Читать книгу Yellowstone Nights - Quick Herbert - Страница 6

THE SECOND PART OF THE BRIDE'S STORY

The Pruntys live near Saint Joe, where they have a town and stockyards and grain-elevators, and thousands and thousands of acres of land all of their own, just like mediæval barons – only instead of having a castle with a donjon-keep with battlements and mysterious oubliettes and drizzly cells and a moat, they live in a great wooden house with verandas all round, and of a sort of composite architecture – Billy says that it is Queen Anne in front and Mary Ann at the rear – and hot and cold water in every room, and with a stone windmill-tower with a wheel on the top that you couldn't possibly put in a picture, it is so round and machiney-looking. Old Mr. Prunty says it cost twenty-seven thousand five hundred and eighty-three dollars and thirty-six cents – says it every chance he gets, without the variation of a cent. The Pruntys are scandalously rich. Their riches bought them a place in this play.

When Pa had begun to forge to the front in Peoria, where he began, he had all the knack he ever possessed for getting business, but he didn't have much money. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't confess this here. So he went to old Mr. Prunty, with whom he had become acquainted while he was putting in a town lighting-plant in the Prunty private village, and showed him how remunerative it would be to put money into Pa's business. This Mr. Prunty did, and I once saw the balance-sheet showing the profits he made. They were something frightful to a mind alive to the evils of the concentration of wealth – and the necessity of dividing with other people; but I shouldn't care so much for that, I am afraid, if it hadn't brought us into relations with Enos Prunty, Junior, who was brought up to the business of taking over the Mid-Continent Electric Company, and incidentally, me. The very idea!

I must not be disingenuous any more, and therefore I will admit that at one time I should have consented to the merger if it hadn't been for Enos' perfectly impossible name. Not that I loved him; not at all. But he wasn't bad looking, and he had overcome a good deal of the Prunty gaucherie– I should think he ought to, the schools he had been through – and a girl really does like to think of trousseaux, and establishments and the like. One day, though, I hired a card-writer on the street to write out for me the name, "Mrs. Enos Prunty, Jr.," upon looking at which I fled as from a pestilence, and threw it into the grate, and had a fire kindled, although it was one of those awful days when the coroner never can tell whether it was the heat or the humidity.

I had met Billy in the restaurant the day before.

But Pa liked Enos, and sort of treated the matter as if it were all arranged; and when Billy came into the spotlight as our social superior – which the Helmerstons would be by any of the old and outworn standards – I began to pet Pa one evening, and ask him how he liked Mr. Helmerston; whereupon Pa exploded with a terrific detonation, and said he wanted the relations of Mr. Helmerston with the Blunt family confined strictly to the field of business; that he hated and despised all the insufferable breed of dubs – I never could get Pa to say "cad" – who crept into employments like spies, under false pretenses, and called an Institute of Technology a "Tech," and looked down on better electricians who had come up by hard knocks. And Pa insisted that a man must have been pretty tough who had acquired in college circles from the Atlantic to the Missouri the nom de guerre of "Billy Hell."

Pa is a good business man, and has exceptional facilities for looking up people's records; but it seemed a little sneaky to use them on Billy, and to know so much, when we were so sure he never suspected a thing. I told him so, too, but all he said was "Huh." I was very angry, and when Mr. Prunty, Junior, came to see me next time I repulsed his addresses with such scorn that he went away in a passion. He said he laid no claim to being a human being, but he was, at least, a member of the animal kingdom, and that my way of treating him would have been inhuman had he been a toadstool. I retorted that I'd concede him a place among the mushrooms – fancy my twitting any one of mushroomery! But the old-family attitude of the Helmerstons was getting into my mental system.

Pa, in the meantime, was preparing to shunt Billy off to Mexico to superintend the installation of the Guadalanahuato power plant – a two years' job – at a splendid salary. But our Mr. Burns went over to the Universal Electric Company (after we had made him what he was!) and Mr. Aplin proved quite incapable of running the business, although he was such a genius in watts and farads and ohms and the coefficient of self-induction, and Billy was simply forked into the general charge of the main office, against his will, and shockingly against Pa's.

