IV
HALKET AND COMPANY
Floyd climbed to a point on the hillside above the last row of houses, and then turned to look down on what was to be the scene of his labors.
It was a hot July day, and as the climb had started the perspiration, he took off his hat and wiped his forehead, not reluctant to defer for a moment the view. Behind him rose a bare slope, with only a few weeds growing out of the gullied and stony soil; below him, its streets slanting up and along the hillside, was the town of New Rome. From the height Floyd looked over the tops of the houses, down upon his grandfather's mills, the steel works of Halket and Company, the enterprise that had built and made New Rome.
"What a huge great smirch it is!" he murmured.
The "works" filled the arc of a mile curve made by the Yolin River, of which Floyd could see only a narrow yellow strip. The mills, mostly corrugated iron sheds, with red sides and black, sloping roofs, and the machine-shops and mill offices, buildings of yellow fire-brick, were pitched together, lengthwise, sidewise; railroad tracks, congested with freight cars, subtended the river arc and formed the inner boundary; other tracks wove in among the mills. In the centre of all was the greatest of the open-hearth furnaces—a huge shed, bearing twenty-two high black chimneys, from each of which a purulent yellow smoke was issuing. Hundreds of chimneys, varying in height and size, broke and confused the vision; some of them stood silent and breathless, but from many smoke was pouring, smoke of all colors as it took the rays of the sun, smoke of but one dull gray as it spread and merged above the chimney line. At the farther end towered the stacks of the blast furnaces, dull red monsters with bloated bodies tapering up to sloping shoulders and narrow throats; even while Floyd looked towards them a car ascended spider-like the webby strands of the incline, pitched forward, and vomited its load of ore into the funnel. Then it slid down again deftly, complacently, scuttling with an apparent human intelligence for another load. Here and there through openings in the sheds appeared the dull cruel glow of red-hot iron; and from a tower that capped the sloping roof of one of the mills blazed an intermittent flame. The clash of great hammers, the shriek of the blast, the throb of mighty engines, the rattle of huge chains, the trundling and jarring of locomotives and cars mingled in discordant, varying, but always continuous clamor.
Under the canopy of smoke that spread high above the mills, the opposite shore of the river revealed itself—hilly as this, but thinly settled and descending almost bare to the water's edge. On the ridge there were a few scattering trees; and an occasional frame house enjoyed a prominence to which neither its size nor its architecture would have entitled it. These houses were the outlying edge of the city of Avalon, eight miles down the river, a city of workshops and forges, indicated by the smoky blur that limited the view' in that direction. Below the works a bridge crossed the river, and Floyd saw a trolley car passing slowly over it.
For all that was squalid and grimy in the aspect of the place, there was little that was human; and this fact commanded in Floyd a kind of awe. The reverberating noises of the mills, the scream of steam, the slow, perpetual unfurling of smoke, the trundling cars of stone and ore without visible hand to guide or control, the swinging of huge cranes and beams,—and then in comparison the tininess, the unimportance of the scattering human forms passing in the mill-yards, made it seem as if mighty forces had been put in operation and then abandoned to their fate.
No less dehumanized was the town. Lying on the hill-side, it was empty and lifeless. A few children played in the streets, a few women toiled here and there up the hill; but apathy, as if initiative had been crushed by the nearness to elemental and tremendous forces, lay oyer New Rome.
Yet even as this singular desolation was impressing itself on Floyd, something happened close at hand suggesting that there was life here, and that it was not always in shadow. From the door of the green frame house just below him—the last house up the hill—a girl issued singing; her head was uncovered, and Floyd's attention was fixed by her gorgeous hair. It was brilliantly, radiantly red; in the whole panorama of the view there had been before not one beautiful detail to emerge from the overpowering black ugliness; yet now, suddenly, there had appeared this, which caught at once Floyd's admiring eyes.
He stood quite near, but the girl, coming out with definite purpose, did not see him; she stopped beside the blackened young peach-tree in the front yard and looked up. Floyd, following her eyes, observed that they rested on one large peach—the only one that the tree bore. Her face showed a childish desire and an equally childish hesitation; she put up her hand and rose on tip-toe, but though she stretched her arm and stood for a moment quivering, the peach was just beyond her grasp. She dropped back with an air of petulance; then bending over, she hunted on the ground for a stick, and finding one, took aim and hurled it, with an awkward push-motion, at which Floyd was amused. The branch shook and the peach jumped, but that was all. She looked round in despair, and saw Floyd; then, with a very stiff show of indifference, she began to saunter about the tree, as if she expected to find something lying on the ground, but had no particular interest in the search.
