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PORT ARGENT is a city lying by a brown navigable river that gives it a waterway to the trade of the Lakes. No one knows why it grew there, instead of elsewhere on the banks of the Muscadine, with higher land and better convenience. One dim-eyed event leaped on the back of another, and the city grew.

In the Senate Chamber where accidents and natural laws meet in Executive Session or Committee of the Whole, and log-roll bills, there are no “press galleries,” nor any that are “open to the public.” Inferences have been drawn concerning its submerged politics, stakes laid on its issues, and lobbying attempted. What are its parties, its sub-committees? Does an administrative providence ever veto its bills, or effectively pardon the transgressors of any statute?

Fifty years ago the Honourable Henry Champney expected that the acres back of his large square house, on Lower Bank Street by the river, would grow in value, and that their growing values would maintain, or help to maintain, his position in the community, and show the over-powers to favour integrity and Whig principles. But the city grew eastward instead into the half-cleared forest, and the sons of small farmers in that direction are now the wealthy citizens. The increment of the small farmers and the decrement of Henry Champney are called by social speculators “unearned,” implying that this kind of attempt to lobby a session of accidents and natural laws is, in general, futile.

Still, the acres are mainly built over. The Champney house stands back of a generous lawn with accurate paths. Trolley cars pass the front edge of the lawn. Beyond the street and the trolleys and sidewalks comes the bluff. Under the bluff is the tumult of the P. and N. freight-yards. But people in Port Argent have forgotten what Whig principles were composed of.

There in his square-cupolaed house, some years ago, lived Henry Champney with his sister, Miss Eunice, and his daughter, Camilla. Camilla was born to him in his middle life, and through her eyes he was beginning, late in his old age, to look curiously at the affairs of a new generation.

Wave after wave these generations follow each other. The forces of Champney's generation were mainly spent, its noisy questions and answers subsiding. It pleased him that he was able to take interest in the breakers that rolled over their retreat. He wondered at the growth of Port Argent.

The growth of Port Argent had the marks of that irregular and corrupt legislation of destiny. It had not grown like an architect-builded house, according to orderly plans. If some thoughtful observer had come to it once every decade of its seventy years, it might have seemed to his mind not so much a mechanic result of men's labours as something living and personal, a creature with blood flowing daily through arteries and veins (trolley cars being devices to assist the flow), with brains working in a thousand cells, and a heart beating foolish emotions. He would note at one decade how it had thrown bridges across the river, steeples and elevator-buildings into the air, with sudden throbs of energy; had gathered a bundle of railroads and a row of factories under one arm, and was imitating speech through a half-articulate daily press; at another decade, it would seem to have slept; at another, it had run asphalt pavements out into the country, after whose enticing the houses had not followed, and along its busiest streets were hollow, weed-grown lots. On the whole, Port Argent would seem masculine rather than feminine, reckless, knowing not form or order, given to growing pains, boyish notions, ungainly gestures, changes of energy and sloth, high hope and sudden moodiness.

The thoughtful observer of decades, seeing these signs of eccentric character, would feel curious to understand it from within, to enter its streets, offices, and homes, to question and listen, to watch the civic heart beat and brain conceive.

One April afternoon, some decades ago, such an observer happened by and found gangs of men tearing up Lower Bank Street.

Lower Bank Street was higher than Bank Street proper, but it was down the river, and in Port Argent people seldom cared whether anything fitted anything else.

Bank Street proper was the main business street beside the river. Fifty years before, in forecasting the future city, one would have pictured Lower Bank Street as an avenue where wealth and dignity would take its pleasure; so had Henry Champney pictured it at that time; but the improvident foreigner lived along it largely, and possessed Port Argent's one prospect, the brown-flowing river with its ships. Most of the buildings were small houses or tenements. There was one stately line of square old mansions, a block or two long and beginning with the Champney place.

A worn-out, puddle-holding Macadam roadbed had lain in the street since the memory of most men. It had occurred to a railroad to come into the city from the north, peg a station to the river bank, and persuade the city to pave its approaches, and when the observer of decades asked a citizen on the sidewalk: “Why, before this long, grey station and freight-yards here of the Peninsular and Northern Railroad are these piles of paving brick, this sudden bustle on Lower Bank Street?” he was told: “It's a deal between Marve Wood and the P. and N. He was going to make them come into the Union Station, but they fixed him, I guess.”

“Fixed him?”

“Oh, they're a happy family now.”

The citizens of Port Argent held singular language.

“Who is Marve Wood?”

“He's—there he is over there.”

“Talking to the young man with the notebook and papers?”

“Yes. That's Dick Hennion, engineer and contractor.”

“And this Wood—is he an engineer and contractor?”

“No—well, yes. He contracts with himself and engineers the rest of us.”

