Then to Johnson – biting his pen-handle in Bobby’s study and wondering where his principal and Applerod could be at this hour – he telephoned to deliver a check in the amount of twenty-seven thousand six hundred dollars to Mr. Chalmers. Never, since he had been plunged into “business,” had Bobby been so elated with himself as when he walked from the office of Miles, Eddy and Company; and, to keep up the good work, as soon as he reached the hall he turned to Applerod with a crisp, ringing voice, which was the product of that elation.
“Now for an engineer,” he said.
“Already as good as secured,” Mr. Applerod announced, triumphant that every necessity had been anticipated. “Jimmy Platt, son of an old neighbor of mine. Fine, smart boy, and knows all about the Westmarsh proposition. Bless you, I figured on this with him every vacation during his schooling!”
An hour later, Bobby, Mr. Applerod and the secretly jubilant Jimmy Platt had sped out Westmarsh way, and were inspecting the hundred and twelve acres of swamp which the new firm of Burnit and Applerod held between them.
“It’s a fine job,” said the young engineer, coveting anew the tremendous task as he bent upon it an admiring professional eye. “This time next year you won’t recognize the place. It’s a noble thing, Mr. Burnit, to turn an utterly useless stretch of swamp like this into habitable land. Have you secured the entire tract?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Bobby confessed with a frown. “The extreme north eight acres are owned by another party.”
“And when you drain your property,” mused Jimmy, smiling, “you will drain his.”
“Not if I can help it,” declared Bobby emphatically.
“You must come to some arrangement before you begin,” warned the engineer with the severe professional authority common to the quite young. Already, however, he was trying to grow regulation engineer’s whiskers; also he immediately planned to get married upon the proceeds of this big job, which, after years of chimerical dreaming, had become too real, almost, to be believed. “Perhaps you could get the owner to stand his proportionate share of the expense of drainage.”
Bobby smiled at the suggestion but made no other answer. He knew Silas Trimmer, or thought that he did, and the idea of Silas bearing a portion of a huge expense like this, when he could not be forced to shoulder it, struck him as distinctly humorous.
CHAPTER IX
AGNES DELIVERS BOBBY A NOTE FROM OLD JOHN BURNIT – IN A GRAY ENVELOPE
That night, at the Traders’ Club, Bobby was surprised when Mr. Trimmer walked over to his table and dropped his pudgy trunk and his lean limbs into a chair beside him. His yellow countenance was creased with ingratiating wrinkles, and the smile behind his immovable mustache became of perfectly flawless circumference as his muddy black eyes peered at Bobby through thick spectacles. It seemed to Bobby that there was malice in the wrinkles about those eyes, but the address of Mr. Trimmer was most conciliatory.
“I have a fuss to pick with you, young man,” he said with clumsy joviality. “You beat me upon the purchase of that Westmarsh property. Very shrewd, indeed, Mr. Burnit; very like your father. I suppose that now, if I wanted to buy it from you, I’d have to pay you a pretty advance.” And he rubbed his hands as if to invite the opening of negotiations.
“It is not for sale,” said Bobby, stiffening; “but I might consider a proposition to buy your eight acres.” He offered this suggestion with reluctance, for he had no mind to enter transactions of any sort with Silas Trimmer. Still, he recalled to himself with a sudden yielding to duty, business is business, and his father would probably have waved all personal considerations aside at such a point.
“Mine is for sale,” offered Silas, a trifle too eagerly, Bobby thought.
“How much?” he asked.
“A thousand dollars an acre.”
“I won’t pay it,” declared Bobby.
“Well,” replied Mr. Trimmer with a deepening of that circular smile which Bobby now felt sure was maliciously sarcastic, “by the time it is drained it will be worth that to any purchaser.”
“Suppose we drain it,” suggested Bobby, holding both his temper and his business object remarkably well in hand. “Will you stand your share of the cost?”
“It strikes me as an entirely unnecessary expense at present,” said Silas and smiled again.
“Then it won’t be drained,” snapped Bobby.
Later in the evening he caught Silas laughing at him, his shoulders heaving and every yellow fang protruding. The next morning, keeping earlier hours than ever before in his life, Bobby was waiting outside Jimmy Platt’s door when that gentleman started to work.
“The first thing you do,” he directed, still with a memory of that aggravating laugh, “I want you to build a cement wall straight across the north end of my Westmarsh property.”
Mr. Platt smiled and shook his head.
“Evidently you can not buy that north eight acres, and don’t intend to drain it,” he commented, stroking sagely the sparse beginning of those slow professional whiskers. “It’s your affair, of course, Mr. Burnit, but I am quite sure that spite work in engineering can not be made to pay.”
“Nevertheless,” insisted Bobby, “we’ll build that wall.”
The previous afternoon Jimmy Platt had made a scale drawing of the property from city surveys, and now the two went over it carefully, discussing it in various phases for fully an hour, proving estimates of cost and general feasibility. At the conclusion of that time Bobby, well pleased with his own practical manner of looking into things, telephoned to Johnson and asked for Applerod. Mr. Applerod had not yet arrived.
“Very well,” said Bobby, “when he comes have him step out and secure suitable offices for us,” and this detail despatched he went out with his engineer to make a circuit of the property and study its drainage possibilities.