I forgot to say that Pa was ill, and confined to his room for a long time. This touches a tender spot in Pa's feelings, but the truth must be told; and you must understand that all his illness came from an ingrowing toe-nail. He had to have an operation, and then he had to stay in the house because it wouldn't heal; and there he was, using language which is really scandalous for a good church-worker like Pa, while Billy attended to the business.

I heaped coals of fire on Pa's head by staying with him hours and hours every day, and reading to him, until he asked me for goodness' sake to stop until he got the cross-talk out of his receiver. I said I'd be glad to dispense with all his cross talk, and he said: "There, now, don't cry" – and we had a regular love feast. Pa was a little difficult at this period. However, that day he got more confidential than he ever was before, and told me that serious business troubles were piling up, and worried him. We were likely, he said, to be spared the disgrace of dying rich. This was irony, for Pa despises this new idea that one should apologize for one's success.

He went on to tell me that Mr. Prunty had always had the most stock in the Mid-Continent, and that now that Enos had got so conceited about being able to run the business, and not being allowed to, the Pruntys seemed to want the whole thing, and hinted around about withdrawing, or buying Pa out.

I have this scene all in my mind for the play, with me sitting in "a dim religious light" and listening to the recital of our ruin and crying over Pa's sore foot. I did cry a good deal about this, truly, for I knew perfectly well that it was the nasty way I had treated Enos that made them so mean; but I still wished from the bottom of my heart that he would come back so I could search my soul for worse things to do to him. I told Billy about this trouble, and explained that Pa couldn't possibly raise money to buy out the Pruntys, and that they could be calculated upon not to pay Pa anything like what his stock was worth.

"I see," said Billy, "you are being squeezed by the stronger party."

He was looking out of the window in an abstracted sort of way, but he came to when I answered that, personally, I hadn't been conscious of anything of the sort.

When the conversation got around to the business again, Billy told me that Goucher – a Missourian that the Pruntys had injected into the business, and who was perfectly slavish in his subserviency to Enos – had been quizzing around Billy, trying to find out what ailed Pa, and if it was anything serious.

"I didn't like the little emissary," said Billy, "and so I told him that Mr. Blunt was precariously ill, with a complication of Bright's disease in its tertiary stage, and locomotor ataxia. He wrote down the Bright's disease and asked me how to spell the other. I told him that the Bright's disease would probably terminate fatally before he could master so much orthography; and still he didn't tumble! Goucher went away conscious of having performed well an important piece of work. I can't help thinking now that this incident has more significance than I then supposed."

He sat puckering up his brows for a long time, and I let him pucker.

At last he said: "Dolly, I shouldn't a bit wonder if they are trying to take some advantage of a dying man. I can see how they work the problem out. 'Here is a sick man,' they say, 'who has been doing the work of half a dozen for twenty years. He is going to pieces physically. If he has some fatal disease, and knows it, we can settle with him, and make him pay a few hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of getting his daughter's inheritance disentangled from a business which she can't run, and in which she will be at the mercy of – of people with whom her relations are a little strained. But first, we'll find out just how sick he is, and whether he's likely to get well soon, or at all.' And so they send Goucher mousing about; and he reports Bright's disease, and something else he can't spell, and they make an appointment with Helmerston for to-morrow morning to find out more about it, Mr. Goucher not being very clear. And your father's rather fierce manner of hiding what his ailment really is makes them all the more suspicious."

"You tell them," said I, firing up, "that Pa is still able – "

But I saw that Billy had one of those epoch-making ideas which mark the crises of history, and I stopped spellbound. He finally struck himself a fearful blow upon the knee, and said that he had it, and one looking at him could easily believe it. Then he explained to me his plan for discomfiting the Pruntys and hoisting them by their own petard. This is deeply psychological, being based upon an intuitive perception of what a Prunty would do when he believed certain things and had money at stake.