The observer of decades moved on, thoughtfully to observe other phases of the city, its markets, churches, charities, children pouring out of school, its pleasures at theatre, fair-grounds, and Outing Club.

The young man with the notebook stood on the curb, writing in it with a pencil. He was large, lean, sinewy, broad-shouldered, brown-haired, grey-eyed, short-moustached, with features bony and straight. He produced the effect of impassiveness, steadiness, something concentrated and consistent in the midst of the bustle. Workmen slouched and hurried to and fro about him, unnoticed. There was the mingled click of shovel and bar and trowel, thud of rammer, and harsh voices of foremen. The elderly “Marve Wood,” stood beside him—thick-set, with a grey beard of the cut once typical throughout the Northern States, which gave to the faces that shape as of a blunt spade, and left the lips clean-shaven. He had a comfortable girth, a straight, thin-lipped mouth, a certain mellow Yankeeism of expression, and wore a straw hat and a black alpaca coat.

Hennion tore a leaf from the notebook, and beckoned the head foreman, a huge, black-moustached Irishman.

“Here, Kennedy, if any of these men ask for jobs to-morrow, set them to work.”

The nearer workmen looked curiously toward' the paper which Kennedy tucked in his vest pocket. Hennion and Wood turned away to the city. The sidewalk grew more crowded as they came to Upper Bank Street, where the statue of a Civil-War general struck a gallant attitude on a pedestal. He appeared to be facing his country's enemies with determination, but time and weather had given the face a slight touch of disappointment, as if he found no enemies worth while in sight, nothing but the P. and N. station and the workmen tearing up Lower Bank Street.

Henry Champney stood at his tall library window, gazing out, and saw Hennion and Wood go up the street. “Dick must have a hundred men out there,” he said.

“Has he?” Camilla looked up from her book.

“Ha! Concentration was the military principle of Napoleon,” Champney went on. “Our energetic friend, Dick, is, in his own way, I should say, Napoleonic in action.” Camilla came to the window and took her father's arm, and stood leaning her head against his large bowed shoulder. She did not seem inclined to concentrate her thoughts on the scene in front of the P. and N. station, or the Napoleonic actions of “Dick,” but looked away at the sunlight shimmering in the thin young maple leaves, at the hurrying, glinting river, at the filmy clouds floating in the perfect blue. The lower edges of this perfect sky were a bit stained with the reek of the factory chimneys across the river; and the river, when you came to consider it, was muddy beyond all reason, and thronged with impetuous tugboats. The factory chimneys and tugboats were energetic, too, concentrated and Napoleonic in action. The tugboats had no poise or repose, but the factory chimneys had both. Their fiery energies had solid bases, and the powers within them did not carry them away. There are men, as well as steam engines, whose energies carry them bodily, and there are others who are equally energetic from a fixed basis, and the difference is important—important to the observer of the signs of the times; possibly even important to Camilla.

Camilla's thoughts had no bearing on factories and tugboats. They were more like the filmy clouds floating in the blue, beyond the stain of the spouting chimneys, and if darkened at all it was probably only as sunny clouds are sometimes darkened mysteriously by the shadows of themselves.

Hennion and Wood entered the swing-door of a business block, mounted a flight of stairs to an office where “Marvin Wood” was gilded on the ground glass of the door. The room was large, and contained a desk and an extraordinary number of comfortable chairs. A typewriter clicked in the next room. They lit cigars and sat down before the open window. The street outside was full of noises. The windows of the office building opposite were open.

“Those were Freiburger's men, you say?” remarked Hennion.

“Whole batch. It's Freiburger's wanting to get on the Council, and his boys are bothering him already for 'shobs.' Oh—well—he's all right.”

“He can get on the City Hall flagstaff and wave himself for a starry banner if he wants to.”

Wood chuckled appreciatively at the image of Freiburger in that function.

“But you'd better tell Freiburger,” continued Hennion, “that I won't stand any deadheads.”

“Shan't tell him a thing, Dick, not a thing.”

Wood turned shrewd grey eyes on the young man, and smiled away the shortness of his answer. The eyes were full of humour and liking for the man beside him, and bordered on a network of wrinkles.

“Supposing you feel like firing some of his men, you'd better go and see him,” he added.

“All right, I'll do that.”

“And take your time, of course,” said Wood. “Hang on till you're both satisfied. He's peaceful, only if you scare him to death, he might feel injured.”

“Well, I'm glad to oblige him——”

“That's it. Talk to him that way. Fire 'em, of course, but—you'd better make it all right with Freiburger. A man that rides in a cross-country schooner, sometimes he has to join the shoving.”

“That's all right.”

Hennion smoked in silence a few moments, then took his cigar out and added, “I see.”