Floyd came near and leaned upon the fence. "Would you like to have that peach?" he asked. "I think I could get it."
She turned and looked at him with disconcerting composure. She had a good white complexion, a little freckled, large blue eyes, and a perfectly able mouth.
"Oh, thank you, I don't really care about it," she said. Then, as if to show that she was not quite lacking in appreciation, she smiled. And with the smile her expression of self-sufficiency disappeared, and was succeeded by one of shyness and dependence. Floyd raised his hat and started away.
"Do you suppose," she called after him, in a hesitating voice, "you could tell me if it was really ripe?"
He turned and she was smiling at him, with a more open friendliness. He entered the yard and stretched his hand up for the peach, but with the tips of his fingers he could barely touch it. "Usually a ripe peach drops when you shake the branch," he said. "This is so black you can't tell by looking at it."
"Yes," she answered, "things get awfully smoky up here."
He caught the branch and drew it down.
"I should call it pretty ripe," he said. "It might be better in a day or two. It's a fine big one."
She seemed in doubt, while he waited for the word to pluck it or to let go.
"I wanted it for my mother," she explained. "This is her birthday. It's the only peach there's been on the tree this year,—it's been a bad peach year, you know,—and then anyway things don't grow very well here. I'd been watching it and thinking it might be just about right for her birthday."
"Here," said Floyd, "feel it for yourself."
He dragged the branch down a little more, and standing on tip-toe she made her investigations.
"Oh," she said; "it's pretty soft. And I think mother would like it just because it's her birthday."
She broke the stem. "It will look better when it's washed. I wish I could give you half of it for helping me,—but—"
"Indeed I would n't spoil a birthday present," he answered.
"Thank you," she said; and with a nod and another demure little smile she went into the house.
Floyd loitered a moment by the fence; the sign in an upper window, "Room to Let," had caught his attention. He glanced, too, about the trim yard; the peach-tree was in the corner; in front of the door was a bed of petunias, sweetwilliams, and verbenas; at the side of the house was a small trellis covered with grapevines, and more grape-vines screened the porch. He detected now a feminine touch in the aspect of the place that gave him a pang of compassion and sympathy. What discouragement must have met all their painstaking little efforts to give it some prettiness and charm! He glanced at his hand; grasping the branch of the peach-tree had blackened it.
In the large office building at the foot of the hill and directly opposite the bridge which led over the railroad tracks into the works, Floyd found the superintendent, Mr. Gregg, a grave, deliberate man, big of body, with a massive head and an iron-gray beard, parted in the middle and combed out into two prongs. His face lighted up when he greeted Floyd, but afterwards relapsed into its usual serious gravity; the cares of his position were evidently never far from his mind. Something of Gregg's record Floyd knew; it was that of one who had entered the works as a boy, and by faithfulness, industry, and ability attained this important place.
"You're coming in with us, your grandfather tells me," he said to Floyd. "Have you any ideas about where you would like to begin?"
"None," said Floyd. "My grandfather feels that I ought to start about where he did."
"Yes," said Gregg slowly. "Yes. That's a maxim that is much esteemed in Avalon." His hesitating tone showed that personally he questioned its wisdom; and Floyd, in spite of his respect for his grandfather's opinion, warmed toward the superintendent at this indication of an enlightened point of view. "I think," Gregg proceeded, "you might spare yourself the blast furnaces. We can put you in one of the open-hearth mills—say, Number Two."
"I should rather not be given any special advantages," Floyd said.
"Oh," Gregg answered, with a smile, tipping back in his chair and stroking first one prong of his beard and then the other, "a man that goes into this business had better not reject any good thing that's offered him. You'll find it hard enough—and different enough from college and abroad. I suppose you would like to go through the works? You'll find they have grown a little since you last went through, two years ago."
He wrote out a pass and handed it to Floyd. "Come in and see me before you go home," he said.
Then he turned seriously to his work,—a man of mild nature harassed by having to be often stern and hard.
In the little house at the entrance to the bridge, the company policeman took Floyd's pass, and reading his name upon it, touched his hat. "Keep a sharp lookout on the tracks, sir," he said. He spoke with reason; an empty sleeve was pinned across his breast.
