Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel
himself. Relieved is the word, for from the minute he had put Miss Sands
into the carriage until then, it was evident even to my wife that his
thoughts were anywhere but upon our outing.
“Jim,” he began in a voice that shook in spite of his efforts to make it
sound calm, “there is no disguising the fact that I am mightily worked up
about this matter, and I want to do everything possible for this girl. No
need of my telling you how sacred we have got to keep what she has just
let me into. You’ll see as I go along that it is sacred, and I know you
will look at it as I do. Miss Sands must be helped out of her trouble.
“Judge Lee Sands, her father, is the head of the old Sands family of
Virginia. The Virginia Sands don’t take off their bonnets to another
family in this country, or elsewhere, for that matter, for anything that
really counts. They have had brains, learning, money, and fixed position
since Virginia was first settled. They are the best people of our State.
It is a cross-road saying in Virginia that a Sands of Sands Landing can go
to the bench, the United States Senate, the House, or the governor’s chair
for the starting, and nearly all of the men folks have held one or all of
these honours for generations. The present judge has held them all. I
don’t know him personally, although my people and his have been thick from
away back. Sands Landing on the James is some fifty miles above our home.
The judge, Beulah Sands’s father, is close on to seventy, and I have heard
mother and father say is a stalwart, a Virginia stalwart. Being rich—that
is, what we Virginians call rich, a million or so—he has been very active
in affairs, and I knew before his daughter told me, that he was the
trustee for about all the best estates in our part of the country. It
seems from what she tells, that of late he has been very active in
developing our coal-mines and railroads, and that particularly he took a
prominent hand in the Seaboard Air Line. You know the road, for your
father was a director, and I think the house has been prominent in its
banking affairs. Now, Jim, this poor girl, who, it seems, has recently
been acting as the judge’s secretary, has just learned that that coup of
Reinhart and his crowd has completely ruined her father. The decline has
swamped his own fortune, and, what is worse, a million to a million and a
half of his trust funds as well, and the old judge—well, you and I can
understand his position. Yet I do not know that you just can, either, for
you do not quite understand our Virginia life and the kind of revered
position a man like Judge Sands occupies. You would have to know that to
understand fully his present purgatory and the terrible position of this
daughter, for it seems that since he began to get into deep water he has
been relying upon her for courage and ideas. From our talk I gather she
has a wonderful store of up-to-date business notions, and I am convinced
from what she lays out that the judge’s affairs are hopeless, and, Jim,
when that old man goes down it will be a smash that will shake our State
in more ways than one.
“Up to now the girl has stood up to the blow like a man and has been able
to steady the judge until he presents an exterior that holds down
suspicion as to his real financial condition, although she says Reinhart
and his Baltimore lawyer, from the ruthless way they put on the screws to
shake out his holdings in the Air Line, must have a line on it that the
judge is overboard. The old gentleman can keep things going for six months
longer without jeopardising any of the remaining trust funds, of which he
has some two millions, and while his wife, who is an invalid, knows the
judge is in some trouble, she does not suspect his real position. His
daughter says that when the blow came, that day of the panic, when
Reinhart jammed the stock out of sight and scuttled her father’s bankers
and partners in the road, the Wilsons of Baltimore, she had a frightful
struggle to keep her father from going insane. She told me that for three
days and nights she kept him locked in their rooms at their hotel in
Baltimore, to prevent him from hunting Reinhart and his lawyer Rettybone
and killing them both, but that at last she got him calmed down and
together they have been planning.
“Jim, it was tough to sit there and listen to the schemes to recoup that
this old gentleman and this girl, for she is only twenty-one, have tried
to hatch up. The tears actually rolled down my cheeks as I listened; I
couldn’t help it; you couldn’t either, Jim. But at last out of all the
plans considered, they found only one that had a tint of hope in it, and
the serious mention of even that one, Jim, in any but present
circumstances, would make you think we were dealing with lunatics. But the
girl has succeeded in making me think it worth trying. Yes, Jim, she has,
and I have told her so, and I hope to God that that hard-headed
horse-sense of yours will not make you sit down on it.”
Bob Brownley had got to his feet; he was slipping the shackles of that
fiery, romantic, Southern passion that years in college and Wall Street
had taught him to keep prisoner. His eyes were flashing sparks. His
nostrils vibrated like a deer buck’s in the autumn woods. He faced me with
his hands clinched.
“Jim Randolph,” he went on, “as I listened to that girl’s story of the
terrible cruelty and devilish treachery practised by the human hyenas you
and I associate with, human hyenas who, when in search of dirty
dollars—the only thing they know anything about—put to shame the real
beasts of the wilds—when I listened, I tell you that I felt it would not
give me a twinge of conscience to put a ball through that slick scoundrel
Reinhart. Yes, and that hired cur of his, too, who prostitutes a good
family name and position, and an inherited ability the Almighty intended
for more honest uses than the trapping of victims on whose purses his
gutter-born master has set lecherous eyes. And, Jim, as I listened, a
troop of old friends invaded my memory—friends whom I have not seen since
before I went to Harvard, friends with whom I spent many a happy hour in
my old Virginia home, friends born of my imagination, stalwart, rugged
crusaders, who carried the sword and the cross and the banner inscribed
‘For Honour and for God.’ Old friends who would troop into my boyhood and
trumpet, ‘Bob, don’t forget, when you’re a man, that the goal is honour,
and the code: Do unto your neighbour as you would have your neighbour do
unto you. Don’t forget that millions is the crest of the groundlings.’