"I must take responsibility in this," said Billy, squaring his shoulders, "and bet my job on my success, and put our happiness in jeopardy. But, if we win, Mr. Blunt can never again say that I am an engineer only, with no head for practical business; and I shall have outlived the disgrace of my Tech training – and the nickname. You must handle your father, and keep me informed of any engagement the Pruntys make with him. I must do the rest. And, if I lose, it's back to climbing poles again!"

I asked Billy if I couldn't do something in line work, and he said I might carry the pliers. And when I said I meant it, he behaved beautifully, and called me his angel, and – and violated the rules, you know – and went away in a perfect frenzy of determination. I felt a solemn joy in spying on Pa and reporting to Billy. It seemed like a foretaste of a life all bound up and merged with his. And this is what took place:

The elder Mr. Prunty called on Billy and said he was appalled at the news Mr. Goucher brought that Mr. Blunt had Bright's disease; and was there any hope that the doctors might be mistaken?

Billy told him that the recent progress in bacteriological science, with which Mr. Prunty was no doubt fully conversant, seemed to make the diagnosis a cinch. By this he meant that they were sure about it.

"I see," said the driver. "I've heared the word afore."

He used a term that Mr. Prunty understood, Billy said, owing to his having done business all his life with reference to it.

Mr. Prunty suggested that people live a long time with Bright's disease, sometimes.

Billy, who is really a great actor, here grew mysterious, and told Mr. Prunty that, being mixed up with Mr. Blunt in business, it seemed a pity that he, Mr. Prunty, should have the real situation concealed from him, and that, as a matter of fact, Mr. Blunt's most pronounced outward symptom was a very badly ulcerated index toe. This of Billy's own knowledge, and Mr. Prunty might depend upon it.

Mr. Prunty studied on this for a long time, and then remarked that he had known several people to recover from sore toes.

Billy then pulled a book – a medical work he had borrowed – from under the desk, and showed Mr. Prunty a passage in which it was laid down that people's toes come off sometimes, in a most inconvenient way, in the last stages of Bright's disease. Mr. Prunty read the whole page, including a description of the way that dread disease ruins the complexion, by making it pasty and corpselike, and then laid the book down with conviction in his eyes.

"From this," said he, motioning at the book with his glasses, "it would seem to be all off."

"If it's Bright's disease," said Billy, "that causes this lesion of the major lower digit, the prognosis is, no doubt, extremely grave. But while there's life, you know – "

"Yes," answered Mr. Prunty, "that is a comfort, of course. Does he know what ails him?"

"He is fully aware of his condition," said Billy, "but, unfortunately, not yet resigned to it." (I should think not.)

"I see you have been studying this thing out," said Mr. Prunty, "as exactly as if it had been an engineering problem; and I want to say, Mr. Helmerston, that I like your style. If we ever control this business the future of such careful and competent and far-sighted men as yourself – in fact, I may say your future – will be bright and assured. Have you any more information for me as to this – this sad affair of Blunt's?"

Billy thanked him, and said he hadn't, at present, and Mr. Prunty went away, trying to look sad. Billy went to the bank in Pa's name and arranged for a lot of money to be used in acquiring the Prunty stock, if it should be needed. The stock was worth twice as much, and the bank people knew it, and couldn't have believed, of course, that we would get it for that. Then the Pruntys made an engagement with me for Pa over the telephone, for a certain hour of a certain day, and I told Billy.

"The time has come," said Billy, when the plot began thickening in this way, "for Little Willie to beard the lion in his den. Smuggle me into the room an hour before the Pruntys are due, darling, and we'll cast the die."

I was all pale and quivery when I kissed Billy – in that sort of serious way in which we women kiss people we like, when we tell them to come back with their shields or on them – and pushed him into the room.

I heard all they said. It was dark in there, and Pa thought at first that it was a Prunty. Pa was sitting in the Morris chair, with his foot on a rest.

"That you, Enos?" said he. "Help yourself to a chair. I'm kind of laid up for repairs."

"It's Helmerston," said Billy. "I called to talk to you about this affair with Mr. Prunty. I have some information which may be of value to you."