There was a roadway from the bridge almost to the bank of the river; there it stopped at a tangle of tracks which spread and branched out on either side, running round and through the mills. Floyd walked up the tracks along the river-bank. He passed idle trains of freight cars, he looked up at the donkey engines that trundled back and forth dragging the ladles to and from the blast furnaces; brakemen, switchmen, engineers, laborers among the heaps of scrap iron and limestone threw him a curious glance as he went by. Each shed had its own fierce noise, a rumble, a thud, a clang, or a shriek, repeated and repeated and repeated, here rapidly, here at measured and deliberate intervals. The mingling of sound and the increasing maze of tracks bewildered Floyd, and he kept looking behind him with a sense that he might at any moment be borne down by some ungovernable mass.
Two blast furnaces towered before him, connected with each other by half a dozen high red stacks, in which the blast was heated and reheated. Between them and the river were the heaps of ore and limestone and coke, which the indefatigable little climbing cars fed into the furnace. A steamboat and two barges were moored at the bank, discharging a cargo of coke; a crane lifted up a great scoop that had been filled, and two of the laborers on the barges, released for a moment from toil, fell to at good-natured fisticuffs. Floyd stopped to watch them; they ducked and dodged about on the loose footing of coke; one got the other's head under his arm and began knuckling it. But by that time the crane had dumped its scoop-load, and with inflexible insistence had swung back demanding more; the laborers stumbled again to their task, and Floyd moved on to Open-Hearth Mill Number Two, where his apprenticeship was to begin.
This was a long shed with a row of twelve yellow fire- brick ovens along each side and a chaotic space between—containing excavations, cranes, sunken iron bowls, sand heaps, and narrow-gauge tracks. Floyd walked down the broad steel-plate pavement in front of one row of furnaces. Each had its iron door with round open eyehole, through which glared a light so blinding that the man looking in to examine the condition of the "heat" had to wear black glasses. Now and then he would catch up a long-handled spoon, draw out a little of the "heat," and spill it on the pavement, testing it. This man was the melter; and he had charge of six furnaces. Under him at each furnace were three helpers, who fired and fed and stirred and tapped the "heats." One of them, having closed the iron door after the last scoop of steel had been emptied, seated himself on a bench near where Floyd was standing and lighted a pipe. He looked like a communicative soul,—the first of the workmen who had seemed to have that character,—and after two or three puffs on his pipe, he said to Floyd,—
"The fire in that furnace ain't been out in fourteen months."
"Pretty steady going," Floyd said. "I suppose it's better, though, for the furnaces to be kept burning than to lie idle."
"Better for the furnaces, better for the men." He seemed a sententious as well as cheerful person; there was a good-humored twinkle in his eyes that Floyd liked. He wore a blue cloth cap; he was a man of thirty-five, perhaps, short, thick-set, with a flat nose and a square, clean-shaven jaw; his undershirt, thrown open at the breast, showed a skin whiter than that of most of the other men.
"We use natural gas in the furnaces," he said to Floyd. "No coal, no coke—except over at the blast furnace."
Floyd caught the man winking to another, who drew near, and he suspected that this urbane volunteering of information was prompted by a desire to have amusement with an uneducated visitor. He was not unwilling to furnish this, and he displayed interest at the idea of natural gas.
"I suppose you have frightful explosions sometimes," he said.
"Yes; fierce. You see them masons down there—working on that eighth furnace? Well, that was because the gas got turned on when nobody was looking, blowed the front of the furnace, and took off a Dago's head. But worse than the explosions is the fumes."
"The fumes?" Floyd asked wonderingly.
"Yep. Danger of their overpowerin' a man. And a man never knows when he's goin' to be overpowered—not till it drops him. Ain't that so, Bill? Why, look here—"
He rose impressively and led Floyd out behind the furnace. The one next below was being tapped; that is, the liquid steel, or "heat," was being drawn off into the huge bowl set in the cavity just behind. As it flowed in, hissing and leaping up in flame, a man standing a little back from the brink tossed in at intervals fragments of steel and chunks of limestone. Each lump sent up a lashing burst of flame.
