BY FRANCIS LYNDE

DAVID VALLORY

BRANDED

STRANDED IN ARCADY

AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN

THE REAL MAN

THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS

THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH

SCIENTIFIC SPRAGUE

THE PRICE

THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN

A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

DAVID VALLORY

It had given him a glow of superecstasy to find that she
was familiar with many of the details. (Page [232])

DAVID VALLORY

BY
FRANCIS LYNDE

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
ARTHUR E. BECHER

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK : : : : : : : : : : 1919

Copyright, 1919, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published August, 1919

TO
THE RIGHT REVEREND
THOMAS FRANK GAILOR
BISHOP OF TENNESSEE
MY BISHOP, ADVISER, AND FRIEND, THIS
BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY
INSCRIBED

CONTENTS

DAVID VALLORY

DAVID VALLORY

I
In the Green Tree

DAVID VALLORY’S train, to make which he had precipitately thrown down pencil and mapping-pen in the drafting room of the Government harbor-deepening project on the Florida coast two days earlier, was an hour late arriving at Middleboro; and in this first home-coming from the distant assignment, the aspect of things once so familiar seemed jarred a trifle out of focus. It was not that the June fields were less green, or the factory suburb through which the long train was slowing more littered and unsightly. But there was a change, and it was in a manner depressive.

“Your home town?” inquired the traveler in the opposite half of the Pullman section, as Vallory began to assemble his various belongings.

“Yes,” said David, adding, as if in some sort of justification: “I was born here in Middleboro.”

The man who had occupied the upper berth looked aside reflectively, taking in and appraising the country-town tritenesses as the open car windows passed them in review.

“A man may be born anywhere,” he remarked; then, with the appraisive glance directed at the fair-haired, frank-faced young man kneeling to strap an over-filled suit case; “It’s a safe bet that you’ll not die in Middleboro—unless you should chance to be killed in an accident.”

Vallory, soberly preoccupied, looked up from the strapping.

“Why do you say that?”

The older man smiled with a rather grim widening of the thin lips half hidden by a cropped beard and mustaches.

“You are young, and youth is always impatient of the little horizons. Let me make another guess. You have been away for some time, and this is your first return. You are finding it a bit disappointing. Am I right?”

“Not exactly disappointing,” Vallory denied.

“Well, then, different, let us say. You may not realize it yet, but you have outgrown the home town. I know, because, years ago, I had precisely the same experience myself. Do your people live here?”

The train had been halted in the yard by a dropped semaphore arm, and for the moment Vallory was at the mercy of his chance traveling companion. Yet he told himself that there was no good reason why he should be churlish.

“Yes,” he conceded; “my father and sister live here. And I have lived here all my life except for the four years in college, and the past two years in Florida.”

“College—to be sure,” the inquisitor agreed half absently. “What course, if I may ask?”

“Engineering.”

At this the bearded man exhibited a tiny fob charm made in the shape of a simple trestle bent and extended a hand individualized by the spatulate thumb and square-ended fingers of the artist-artisan.

“Shake!” he exclaimed, with something more than Middle-Western informality. “I happen to be one of the same breed. Now I am quite certain you won’t die here in—Middletown?—is that the name?—always making an exception in favor of the untoward accident, of course.”

“Middleboro,” David corrected. Then to the repetition of the prophecy: “You are probably right. I found that I had to leave home to get my first job. I have been on Government work in Florida—rivers and harbors.”

“Government work? A deep grave and a safe one. Would you mind telling me just why you chose to bury yourself in it?”

Vallory’s smile was still good-natured. For so young a man he was singularly free from the false dignity which so often is made to pass for the real.

“I don’t mind in the least. I did what most college men do; took the first reasonably decent thing that offered. It wasn’t at all what I wanted, but my own particular line was rather dull two years ago. I majored in railroad building.”

“Railroad building, eh? That’s my trade, too,” said the other. Then, with an overlooking glance that was too frankly a renewal of the appraisive summing-up to be mistaken for anything else: “You’ll go far, my young friend—if you’re not too good.”

David Vallory’s smile broadened into a laugh.

“Thanks,” he said. “But what do you mean by ‘too good’?”

“Precisely what I say; no more and no less. You can take it from a total stranger, can’t you? You have a good jaw, and I shouldn’t care to get in your way if you had any reason to wish to beat me up. But your eyes tell another story.”

Vallory had a telegram in his pocket, the brief summons which, two days earlier, had caused him to drop pen and pencil in the Florida office and hasten to catch the first northbound train. There was nothing in the wording of the message to breed alarm; but the mere fact that his father had telegraphed him to come home had awakened disturbing qualms of anxiety. Wondering if he were still youthful enough to advertise the disquietude so plainly that a stranger might read the signs of it, he said:

“Well, go on; what do my eyes tell you?”

“This: that in spite of your twenty-five, six, or seven years, whatever they may be, you are still sufficiently youthful and unspoiled to take things at their face value. You believe good of a man or a woman until the evil is proved, and even then you change reluctantly. You hold your word as binding as your oath. In short, you are still generous enough to believe that the world is much better than the muckrakers would make it out to be. Isn’t this all true?”

“I should be sorry if I had to contradict you,” said Vallory soberly. “At that, you are only accusing me of the common civilized humanities. The world has been very decent to me, thus far. Doesn’t it occur to you that a man usually finds what he looks for in life?—that, as a general proposition, he gets just about what he is willing to give?”

The bearded man shook his head, as one too well seasoned to argue with unvictimized youth.

“Four years in college, and two in a Government service which taught you absolutely nothing about life as it is lived in a world of men and women and sharply competitive business,” he scoffed gently. “Ah, well; we’ll let it go with a word of advice—advice from a man whose name you don’t know, and whom you will most likely never meet again. When you come to take the plunge; the real plunge into the sure-enough puddle of life as it is lived by most men and not a few women; don’t tie up too hard with any man or set of men, or yet to those old-fashioned principles which you have been taught to regard as law and Gospel. If you do, you won’t succeed—in the only sense in which the world measures success.”

The train was moving on again, and Vallory was not sorry. Being healthily suspicious of cynicism in any of its forms, he was glad that his critical section mate had not chosen to begin on him at the dining-car breakfast, where they had first met. None the less, at the station stop he shook hands with the volunteer prophet of evil.

“Good-by,” he said. “I’d like to hear your estimate of the next man with whom you happen to share a Pullman section. But part of your prediction will doubtless come true. I have definitely broken away from the Government job, and I shall probably not stay very long in Middleboro.”

As he left the train he glanced at his watch. It was past nine; therefore his father would be at the bank. With only a hand-bag for encumbrance he walked rapidly up the main street with the well-remembered home town surroundings still making their curiously depressive appeal.

II
The Deluge

THE Middleboro Security Bank, housed in a modest two-storied brick three squares up from the railroad station, seemed on that morning of mornings to be a center of subdued excitement. Early in the forenoon as it was, a number of farm teams were halted at the curb, and little knots of country folk and townspeople obstructed the sidewalk. David Vallory nodded good-morning to one and another in the groups as he swung past, and was immediately conscious of a sort of hushed restraint on the part of those who returned his greetings.

