“That’s only because of that affair you told me of,” said my wife. “Since I’ve seen her, I’ve made up my mind that you misconstrued the matter utterly. There was really nothing to it.”
In a week I wrote to Mr. Elkins, accepting his proposal, and promising to close up my affairs, remove to Lattimore, and join with him.
“I do not feel myself equal to playing the part of either Romulus or Remus in founding your new Rome,” I wrote; “but I think as a writer of fire-insurance policies, and keeping the office work up, I may prove myself not entirely a deadhead. My wife asks how the breathing-spaces for the populace are coming on?”
And the die was cast!
CHAPTER VII.
We make our Landing.
Had I known how cordially our neighbors would greet our return, or how many of them would view our departure with apparently sincere regret, I might have been slower in giving Jim my promise. I proceeded, however, to carry it out; but it was nearly six months before I could pull myself and my little fortune out of the place into which we had grown.
Mr. Elkins kept me well informed regarding Lattimore affairs; and the Herald followed me home. Jim’s letters were long typewritten communications, dictated at speed, and mailed, sometimes one a day, at other times at intervals of weeks.
“This is a sure-enough ‘winter of our discontent,’ ” one of these letters runs, “but the scope of our operations will widen as the frost comes out of the ground. We’re now confined to the psychical field. Subjectively speaking, though, the plot thickens. Captain Tolliver is in the secondary stages of real-estate dementia, and spreads the contagion daily. There’s no quarantine regulation to cover the case, and Lattimore seems doomed to the acme of prosperity. This is the age of great cities, saith the Captain, and that Lattimore is not already a town of 150,000 people is one of the strangest, one of the most inexplicable things in the world, in view of the distance we are lag of the country about us, so far as development is concerned. And as our beginning has been tardy, so will our progress be rapid, even as waters long dammed up rush out to devour the plains, etc., etc.
“In this we are all agreed. We want a good, steady, natural growth—and no boom.
“When a boom recognizes itself as such, it’s all over, and the stuff off. The time for letting go of a great wheel is when it starts down hill. But our wheels are all going up—even if they are all in our heads, as yet.
“You will remember the railway connection of which I spoke to you? Well, that thing has assumed, all of a sudden, a concreteness as welcome as it is unexpected. Ballard showed me a telegram yesterday from lower Broadway (the heart of Darkest N. Y.) which tends to prove that people there are ready to finance the deal. It would have amused you to see the horizontality of the coat-tails of the management of the Lattimore & Great Western, as they flaxed round getting up a directors’ meeting, so as to have a real, live directorate of this great transcontinental line for the wolves of Wall Street to do business with! Things like this are what you miss by hibernating there, instead of dropping everything and applying here for your pro rata share of the gayety of nations and the concomitant scads.
“I was elected president of the road, and as soon as we get a little track, and an engine, I expect to obtain an exchange of passes with all my fellow monopolists in North America. I at once fired back an answer to Ballard’s telegram, which must have produced an impression upon the Gould and Vanderbilt interests—if they got wind of it. If the L. & G. W. should pass the paper stage next summer, it will do a whole lot towards carrying this burg beyond the hypnotic period of development.
“The Angus Falls branch is going to build in next summer, I am confident, and that means another division headquarters and, probably, machine-shops. I’m working with some of the trilobites here to form a pool, and offer the company grounds for additional yards and a roundhouse and shops. Captain Tolliver interviewed General Lattimore about it, and got turned down.
“ ‘He told me, suh,’ reported the Captain, in a fine white passion, ‘that if any railway system desiahs to come to Lattimore, it has his puhmission! That the Injuns didn’t give him any bonus when he came; and that he had to build his own houses and yahds, by gad, at his own expense, and defend ’em, too, and that if any railroad was thinkin’ of comin’ hyah, it was doubtless because it was good business fo’ ’em to come; and that if they wanted any of his land, were willing to pay him his price, there wouldn’t be any difficulty about theiah getting it. And that if there should arise any difference, which he should deeply regret, but would try to live through, the powah of eminent domain with which railways ah clothed will enable the company to get what land is necessary by legal means.’
“ ‘I could take these observations,’ said the Captain, ‘as nothing except a gratuitous insult to one who approached him, suh, in a spirit of pure benevolence and civic patriotism. It shows the kind of tyrants who commanded the oppressors of the South, suh! Only his gray hairs protected him, suh, only his gray hairs!’ ”
“It’s a little hard to separate the General from the Captain, in this report of the committee on railway extensions,” said my wife.
“The only thing that’s clear about it,” said I, “is that Jim is having a good deal of fun with the Captain.”
This became clearer as the correspondence went on.
“Tolliver thinks,” said he, in another letter, “that the Angus Falls extension can be pulled through. However, I recall that only yesterday the Captain, in private, denounced the citizens of Lattimore as beneath the contempt of gentlemen of breadth of view. ‘I shall dispose of my holdin’s hyah,’ said he, with a stately sweep indicative of their extent, ‘at any sacrifice, and depaht, cuhsin’ the day I devoted myself to the redemption of such cattle.’
“But, at that particular moment, he had just failed in an attempt to sell Bill Trescott a bunch of choice outlying gold bricks, and was somewhat heated with wine. This to the haughty Southron was ample excuse for confiding to me the round, unvarnished truth about us mudsills.
“Josie and I often talk of you and your wife. I don’t know what I’d do out here if it weren’t for Josie. She refuses to enthuse over our ‘natural, healthy growth,’ which we look for; but I guess that’s because she doesn’t care for the things that the rest of us are striving for. But she’s the only person here with whom one can really converse. You’d be astonished to see how pretty she is in her furs, and set like a jewel in my new sleigh; but I’m becoming keenly aware of the fact.”
We were afterwards told that the trilobites had shaken off their fossilhood, and that the Angus Falls extension, with the engine-house and machine-shops, had been “landed.”
“This,” he wrote, “means enough new families to make a noticeable increase in our population. Things will be popping here soon. Come on and help shake the popper; hurry up with your moving, or it will all be over, including the shouting.”
We were not entirely dependent upon Jim’s letters for Lattimore news. Mrs. Barslow kept up a desultory correspondence with Miss Trescott, begun upon some pretext and continued upon none at all. In one of these letters Josie (for so we soon learned to call her) wrote:
“Our little town is changing so that it no longer seems familiar. Not that the change is visible. Beyond an unusual number of strangers or recent comers, there is nothing new to strike the eye. But the talk everywhere is of a new railroad and other improvements. One needs only to shut one’s eyes and listen, to imagine that the town is already a real city. Mr. Elkins seems to be the center of this new civic self-esteem. The air is full of it, and I admit that I am affected by it. I have
“ ‘A feeling, as when eager crowds await,
Before a palace gate,
Some wondrous pageant.’
“You are indebted to Captain Tolliver for the quotation, and to Mr. Elkins for the idea. The Captain induced me