"First-rate!" cried Walworth, relieved by any outcome whatever. "Stockbridge! Why, that's where I did my courting!"
Mrs. Floyd was caught in a melting mood.
"We shall be very happy to see Mr. Ogden," she pronounced primly.
III
In one of the first-floor corners of the Clifton is situated the Underground National Bank—Erastus H. Brainard, president.
The Underground is not so styled on account of the policy and methods of its head, oblique and subterranean though they may be; it is merely that the Clifton is almost entirely shut in by its tall neighbors, and that, so far as its lower floors are concerned, direct sunlight, except for a month or two in the early summer, is pretty nearly out of the question. We shall have to throw our own sunlight on the Underground and on the man who is its president and its principal stockholder.
The Underground is not one of the old banks, nor is it one of the large ones; if Brainard had no other irons in the fire he would not cut much of a figure in business circles. The Underground is simply one in a batch of banks that have sprung up in the last seven or eight years and that are almost unknown, even by name, to men who, in the clearing-house at that time, have since passed on to other and different affairs. It is spoken of as Brainard's bank, just as other banks are spoken of as Shayne's, or Cutter's, or Patterson's. Sow Shayne, for example, began life with a fruit-stand—Jim Shayne they called him. The fruit-stand developed into a retail grocery, and Jim Shayne (about the time of the Fire) became J. H. Shayne. The retail grocery expanded into a wholesale grocery, and the sign read, "James H. Shayne & Co.," and the firm made money. But the day dawned when his wife began to figure at dances and receptions—her own and those of other people—as Mrs. James Horton Shayne, and when his daughter's wedding was not far away, with all the splendor that St. Asaph's could command. This was no juncture for laying undue stress on the wholesale grocery business; it seemed worth while to become identified a little less closely with mercantile circles and a little more closely with financial circles. Shayne & Co. went right on—both routine and profits; but the High-flyers' National was started, and James Horton Shayne was more likely to be found on La Salle Street than on River Street.
Cutter was in hardware. His daughter was a great beauty. One day he dropped hardware in favor of his sons, to become the head of a board of directors. Then people could say, "Ah! a fine girl that! Her father runs the Parental National."
Patterson's case was different. He had just invested half a million in a big business block, and his daughter had just invested her all in a husband. The best office in the new building remained tenantless at the end of six months, and the man of his daughter's choice continued practically without occupation during the same term. The office was worth ten thousand dollars, the son-in-law—in the present state of things—about ten thousand cents. So Patterson, in order to secure a tenant for his new building and a career for his new son, started a new financial institution—the Exigency Trust Co.
But no such considerations as these influenced Erastus Brainard when he founded the Underground. He was far aside from all social ambitions, and his domestic affairs took care of themselves. His business interests spread all over the city, the state, the West, even the Ear West, and this vast web must have a centre. That centre was on the lower floor of the Clifton, where he ran a bank, true, but a good many other things besides.
Brainard had come up from the southern part of the state—from "Egypt," as it is called. A darkness truly Egyptian brooded over his early history, so that if it is a fact that he was an exhorter at Methodist camp-meetings in his early twenties, proof of that fact might be sought for in vain. The first definite point in his career is this: that as a youngish man he was connected in some capacity with a cross-country railroad on the far side of Centralia. How successful he was in transporting souls no one can say; that he has been successful in transporting bodies no one will deny. He is unrivalled in his mastery of the street-car question, and his operations have lain in many scattered fields.
To claim that Brainard has a national reputation would be going too far. However, his reputation might fairly be termed inter-state. If the man were to die to-morrow, sketches of his life would appear in the papers of Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and St. Louis; and the caustic and frankly abusive paragraphs would be copied appreciatively as far as the remoter counties of Nebraska. For Brainard's success is not without the elements of public scandal. His manipulation of city councils and of state legislatures has been freely charged. Old stories of his brief incarceration in prison, or of his narrow escape from it, sometimes arise and flutter; and there are those who think that if he never has been in jail, then this is all the more reason for his being there now. His demise would indeed set the clipping-bureaus to work; but the work would not be started by the direction of his surviving family. Such is the chief to whom young George Ogden has sworn allegiance.
"I shall marry him," said a voice quite firmly; "you may make up your mind to that."
Ogden started. These words came through a door which stood ajar in the partition that separated him from the president's room; the office was splendid with bevelled glass and oxidized iron-work, yet it was as compact as high rentals compel. They were words in striking contrast to most of the talk that his pen commanded. "Make it thirty days more"; "I'll take the rest in small bills, please"; "It will be due day after to-morrow." And with these—"I shall marry him; make up your mind to that."
He knew the voice perfectly well; he had heard it a fortnight before in Floyd's office.
The door in the partition opened a foot or two wider; the bulky figure of Erastus Brainard appeared and his hard and determined face. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a close-clipped gray beard and a shaven upper lip. Two or three red veins showed prominently in his bulbous nose. He wore black broadcloth; his coat had a velvet collar, and on his shoulders there was a light fall of dandruff. He wore boots. On Sundays his boots had "tongues," and his trade was the mainstay of a German shoemaker who kept a shop behind his house, and whom, twice a year, he literally terrified into a fit.
But now his big figure clutched at the red-cherry door-jamb with a tremulous hesitancy, the hard, fierce eyes looked out appealingly from under their coarse and shaggy brows, and the proud and cruel lips opened themselves to address the young man with an order that was almost an entreaty.
"Ogden, won't you ask Mr. Fairchild to step this way?"
For a mouse had come into the place, and the elephant was in terror.
The Underground National Bank, with a surplus equal to a third of its capital, had not declared a dividend for several years. Brainard, along with his son and his brother, owned five eighths of the stock. Put these two facts together and surmise the rest. Understand, without the telling, how Brainard had bought back big blocks of stock from men who had invested on his own advice and representations, only to sell out at less than two thirds the price they had paid. Understand how widowed and unprotected women, with little realization of the remote possibilities of the science of banking and no realization at all of the way in which their five thousands had come to be worth so much less than five thousand, would come to his office to implore ingenuously with sobs and tears that he would give them back their money. Consider these and a dozen other phases of the pleasant pastime known as "freeze out," and then judge whether Brainard, by this time, were capable or no of braving, warding off, beating down, despising the threats, the imprecations, the pleadings, the attacks of the harmless domestic animal known as the investor. But now another domestic animal, the wilful daughter, had entered his lair, and with this new antagonist he felt himself unable to cope.
"Ogden, won't you ask Mr. Fairchild to step this way!"
Fairchild was only the cashier of the bank, while Brainard was its head; but Fairchild was a good deal of a man—and that was more than Brainard, with all his money and