In the bank an orderly throng was inching and shuffling its way in sober silence to the paying teller’s window. There were no signs of panic, and any excitement that might underlie the unusual crush of business seemed to be carefully suppressed. But Vallory saw that old Abner Winkle, and the clerk he had called into the cage to help him, wore anxious faces; and Winkle’s hands, the hands of a man who had grown gray in the service of the country-town bank, were tremulous and uncertain as he counted out the money to the waiting cheque-holders.

David made his way to the rear of the narrow lobby, to a door with a ground-glass panel bearing the word “President” in black lettering. He entered without knocking, but was careful to snap the catch of the lock to prevent a possible intrusion. A tall, thinly bearded man, prematurely white-haired, with a face that was almost effeminate in its skin texture and the fineness of its lines, and with the near-sighted eyes and round-shouldered stoop of a student and book lover, got rather uncertainly out of his chair at the old-fashioned desk.

“David!” he exclaimed. “I knew you’d come, and I’m glad you are here. Was the train late?”

“An hour or thereabouts. Didn’t you get my answer to your wire?”

The older man put his hand to his head. “Did I?” he asked half absently. “I suppose I must have, if you sent one. I—I think I haven’t been quite responsible since I telegraphed you. You saw what is going on out in the bank; it has been that way since day before yesterday. I waited as long as I dared. I knew it would be a shock to you, and I—I didn’t want to shock you, son.”

David Vallory placed a chair for himself at the desk end and felt mechanically for his pipe and tobacco. Disaster was plainly in the air and he prepared himself to meet it.

“When you’re ready, Dad,” he said.

Adam Vallory sank into his chair. There was a bit of string on the desk and he picked it up and began aimlessly to untie the knots in it.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come; I didn’t know whether you could come. It isn’t fair to take you away from your work; but——”

“Of course, I’d come!” David broke in warmly. “I’m here to take hold with you, and you must remember that there are two of us now. What has gone wrong?”

Adam Vallory shook his head sadly.

“The thing that went wrong dates back to a time before you were born, David; to the time when I allowed your grandfather, and some others, to persuade me that I ought to make a business man of myself. That was a mistake; a very sorry mistake. I haven’t been a good banker.”

David shook his head in honest filial deprecation. “You have been the best and kindest of fathers to Lucille and me, and that counts for much more than being a successful money-grabber. And you’ve earned the love and respect of everybody worth while in Middleboro. What is the present trouble? Are you having a run on the bank?”

“I suppose you wouldn’t call it a run, as yet. There is no special excitement and the people are very quiet and orderly. But there have been a great many withdrawals, and there will doubtless be more. If it should come to a real run——”

“Let me have it all,” the son encouraged, when the pause grew over-long. “Do you mean that the bank isn’t solvent?”

“It is not,” was the low-toned rejoinder, given without qualification. “I have made a number of bad loans. So long as I had to deal only with neighbors and friends, men whom I have known and trusted all my life, I got along fairly well, though the bank has never earned much more than the family living, as you know. But when the town began to grow and the factories came in the conditions were changed—for me. Then Mugridge started the Middleboro National, and that was the beginning of the end. He took his pick of the new customers and let me have the fag ends. The Stove Works went into bankruptcy a week ago, and that was the last straw.”

“You were carrying Carnaby, of the Stove Works?” David asked.

“Yes; and for much more than his capitalization, or our resources, would warrant. He has been very smooth and plausible, and I have believed in him, as I have in others. The story of my involvement with Carnaby leaked out, as such stories always do. As I have said, there has been no panic; just the steady stream of withdrawals and account-closings. It’s telling on us fast now, and the end is practically in sight. This is no world for the idealist in business, David.”

David Vallory was silent for a time, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his chin propped in his palms. His pipe had gone out, but he still held it clamped between his teeth. In Middleboro tradition it was said that he favored his mother’s people, and the square-set, firm-lipped mouth bore out the assertion. But the good gray eyes were, not the eyes of a dreamer, perhaps, but the eyes of the son of a dreamer; more—they were the eyes of a man who had not yet outgrown the illusions. Adam Vallory had matured slowly; he was in his thirties when he married. And the slow maturing process seemed to have been handed on to the son. A stronger man than his father, this David, one would have said; though perhaps only as athletic youth is stronger than age. And a close observer, like the crop-bearded stranger of the Pullman car, might have added that the strength was idealistic rather than practical; a certain potency of endurance rather than of militancy.

“Just how bad is it—in actual figures?” the son asked, at the end of the chin-nursing pause.

Adam Vallory closed his eyes as one wearied and stunned in the clash and clamor of a battle too great for him.

“We can go on paying out to-day, and perhaps to-morrow. Beyond that, there is failure for the bank; and—and beyond the failure, David, there is a prison for me!”

The younger man straightened up quickly and there was unfeigned horror in the good gray eyes.

“Good heavens, Dad!—you don’t mean anything like that!” he exclaimed in a shocked voice.

“I wish I didn’t, son, but it is true. I have been weak; criminally weak, some will say. All along I have been clinging desperately to the hope that I could pull through; that the bad paper the bank is holding would somehow miraculously turn into good paper. A better business man would have faced the worst weeks ago. I didn’t. We have gone on receiving deposits when I knew that we were, to all intents and purposes, insolvent. That, as you know, is a penitentiary offense.”

David Vallory got upon his feet and began to pace up and down the length of the small room, three strides and a turn. It was his maiden projection into the jostling arena of business, and for the moment he could only struggle hardily for standing room in it. He had always known, in a general way, that his book-loving father was no money-getter in any modern sense of the term, but there had always been enough and something to spare for him and for the blind sister whose birth had cost the mother’s life. With the healthy ambition of the average boy and youth, he had looked forward to a time when he should go to work for himself in some chosen field and manfully build up the slender fortunes of the family. But now the world of youthful anticipation had gone suddenly and hopelessly awry.

“We can’t think of giving up, Dad!” he broke out, after he had tramped his way through to some measure of decision. “There must be something that we can turn into money and save the bank and your good name. Can’t you find somebody who will carry you until we can make the turn?”

Adam Vallory shook his head in patient despair.

“That ground has all been plowed long ago, son. It is now six months or more since I began borrowing on my private resources, such as they are. There is nothing left; not even the house we live in. I suppose I should have told you sooner, but that was another weakness. I wished you to have a chance to finish your college course and get your start in the world without distractions, and that much, at least, has been accomplished.”

Once more the younger man sought to stem the torrent of the incredible reversals, and this time he was partly successful.

“We can still hope that it isn’t altogether as bad as you think it is, Dad,” he said, with greater optimism than his inner conviction warranted. “In a few minutes I’m going to pull off my coat and have a look at things from the inside. We’re not going down without a fight; that’s settled. Aside from this prison scare—and it’s only a scare, you know—no Middleboro jury would ever believe for a single moment that you meant to do a criminal act—aside from that, there are two mighty good reasons why we mustn’t go to the dogs.”

