Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic
the Trescotts to use their land longer as a farm. Lattimore was changing
daily. The streets were gashed with trenches for gas- and water-mains;
piled-up materials for curbing, paving, office buildings, new hotels,
and all sorts of erections made locomotion a peril; but we were happy.
The water company was organized in our office, the gas and
electric-light company in Cornish's; but every spout led into the same
bin.
Mr. Hinckley had induced some country dealers who owned a line of local
grain-houses to remove to Lattimore and put up a huge terminal elevator
for the handling of their trade. Captain Tolliver had been for a long
time working upon a project for developing a great water-power, by
tunneling across a bend in the river, and utilizing the fall. The
building of the elevator attracted the attention of a company of
Rochester millers, and almost before we knew it their forces had been
added to ours, and the tunnel was begun, with the certainty that a
two-thousand-barrel mill would be ready to grind the wheat from the
elevator as soon as the flume began carrying water. This tunnel cut
through an isthmus between the Brushy Creek valley and the river, and
brought to bear on our turbines the head from a ten-mile loop of shoals
and riffles. It opened into the gorge near the southern edge of Lynhurst
Park, and crossed the Trescott farm. So it was that Bill awoke one day
to the fact that his farm was coveted by divers people, who saw in his
fields and feed-yards desirable sites for railway tracks, mills,
factories, and the cottages of a manufacturing suburb. This it was that
had put the Captain, like a blood-hound, on his trial, to the end that
he was run to earth in my office, and made his appeal for help in
managing Josie.
"There she comes now," said he. "Labor with her, won't yeh?"
"Bring her with us to the hotel," said I, "to take dinner. If my wife
and Elkins can't fix the thing, no one can."
So we five dined together, and after dinner discussed the Trescott
crisis. Bill put the case, with all a veteran dealer's logic, in its
financial aspects.
"But we don't want to be rich," said Josie.
"What've we ben actin' all these years like we have for, then?" inquired
Bill. "Seem's if I'd been lab'rin' under a mistake f'r some time past.
When your ma an' me was a-roughin' it out there in the old log-house,
an' she a-lookin' out at the Feb'uary stars through the holes in the
roof, a-holdin' you, a little baby in bed, we reckoned we was a-doin' of
it to sort o' better ourselves in a property way. Wouldn't you
'a'thought so, Jim?"
"Well," said Mr. Elkins, with an air of judicial perpension, "if you had
asked me about it, I should have said that, if you wanted to stay poor,
you could have held your own better by staying in Pleasant Valley
Township as a renter. This was no place to come to if you wanted to
conserve your poverty."
"But, pa, we're not adapted to town life and towns," urged Josie. "I'm
not, and you are not, and as for mamma, she'll never be contented. Oh,
Mr. Elkins, why did you come out here, making us all fortunes which we
haven't earned, and upsetting everything?"
"Now, don't blame me, Josie," Jim protested. "You ought to consider the
fallacy of the _post hoc, propter hoc_ argument. But to return to the
point under discussion. If you could stay there, a rural Amaryllis,
sporting in Arcadian shades, having seen you doing it once or twice, I
couldn't argue against it, it's so charmingly becoming."
"If that were all the argument--" began Josie.
"It's the most important one--to my mind," said Jim, resuming the
discussion, "and you fail on that point; for you can't live in that way
long. If you don't sell, the Development Company will condemn grounds
for railway tracks and switch-yards; you'll find your fields and
meadows all shot to pieces; and your house will be surrounded by
warehouses, elevators, and factories. Your larks and bobolinks will be
scared off by engines and smokestacks, and your flowers spoiled with
soot. Don't parley with fate, but cash in and put your winnings in some
safe investment."
"Once I thought I couldn't stay on the old farm a day longer; but I feel
otherwise now! What business has this 'progress' of yours to interfere?"
"It pushes you out of the nest," answered Jim. "It gives you the chance
of your lives. You can come out into Lynhurst Park Addition, and build
your house near the Barslow and Elkins dwellings. We've got about
everything there--city water, gas, electric light, sewers, steam heat
from the traction plant, beautiful view, lots on an established grade--"
"Don't, don't!" said Josie. "It sounds like the advertisements in the
_Herald_."
"Well, I was just leading up to a statement of what we lack," continued
Jim. "It's the artistic atmosphere. We need a dash of the culture of
Paris and Dresden and the place where they have the dinky little
windmills which look so nice on cream-pitchers, but wouldn't do for one
of our farmers a minute. Come out and supply our lack. You owe it to the
great cause of the amelioration of local savagery; and in view of my
declaration of discipleship, and the effective way in which I have
always upheld the standard of our barbarism, I claim that you owe it to
me."
"I've abandoned the brush."
"Take it up again."
"I have made a vow."
"Break it!"
She refused to yield, but was clearly yielding. Alice and I showed
Trescott, on a plat, the place for his new home. He was quite taken with
the idea, and said that ma would certainly be tickled with it.
Josie sat apart with Mr. Elkins, in earnest converse, for a long time.