Pa sat as still as an image for perhaps a minute. I could almost hear his thoughts. He was anathematizing Billy mentally for butting in, but he was too good a strategist to throw away any valuable knowledge.

"Well," said he at last, "I'm always open to valuable information. Turn it loose!"

Then Billy told him all you know, and a good deal more, which I shall not here state, because it is not necessary to the scenario, and I did not understand it, anyhow. There was some awfully vivid conversation at times, though, when Pa went up into the air at what Billy had done, and Billy talked him down.

"Do you mean to say, you – you young lunatic," panted Pa, "that you've told Prunty that he's got a living corpse to deal with, when I need all the prestige I've won with him to hold my own?"

But Billy explained that he'd taken the liberty of thinking the whole thing out; and, anyhow, had merely refrained from removing a mistaken notion from Prunty's mind.

"But," said he, "you can assure him when he gets here that you are really in robust health."

"Assure him!" roared Pa. "He'd be dead sure I was trying to put myself in a better light for the dicker. I couldn't make him believe anything at all. I know Prunty."

Billy said that the psychology of the situation was plain. Mr. Prunty was convinced that Pa was in such a condition that he never could go back to the office, and could no more take sole ownership of the Mid-Continent than a baby could enter a shot-putting contest. What would they do when it came to making propositions? They would offer something that they were sure a case in the tertiary stage couldn't accept. They would probably offer to give or take a certain price for the stock. Believing that Pa wasn't in position to buy, but was really forced to sell, they would name a frightfully low price, so that when Pa accepted it perforce they would be robbing him out of house and home, almost. This was the way with these shrewd traders always, and to whipsaw a dying man would be nuts for a man like Prunty. (I am here falling into Billy's dialect when he was in deadly earnest.) Then the conversation grew mysterious again with Pa listening, and once admitting that "that would be like old Enos."

"But he'll back out," said Pa, "if he's thief enough ever to start in."

"Have him make a memorandum in writing, and sign it," answered Billy.

"But," rejoined Pa, in a disgusted way, as if to ask why he condescended to argue with this young fool, "you don't know Prunty. Unless he has the cash in hand he'll go to some lawyer and find a way out."

"I thought of that, too," said Billy; "and so I took the liberty of going to the bank and getting the cash – for temporary use, you know."

"I like your nerve!" moaned Pa angrily. "Do you know, young man, that you've built up a situation that absolutely forces me to adopt your fool plans? Absolutely infernal nonsense! To imagine it possible to get the Prunty stock at any such figures is – " And Pa threw up wild hands of desperation to an unpitying sky.

"Is it possible to imagine," said Billy, "such a thing as the Pruntys trying to get your stock at that figure? That's the thing I'm looking for and counting on." And when Pa failed to reply, but only chewed his mustache, Billy went on: "I thought the logic of the situation would appeal to you," said he. "And now let us set the stage. The time is short."

And then came the most astounding thing, and the thing that showed Billy's genius. First he took out the electric-light bulbs of the electrolier, and screwed in others made of a sort of greenish glass – just a little green tinge in it. He took some stage appliances and put just a little shade of dark under Pa's eyes, and at the corners of his mouth; and when the green lights were turned on Pa had the most ghastly, ghostly, pasty, ghoulish look any one ever saw. I was actually frightened when I came in: it was as bad as Doctor Jekyll turned to Mr. Hyde. Pa looked rather cheap while Billy was doing this, but the time was getting short, and he was afraid the Pruntys would come bursting in and catch them at it. Billy placed Pa right under the green lights, and shaded them so that the rest of us received only the unadulterated output of the side lamps. Then they arranged their cues, and Billy stepped into the next room. As he went, Pa swore for the first time since he quit running the line-gang, when, he claims, it was necessary.

"If this goes wrong, as it will," he hissed through his livid lips, "I'll kick you from here to the city-limits if it blows the plug in the power-house!"

"Very well, sir," answered Billy – and the footman announced the Pruntys.