“Lucille?” queried the father.

“Yes; she is one of the reasons, and a pretty stout one. Life is always going to be hard enough for the little sister, without adding poverty and a sorrow that she can neither help nor hinder.”

“Quite true; and the other reason?”

David Vallory had sat down again, and a boyish flush came to darken the healthy brown which was the gift of a more or less athletic youth.

“I didn’t intend to tell you—not just yet,” he demurred; “at least, not until I had shown you that I could make good on my own, and prove that you haven’t been throwing your money away on me. I—I’ve found the girl, Dad.”

The older man leaned back in his chair and the tired eyes were closed.

“That is natural, and was to be expected,” he acquiesced. “You have been very moderate, David. Many another young fellow would have found, not one girl, but a round dozen, before reaching your age.”

David Vallory’s laugh matched the absurdity of the “round dozen.”

“Nothing like that; I’m not built that way, I guess,” he returned. “There is only one girl, and though I hadn’t realized it until lately, I think I discovered her to be that one while I was still wearing knickerbockers.”

Adam Vallory nodded as one who understood.

“I have often wondered if it might not turn out that way,” he said; “wondered and been just a trifle—no, I won’t say it. Judith is a good girl, and she will doubtless make you a warm-hearted, loyal wife.”

“Judith?” said David, and now his flush was darker.

“Yes. You thought you were mighty secret about it, but I knew it, all along; knew that you were corresponding with her while you were at college, and missed you every time you spent an evening at the Fallons’. It’s all right, son. I haven’t a word to say.”

“But—but—you’re tremendously mistaken, Dad!” the younger man protested earnestly. “There has never been anything serious between Judith and me. We were just good chums together in school, and——”

“Hold on a minute, son,” said Adam Vallory gently. “We have no money, but we still have a few traditions. One of them is that no man of the Vallory name has ever put the burden of proof on a woman, so far as the records show. You admit that you wrote to Judith while you were in college, and all Middleboro knows that you were always going about with her in your vacations. Haven’t you been writing back and forth while you were in Florida?”

“Oh, yes; now and then, of course. But——”

“You are trying to tell me that I have guessed wrong. Before you go any farther, let me say this: your relations with Judith may have meant nothing to you; but how about Judith herself? She is warm-blooded, ardent, and much more mature than you are, in spite of the difference in your ages. Be very sure that you don’t owe her something, David—the biggest debt that a woman can ever hold against a man. Now go on and tell me as much as you care to about the other girl—the real one.”

David was still showing the marks of disturbance, but he went on manfully.

“There isn’t so very much to tell. I’ve—well, I’ve just found her, that’s all. I met her last winter at Palm Beach. She was down there with a bunch of New York people who go there every year. Raglan, my chief on the Government job, knew her and some of her New York friends. He began to introduce me, but she laughed and said, ‘Mr. Vallory and I were rocked in the same cradle—in Old Middleboro,’ and that settled it.”

The beaten man in the desk chair roused himself to say: “Then you did know her as a child? She belongs here?”

“Not now. She is a citizen of a very much larger world.”

“Do I know her, or her people?—but of course I must.”

“You do. You have held her on your knee and told her fairy tales many a time, while I stood by and listened. Doesn’t that place her for you?”

Adam Vallory shook his head with a smile that was reminiscent of pleasanter things than the navigating of stormy seas in a sinking business craft.

“I have held many little girls on my knee to tell them fairy stories, David. That is another reason why I should never have been a banker; I love children—and fairy tales—far too well.”

“You would never guess,” said David, with all the fatuousness of the new-born lover. “Yet you and her father were schoolboys together.”

Adam Vallory roused himself again. “Not Eben Grillage?” he said.

“Yes; she is Mr. Grillage’s daughter; the brown-eyed little Vinnie we used to know; though they all call her ‘Miss Virginia’ now.”

Again the upcast of reminiscence came to make the unsuccessful banker forget for the moment the rotten business craft that was sinking beneath him.

“Eben Grillage,” he mused. “He was, and is, everything that I am not. He was a born leader, even as a boy. Success, or what most people value as success, has been his for the taking. You have seen him, David? Is he growing old, as I am?”

“You are old only in hard work; work that doesn’t appeal to you,” the son said loyally. Then: “I have met Mr. Grillage only once, and—well, I guess he didn’t have much time to throw away on an apprentice engineer who was just then trying his prettiest to get a chance to talk over old times with his daughter. I remember he asked about you.”

“That was in Florida?”

“Yes. I chased over to Palm Beach as often as I could during the short season, but it didn’t do me much good. There were too many other fellows ahead of me. It was on one of these trips that I met Mr. Grillage. He had run down from some place in Georgia, where his company was building a dam, to spend a week-end with his daughter. The most that he said to me was in the nature of a good-humored ‘josh’ for burying myself in a Government job.”

Adam Vallory nodded.

“You don’t remember Vinnie’s mother, of course; she died while you were still only a little lad. She was what we, in my younger days, used to call a belle; a most attractive woman, and as true and good as she was beautiful. Eben Grillage had none of the qualities that such women are supposed to care for—save one; he was big enough and strong enough to reach out and take what he wanted. He idolized his wife; and the love which was hers while she lived has been carried along to his daughter.”

“Any one can see that,” said David, laughing. “Virginia is the apple of his eye. Have you kept in touch with him at all since he left Middleboro?”

“Only at long intervals.”

“They say he is rich, and rapidly growing richer. He has made the Grillage Engineering Company; built it from the ground up; and there isn’t any undertaking too big for him to tackle and carry through. If he wasn’t Virginia’s father, I’d strike him for a job—after we get things straightened out here for you.”

“He would do well by you, for old times’ sake, I don’t doubt. To me, Eben Grillage has never been the hard man that others seem to find him; he is still the loyal friend of the boyhood days—our boyhood. Different as we were, or perhaps just because of that difference, we were like brothers. Why should the fact that he is Vinnie’s father make you hold back?”

“I don’t know that I could explain it, even to you, Dad. But, somehow, I should feel handcapped. Virginia has a mighty keen, sharp-edged little mind of her own. I have a notion that she wouldn’t think much of a fellow that her father was nursing along by hand.”

“Perhaps you are right. But tell me more about her.”

“I wish there were more to tell. I have met her a few times, and she has been mighty sweet to me—for the sake of the kiddie days here in Middleboro, as she occasionally took care to remind me. I’m not in her set, you know; not even in the outer edges of it. Besides, as I have said, she has a string of fellows as long as your arm. It’s only a pipe-dream for me, as yet, and I’m going to forget all about it now, until after we’ve staved off this trouble of yours. Will you turn me loose among the money papers and securities? I’d like to make a few figures for myself.”

With this for a beginning, David Vallory’s first day in the home town resolved itself into a grind of hard work. Through what was left of the forenoon, and straight on to three o’clock—welcome hour when the bank doors were shut upon the public, and the tired old paying teller and his assistant had an opportunity to balance their cash—the young man probed steadily, sometimes with his father at his elbow, but oftener alone.

