Mechanically he put the papers and bank-notes back into the wallet, and shoved it into his pocket. Then he looked at his watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. If he was to leave to-night, as the old man had ordered, there was no more time to lose.
Without further hesitation, he threw a few articles into an old bag and started for the ferry. On the way he stopped to telephone the hospital. After a delay which made him impatient, he learned that the sick man was resting quietly—“still unconscious,” the nurse said. So he had not spoken again.
When Brainard reached the station in Jersey City, having a few moments to spare, he wrote a brief note to the hospital authorities, saying that he was leaving the city on business, and would call on his return in a week or ten days. He inclosed several bank-notes, requesting that the sick man should have every comfort. Having dropped his letter into the box he stepped into the Chicago sleeper. The exhilarating beat of his heart told him that he had done well.
The disdainful look that the porter had given him when he took charge of his shabby bag, as well as the curious glances of his fellow passengers, the next morning, made Brainard conscious of his eccentric appearance. But all that he could do, for the present, to improve his neglected person, was to have himself shaved and his hair cut. He was obliged to keep his rain-coat on, although the car was hot, in order to cover up a large hole in his trousers—the only pair he possessed.
He resolved to employ the few hours in Chicago, between trains, in making himself as decent as possible. Meanwhile he ate three good meals and furtively watched his more prosperous fellow travelers.
IV
It was a very different person, in appearance, who seated himself on the observation platform of the Overland Limited that evening. Only the round steel spectacles were left as a memento of Brainard’s former condition. He had had no scruples in helping himself freely from the store of bills in the wallet. What lay before him to do for the sick man would probably be difficult, in any event, and it would be foolish to handicap himself by presenting a suspicious appearance at Krutzmacht’s office. He would play his part properly dressed.
So, when he glanced into the little mirror beside his berth, he smiled in satisfaction at the clean-shaven, neatly dressed, alert young man who looked back at him. With his ragged habiliments he seemed also to have discarded that settled look of failure, and not a few of his years. Without unduly flattering himself, he felt that he might easily be taken for one of the energetic young brokers or lawyers whom he observed on the train.
Removing his new hat, and stretching his well-shod feet on the cushioned seat opposite, he took up the evening newspapers and glanced through them for some telegraphic item about the fate of his mysterious employer. If Krutzmacht were a well-known figure, as he supposed likely, reporters must doubtless have discovered him before this and proclaimed his predicament to the world. But Brainard could find no reference to any such person in the newspapers, and with a sigh of relief he let them slip from his lap.
His task would be easier, if it could be accomplished while the sick man lay undiscovered in the hospital. If he should already be dead, when he arrived, there would be an end to Brainard’s job altogether; and that would have been a keen disappointment to the young man.
His job? A hundred times his mind reverted to this perplexing consideration—what, exactly, was he to do when he had reached the end of his long journey?
First, he would find where Krutzmacht’s offices were, and then? He had been told to make off with whatever he might find in the private safe. For this purpose he had provided himself, in Chicago, with a bulky leather valise, in which his discarded raiment was now reposing. It all sounded like an expedition in high piracy, but he quieted any scruples with the resolve that he would make off merely to New York, if Krutzmacht still lived, instead of Berlin, and remain there to await further developments.
So, as the Overland Limited rushed across the prairie states, Brainard took counsel with himself, mentally sketching out his every move from the moment when he should step from the train. The readiness with which his mind reached out to this new situation surprised himself; he was already becoming in some way a new person.
The journey itself was a revelation to him and an education. With his Broadway prejudice that the United States stopped somewhere just above the Bronx and behind the Jersey hills, he was astonished to find so much habitable country beyond these horizons and so many people in it who did not seem to depend upon New York City for their livelihood or happiness. At first he was so much preoccupied with his errand and himself in his surprising new rôle that he paid little attention to the scenes spread before his eyes. Chicago impressed him only as a dirtier and more provincial New York. But the next morning when he awoke at Omaha he began to realize that America was more than a strip of land along the Atlantic seaboard, and by the time the train had left Ogden his respect for his fatherland had immensely increased.
He noticed also that the character of the people on the train was gradually changing. Large, rough-looking men, with tanned faces not too carefully shaved, and sometimes with a queer assortment of jewelry and patent leather shoes took the places of the pallid, smooth shaven business men that had been his companions from Jersey City to Chicago. There were also a number of women traveling alone, large, competent, and not overrefined. Brainard, whose ideas of Americans other than the types to be seen on the streets of New York had been drawn from the travestied figures of the stage—the miner and the cowboy with flapping sombrero and chaps—watched these new specimens of his fellow countrymen with keen interest. In spite of their rather uncouth speech and their familiarity with the negro porters, they were attractive. They had a vigorous air about them, indicating that they came from a big country, with big ways of doing things in it, and a broad outlook over wide horizons. The would-be dramatist began to perceive that the world was not peopled wholly by the types that the American stage had made familiar to him.
A little way beyond Ogden the train rolled out into the bright blue inland sea of the Great Salt Lake and trundled on for mile after mile in the midst of the water on a narrow strip of rocky roadbed. Brainard had read in the newspapers of this famous “Lucin cut-off” where in an effort to save a detour of a few miles around the shore of the lake millions of tons of “fill” had been dumped into an apparently bottomless hole. The pluck and the energy of that road builder who had conceived this work and kept at it month after month, dumping trainloads of rock into a great lake had not specially thrilled him when he read of it. But now the imagination and the courage of the little man who did this sort of thing thrilled him. Harriman, the bold doer of this and greater things, was of course a popular Wall Street hero to the New Yorker—one of those legendary creatures who were supposed to have their seat of power in the lofty cliffs of that narrow Via Dolorosa and somehow like the alchemists of old conjure great fortunes out of air, with the aid of the “tape.” That was the way in which this young man had always thought of Harriman—“the wizard of railroad finance.”
But now as he glided smoothly over the solid roadbed that ran straight westward into the remote distance with the salt waves almost lapping the tracks and leaving a white crust from their spume, with lofty mountains looming to south and to north—as he stood on the rear platform of the heavy steel train observing this marvelous panorama—a totally new conception of the renowned financier came to him. This was not done by watching the tape! It demanded will and force and imagination and faith—spiritual qualities in a man—to do this. The young traveler mentally did homage to the character that had created the wonderful highway over which for a day and a half he had been comfortably borne in luxurious ease.
As he watched the blue mountains about Ogden fade into the haze, it seemed that New York, his life there, and all his conventional conceptions of the little world in which he had vainly struggled for existence also receded and grew smaller, less real. The train in its westward flight was bearing him forward into a new world, within as well as without! As the track began to wind up again to higher levels before taking its next