I was as pale as a ghost, and my eyes were red, and the look of things was positively sepulchral when they came in, Enos tagging at his father's heels as if he was ashamed. The footman turned on the light, and almost screamed as he looked at poor Pa, with the pasty green in his complexion, and the cavernous shadows under his eyes. Billy had seen to it that the Pruntys had had plenty of literature on the symptoms of Bright's disease, and I could see them start and exchange looks as Pa's state dawned on them.

"I'm sorry to see you in this condition," said Mr. Prunty, after Pa had weakly welcomed them and told them to sit down.

"What condition?" snapped Pa, the theatricality wearing off. "I'm all right, if it wasn't for this blamed toe!"

"Is it very bad?" asked Mr. Prunty.

"It won't heal," growled Pa, and the visitors exchanged glances again. "But you didn't come here to discuss sore toes. Let's get down to business."

Then Mr. Prunty, in a subdued and sort of ministerial voice, explained to Pa that he was getting along in years, and that Pa wasn't long – that is, that Pa was getting along in years, too – and both parties would, no doubt, be better satisfied if their interests were separated. Therefore he had decided to withdraw his capital from the business, and place it in some other enterprise which would give his son a life work along lines laid out in his education and training. He didn't want to sell his stock to the Universal Electric Company as he had a chance to do (Pa started fiercely here, for he was afraid of the Universal Electric); although the old agreement by which neither party was to sell out to a competitor was probably no longer binding; and so they had come as man to man to talk adjustment.

"But," says Pa, "this takes me by surprise. I don't quite see my way clear to taking on such a load as carrying all the stock would be. Mid-Continent stock is valuable."

They exchanged glances again, as much as to say that Pa was evidently anxious to sell rather than buy, and was crying the stock up accordingly, so as to get as much money as he could for me before he died.

"We may not be so grasping as you think," said Mr. Prunty; and then nothing was said for quite a while.

Pa was looking awfully sick, and Mr. Prunty was just exuding love and kindness and magnanimity from every pore.

"You had some proposition thought out," interrogated Pa, feeling anxiously for his own pulse, "or you wouldn't have come. What is it, Prunty?"

"Well," answered Mr. Prunty, gazing piercingly at Pa, as if to ask if such a cadaverous person could possibly take on the sole control of the Mid-Continent even if he had the money – "well, we had thought of it a little, that's a fact. We thought we'd make you an offer to buy or sell – "

"Hurrah for Billy!" my heart shouted. For this was just what he said would happen. But, instead of hurrahing, I came to the front and gave Pa a powder. It was mostly quinine, and was dreadfully bitter.

"To buy or sell," went on Mr. Prunty, "at a price to be named by us. If it's a reasonable figure, take our stock and give us our money. If it's too high, why, sell us yours. That's fair, ain't it?"

Pa lay back and looked green and groaned. He was doing it nobly.

"What is fair in some circumstances," he moaned, "is extortion in others; and I – er – yes, I suppose it would be called fair. What's your give-or-take price, Prunty?"

"We are willing," said Mr. Prunty, "to give or take seventy-five for the stock."

Pa was so still that I had to rouse him, and Mr. Prunty repeated his offer.

"I – I'm getting a little forgetful," said Pa, "and I'd like to have you put it in writing, so I can consider it, and be sure I have it right, you know."

The Pruntys consulted again, and again they came forward. Enos wrote down the proposition, and Mr. Prunty signed it. I didn't understand it very well, and the strain was so frightful that I expected to fly all to pieces every instant, but I didn't.

When Enos handed the paper to Pa, Pa cleared his throat in a kind of scraping way, and in stepped Billy with a great box under his arm.

"Mr. Helmerston," said Pa, as calmly as General Grant at – any place where he was especially placid – "I want you and my daughter to be witnesses to the making of the proposition in this writing, from Mr. Prunty to me."

Billy read the paper, and said he understood that it was a give-or-take offer of seventy-five for all the stock of the Mid-Continent. Mr. Prunty said yes, looking rather dazed, and not so sympathetic.