What he discovered sobered him at first, and later evoked symptoms of a panicky nature. The Middleboro Security, a one-man bank in all that the term implies, was—unless some of the bad paper could be redeemed—plainly insolvent; and, what was much worse, the insolvent condition was of long standing. The failure of the Carnaby Stove Works had been merely the tiring spark to set off the explosion. Without immediate help; help that must run into the tens of thousands; the bank must close its doors.

Though the June afternoon was not oppressively warm, David Vallory found himself sweating profusely when the final column of figures had been added. In the quiet of the semi-darkened bank, where Winkle and the three clerks were still striving silently for their balances after the strenuous business day, a menacing shadow fell. It was not only ruin; it was ruin with disgrace. David was far from holding his father responsible in any moral sense, this though it was apparent that the present state of affairs had been long threatened. That it had not reached a climax sooner was due chiefly to the fact that for many years the country-town bank had done business only with honest customers. David was not blind to his father’s one amiable weakness. It was known far and wide that Adam Vallory could never say “No” to a sufficiently importunate borrower; also, that he judged all men by his own upright standards.

David Vallory got up from the table-desk at which he had been working and slowly struggled into his coat. Grown man as he was, this was his first rude collision with life in its commercial aspect, and he rose from the preliminary grapple with a belittling feeling of inadequacy; as if, as a boy, he had been rudely buffeted into the gutter by a man. But the feeling did not becloud the clearly defined conclusion at which he had arrived. He did not—could not—minify the impending consequences. The bank examiner would come, and at his coming the pitiless mill of publicity would begin to grind. There would be exposure and a criminal prosecution. Those who knew Adam Vallory, the man, would refuse to believe that he had consciously committed a crime; but to the wider world he would figure merely as another addition to the ranks of those who gamble with other people’s money; a banker who had taken the desperate chance involved in going on and receiving deposits when there was no reasonable hope of repaying the depositors.

The old-fashioned clock on the wall was striking four as the volunteer checker of accounts gathered up the slips of scratch paper which he had covered with figures and passed out to the small room at the rear of the working space. The gray-faced man bending dejectedly over his desk and waiting had no illusions. “Well, son?” he said, as David came in.

The young man dropped heavily into a chair and sat for some moments staring at the slips of scratch paper.

“This morning when you told me where we stood you didn’t make it any worse than it really is,” he announced soberly. “Winkle gave me his figures just now—the withdrawals for to-day. If they come after us to-morrow as they have to-day, we shan’t be able to last until three o’clock. I’ve gone over everything in the vault with a fine-tooth comb; we need something like a hundred thousand dollars more than we have in sight.”

Adam Vallory’s gaze was fixed upon the dust-covered steamship lithograph hanging above his desk, but he saw the picture only with the outward eye.

“A hundred thousand,” he repeated slowly. “David, it might as well be a million. There is no use. I shall telegraph to the bank examiner to-night, and we won’t open the bank doors in the morning.”

III
Eben Grillage

AT his father’s definite acknowledgment of defeat David Vallory rose and thrust the penciled sheets into his pocket, crumpling them absently into a wad.

“I can’t tell you what to do,” he admitted. “I’m too young and too raw; how raw I never realized until to-day. Just the same, everything in me rises up to yell for an endurance fight. Call it stubbornness or anything you like, but I’d rather be knocked out than squeezed out. Some of the bad paper can be made good if we retain an up-to-date lawyer and put the pressure on as if we meant it. In the savings department we can gain time by insisting upon the sixty days’ notice of withdrawal that the law allows. It’s tough to have to go down without mixing it up a little with the enemy, Dad!”

“I know,” was the colorless reply. “But the fight has all been taken out of me, David. You mustn’t think that I’ve been sitting here in my chair and letting things take their course without making a struggle. It hasn’t been anything like that. I’ve turned and twisted every way; have borrowed to my limit and then tried to borrow more. I’ve even gone practically on my knees to Mugridge, of the new Middleboro National. He was as cold as a fish; told me that I ought to push my collections.”

“Have you consulted a lawyer?”

“Not specifically. Young Oswald has known about how things were going, and he has advised me—as a friend. He would make a legal fight for us if I’d let him.”

“Bert Oswald is going to make himself the rarest combination on earth—or at least he was heading that way when he came out of the law school.”

“A combination?”

“Yes, a man who will be stubbornly honorable and upright in spite of his profession.” David Vallory was prone to magnify his own profession to the detriment of some others, and in the engineering school he had imbibed the technical man’s suspicion of those who draw up contracts and specifications only to leave loopholes of escape. “I don’t believe he would ever take a rascal’s retainer,” he went on, adding: “Why don’t you employ him?”

It was Adam Vallory’s turn to show embarrassment.

“Bert has been coming to the house rather oftener than his boyhood friendship with you would seem to warrant,” he returned half reluctantly. “This morning you gave me your reason for not wishing to take service under Eben Grillage. Can’t you imagine that I may have a somewhat similar reason for not wishing to involve young Oswald in this sorry business of ours?”

This was a new surprise for David. “Lucille?” he queried.

Adam Vallory nodded. “It can come to nothing, of course. Lucille, herself, would be the first to insist that one with her affliction has no right to become a wife and mother. Yet it has been a great comfort to her to have Oswald dropping in at odd moments, or for an evening. He understands her thoroughly, shares her keen love for music, and all that. He has even taught her to play chess and to do a number of things that we have never thought she was able to attempt. For her sake we mustn’t drag him into this mess of ours, David.”

This hesitantly given explanation opened a new field of dismay for David Vallory. As it seemed, there was a separate and distinct disaster reaching out for each member of the little family of three persons; the grim threat hanging over his father, the indefinite postponement of his own embryo love affair, and now this portentous problem of Lucille’s happiness. His love for the blind sister was deep and tender, as it should have been, and at the moment his own affair shrank to inconsequence, as it was constrained to when he realized how heavily the blow would fall upon one who had been sheltered and protected in every way.

“You have fully made up your mind to wire for the examiner to-night?” he asked, after another interval filled with blind gropings for a helpful suggestion.

Adam Vallory looked away toward the window and through it to the empty country-town street beyond.

“There is no use in prolonging the agony, David. The day of reckoning has come, and a few hours one way or another can make no possible difference. I shall have to face the music in the end; we shall all three have to face it, more is the pity. If there were the slenderest chance of escape——”

The interruption, voices in the adjoining banking room, gruff tones raised emphatically, and Winkle’s more moderate ones parroting excuses and explanations came over the half-height partition of the rear office. It culminated now in an abrupt opening of the door of privacy. The intruder, whom Winkle had apparently been trying to bar out, was a big man with a clean-shaven face in which each feature seemed to have been massively exaggerated to make it harmonize with the gigantic figure; a great Roman beak of a nose; a hard-bitted mouth buttressed by a jaw over which the heavy cheeks hung like the dewlaps of a bulldog; strong teeth clamping the blackest of cigars; shrewd eyes that glared from beneath penthouse brows; in short, a man who, in the Stone Age, would have acquired the most commodious of the caves and swung the heaviest of the clubs.

