One day George ran into Sam Pennock, a boyhood friend and a classmate at Pine Rock College. Sam came down the busy street swiftly at his anxious, lunging stride, and immediately, without a word of greeting, he broke hoarsely into the abrupt and fragmentary manner of speaking that had always been characteristic of him, but that now seemed more feverish than ever:
“When did you get here? . . . How long are you going to stay? . . . What do you think of the way things look here?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he demanded with brusque, challenging, and almost impatient scornfulness: “Well, what do you intend to do — be a two-thousand-dollar-a-year school-teacher all your life?”
The contemptuous tone, with its implication of superiority — an implication he had noticed before in the attitude of these people, big with their inflated sense of wealth and achievement — stung George to retort sharply:
“There are worse things than teaching school! Being a paper millionaire is one of them! As for the two thousand dollars a year, you really get it, Sam! It’s not real estate money, it’s money you can spend. You can buy a ham sandwich with it.”
Sam laughed. “You’re right!” he said. “I don’t blame you. It’s the truth!” He began to shake his head slowly. “Lord, Lord!” he said. “They’ve all gone clean out of their heads here . . . Never saw anything like it in my life . . . Why, they’re all crazy-as a loon!” he exclaimed. “You can’t talk to them . . . You can’t reason with them . . . They won’t listen to you . . . They’re getting prices for property here that you couldn’t get’ in New York.”
“Are they getting it?”
“Well,” he said, with a falsetto laugh, “they get the first five hundred dollars . . . You pay the next five hundred thousand on time.”
“How much time?”
“God!” he said. “I don’t know . . . All you want, I reckon . . . For ever! . . . It doesn’t matter . . . You sell it next day for a million.”
“On time?”
“That’s it!” he cried, laughing. “You make half a million just like that.”
“On time?”
“You’ve got it!” said Sam. “On time . . . God! Crazy, crazy, crazy,” he kept laughing and shaking his head. “That’s the way they make it.”
“Are you making it, too?”
At once his manner became feverishly earnest: “Why, it’s the damnedest thing you ever heard of!” he said. “I’m raking it in hand over fist! . . . Made three hundred thousand dollars in the last two months . . . Why, it’s the truth! . . . Made a trade yesterday and turned round and sold the lot again not two hours later . . . Fifty thousand dollars just like that!” he snapped his fingers. “Does your uncle want to sell that house on Locust Street where your Aunt Maw lived? . . . Have you talked to him about it? . . . Would he consider an offer?”
“I suppose so, if he gets enough.”
“How much does be want?” he demanded impatiently. “Would he take a hundred thousand?”
“Could you get it for him?”
“I could get it within twenty-four hours,” he said. “I know a man who’d snap it up in five minutes . . . I tell you what I’ll do, Monk, if you persuade him to sell — I’ll split the commission with you . . . I’ll give you five thousand dollars.”
“All right, Sam, it’s a go. Could you let me have fifty cents on account?”
“Do you think he’ll sell?” he asked eagerly.
“Really, I don’t know, but I doubt it. That place was my grandfather’s. It’s been in the family a long time. I imagine he’ll want to keep it.”
“Keep it! What’s the sense in keeping it? . . . Now’s the time when things are at the peak. He’ll never get a better offer!”
“I know, but he’s expecting to strike oil out in the backyard any time now,” said George with a laugh.
At this moment there was a disturbance among the tides of traffic in the street. A magnificent car detached itself from the stream of humbler vehicles and moved in swiftly to the kerb, where it came to a smooth stop — a glitter of nickel, glass, and burnished steel. From it a gaudily attired creature stepped down to the pavement with an air of princely indolence, tucked a light Malacca cane carelessly under its right armpit, and slowly and fastidiously withdrew from its nicotined fingers a pair of lemon-coloured gloves, at the same time saying to the liveried chauffeur:
“You may go, James. Call for me again in hal-luf an houah!” The creature’s face was thin and sunken. Its complexion was a deathly sallow — all except the nose, which was bulbous and glowed a brilliant red, showing an intricate network of enlarged purple veins. Its toothless jaws were equipped with such an enormous set of glittering false teeth that the lips could not cover them, and they grinned at the world with the prognathous bleakness of a skeleton. The whole figure, although heavy and shambling, had the tottering appearance which suggested a stupendous debauchery. It moved forward with its false, bleak grin, leaning heavily upon the stick, and suddenly George recognised that native ruin which had been known to him since childhood as Tim Wagner.
J. Timothy Wagner — the “J” was a recent and completely arbitrary addition of his own, appropriated, no doubt, to fit his ideas of personal grandeur, and to match the eminent position in the town’s affairs to which he had belatedly risen — was the black sheep of one of the old, established families in the community. At the time George Webber was a boy, Tim Wagner had been for so long the product of complete disillusion that there was no longer any vestige of respect attached to him.
He had been preeminently the town sot. His title to this office was unquestioned. In this capacity he was even held in a kind of affection. His exploits were notorious, the subjects of a hundred stories. One night, for example, the loafers in McCormack’s pharmacy had seen Tim swallow something and then shudder convulsively. This process was repeated several times, until the curiosity of the loafers was aroused. They began to observe him furtively but closely, and in a few minutes Tim thrust out his hand slyly, fumbled round in the gold-fish bowl, and withdrew his hand with a wriggling little shape between his fingers. Then the quick swallow and the convulsive shudder were repeated.
He had inherited two fortunes before his twenty-fifth year and had run through them both. Hilarious stories were told of Tim’s celebrated pleasure tour upon the inheritance of the second fortune. He had chartered a private car, stocked it plentifully with liquor, and selected as his travelling companions the most notorious sots, vagabonds, and tramps the community could furnish. The debauch had lasted eight months. This party of itinerant bacchuses had made a tour of the entire country. They had exploded their empty flasks against the ramparts of the Rocky Mountains, tossed their empty kegs into San Francisco Bay, strewn the plains with their beer bottles. At last the party had achieved a condition of exhausted satiety in the nation’s capital, where Tim, with what was left of his inheritance, had engaged an entire floor at one of the leading hotels. Then, one by one, the exhausted wanderers had drifted back to town, bringing tales of bacchanalian orgies that had not been equalled since the days of the Roman emperors, and leaving Tim finally in solitary possession of the wreckage of empty suites.
From that time on he had slipped rapidly into a state of perpetual sottishness. Even then, however, he had retained the traces of an attractive and engaging personality. Everyone had had a tolerant and unspoken affection for him. Save for the harm he did himself, Tim was an inoffensive and good-natured