"There!" said Floyd's informant. "There was a fellow doing just what that man is. He was a rash sort of fool—always showing off and showing how nothing ever troubled his nerve. He'd stand on the edge of a thing like that—stand on one foot and then wave the other one out over the heat—just to let us know he was n't afraid. If a place was too hot for a man to stand in, he'd go and stand there and let on he liked it. Always lookin' for trouble—that was him. Well, one day he was pitchin' scrap into the heat as it was being drawed off, and nothing would do but he must stand right up on the very brink—step up and take a look."
"It does n't seem possible a man could stand so close as that," said Floyd with due innocence.
"That's because you ain't used to it. I was off just about there, making ready to tap my furnace; I happened to look up and it struck me he was kind of queer. There was a kind of blankness on his face, and he was standing holding a chunk of stone like this,—just hanging in his fingers,—and next thing it slipped right out of 'em, glanced off the edge, and plunked in. And then all of a sudden he slumped together and pitched forward, head first. He never made no sound."
"How awful!" said Floyd.
"Well, if he was overcome by the fumes, as we all thought, he probably did n't suffer none. Of course, we never strained out so much as a toe-nail. And there was a funny thing about that heat,—it qualified as first-class steel. Likely he's now helping to hold up some skyscraper in New York."
Floyd expressed his horror and his hope that the men were generally more cautious.
"Oh, we take care. But the fumes is something you can't exactly guard against." He was evidently on the verge of another story, when the melter spied round the corner of the furnace and summoned him.
Floyd strolled the length of the mill and passed out at the farther end. The afternoon was waning; the sun stood above the hill across the river, red through the smoke; except for a few open patches here and there, the mill-yards were in shadow. But within the works there was no slackening of energy, and for the first time it struck Floyd with a sense of awfulness that night might fall and that still the hammers would ring and the forges glow and the blast shriek—that here was a town which might never be all at rest.
Through an opening in one of the buildings he noticed a red, weaving thread; he entered and found himself in the rod-mill. Here, instead of the ingots, billets of steel, a little larger than an ordinary brick, were rolled. A man took the white-hot billet out of the furnace in tongs hung by a chain, and pushed it, suspended in the air, to the first roller. He in turn received it in his tongs, thrust it through the rolls to his partner, who caught it and returned it; back and forth they passed it, drawing it out each time; then it was put through a second set of rolls, and then through a third, each time a different pair of men handling it with tongs in the manner required by its constantly increasing length. At last the little white-hot block came out a squirming red serpent twenty feet long, and lay curved and still.
The work of the rollers was dexterous and pretty. The white-hot billet came hissing and menacing through the press. The roller stood close, caught it with his tongs just in front of his right leg, drew back a step, and then shot it forward and through. A misstep, a slip of the hand on the tongs, a sudden failure of the eye, and the white-hot metal would drop on the bungler's foot and sear it to the ankle. The men worked rapidly, each one seeming to hurry the next, harassed by anxiety or by eagerness to turn out a larger and yet larger number of rods, for by tonnage were they paid.
Only one did Floyd notice who seemed not only unworried, but even nonchalant and gay in the performance of his work. This was the younger of the two men at the first set of rolls, the one who received the billet from the furnace-man. The others stood tense or nervous to grapple with the steel; he displayed an easy grace, he did not crouch with tongs already open, but waited quietly erect, caught and stepped back with the same motion, passed the steel forward with a lithe swing, and fell into position, resting but ready. He was heavy and strong, and at the same time cleanly built; his weight, as Floyd could see from the outline of chest and hips and thighs, was more of muscle than of bone. Blackened as was his face, it had a cheerful look; it seemed the face of a boy to whom this work was still, in spite of his expertness, a novelty, and who found somewhat the same sport in catching hot blocks of steel as he might have found in catching a ball. He came over to the tank of greenish, scum-covered water near which Floyd was standing, and plunged his tongs into it. Floyd glanced at his bare arms; the sweat was streaming down them, the muscles seemed oiled and glistening. He looked at Floyd with a genial smile and addressed him with a particularly outrageous oath. That it was hot was the burden of his remark. Then he hastened back to his place and caught the next billet on the run.
It was growing late. Floyd turned and made his way out of the yards across the bridge. The one-armed policeman at the wicket saluted him again as he passed. He went to the office of the superintendent, who looked up with a smile and said, "Well?"
"I'll be ready to start at the beginning of the week," Floyd answered.
"All right; report to the foreman of Number Two on Monday morning. You'll live out here, I suppose?"