“Adam—you old snipe!” was the giant’s explosive greeting, and his hand-grip fairly lifted the slighter man out of his chair. “Nice kind of a welcome your watch-dog cashier out there was trying to hand me: said you were busy and couldn’t be interrupted! How are you, David, boy”—and now it came David’s turn to wince under the vigorous hand-grasp; at least, until he could summon his athletic training and do a little bone crushing on his own account.

Adam Vallory, sunk fathoms deep in the pool of despair but a moment before, made a generous effort to rise to the hospitable requirements.

“You took us completely unawares, Eben; I didn’t dream you were anywhere within a day’s journey of old Middleboro. And Winkle’s eyesight must be getting bad if he didn’t recognize you. Sit down, if you can find a chair big enough to hold you. It’s a pleasure to see your face again; you don’t give me the chance any too often. Now tell us what good wind has blown you back to Middleboro.”

The big man seated himself, and the chair, though it was the stoutest one in the room, whined its protest.

“Business, Adam; always business. We have an order in with your two-by-four equipment factory here for a lot of scrapes and dump-cars, and at the last minute Judson wired that he couldn’t deliver on time. I didn’t happen to have anybody to send, so I came down here to read the riot act to Tom Judson. He’ll ship now; I’ve just been out to see him.” Then to David: “Young man, how soon can I get a train back to Chicago?”

David looked up the required information. The next through train would leave at four minutes past nine o’clock. The visitor glanced at a watch big enough and thick enough to have been used as a missile.

“That gives us about four hours, Adam,” he rumbled, “and we ought to be able to pull up a good lot of the arrears in that length of time. Shut up your desk and call it a day. We’ll trot over to the hotel and be boys together for a little while. David will stay here and wind up the odds and ends of the day’s business for you.”

Adam Vallory was opening his mouth to protest hospitably against the hotel, but his son broke in ahead of him.

“That’s right, Mr. Grillage; I’m mighty glad you can have a little time with Dad,” he interposed quickly. “We were speaking of you this morning, and I was telling Dad that I had met you for a few minutes one day last winder in Florida. Take him away with you, and I’ll stay and close the bank.”

“Good boy!” was the gruff rejoinder. “By and by, when you get around to it, you may make a sleeper reservation for me on that nine o’clock train. Wire for it, and bring the answer over to the hotel. No, Adam”—to the host who was trying to make himself the entertainer instead of the entertained—“no, you’re not going to take me home with you, this time. I want you all to myself. We’ll go to the St. Nicholas and make old Vignaux give us one of his Frenchy dinners in a private room. Get your hat and come along.”

Left to himself, David Vallory checked over the day’s transactions with Winkle, telegraphed for the big man’s berth in the Chicago sleeping-car, and then walked out to the tree-shaded suburb on the hill to eat his dinner with the sister whom he had not yet seen. To his great satisfaction he found young Herbert Oswald at the house, and the presence of the young lawyer, who was easily persuaded to make a third at the family dinner-table, pushed the disaster explanations, or such of them as might have to be made to the blind girl, a little farther into the future.

Though David forced himself to talk at the table-for-three, his cheerful attempts to keep the conversation in some safe middle-of-the-road channel did not obscure for him the sentimental situation developing under his eyes. Lucille, whose delicate, rose-leaf beauty was a direct inheritance from her father, was more animated than David had ever seen her, and it was doubly hard to realize that the softly lighted eyes, lifted shyly now and again in Oswald’s direction, were sightless. And as for the clean-cut, eager-faced young attorney, there was small effort at concealment on his part.

David Vallory left the house after dinner with a heavy heart. He had known Oswald all his life, and liked him. He was well assured that the young lawyer would stand by and be a very tower of strength to the family in the storm which was about to burst. But the outcome of it all would be a swift conflagration in the sentimental field, and a heart-breaking awakening for the blind sister, who was obviously in love with Oswald without at all realizing it. On the half-mile walk to the St. Nicholas David Vallory told himself in many and sternly emphatic repetitions that something must be done to avert the triple-headed calamity; though what the “something” should be was entirely beyond his powers of imagination.

It was past eight o’clock when he reached the town’s one hotel and found a quiet corner in the small office-lobby where he could smoke and wait for the two who were bringing up the boyhood arrears in a private room above-stairs. When the waiting interval ended, it was only the burly guest-host who appeared, coming down from the private-dining-room suite alone. Catching sight of David, he crossed the lobby, cast his big body heavily into a chair, and lighted a cigar, the end of which was already chewed into shapelessness.

“You have sent Dad home?” inquired the son, after he had delivered the telegram assuring one Eben Grillage of a reserved space in the Chicago sleeping-car.

“No!”—disgustedly. “Some crazy farmer broke in on us a few minutes ago and insisted on taking your father over to the bank. Said he had an option on a piece of land, and was obliged to get his money to-night to make good on it.”

David winced. He knew perfectly well that the excuse given had been only an excuse; that the intruding farmer was merely one of the badly frightened depositors in the Middleboro Security who was afraid to wait for another day. He was wondering how much or how little his father had told Grillage of the threatened disaster when the big man went on.

“There is something the matter with your father, David. All evening he’s been acting like a man with a clot on his brain. Hasn’t been sick, has he?”

This was one question that the son could answer without reservations: “No; he hasn’t been side.”

“Humph! Then it’s business. How long have you been home, and how much do you know about his banking affairs?”

“I’ve been here only one day, but I know all there is to know, I guess,” said David, looking down at the worn pattern of the linoleum on the lobby floor.

The head of the Grillage Engineering Company twisted himself in his chair and bored into the young man at his side with the masterful eyes.

“Huh! Been here only one day, and yet you know it all. That means that he’s up against it. I knew it; it was bound to come sooner or later. Anywhere else but in Middleboro he would have gone on the rocks years ago; I’ve always told him that. Shake it loose, young man, and give me the facts.”

David hesitated in some manly fashion. If his father had not seen fit to confide in the tried friend of his youth, it was not for the son to take matters into his own hands.

“I don’t know that I have a right to do that, Mr. Grillage,” he began. “I——”

“See here!” was the explosive interruption; “if you knew me a little better, you wouldn’t make a break like that. When I ask a man to loosen up, he loosens, and that’s all there is to it. Dump it out—all of it.”

David, untried enough to feel that any sharing of the dreadful thing would be a relief, hesitated no longer. The secret would be published broadcast in a day or two at most, so nothing mattered much. In a few words he told the story of the threatening catastrophe, exaggerating nothing, minimizing nothing. Eben Grillage heard him through without interrupting, shifting the chewed cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other as he listened. But at the end of the story he was scowling ferociously.