"I accept the proposition," snapped Pa, his jaw setting too awfully firm for the tertiary stage. "I'll take your stock at seventy-five. Helmerston, pay 'em the money!"

Billy had the cash in ten-thousand-dollar bundles; and I was so fascinated at the sight of so much treasure being passed over like packages of bonbons, that for a while I didn't see how funny Mr. Prunty was acting. When I did look, he was holding his nose in the air and gasping like one of Aunt Maria's little chickens with the pip. He seemed to have a sort of progressive convulsions, beginning low down in wrigglings of the legs, and gradually moving upward in jerks and gurgles and gasps, until it went off into space in twitchings of his mouth and eyes and nose and forehead. Enos had the bundles of money counted, and a receipt written, before he noticed that his father was having these fits, and then he seemed scared. I suppose these people have a sort of affection for each other, after all.

"Father," said he – "Father, what's the matter?"

"Matter?" roared Mr. Prunty. "Does the fool ask what's the matter? Don't you see we're done brown? Look at the basketful they brought, that we might just as well have had as not, if it hadn't been for – Blast you, Blunt, I'll show you you can't chisel old Enos Prunty out of his good money like this, I will! I'll put the whole kit and boodle of yeh in jail! That stock is worth a hundred and fifty, if it's worth a cent. Ene, if you'll stand by like a stoughton bottle and see your old father hornswoggled out of his eye-teeth by a college dude and this old confidence-man, you'll never see a cent of my money, never! Do you hear, you ass? He's no more sick than I am! That's false pretenses, ain't it? He's got some darned greenery-yallery business on that face of his! Ain't that false? Blunt, if you don't give me the rest in the basket there I'll law you to the Supreme Court!"

"Hush, father," said Enos; "Aurelia's here."

"When you get everything set," said Pa, with a most exasperating smile, "just crack ahead with your lawsuit. We'll trot you a few heats, anyhow. You'd better take your pa away, Enos, and buy him a drink of something cool."

"I want to compliment you, Mr. Helmerston," said Enos, quite like a gentleman, "on the success of your little stage-business, and especially on your careful forecast of the play of human motives. I can see that a man with only ordinary business dishonesty, like myself, need not be surprised at defeat by such a master of finesse as you."

He bowed toward me. Billy flushed.

"If you mean, sir – " he began.

"Oh, I mean nothing offensive," answered Enos. "I will be in the office in the morning, and shall be ready, as secretary, to transfer this stock on the books, previous to resigning. Come, father, we've got our beating; but we can still have the satisfaction of being good losers. Good-by, Miss Blunt; I wish you joy!"

Pa came out of the green light as they disappeared, limping on his wrapped-up foot, and shouted that he had always said that Enos was a brick, and now he knew it. I ran up to him and kissed him. Then I threw myself into Billy's arms.

"Aurelia!" said Pa, looking as cross as a man could look in such circumstances, "I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself!"

I dropped into a chair and covered up my face, while Pa went on addressing Billy, trying to be severe on him for letting me kiss him, and to beam on him at the same time for helping him with the Pruntys.

"Young man," said he, "I owe you a great deal. This tomfoolery happened to work. Please to consider yourself a part of the Mid-Continent Electric Company in any capacity you choose."

"Yes, sir," said Billy, gathering up the money. "Is that all, sir?"

"I should like to have you take Enos' place as secretary," added Pa.

"Thank you," said Billy. "I shall be pleased and honored. Is that all? Do I still go to Mexico?"

Pa pondered and fidgeted, and acted awfully ill at ease.

"Yes," said he at last. "You're the only competent engineer we've got who understands the plans. You'll have to go for a few months – if you don't mind – anyhow."

"Pa," said I, "I'm tired of metal work, and I need a vacation in new and pleasant surroundings, and – and associations. Billy is awfully pleasant to associate with, and – and be surrounded by; and I've never, never been in Guadalanawhat-you-may-call-it; and – and – may we Pa?"

"Young woman!" glared Pa, "who have you the effrontery to call 'Billy'?" – Pa could never acquire what he calls "the 'whom' habit."

Billy stepped manfully forward.