"Yes; I wondered if you could suggest a boarding-house—"
"We keep a list," said the superintendent, and from one of the drawers in his desk he produced some typewritten pages. "Any of these places is all right."
"There's a house at the top of this street—the last house," Floyd said. "I liked its looks; is that here? I made a note of the number. Yes, this is it; I think I'll go there. Good-night, Mr. Gregg."
The superintendent rose and held out his hand.
"Good-night and good luck," he answered.
It was nearly six o'clock, and low as the sun was, the heat seemed not to have abated. The intermittent breeze of the day had ceased and a heavy sultriness prevailed; the western sky was brassy, and the smoke hung low over the river—cupped as it were between the hills. Down the sloping streets of the town men were going to their work, carrying their wicker lunch-baskets or tin pails—most of them in their undershirts, with their coats upon their arms. New Rome had now a more busy aspect than earlier in the afternoon, when Floyd had surveyed it from the hill. He strolled up one street and along another and another, but there was no need of much travel to acquaint oneself with New Rome. It lay spread out upon the hillside, open for any one to read.
It was a feudal town. The central block on the hillside was occupied by the house and grounds of the superintendent of the works. The house was very large, of yellow brick, of a Moorish type of architecture; the grounds were terraced, in green, well-kept lawns that seemed to thrive in spite of smoke and dirt. In the block below were six smaller yellow brick houses, also of a Moorish type of architecture—smaller, and yet large, and each having its own spacious grass plot. In these dwelt the superintendents of the largest mills. One block lower down there were ten yellow brick houses of very respectable size, occupied by the lesser superintendents. Then, above and below, came houses of wood, for the foremen and rollers and melters, more numerous, all pretty much of a pattern, all prosperous looking. Beyond these were smaller houses still, dwindling down to the wretched two-room hovels, painted red or whitewashed, which clung just outside the high board fence that marked the mill inclosure.
The town was full of monuments to Colonel Halket's beneficence. Above the general superintendent's house rose the Halket Free Public Library, again of yellow brick, though of a subdued Moorishness. In one wing of it was an auditorium, in another, dub-rooms and a gymnasium. The Halket Hotel stood at the bottom of the hill, opposite the company's office. Halket Park was a large inclosed field adjoining the mill inclosure; a baseball ground was laid out here, and it held two stands for spectators.
New Rome was a model town. And now, walking along its streets, confronting it and the problem it presented to him, Floyd felt depressed, for the first time since he had been brought up to meet this problem.
His grandfather had created the place and the industry; his was the honor and his had been the joy of creation. And for the grandson, what was left? Nothing except to stand ready with a hand to guide or restrain, and let the great machine run itself. The whole organization was complete and efficient, and merely to be occupied with maintaining it seemed a tame and languid task. There was nothing for Floyd to build. Worst of all, he had a discouraged feeling that this was not the kind of thing that he would have most cared to build.
The six o'clock whistle blew while Floyd was still walking the homogeneous streets and indulging in these meditations. The "day turn" was at an end, the "night turn" was beginning. Floyd had a thought of the diversity of workmen he had seen that afternoon, of the men who were giving up their lives to the performance of some trifling task,—spooning along hot metal in a trough, kicking hot steel rods to one side, measuring steel plates, pulling levers. Floyd thought of them all compassionately. He did not pity himself for having to work with them; indeed, he still looked forward to that experience as to an adventure in which the interesting would counterbalance the unpleasant. But the years afterwards—when he had ceased to work with his hands and these men were growing old in his service, and other men, young and with life to face, were entering it—these years loomed suddenly before Floyd, and their image seemed sombre and reproachful to his mind.
It was growing late; Floyd betook himself to the house where he had seen the girl with the red hair. When he rang the bell, she came to the door.
"I am looking for a room," he said. "I remembered the sign in your window and thought I would come here."
She had recognized him, and as he spoke he thought that the expression of her face became unfriendly.
"If you will step inside," she said in a tone which held out no welcome, "I will speak to my mother."
He entered a cramped and dark hallway and followed her into the parlor. There she left him and ran upstairs. The folding-doors between the parlor and the dining-room were open; through them Floyd saw the table set for three, and on it in the centre a white frosted cake, surrounded with a palisade of pink candles. He hoped very much that the girl was not going to be unfriendly, for already he liked the family; he wondered who the third member was.
