Young Wallingford. Chester George Randolph
small surplus, up to the fifteenth. It’s very nice of you to offer it, however.”
“You see,” he went on, after a moment’s hesitation, “I’m not coming back.”
She turned now, and faced him squarely for the first time.
“You’d better stay here,” she told him. “I’m afraid you’ll cost me more away from home than you do in Filmore.”
“I shall never cost you a cent,” he declared. “I have found out how to make money.”
She smiled in a superior way.
“I am a bit incredulous; but, after all, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. Your father at least had that quality, and you should have inherited something from him besides” – and she paused a trifle – “his name.” She sighed, and then continued: “Very well, son, I suppose you must carve out your own destiny. You are quite old enough to make the attempt, and I have been anticipating it for some time. After all, you really ought to have very little trouble in impressing the world favorably. You dress neatly,” she surveyed him critically, “and you make friends readily. Shall I see you again before you go?”
“I scarcely think so. I have a little down-town business to look after, and shall take dinner on the train; so I’ll just say good-by to you now.”
He shook hands with her and stooped down, and they kissed each other dutifully upon the cheek. Mrs. Wix, being advanced, did not believe in kissing upon the mouth. After he had gone, a fleeting impression of loneliness weighed upon her as much as any purely sentimental consideration could weigh. She looked thoughtfully at the closed door, and a stirring of the slight maternal instinct within her made her vaguely wistful. She turned, still with that faint tugging within her breast which she could not understand, and it was purely mechanical that her eyes, dropping to the surface of the paper, caught the sentence: “Mental suggestion, unfit for growing minds, is upon every page.” The word “Mental” seemed redundant, and she drew her pen through it, neatly changing the “s” in “suggestion” to a capital.
A cab drove past Wix as he started down the street and he saw Smalley in it. He turned curiously. What was Smalley doing there? He stopped until he saw the cab draw up in front of Gilman’s house. He saw Smalley assist young Gilman out of the cab, and Gilman’s mother run out to meet them. He was thoughtful for a moment over that, then he shrugged his shoulders and strode on.
On the train that night as he swaggered into the dining-car, owning it, in effect, and all it contained, he saw, seated alone at a far table, no less a person than Horace G. Daw, as black and as natty as ever, and with a mustache grown long enough to curl a little bit at the ends.
“Hello, old pal,” greeted Daw. “Where now?”
“I’m going out alone into the cold, cold world, to make fortunes and spend them.”
“Half of that stunt is a good game,” commented Mr. Daw.
Wix chuckled.
“Both ends of it look good to me,” he stated. “I’ve found the recipe for doing it, and it was you that tipped off the plan.”
“I certainly am the grand little tipper-off,” agreed Daw, going back in memory over their last meeting. “You got to that three thousand, did you?”
“Oh, no,” said Wix. “I only used it to get a little more. Our friend Gilman has his all back again. Of course, I didn’t use your plan as it laid. It was too raw, but it gave me the suggestion from which I doped out one of my own. I’ve got to improve my system a little, though. My rake-off’s too small. In the wind-up I handled twenty-one thousand dollars, and only got away with eight thousand-odd of it for myself.”
“You haven’t it all with you?” asked Daw, a shade too eagerly.
Wix chuckled, his broad shoulders heaving and his pink face rippling.
“No use, kind friend,” said he. “Just dismiss it from your active but greedy mind. If anybody gets away unduly with a cent of this wad, all they need to do is to prove it to me, and I’ll make them a present of the balance. No, my dark-complected brother, the bulk of it is in a safe place in little old New York, where I can go get it as I need it; but I have enough along to buy, I think. It seems to me you bought last,” and they both grinned at the reminiscence.
“I wasn’t thinking of trying to annex any of that coin,” lied Mr. Daw glibly, and changing entirely his attitude toward Mr. Wix as his admiration grew; “but I was thinking that we might cook up something together. I’ll put up dollar for dollar with you. I’ve just been harvesting, myself.”
Again Wix chuckled.
“Declined with thanks,” he returned. “I don’t mind trailing around a bit with you when we get to New York, and also meeting the carefully assorted selection of dead-sure-thing geniuses who must belong to your set, but I’ll go no further. For one thing, I don’t like the idea of a partner. It cramps me to split up. For another thing, I wouldn’t like to hook up in business with you. You’re not safe enough; you trifle too much with the law, which is not only foolish but unnecessary.”
“Yes?” retorted Daw. “How about this eight thousand or so that you committed mayhem on Filmore to get?”
“Good, honest money,” asserted Wix. “I hate to boast about your present companion, but I don’t owe Filmore a cent. I merely worked up a business and sold my share in it. Of course, they didn’t know I was selling it, but they’ll find out when they go over the records, which are perfectly straight. If, after buying the chance to go into business, they don’t know what to do with it, it isn’t my fault.”
A traveling man who had once been in the office of The La Salle Grain and Stock Brokerage Company for an afternoon’s flyer, and who remembered the cordial ease with which Wix had taken his money, came over to the table.
“Hello, Wix; how’s tricks?” he hailed.
Wix looked up at him blankly but courteously.
“Beg pardon,” he returned.
The face of the traveling man fell.
“Aren’t you Mr. Wix, of Filmore?”
“I’m afraid not,” replied Wix, smiling with great cordiality. “Sorry to disappoint you, old man.”
“Really, I beg your pardon,” said the traveling man, perplexed. “It is the most remarkable resemblance I ever saw. I would have sworn you were Wix. He used to run a brokerage shop in the Grand Hotel in Filmore.”
“Never was in the town,” lied Wix.
The man turned away. Daw looked after him with an amused smile.
“By the way, Wix, what is your name now?”
“By George, I haven’t decided! I was too busy getting rid of my only handicap to think up a substitute. I’ll tell you in a minute,” and on the spur of the moment he invented a quite euphonious name, one which was to last him for a great many years.
“Wallingford,” he announced. “How does that hit you? J. Rufus Wallingford!”
CHAPTER VI
They were glad to see Blackie Daw back on Broadway – that is, in the way that Broadway is glad; for they of the Great White Way have no sentiments and no emotions, and but scant memories. About Blackie’s companion, however, they were professionally curious.
“Who is this large, pink Wallingford person, and where did you get it?” asked Mr. Phelps, whose more familiar name was Green-Goods Harry.
Mr. Daw, standing for the moment with Mr. Phelps at the famous old cheese-and-crackers end of the Fifth Avenue bar, grinned.
“He’s an educated Hick,” he responded, “and I got him out of the heart of the hay-fever district, right after he’d turned a classy little trick on the easy producers of his childhood home. Sold ’em a bankrupt bucket-shop for eight thousand, which is going some!”
Mr.