“Your father is still the same kind of a tender-hearted fool that he has always been!” he rapped out. “Sat through an hour-and-a-half dinner with me—dammit!—and never once opened his head about this bog hole he’s mired in!” Then he dragged out the biscuit-like watch. “We’ve got barely fifteen minutes, young man. You go and get Judson, the scrapers-and-dump-car man, on the ’phone, while I do a bit of figuring. Jump for it!”

David Vallory obeyed blindly, with his brain in a whirl. It took several of the hastening minutes to locate Judson at his home in the northern suburb, and when the telephone connection was finally made, the hotel porter was calling the Chicago train and Eben Grillage was at the desk, paying his bill and growling out orders about his hand-baggage. A moment later David had handed the telephone receiver to the big-bodied man and was listening mechanically to the audible half of the conversation which began with shot-like directness.

“Yes, this is Grillage.... No, I don’t want to talk about the shipment; I want to know where you do your banking.... With the Middleboro National, you say? Well, this time you’ll do it through my bank—the Middleboro Security. Get that? Attach your draft to bill of lading and give it to Adam Vallory. Otherwise you don’t get your money. That’s all. Good-night.”

“Train time, Mr. Grillage,” interrupted the hotel clerk, in his most deferential tone.

“That’s all right; you hold that ’bus until I get ready!” snapped the departing guest. Then, thrusting a slip of paper into David’s hand: “Take that to your father, with my love. And a word to you, my boy”—this in a rumbling aside: “After this ’phone talk of mine gets handed about, your father will have all the credit he needs; but just the same, if you’ve got the level head that you seem to have, you’ll stand by and wind this bank business up, once for all. Your father’s too damned good to be a banker in any such wicked world as the one we’re living in. Dig up a good lawyer, push the crooked borrowers to a settlement, and see if you can’t screw enough out of it to square up and leave your father and sister a little something to live on. When it’s done, you let me know by wire, and I’ll give you a job where you can make good if you’ve got it in you. That’s all I’ve got to say. Tell your father good-by for me; I shan’t have time to stop at the bank.”

It was not until after the crazy omnibus had rattled away, bearing the St. Nicholas’s departing guest in galloping haste for the train, that David Vallory ventured to glance at the slip of paper which had been shoved into his hand. For an instant the figures on it dazzled him and he had a rush of blood to the brain that made the electric lights in the hotel lobby coruscate and take on many-colored halos.

The slip of paper was Eben Grillage’s personal cheque on a Chicago bank for the round sum of one hundred thousand dollars.

IV
An Honorable Discharge

DAVID VALLORY lost little time in crossing the square from the St. Nicholas to the bank corner; in point of fact, he was boyish enough to run. In the bank he found his father relocking the vault after having given the frightened farmer his money.

“Is your heart-action still pretty good, Dad?” he asked. “No high blood pressure, or anything like that, is there?”

“No, David. If I were as sound in mind as I am in body——”

But David would not let him finish. “Take a look at this and tell the blues to go hang,” he laughed, fishing the cheque of salvation out of an inner pocket.

Adam Vallory held the strip of paper up to the electric vault light, saw the figures and the signature, and dropped back into a chair, shaken and tremulous.

“David!” he gasped reproachfully. “Did you tell him?”

“I did. Because it was evident that you hadn’t told him, I tried my best to dodge; but it was no manner of use. When Mr. Eben Grillage goes after a thing, he is not to be denied. He nearly bit my head off when he saw that I was trying to keep something from him. He said I was to give you that piece of paper with his love; that was after he’d ordered me to call Tom Judson on the ’phone for him and had told Judson that the Middleboro Security was his bank, and that he must draw through you for the money to pay for the shipment of scrapers and dump-cars. He said it so that the people standing around in the hotel lobby couldn’t help hearing and knowing that he is backing you. Isn’t that just about the finest thing you ever heard of?”

Adam Vallory was shaking his head dubiously.

“It is too fine, David; the obligation, even from an old friend like Eben.... It’s crushing. But we must consider it as a loan, no matter how he regards it. Yet I don’t see how we shall ever be able to pay it back.”

The young man had perched himself upon the bookkeeper’s high stool, and he had his answer ready.

“You’ve been doing all the scrapping, thus far, Dad, but now you must let me take my whirl at it. We’ll let the old ship go decently and honorably ashore, and then climb out and save the pieces. We’ll pay Mr. Grillage back all we can rake and scrape out of the wreck; and beyond that——”

“Well?—beyond that, what, son?”

“It sounds rather stagy, but I’m going to say it. Beyond what money payment we may be able to make, we shall owe Mr. Grillage a debt of gratitude that will be canceled only when we are both under the sod. That is about the way it strikes me. I don’t care what people say about his business methods and the way he rides rough-shod over his competitors; that doesn’t cut any figure in his relations with you. He has done this thing for you, individually, and I don’t come even into the outer edges of it; just the same, he has laid an obligation upon me that I shall never live long enough to forget.”

For a long minute Adam Vallory sat staring into vacancy. When he looked up it was to say: “You are bone of my bone, David, and I thank God for a son who can see eye to eye with me at a time like this. And yet ... you are young, David; in many ways you are younger than your years. You are maturing slowly, just as I did. Sometimes I’ve been afraid—afraid you might throw yourself into something as a boy throws himself, without reserve, you know; blind to everything but the one thing, whatever it might be. If you can only have time to ripen——”

David’s laugh was entirely care free. “That was the way you talked when I went to college, Dad, and again, when I left for Florida. I haven’t noticed that I’m particularly raw, compared with other men.”

“It isn’t that,” the father hastened to say, “it’s just that, up to to-day, you’ve never had to shoulder a man’s load. Perhaps I am foolishly apprehensive, but the way in which you spoke just now of our obligation—your obligation—to Eben Grillage.... I don’t know how to express it, but it made me feel as I have sometimes felt before; that if anything which you might conceive to be a duty were pushing you, you’d shut your eyes and go to any length.”

David laughed and shook his head. “Some day, Dad, you’ll wake up and find that I’m a man grown; or I hope you will. Just the same, we do owe Mr. Grillage a lot more than we can ever pay, and if it ever comes in my way to chop the debt down a bit, you may be sure I’ll sharpen my axe. Now, if you are not too wretchedly tired and worn out, suppose we turn in and make our plans before we sleep. I told Lucille that we’d most likely be late coming home and she won’t be sitting up for us. To-morrow morning you’re going to turn the winding up of this thing over to me and let me save what I can. That is what Mr. Grillage said I must do, and it is what I mean to do.”

Deep into the night father and son sat together in the private room in the rear, poring over the books and bank paper and setting things in order for the speedy beaching of the outworn business ship. But it was not until after they had left the bank and were walking home that David won his final point.

“You shall do as you think best, David,” the father conceded, closing an argument which had begun at the very outset of the planning. “If it were left to me, I should probably be too easy with the bank’s debtors, as I’ve always been. You may retain Oswald, if you think best; only don’t let him be too hard on the borrowers who are in difficulties.”