She looked frequently at her father, Jim constantly at her. Mr. Cornish
dropped in for a little while, and joined us in presenting the case for
removal. While he was there the girl seemed constrained, and not quite
so fully at her ease; and I could detect, I thought, the old tendency to
scrutinize his face furtively. When he went away, she turned to Jim more
intimately than before, and almost promised that she would become his
neighbor in Lynhurst. After the Trescotts' carriage had come and taken
them away, Jim told us that it was for her father, and the temptations
of idleness in the town, that Miss Trescott feared.
"This fairy-godmother business," said he, "ain't what the prospectus
might lead one to expect. It has its drawbacks. Bill is going to cash in
all right, and I think it's for the best; but, Al, we've got to take
care of the old man, and see that he doesn't go up in the air."
CHAPTER XIII.
A Sitting or Two in the Game with the World and Destiny.
Our game at Lattimore was one of those absorbing ones in which the
sunlight of next morning sifts through the blinds before the players are
aware that midnight is past. Day by day, deal by deal, it went on, card
followed card in fateful fall upon the table, and we who sat in, and
played the World and Destiny with so pitifully small a pile of chips at
the outset, saw the World and Destiny losing to us, until our hands
could scarcely hold, our eyes hardly estimate, the high-piled stacks of
counters which were ours.
We saw the yellowing groves and brown fields of our first autumn; we
heard the long-drawn, wavering, mounting, falling, persistent howl of
the thresher among the settings of hive-shaped stacks; we saw the loads
of red and yellow corn at the corn-cribs,--as men at the board of the
green cloth hear the striking of the hours. And we heeded them as
little. The cries of southing wild-fowl heralded the snow; winter came
for an hour or so, and melted into spring; and some of us looked up from
our hands for a moment, to note the fact that it was the anniversary of
that aguish day when three of us had first taken our seats at the table:
and before we knew it, the dust and heat and summer clouds, like that
which lightened over the fete in the park, admonished us that we were
far into our second year. And still shuffle, cut, deal, trick, and hand
followed each other, and with draw and bluff and showdown we played the
World and Destiny, and playing won, and saw our stacks of chips grow
higher and higher, as our great and absorbing game went on.
Moreover, while we won and won, nobody seemed to lose. Josie spoke that
night of fortunes which people had not earned; but surely they were
created somehow; and as the universe, when the divine fiat had formed
the world, was richer, rather than poorer, so, we felt, must these
values so magically growing into our fortunes be good, rather than evil,
and honestly ours, so far as we might be able to secure them to
ourselves. I said as much to Jim one day, at which he smiled, and
remarked that if we got to monkeying with the ethics of the trade,
piracy would soon be a ruined business.
"Better, far better keep the lookout sweeping the horizon for sails,"
said he, "and when one appears, serve out the rum and gunpowder to the
crew, and stand by to lower away the boats for a boarding-party!"
I am afraid I have given the impression that our life at this time was
solely given over to cupidity and sordidness; and that idea I may not be
able to remove. Yet I must try to do so. We were in the game to win; but
our winnings, present and prospective, were not in wealth only. To
surmount obstacles; to drive difficulties before us like scattering
sparrows; to see a town marching before us into cityhood; to feel
ourselves the forces working through human masses so mightily that, for
hundreds of miles about us, social and industrial factors were compelled
to readjust themselves with reference to us; to be masters; to
create--all these things went into our beings in thrilling and dizzying
pulsations of a pleasure which was not ignoble.
For instance, let us take the building of the Lattimore & Great Western
Railway. Before Mr. Elkins went to Lattimore this line had been surveyed
by the cooeperation of Mr. Hinckley, Mr. Ballard, the president of the
opposition bank, and some others. It was felt that there was little real
competition among the railways centering there, and the L. & G.W. was
designed as a hint to them of a Lattimore-built connection with the
Halliday system, then a free-lance in the transportation field, and
ready to make rates in an independent and competitive way. The Angus
Falls extension brought this system in, but too late to do the good
expected; for Mr. Halliday, in his dealings with us, convinced us of the
truth of the rumors that he had brought the other roads to terms, and
was a free-lance no longer. Month by month the need of real competition
in our carrying trade grew upon us. Rates accorded to other cities on
our commercial fighting line we could not get, in spite of the most
persistent efforts. In the offices of presidents and general managers,
in St. Louis, Chicago, St. Paul and Minneapolis, Kansas City, Omaha and
New York we were received by suave princes of the highways, who each
blandly assured us that his road looked with especial favor upon our
town, and that our representations should receive the most solicitous
attention. But the word of promise was ever broken to the hope.
After one of these embassies the syndicate held a meeting in Cornish's
elegant offices on the ground-floor of the new "Hotel Elkins" building.
We sent Giddings away to prepare an optimistic news-story for
to-morrow's _Herald_, and an editorial leader based upon it, both of
which had been formulated among us before going into executive session
on the state of the nation. Hinckley, who had an admirable power of
seeing the crux of a situation, was making a rather grave prognosis for
us.
"If we can't get rates which will let us into a broader territory, we
may as well prepare for reverses," said he. "Foreign cement comes almost