And, Jim, I thought my friends looked at me with reproachful eyes, as
they said, ‘You are well on the road, Bob Brownley, and in time your heart
and soul will bear the hall-mark of the snaky S on the two upright bars,
and you will be but a frenzied fellow in the Dirty Dollar army.’ Jim, Jim
Randolph, as I listened to that agonising tale of the changing of that
girl’s heaven to hell, I did not see that halo you and I have thought
surrounded the sign of Randolph & Randolph. I did not see it, Jim, but I
did see myself, and I didn’t feel proud of the picture. My God, Jim, is it
possible you and I have joined the nobility of Dirty Dollars? Is it
possible we are leaving trails along our life’s path like that Reinhart
left through the home of these Virginians, such trails as this girl has
shown me?”
Bob had worked himself into a state of frenzy. I had never seen him so
excited as when he stood in front of me and almost shouted this fierce
self-denunciation.
“For heaven’s sake, Bob, pull yourself together,” I urged. “The captain on
the bridge there is staring at you wild-eyed, and Katherine will be up
here to see what has happened. Now, be a good fellow, and let us talk
this thing over in a sensible way. At the gait you are going we can do
nothing to help out your friends. Besides, what is there for you and me to
take ourselves to task for? We are no wreckers and none of our dollars is
stained with Frenzied Finance. My father, as you know, despised Reinhart
and his sort as much as we do. Be yourself. What does this girl want you
to do? If it is anything in reason, call it done, for you know there is
nothing I won’t do for you at the asking.”
Bob’s hysteria oozed. He dropped on the rail-seat at my side.
“I know it, Jim, I know it, and you must forgive me. The fact, is, Beulah
Sands’s story has aroused a lot of thoughts I have been a-sticking down
cellar late years, for, to tell the truth, I have some nasty twinges of
conscience every now and then when I get to thinking of this dollar game
of ours.”
I saw that the impulsive blood was fast cooling, and that it would only be
a question of minutes until Bob would be his clearheaded self.
“Now, what is it she wants you to do?” I persisted. “Is it a case of
money, of our trying to tide her father over?”
“Nothing of that kind, Jim. You don’t know the proud Virginia blood.
Neither that girl nor her father would accept money help from any one.
They would go to smash and the grave first.”
He paused and then continued impressively:
“This is how she puts it. She and her father have raked together her
different legacies and turned them into cash, a matter of sixty thousand
dollars, and she got him to consent to let her come up here to see if
during the next six months she might not, in a few desperate plunges in
the market, run it up to enough to at least regain the trust funds. Yes, I
know it is a wild idea. I told her so at the beginning, but there was no
need; she knew it, for she is not only bright, but she has the best idea
of business I ever knew a woman to have. But it is their only chance, Jim,
and while I listened to her argument I came around to her way of
thinking.”
“But how did she happen to come to you with this extraordinary scheme?” I
interrupted.
“It’s this way—her father, who knew Randolph & Randolph through your
father’s handling of the Seaboard’s affairs, learned of my connection
with the house, and gave her a letter, asking me to do what I could to
help his daughter carry out her plans. She wants to get a position with
us, if possible, in some sort of capacity, secretary, confidential clerk,
or, as she puts it, any sort of place that will justify her being in the
office. She tells me she is good at shorthand, on the machine, or at
correspondence, also that she has been a contributor to the magazines. If
this can be arranged, she says she will on her own responsibility select
the time and the stock, and hurl the last of the Sands fortune at the
market, and, Jim, she is game. The blow seems to have turned this child
into a wonderfully nervy creature, and, old man, I am beginning to have a
feeling that perhaps the cards may come so she will win the judge out. You
and I know where less than sixty thousand has been run up to millions more
than once, and that, too, without the aid she will have, for I’ll surely
do all I can to help her steer this last chance into spongy places.”
Bob in his enthusiasm had completely lost sight of the fact that he was
indorsing a project that but a moment previously he had pronounced insane,
and with a start I realised what this sudden transformation betokened.
Inevitably, if the project he outlined were carried out, Bob and the
beautiful Southern girl would be thrown into close association with each
other, and further acquaintance could only deepen the startling influence
Beulah Sands had already won over my ordinarily sane and cool-headed
comrade. As I looked at my friend, burning with an ardour as unaccustomed
as it was impulsive, I felt a tug at my heartstrings at thought of the
sudden cross-roading of his life’s highway. But I, too, was filled with
the glamour of this girl’s wondrous beauty, and her terrible predicament