The following day saw the beginning of the end for the oldest banking institution in the county. At nine o’clock in the morning the cue leading to Winkle’s wicket was formed again; but in an hour or two the tide showed signs of turning. At Oswald’s suggestion the Vallorys had posted a notice in the bank window to the effect that Middleboro Security was going out of business, and inviting all who had claims upon the bank to present them and get their money. Coincidently with the posting of this notice, a rumor, starting from nobody knew just where, began to pass from lip to lip among the anxious depositors. It was to the effect that Eben Grillage, well known in the town and currently spoken of by his former townsmen as a multimillionaire, was backing Adam Vallory. The result was almost magical. First one and then another dropped out of the line in front of Winkle’s window; and by noon many of those who had already withdrawn their savings were coming back to furnish an object-lesson in the mutability of human nature by begging Adam Vallory to stay in business and reinstate them as depositors.

Early in the afternoon David persuaded his father to go home, and himself took the chair at the president’s desk, with Herbert Oswald at his elbow. By evening a good beginning had been made and the tangle was simplifying itself.

“Time is the thing we need to save,” said David, as he and the young lawyer went together to the St. Nicholas for their belated dinner. “Dad is needing a rest, and I’ve got to strike out and do something for myself; something better than making maps in a Government surveying office. Naturally, I can’t go until after things are wound up properly here, and Dad and Lucille are provided for in some fashion. How long do you think it is going to take?”

Oswald reserved his answer until after they had found their places in the café and had given their dinner order.

“As to the time, it will probably ask for more than you will care to give to it,” he predicted; “that is, if you mean to stay and see it through. But that isn’t at all necessary. We can shake you loose in a few days, after we have closed the bank doors and have brought matters down to a routine settlement with debtors and creditors. I can handle that part of it myself, as the bank’s counsel.”

In accordance with this outline of Oswald’s, David Vallory stood by for the few days, taking his father’s place in the bank and doing what he could to hasten the beaching of the Security ship. The end of that phase of it came when the last depositor had chequed out his account, and Winkle had closed his wicket for the final time. Only the deferred collections remained, and these were turned over to Oswald.

In the evening of this climaxing day, David and the young attorney were once more dining together in Vignaux’s café. The strain was off, and for the first time since his home-coming, David was free to begin the consideration of his own future. It was Oswald who gave the table talk its start in the proper direction.

“You are footloose at last, David, and I can imagine that you are mighty glad of it,” was the way the start was given. “It has been a new experience for you, and you have certainly buckled down to it like a man.”

David’s smile was boyishly complacent. “Sure I have; there was no reason why I shouldn’t. Isn’t that what a man’s son is for, in the last analysis?”

“Yes, but——”

“But what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A good many sons don’t seem to see it in that light; and in your case—well, I’ve known you a long time, David, and I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend,’” David quoted, with a return of the good-natured smile. “What have I done to make you think small of me? Or is it something that I haven’t done?”

“Neither,” was the thoughtful reply. “It’s just—oh, well; I guess it is because we were boys together, and I couldn’t seem to realize that you have grown up.”

“You and Dad are the limit. Do you realize it now?”

“Y-yes; to some extent. I’ve been watching you through this business whirl. You’ve done well; splendidly well. But it was the fighting of the untrained soldier.”

“Of course it was. What I didn’t know of the actual details of the business would have filled a library.”

“That isn’t what I meant; I guess I can’t express myself clearly enough to make you understand just what it is that I do mean. It sizes itself up something like this: you’re so wholesome and straightforward and decent, David——”

“Break it off,” laughed David; “you make me blush!”

“That’s it,” said the keen-eyed young fellow across the table; “you do blush. Which is the proof of the pudding. But I mustn’t devil you when you’re tired; tired and more or less discouraged.”

“Discouraged? Not a bit of it. Why should I be discouraged?”

“Most fellows would be, in your shoes. You’ve had every reason to believe that you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth—or at least, a triple-plated one.”

“I? Not in a thousand years!” grinned the son whose light was of a proper filial brightness. “I’ve known all along that the Middleboro Security would have to be wound up some time. Dad is all the fine things you can say of him, Bert, but he wasn’t cut out for a successful banker. He knows it as well as anybody.”

Oswald looked up questioningly. “You haven’t any twinges of your own, Dave? It used to be the town’s idea that you’d some day come back and marry Judith Fallon and settle down to be Vallory Number Two in the banking business.”

“Marry Judith? What put that idea into the town’s head—or yours?”

“You did,” said Oswald gravely.

“Great Scott! Can’t a man be just ordinarily chummy with a girl he’s known all his life without having the gossips of a country-town tie a tin can to him?”

“With a number of them, yes; but with one, no.”

“Bosh!” said David.

“No, it isn’t ‘bosh.’ You’ve specialized on Judith; I’ve seen it myself. Candidly, David, I’ve tried to shut my eyes to it, partly because I hoped it might die out. Judith’s a good girl, and in her own class she is the prettiest thing that was ever turned loose in a world of more or less squashy young men. But I can’t seem to see her calling herself Mrs. Vallory.”

“You needn’t try.”

Oswald’s eyebrows went up. “She has turned you down?”

“Bert, if this place wasn’t so public I should blow up! Good Lord, man! there has never been anything sentimental between Judith and me!—nothing on top of earth more than a bit of jolly good-comradeship!”

Being already up, Oswald’s eyebrows stayed in that position.

“On your part, perhaps; but how about Judith? Listen, David: within the past month I’ve heard half a dozen times that you and Judith were to be married as soon as you got yourself relocated in some more habitable place than a Florida swamp. You may howl all you want to about country-town gossip, but——”

This time David Vallory interrupted with a twist of the square jaw that took Oswald swiftly back to a day long remembered in Middleboro school annals when David had plunged, head down, into battle with the leader of the “factory gang” and had for all time vindicated the superiority of “town-side” brain over mere brawn.

“Drop it, Herbert,” he said quietly; and then: “Let’s get back on the main track again. You were saying that the town expected me to come back and follow in Dad’s footsteps. There’s nothing doing. In another way, I’m as incompetent as he is. Money-handling doesn’t appeal to me; it never has appealed to me. I’d rather go out as a transit-man on some building job worth while than to be the president of the biggest bank in the State. It’s all in the way a man happens to be built.”

“You are beginning at the bottom in your profession, though, aren’t you?”

“Of course; any man worth his salt begins that way. And that brings us down to the finances again. Have you carried the figuring far enough along to be able to guess at what will be left after all the bills are paid?”

Oswald shook his head. “Your father hasn’t taken either of us fully into his confidence,” he averred. “He insists that we must try to realize on the assets so as to have a hundred thousand dollars left to pay a personal debt which doesn’t appear on the bank’s books. If we subtract even half of that amount from the most favorable outcome at present in sight, there will be nothing of any account left for him and your sister.”

“It will be enough; with what I may be able to add to it,” said David, neither affirming nor denying the lawyer’s hint that he was not entirely in his father’s confidence.

“You are going away to look for a job?” Oswald asked.