“I never knew a man that made a living by looking up rows for himself,” said Wood, wrinkling his eyes thoughtfully at the coils of smoke, “except one, and that wasn't what you'd call a comfortable living. It was a man named Johnson, in St. Joseph, somewhere about '60. He started in to fight the landlord of the Morton House for his bill, till the landlord was full of knots, and his features painful, and his secretest rheumatism woke up, and his interest in his bill was dead. That was all right, supposing Johnson didn't really have the price. I guess, like enough, he hadn't. But he went round town then making the same arrangement with other folks, a lawyer and a liveryman and others. Sometimes he had to fight, sometimes he didn't, but after a while somebody drew a gun on him, and St. Joseph buried him with a sigh. He never was really comfortable.”

Wood wrinkled his eyes, and followed the twists and capers of the smoke with a close interest. Hennion sighted over the points of his shoes at an upper window opposite, where three men were arguing excitedly in what appeared dumb-show.

“Does the parable mean something, particularly St. Joseph's sigh?”

“The parable,” said Wood, “particularly St. Joseph's sigh. Yes. It means, if the peaceable man comes out better 'n the warlike, it's because folks get so tired of the warlike.”

“Oh!”

“Now, the Preacher, up on Seton Avenue——”

“Aidee?”

“Yes. He's terrible warlike. He says I'm a thief. I say he's a fine man—fine man. He keeps on saying it. I keep on saying it. Folks got kind of tired of him a while ago. He says I'm a disease, now. Well—maybe so. Then I guess this world's got me chronic. Chap comes along with a patent pill, and a new porous plaster, and claims his plaster has the holes arranged in triangles, instead of squares like all previous plasters; he has an air of candid discovery; he says, 'Bless my soul! Your system's out of order.' Sounds interesting once in a while. And then this world gets so tired of him; says, 'I've had a belly-ache eleven thousand years. I wish to God you wouldn't keep giving it new names.' Well,—a couple of years ago the Chronicle was publishing Aidee's speeches on Civic something or other every week. Aidee used to shoot straight but scattering at that time. He'd got too much responsibility for the details of the millennium. Why, when you come right down to it, Dick, Aidee's got as sky-high an opinion of himself as anybody I know. That's natural enough, why, yes. If I could stand up like him, and convert myself into a six-inch pipe of natural gas on the blaze, I'd have the same. Certain, I would. But, there ain't any real democracy in him. He says he'd sit in the gutter with any man. Guess likely he would. I wouldn't. But would he and the other gutter-man hitch. Would they get along together? No, they wouldn't. Aidee's a loose comet that thinks he's the proper conflagration for boiling potatoes. Go on now! He's too warlike. Him and his Independent Reform and his Assembly—oh, well—he wasn't doing any great harm then. He ain't now, either. I told him one time, like this: “I says, 'Fire away anyhow that suits you. But,' I says, 'what makes you think you'd like my job?'”

“'What is your job?' says he.

“'Don't know as I could describe it,' I says, and I was a little stumped. 'It's not that kind. It's complicated.'

“'No,' he says, 'as you understand and work your job, I shouldn't like it.'

“'No more I shouldn't yours. Speaking of which,' I says, 'what is your job?'

“And he was stumped too. He was, for a fact.

“'I don't know as I could describe it. It's not that kind,' he says.

“'Complicated?'

“'Yes.'

“'Well,' I says, 'I shouldn't want to try it. I'd mean all right, but it wouldn't go.' I says, 'There was a man died up here at the city jail last year, and Sol Sweeney, the jailor, he was going to call in a clergyman on the case as being in that line. But then Sweeney thinks, “I can talk it. I've heard 'em.” Well, Sweeney's got an idea his intellectuals are all right anyhow. Being a jailor, he says, he's got the habit of meditation. So he starts in.”

“Bill, you've been a bad lot.”

“Yep.”

“There ain't no hope for you, Bill.”

“No,” says Bill, “there ain't.”

“You'll go to that there bad place, Bill.” Bill was some bored, but he allowed, “I guess that's right,” speaking feeble. “Well, Bill,” says Sweeney, “you ought to be thankful you've got a place to go to.”'

“Aidee laughed,—he did really,—and after that he looked thoughtful. Fine man, Dick. I sized him up for the things he didn't say. 'Sweeney,' I says, 'he meant all right, and he'd got the general outline of it. But I was going to say, if I tried to run your job for you, thinking anybody could run it with his intentions, I'd make a gone fool of myself, sure.'

“Now see this, Dick. I did make a gone fool of myself, sure. It wasn't any of my business what he didn't know. He's been acting too reasonable since. That's what I wanted to tell you.”

“What for?”

“Oh, well,” said Wood balmily, “you might run across him. You might be interested to find out what he's up to.”

After a few moments of silence Hennion dropped his feet and stood up.

“All right. I won't row with Frei-burger, but I don't see what Aidee's got to do with me,” he said, and went out, and up Bank Street, and then turned into Hancock, a street which led back from the river into the residence sections.