, his clothing glistening with rain, stood in the hall. He was shivering and his hat quivered in his hands. Suddenly he began to cry.
"Run over, run over," he sobbed. "I was right there and I couldn't do a thing for him. Right over one leg. He lay there alongside the track and didn't say a word."
Twice Bert's lips moved before words came. "How did it happen?"
"The rain. The step was slippery. He was just pulling himself up when . . . when he fell. Then I began to shout, and railroad men came, and they picked him up."
"Where is he now?" Mrs. Quinby asked. She was holding a handkerchief to her mouth, and shaking her head, and murmuring broken words.
"They sent for Dr. Elman, and when the doctor came Bill was put on a flat car, and the doctor got up with him, and then they started for the hospital in the city."
Run over! Those two words kept pounding through Bert's stunned mind. Maybe Bill might die. He knew that Dolf was going, still crying, still shivering, and that his mother had put his raincoat about the wet, miserable boy. But these things made little impressions upon him. Run over! His shocked mind tried to straighten out the confusion of a horrified thought. Then his mother, having piloted Dolf on his way, came back from the door.
"You see it now, Bert?" she asked.
He could only nod.
"Who first suggested this train riding?"
His face went white. "I don't know."
But he did know. He had been the first to suggest the possibility. When he got to his room he threw himself across the bed, and gripped the coverlet with his hands, and stared, wide-eyed, across the room. Bill Harrison with one leg, hobbling through life on a crutch.
"Just like Peg Scudder," Bert whispered hoarsely; "just like Peg Scudder."