“As it happens, I don’t have to look for one. I leave for Chicago on the eleven-fifteen to-night, and my job is waiting for me.”

“Fine!” was the friendly approval. “Is it a secret?”

“Not at all. I’m going to work for the Grillage Engineering Company; an assistant engineer’s billet on a bridge construction job up in Wisconsin. There is a reason why I shouldn’t take the job, and a still stronger reason why I can’t refuse.”

“That’s capital!” said Oswald, ignoring the qualifying part of the announcement. “You are lucky—or I guess you are. They say Mr. Eben Grillage can dig his profit out of the shrewdest contract that was ever drawn and never turn a hair. But as an engineer in the field, you won’t have anything to do with that part of it.”

David glanced up quickly with a little frown coming and going between the honest eyes.

“Again I’ll have to ask you to break it off, Bert. Mr. Grillage is my father’s friend.”

“Of course he is; I forgot for the moment,” was the placative reply. “I shouldn’t have repeated the gossip—which is only gossip, after all. I suppose you remember his daughter Vinnie, as a little girl, don’t you?”

“Very well, indeed,” said David, with his eyes on his plate.

“She has grown up to be a raving, tearing, heart-smashing beauty,” the lawyer went on, entirely unmindful of the sudden change in his table-mate. “I met her in Indianapolis last summer when I was there on a business trip. She was stopping with friends, and she gave me exactly five minutes by the watch—which was all the time she could spare; all the time a dozen other fellows would let her spare. Somebody told me she was, or is, going to marry an English title.”

“That is gossip, too,” said David, still looking down.

“I suppose so. You can hear all sorts of things if you’ll only hold your ears open. Finished your dinner? If you have, let’s go and smoke.”

At this, David Vallory came to life again.

“No; I can’t take the time, Bert. I must go out home and pack my trunk. And I’m going to ask a favor of you. Will you be at the train to see me off.”

“Surest thing in the world,” said the young lawyer; and after David had gone he sauntered out to the office-lobby and bought a cigar with thoughtful deliberation, recalling, now that he had time to do so, David’s cryptic remark about the reasons—still unexplained—for and against his new employment.

V
Gloriana

DAVID VALLORY had not been strictly truthful in pleading the journey preparations as an excuse for leaving Oswald at the dinner-table. It still wanted three hours of train time; and, as a matter of fact, his trunk, packed in Florida for the hurried flight northward, had not since been unpacked. But on no account would he have given Oswald the real reason for his early defection.

That reason began to define itself when, at the corner beyond the St. Nicholas, he turned to the left and walked rapidly in a direction precisely opposite to that in which the home suburb lay. Down to the railroad yards and across the tracks he fared, turning presently from the main street into another which led to a region called “Judsontown,” taking its name from the Judson Foundries and housing the major portion of Judson’s workmen.

At the gate of a cottage a trifle larger and more commodious than its neighbors on either hand, David turned in and walked up the slag-paved path to the porch. There was a light turned low in one room of the cottage, but no other signs of life. But at his approach there was a rustle of modish skirts on the porch and a vision appeared; the vision taking the form of a strikingly handsome young woman, round limbed, scarlet-lipped, with midnight eyes and hair. The light from the near-by street lamp framed her in the porch opening for David as he swung up the path, and it was a picture to stir the blood in the veins of an anchorite.

“Gloriana!” he said, taking both of her hands, and giving her the name she had given herself as soon as she was old enough to hate the one her parents had given her.

“Davie! you’ve come at last, have you?” she breathed. “’Tis long ago I’d given you up. A week you’ve been back, and but for the papers I’d never have known it!”

“Don’t scold me, Glo,” he begged. “If you could only know how busy I’ve been. This is the first spare minute I’ve had in the week, honestly. Where are your father and mother?”

“They’ve gone up-town to the movie. You’ll be coming in?”

“Just for a little while.”

She led the way into the cottage, into the room of the dimmed light. It was exactly as David remembered it from a time when he had often been made at home in it; the big-figured red carpet, the marble-topped center table with the family Bible, the family photograph album, and a crocheted mat in the middle for the foot of an ornate parlor lamp with a crimson shade. Also, there were the same stiff-backed chairs and the same sofa upholstered in green rep. In one corner was the young woman’s piano. John Fallon was a foreman in the Judson Foundries and could well afford to buy his daughter a piano, if he chose. David sat down on one of the uncomfortable chairs.

“Turn up the light and let me see you, Glo,” he said, and when she did it: “Jove! but you picked the right name for yourself years ago when we were kiddies! The movie stars have nothing on you—not one of them.”

“Flatterer!” she laughed, and if there were a faint suggestion of the “h” after the “t’s” he did not mind. Her Irish accent had always seemed to harmonize perfectly with her rich, “black-Irish” beauty. Then: “The two years have been making you into a man, Davie. ’Twas in your letters when I’d be reading them. Don’t be propping yourself on that chair; come over here and be yourself.”

He went to sit beside her on the green sofa and was straightway conscious that he had stepped within a strange aura. Pointedly and of set purpose he began to talk of commonplace things; Middleboro things that had happened during his absence. But the subtle distraction persisted, coming like a veil between the thought and the words until he scarcely knew at times what he was saying. It was a new experience. What he had told Oswald was the simple truth; in the old days he and Judith Fallon had been more like two boys together than a boy and girl, and the frank comradeship had carried over from childhood to manhood and womanhood; or it had up to now. But now he could see and feel nothing but her superb physical beauty. Once, as a college Freshman, he had permitted himself to be ridiculed into gulping down a drink of whiskey. “It was like this,” he found himself saying aloud, and the girl beside him laughed.

“What’s come over you, Davie?” she said. “Half the time you’re talking nonsense—just nonsense. But for knowing how you hate it, I might think you’d been drinking!”

“I have,” he returned soberly, suddenly realizing. Then: “Glo, you ought to pick out some decent young fellow and get married.”

She laughed at this, but the black eyes were hard.

“Why would I want to be getting married?” she demanded.

“Don’t you?”

“I thought I did—two years ago.”

“You were too young then,” he decided gravely. “But now it is time. You—you’re a living threat, as you are. Don’t you know it?”

“And what would I be threatening, then?”

“The peace of mind of every man who comes near you. You may not know it, Glo, but you are the kind of woman for whom men, ever since the world began, have been throwing everything worth while into the discard; truth, honor, loyalty—anything they had to fling away.”

“Would you just be finding that out, Davie?”

“You—you’re different in some way, Glo; or else I am. What have you been doing to yourself in these two years?”

“What should I be doing? Is a girl to be waiting always for something that’s never going to happen?”

A cold horror seized him, but he tried to shake it off; tried to recall the Gloriana he had grown up with; a frank, outspoken daughter of the people, strong to attract, but also strong to resist. The “town-side” boys had jeered him for companying with John Fallon’s daughter, a “factory-side” girl, but then, as now, he was wont to go his own way when he was convinced that the way was straight and honest. The way had been straight, he told himself, because the girl was straight. But now——