He seated himself in a rocking-chair on a patchwork cushion. There was an oak bookcase with glass doors in one corner, in which a set of Scott and another of Dickens were conspicuous. It also held a small "handy volume" set of Shakespeare. On the marble-topped centre table beside the large Bible was a copy of "Ben-Hur," bound in alligator skin. On the mantel was a clutter of shells, little china figures, matchsafes, deep-sea crustacea, vases, and above it hung an engraving of the Madonna of the Chair. On the wall opposite was a still-life water-color in a stout gilt frame, the subject, strawberries pouring out of a tin pail that lay on its side. There was an upright piano, and in the corner beside it a bass viol in a green baize cover. All the length of the top of the piano, propped against the wall, ran a line of photographs. The carpet was a faded gray, the wall-paper a cheerless yellow, the window-curtains were of lace, white and clean and with thick-looking mended places. Floyd had leisure enough to examine all that the room contained.
By and by he heard footsteps tripping down the stairs; then the girl entered.
"Don't rise," she said haughtily. "My mother will be down in a moment."
She passed into the dining-room, where she busied herself about the table. Floyd, glanced at her from time to time; her movements were quick and decisive. He was beginning to suspect the cause of her abruptness with him; no doubt she thought he was trying to force an acquaintance. He sat, therefore, meek and patient, and only now and then threw furtive glances at her. She had changed her dress of the afternoon, and wore something now that was light and airy-looking and sprinkled over with red crescents. The sleeves, fringed with lace, reached only to her elbows; there was a blue sash round her waist; and her hair, instead of being piled loosely on her head, was coiled low down against the nape of her neck. She was, Floyd thought, a very handsome and imperial looking girl.
Her mother came down the stairs, a plain and insignificant old woman, dressed in black, grayhaired, with gold-rimmed spectacles and an upward, short-sighted perk of her faded face. Her fingers were rheumatic and twisted, and coarsened by hard work; Floyd noticed this as he took her timidly offered hand. But like her daughter, she had an indefinably festive air, imparted, perhaps, by the white cuffs on the black sleeves, and the bit of lace at her throat, fastened with a gold pin.
"I came," said Floyd, "to look at rooms."
"Yes," she answered hesitatingly. "I have a room to let. I don't know, though, as I want to let it just for a few days; I'd like to get somebody who'd take it by the month or year."
"If I find it satisfactory," said Floyd, " I should want to take it for a year."
"Oh," said the woman, confused by this unexpected reply. Well—" Her daughter spoke up.
"The room does n't look very well, mother, but perhaps," and she turned to Floyd, "you'll be able to tell if it would suit."
She led the way upstairs. Somewhat bewildered by her sudden change of manner, he followed at her heels. Behind them the older woman toiled slowly. The room was under the roof and had two gable windows, neither of which, to judge by the hot, close air of the place, had been open all summer.
"My!" said the girl, and she raised one and then the other.
The furniture was meagre, an iron bedstead, a brown chest of drawers and a washstand, a small pine table and one chair. There was a fireplace with an asbestos lining for natural gas.
"There is n't a window in town that gives a better view," said the girl, "if you care for the view." The grimness of her humor indicated that she had not quite shaken off distrust.
"There is always the sky," Floyd said.
"Generally," she answered.
He said he would like to sign a lease for a year. The older woman appeared embarrassed, the younger indifferent.
"I generally ask for references," the girl's mother said at last. "I suppose you're in the company's office?"
"No," Floyd admitted. "I'm just going to begin in one of the mills. I think, though, the superintendent, Mr. Gregg, would vouch for me."
"Oh." The woman seemed reassured. "Some relation of his, I presume?"—for shrinking though she was, she had, as Floyd afterwards found out, her full measure of inquisitiveness.
"No, no relation," he replied. "But he found a place for me in one of the open-hearth mills."
"Well, if Mr. Gregg says it's all right;" she added in apology, "You see, two women living alone, we have to be careful."
The daughter interjected,—
"You forgot to say, mother, that payment is always a month in advance."
"Of course," Floyd said. "That is what I expected. I came prepared." He took out a roll of bills.
There was still an awkward pause; then the girl spoke frankly.
"You don't somehow look as if you belonged at the mills."
"Don't I?" Floyd laughed. "Well, you wait till you see me next Monday."
