In the West, all roads run to or from Chicago. It is nearer to almost any place by the way of Chicago than by any other route: so Alice and I went to the city by the lake, as the beginning of our prospecting tour. I took her to the art gallery and showed her just where my two lovers had stood—telling her the story for the first time. Then she wanted to eat a supper at Auriccio’s; and after the play we went there, and I was forced to describe the whole scene over again.
“Didn’t she see you at all?” she asked.
“Not at all,” said I.
“You are a good boy,” said my wife, judging me by one act which she approved. “Kiss me.”
This occurred after we reached our lodgings. I suggested as a change of subject that my next day’s engagements took me to the Stock Yards, and I assumed that she would scarcely wish to accompany me.
“I think I prefer the stores,” said she, “and the pictures. Maybe I shall have an adventure.”
At the big Exchange Building, I found that the acquaintance whom I sought was absent from his office, and I roamed up and down the corridors in search of him. As usual the gathering here was intensely Western. There were bronzed cattlemen from every range from Amarillo to the Belle Fourche, sturdy buyers of swine from Iowa and Illinois, sombreroed sheepmen from New Mexico, and vikingesque Swedes from North Dakota. Men there were wearing thousand-dollar diamonds in red flannel shirts, solid gold watch-chains made to imitate bridle-bits, and heavy golden bullocks sliding on horse-hair guards. It pleased me, as such a crowd always does. The laughter was loud but it was free, and the hunted look one sees on State Street and Michigan Avenue was absent.
“I wish Alice had come,” said I, noting the flutter of skirts in a group of people in the corridor; and then, as I came near, the press divided, and I saw something which drew my eyes as to a sight in which lay mystery to be unraveled.
Facing me stood a stout farmer in a dark suit of common cut and texture. He seemed, somehow, not entirely strange; but the petite figure of the girl whose back was turned to me was what fixed my attention.
She wore a smart traveling-gown of some pretty gray fabric, and bore herself gracefully and with the air of dominating the group of commission men among whom she stood. I noted the incurved spine, the deep curves of the waist, and the liberal slope of the hips belonging to a shapely little woman in whom slimness was mitigated in adorable ways, which in some remote future bade fair to convert it into matronliness. Under a broad hat there showed a wealth of red-brown hair, drawn up like a sunburst from a slender little neck.
“I have provided a box at Hooley’s,” said the head of a great commission firm. “Mrs. Johnson will be with us. We may count upon you?”
“I think so,” said the girl, “if papa hasn’t made any engagements.”
The stout farmer blushed as he looked down at his daughter.
“Engagements, eh? No, sir!” he replied. “She runs things after the steers is unloaded. Whatever the little gal says goes with me.”
They turned, and as they came on down the hall, still chatting, I saw her face, and knew it. It was the Empress! But even in that glimpse I saw the change which years had brought. Now she ruled instead of submitting; her voice, still soft and low, had lost its rustic inflections; and in spite of the change in the surroundings—the leap from the art gallery to the Stock Yards—there was more of the artist now, and less of the farmer’s lass. They turned into a suite of offices and disappeared.
“Well, Mr. Barslow,” said my friend, coming up. “Glad to see you. I’ve been hunting for you.”
“Who is that girl and her father?” I asked.
“One of the Johnson Commission Company’s Shippers,” said he, “Prescott, from Lattimore; I wish I could get his shipments.”
“No!” said I, “Not Lattimore!”
“Prescott of Lattimore,” he repeated. “Know anything of him?”
“N-no,” said I. “I have friends in that town.”
“I wish I had,” was the reply; “I’d try to get old Prescott’s business.”
“There’s destiny in this,” said Alice, when I told her of my encounter with the Empress and her father. “Her living in Lattimore is not an accident.”
“I doubt,” said I, “if anybody’s is.”
“She looked nice, did she?” Alice went on, “and dressed well?” and without waiting for an answer added: “Let’s leave Chicago. I’m anxious to get to Lattimore!”
CHAPTER V.
We Reach the Atoll.
So we journeyed on to Duluth, to St. Paul and Minneapolis, and to the cities on the Missouri. It was at one of those recurrent periods when the fever of material and industrial change and development breaks out over the whole continent. The very earth seemed to send out tingling shocks of some occult stimulus; the air was charged with the ozone of hope; and subtle suggestions seemed to pass from mind to mind, impelling men to dare all, to risk all, to achieve all. In every one of these young cities we were astonished at the changes going on under our very eyes. Streets were torn up for the building of railways, viaducts, and tunnels. Buildings were everywhere in course of demolition, to make room for larger edifices. Excavations yawned like craters at street-corners. Steel pillars, girders, and trusses towered skyward—skeletons to be clothed in flesh of brick and stone.
Suburbs were sprouting, almost daily, from the mould of the market-gardens in the purlieus. Corporations were contending for the possession of the natural highway approaches to each growing city. Street-railway companies pushed their charters to passage at midnight sessions of boards of aldermen, seized streets in the night-time, and extended their metallic tentacles out into the fields of dazed farmers.
On the frontiers, counties were organized and populated in a season. Every one of them had its two or three villages, which aped in puny fashion the achievements of the cities. New pine houses dotted prairies, unbroken save for the mile-long score of the delimiting plow. Long trains of emigrant-cars moved continually westward. The world seemed drunk with hope and enthusiasm. The fulfillment of Jim’s careless prophecy had burst suddenly upon us.
Such things as these were fresh in our memories when we reached Lattimore. I had wired Elkins of our coming, and he met us at the station with a carriage. It was one sunny September afternoon when he drove us through the streets of our future home to the principal hotel.
“We have supper at six, dinner at twelve-thirty, breakfast from seven to ten,” said Jim, as we alighted at the hotel. “That’s the sort of bucolic municipality you’ve struck here; we’ll shove all these meals several hours down, when we get to doubling our population. You’ll have an hour to get freshened up for supper. Afterwards, if Mrs. Barslow feels equal to the exertion, we’ll take a drive about the town.”
Lattimore was a pretty place then. Low, rounded hills topped with green surrounded it. The river flowed in a broad, straight reach along its southern margin. A clear stream, Brushy Creek, ran in a miniature canyon of limestone, through the eastern edge of the town. On each side of this brook, in lawns of vivid green, amid natural groves of oak and elm, interspersed with cultivated greenery, stood the houses of the well-to-do. Trees made early twilight in most of the streets.
People were out in numbers, driving in the cool autumnal evening. As a handsome girl, a splendid blonde, drove past us, my wife spoke of the excellent quality of the horseflesh we saw. Jim answered that Lattimore was a center of equine culture, and its citizens wise in breeders’ lore. The appearance of things impressed us favorably. There was an air of quiet prosperity about the place, which is unusual in Western towns, where quietude and progress are apt to be thought incompatible. Jim pointed out the town’s natural