Part 6 (1/2)

”Why, yes.” There was a note of surprise in Gabriel's answer, for he remembered, also, that he had sold his watch a little later in the day to a Union soldier, and had divided the eighty dollars with Cyrus. For an instant, he almost believed that the other was going to allude for the first time to that incident.

”Well, I've never forgotten that green persimmon tree by the roadside,”

pursued the great man, ”and the way you stopped under it and said, 'O Lord, wilt Thou not work a miracle and make persimmons ripen in the spring?'”

”No, I'd forgotten it,” rejoined Gabriel coolly, for he was hurt by the piece of flippancy and was thinking the worst of Cyrus again.

”You'd forgotten it? Well, I've a long memory, and I never forget.

That's one thing you may count on me for,” he added, ”a good memory. As for John Henry--I'll see James about it. I'll see what James has to say.”

When Gabriel had gone, accompanied as far as the outer door by the secretary, Cyrus turned back to the window, and stood gazing over a steep street or two, and past the gabled roof of an old stone house, to where in the distance the walls of the new building of the Treadwell Tobacco Company were rising. Around the skeleton structure he could see the workmen moving like ants, while in a widening circle of air the smoke of other factories floated slowly upward under a brazen sky.

”There are too many of them,” he thought bitterly. ”It's compet.i.tion that kills. There are too many of them.”

So rapt was his look while he stood there that there came into his face an expression of yearning sentiment that made it almost human. Then his gaze wandered to the gleaming tracks of the two great railroads which ran out of Dinwiddie toward the north, uncoiling their length like serpents between the broad fields sprinkled with the tender green of young crops. Beside them trailed the ashen country roads over which farmers were crawling with their covered wagons; but, while Cyrus watched from his height, there was as little thought in his mind for the men who drove those wagons through the parching dust as for the beasts that drew them. It is possible even that he did not see them, for just as Mrs. Pendleton's vision eliminated the sight of suffering because her heart was too tender to bear it, so he overlooked all facts except those which were a part of the dominant motive of his life. Nearer still, within the narrow board fences which surrounded the backyards of negro hovels, under the moving shadows of broad-leaved mulberry or sycamore trees, he gazed down on the swarms of mulatto children; though to his mind that problem, like the problem of labour, loomed vague, detached, and unreal--a thing that existed merely in the air, not in the concrete images that he could understand.

”Well, it's a pity Gabriel never made more of himself,” he thought kindly. ”Yes, it's a pity. I'll see what I can do for him.”

At six o'clock that evening, when the end of his business day had come, he joined James at the door for his walk back to Bolingbroke Street.

”Have you done anything about Jones's place in the bank?” was the first question he asked after his abrupt nod of greeting.

”No, sir. I thought you were waiting to find out about Oliver.”

”Then you thought wrong. The fellow's a fool. Look up that nephew of Gabriel Pendleton, and see if he is fit for the job. I am sorry Jones is dead,” he added with a touch of feeling. ”I remember I got him that place the year after the war, and I never knew him to be ten minutes late during all the time that I worked with him.”

”But what are we to do with Oliver?” inquired James after a pause. ”Of course he wouldn't be much good in the bank, but----”

And without finis.h.i.+ng his sentence, he glanced up in a tentative, non-committal manner into Cyrus's face. He was a smaller and somewhat imperfect copy of his father, naturally timid, and possessed of a superst.i.tious feeling that he should die in an accident. His thin anaemic features lacked the strength of the Treadwells, though in his cautious and taciturn way he was very far indeed from being the fool people generally thought him. Since he had never loved anything with pa.s.sion except money, he was regarded by his neighbours as a man of unimpeachable morality.

At the end of the block, while the long pointed shadows of their feet kept even pace on the stone crossing, Cyrus answered abruptly: ”Put him anywhere out of my sight. I can't bear the look of him.”

”How would you like to give him something to do on the road? Put him under Borrows, for instance, and let him learn a bit about freight?”

”Well, I don't care. Only don't let me see him--he turns my stomach.”

”Then as long as we've got to support him, I'll tell him he may try his hand at the job of a.s.sistant freight agent, if he wants to earn his keep.”

”He'll never do that--just as well put him down under 'waste,' and have done with him,” replied Cyrus, chuckling.

A little girl, rolling a hoop, tripped and fell at his feet, and he nodded at her kindly, for he had a strong physical liking for children, though he had never stopped to think about them in a human or personal way. He had, indeed, never stopped to think about anything except the absorbing problem of how to make something out of nothing. Everything else, even his marriage, had made merely a superficial impression upon him. What people called his ”luck” was only the relentless pursuit of an idea; and in this pursuit all other sides of his nature had been sapped of energy. From the days when he had humbly accepted small commissions from the firm of Machlin & Company, to the last few years, when he had come to be regarded almost superst.i.tiously as the saviour of sinking properties, he had moved quietly, cautiously, and unswervingly in one direction. The blighting panic of ten years before had hardly touched him, so softly had he ventured, and so easy was it for him to return to his little deals and his diet of crumbs. They were bad times, those years, alike for rich and poor, for Northerner and Southerner; but in the midst of cras.h.i.+ng firms and noiseless factories, he had cut down his household expenses to a pittance and had gone on as secretively as ever--waiting, watching, hoping, until the worst was over and Machlin & Company had found their man. Then, a little later, with the invasion of the cigarette, there went up the new Treadwell factory which the subtle minded still attributed to the genius of Cyrus. Even before George and Henry had sailed for Australia, the success of the house in Dinwiddie was a.s.sured. There was hardly a drug store in America in those days that did not offer as its favourite James's crowning triumph, the Magnolia cigarette. A few years later, compet.i.tion came like a whirlwind, but in the beginning the Treadwell brand held the market alone, and in those few years Cyrus's fortune was made.

”Heard from George lately?” he inquired, when they had traversed, accompanied by their long and narrow shadows, another couple of blocks.

The tobacco trade had always been for him merely a single p.a.w.n in the splendid game he was playing, but he had suspected recently that James felt something approaching a sentiment for the Magnolia cigarette, and true to the Treadwell scorn of romance, he was forever trying to trick him into an admission of guilt.

”Not since that letter I showed you a month ago,” answered James. ”Too much compet.i.tion, that's the story everywhere. They are flooding the market with cigarettes, and if it wasn't for the way the Magnolia holds on, we'd be swamped in little or no time.”

”Well, I reckon the Claypole would pull us through,” commented Cyrus.

The Claypole was an old brand of plug tobacco with which the first Treadwell factory had started. ”But you're right about compet.i.tion. It's got to stop or we'll be driven clean out of the business.”

He drew out his latchkey as he spoke, for they had reached the corner of Bolingbroke Street, and the small dingy house in which they lived was only a few doors away. As they pa.s.sed between the two blossoming oleanders in green tubs on the sidewalk, James glanced up at the flat square roof, and observed doubtfully, ”You'll be getting out of this old place before long now, I reckon.”

”Oh, someday, someday,” answered Cyrus. ”There'll be time enough when the market settles and we can see where the money is coming from.”