She looked at him steadily, and surrendered before the open honesty and amusement of his laugh. "All right," she said. "I'll wait and see how you look then." And as they descended the stairs, she remarked to him, "That peach was ripe."
"Yes," her mother said, turning round, "Letty told me you were the young man that got it for her. And it was a nice peach; I enjoyed it."
"That peach-tree and the grapevines and the garden were why I came here," Floyd said. "Not because I hope to eat up your fruit—but your place looked so much prettier than the others."
At this the girl gave him a most friendly smile. "Mother does most of the tending to it," she said.
"Now, Letty!" her mother cried protestingly. And then she broke off into a startling and independent speech. "She's giving me a birthday supper—I guess maybe you saw the cake. We'd be happy, so long as you're soon to be one of the family, so to speak, if you'd stay to it."
Letty failed to second the invitation, and Floyd suspected from her expression that she did not approve of it. He regretted that he had to go to Avalon, and then he said that he would just sign the lease and be off, Mrs.—Mrs.—?
"Bell—Mrs. Edward Bell. Oh, we won't bother with no lease. Just so long as you say you'll take it for a year and you've paid a month in advance, why, that's all right. Just you leave your name, and I'll see the room is read up for you."
A few minutes before, Floyd was wandering the streets, melancholy and oppressed by the responsibilities to which he was heir; now he delivered up the card bearing his name with a secret pleasure and pride. Had he not at such a moment enjoyed these sensations, he would surely have had none of his grandfather in him.
Mrs. Bell's demonstration at reading the name was gratifyingly melodramatic. She fell back against the wall of the cramped hallway. "Mr. Floyd Halket!" she exclaimed. "Read it, Letty! Oh, my goodness! To think of Colonel Halket's grandson coming here to live!"
"But," asked Floyd, with some curiosity, "what makes you think I'm his grandson?"
"Why, would n't I know the name?" cried the widow. "And all about the family? Who in New Rome would not? The idea of me asking you to sit down to the supper-table!"
"Indeed," said Miss Bell, quite haughtily, "I did n't approve of it at the time, mother; but I see nothing wrong about it now."
"I hope you'll be asking me just about every night," Floyd said gallantly. "You know I want board here as well as a room."
"And there's no joke about your coming?" cried Mrs. Bell.
"Not the least."
"Well," Mrs. Bell said, "if you can put up with it here—"
There was a sudden rattling tattoo played with stout fingers on the glass of the front door. The girl stepped forward and opened it, and with the greeting, "Hello, Let," a young man entered. As he took off his hat and showed his light straight hair and red face, Floyd recognized, in spite of the white collar and blue coat which now adorned him, the young roller in the rod-mill.
"What is it, Mrs. Bell?—your thirty-fifth?" the newcomer asked cheerfully. "Many happy returns."
While he spoke he ran his eyes over Floyd with a glance of recognition.
Floyd turned and held out his hand to Mrs. Bell. "I won't keep you any longer from lighting those candles in the dining-room," he said. "I'll send my things Saturday and come out here Sunday night to sleep, if that's convenient. Good-by."
"I suppose," interrupted Miss Bell, "you might as well meet now as later. Mr. Farrell, this is Mr. Halket. Mr. Farrell's a neighbor, and Mr. Halket's the new boarder, and going to work next week at the Open Hearth," she explained to each of them in turn.
"I mind seeing you this afternoon," said Mr. Farrell, "and it seems like I had heard your name before, Mr. Halket."
"I shouldn't wonder; it seems a common one out here," Floyd answered.
"Well, there's no shame in being a poor relation of such folks, if that's what you are," Farrell assured him consolingly.
"Hugh!" cried Mrs. Bell, agonized, and Letty, clapping her handkerchief to her mouth, choked back her laughter.
"Made a break, have I?" asked Farrell; and as he looked round, his face lighted up intelligently. "Well, I suppose, then, you ain't a poor relation. And that's better yet, and it makes no difference with me."
"Then I'm glad to meet you," said Floyd, as they shook hands.
"You won't mind my talk," Farrell promised him. "The only thing that puts a brake on it is the presence of ladies."
"A sort of hot-air brake," suggested Floyd in the slang of the period.
"One on me," Farrell cried. "One on me—eh, Let?"
He was still chuckling and Mrs. Bell was still aghast at his daring and at the use of slang by Colonel Halket's grandson when Floyd passed out of the house.