From profiles that Platt had made they found the swamp at its upper point to be much lower than the level of the river, which ran beyond low hills nearly a mile away; but the river made a detour, including a considerable fall, coming back again to within a scant half-mile of the southern end of the tract, where it was much lower than the marsh. Between marsh and river at the south was an immense hill, too steep and rugged for any practical purpose, and this they scaled.
The west end of the city lay before them crowding close to the river bank, and already its tentacles had crept around and over the hills and on past Westmarsh tract. Young Platt looked from river to swamp, his eyes glowing over the possibilities that lay before them.
“Mr. Burnit,” he announced, after a gravity of thought which he strove his best to make take the place of experience, “you ought to be able to buy this hill very cheaply. Just through here we’ll construct our drainage channel, and with the excavation fill your marsh. It is one of the neatest opportunities I have ever seen, and I want to congratulate you upon your shrewdness in having picked out such a splendid investment.”
This, Bobby felt, was praise from Cæsar, and he was correspondingly elated.
He did not return to the study until in the afternoon. He found Johnson livid with abhorrence of Applerod’s gaudy metamorphosis. That gentleman wore a black frock-coat, a flowered gray waistcoat, pin-striped light trousers, shining new shoes, sported a gold-headed cane, and on the table was the glistening new silk hat which had reposed upon his snow-white curls. His pink face was beaming as he rose to greet his partner.
“Mr. Burnit,” said he, shaking hands with almost trembling gravity and importance, “this day is the apex of my life, and I’m happy to have the son of my old and revered employer as my partner.”
“I hope that it may prove fortunate for both of us,” replied Bobby, repressing his smile at the acquisition of the “make-up” which Applerod had for years aspired to wear legitimately.
Johnson, humped over the desk that had once been Bobby’s father’s, snorted and looked up at the stern portrait of old John Burnit; then he drew from the index-file which he had already placed upon the back of that desk a gray-tinted envelope which he handed to Bobby with a silence that was more eloquent than words. It was inscribed:
To my Son if he is Fool Enough to Take up With Applerod’s Swamp Scheme
Rather impatiently Bobby tore it open, and on the inside he found:
“When shrewd men persist in passing up an apparently cinch proposition, don’t even try to find out what’s the matter with it. In this six-cylinder age no really good opportunity runs loose for twenty-four hours.”
“If the governor had only arranged to leave me his advice beforehand instead of afterward,” Bobby complained to Agnes Elliston that evening, “it might have a chance at me.”
“The blow has fallen,” said Agnes with mock seriousness; “but you must remember that you brought it on yourself. You have complained to me of your father’s carefully-laid plans for your course in progressive bankruptcy, and he left in my keeping a letter for you covering that very point.”
“Not in a gray envelope, I hope,” groaned Bobby.
“In a gray envelope,” she replied firmly, going across to her own desk in the library.
“I had feared,” said Bobby dismally, “that sooner or later I should find he had left letters for me in your charge as well as in Johnson’s, but I had hoped, if that were the case, that at least they would be in pink envelopes.”
She brought to him one of the familiar-looking missives, and Bobby, as he took it, looked speculatively at the big fireplace, in which, as it was early fall, comfortable-looking real logs were crackling.
“Don’t do it, Bobby,” she warned him smiling. “Let’s have the fun together,” and she sat beside him on the couch, snuggling close.
The envelope was addressed:
To My Son Upon his Complaining that His Father’s Advice Comes too Late!
He opened it, and together they read:
“No boy will believe green apples hurt him until he gets the stomach-ache. Knowing you to be truly my son, I am sure that if I gave you advice beforehand you would not believe it. This way you will.”
Bobby smiled grimly.
“I remember one painful incident of about the time I put on knickerbockers,” he mused. “Father told me to keep away from a rat-trap that he had bought. Of course I caught my hand in it three minutes afterward. It hurt and I howled, but he only looked at me coldly until at last I asked him to help. He let the thing squeeze while he asked if a rat-trap hurt. I admitted that it did. Would I believe him next time? I acknowledged that I would, and he opened the trap. That was all there was to it except the raw place on my hand; but that night he came to my room after I had gone to bed, and lay beside me and cuddled me in his arms until I went to sleep.”
“Bobby,” said Agnes seriously, “not one of these letters but proves his aching love for you.”
“I know it,” admitted Bobby with again that grim smile. “Which only goes to prove another thing, that I’m in for some of the severest drubbings of my life. I wonder where the clubs are hidden.”
He found one of them late that same night at the Idlers’. Clarence Smythe, Silas Trimmer’s son-in-law, drifted in toward the wee small hours in an unusual condition of hilarity. He had a Vandyke, had Mr. Smythe, and was one who cherished a mad passion for clothes; also, as an utterly impossible “climber,” he was as cordially hated as Bobby was liked at the Idlers’, where he had crept in “while the window was open,” as Nick Allstyne expressed it. Ordinarily he was most prim and pretty of manner, but to-night he was on vinously familiar terms with all the world, and, crowding himself upon Bobby’s quiet whist crowd, slapped Bobby joyously on the shoulder.
“Generous lad, Bobby!” he thickly informed Allstyne and Winthrop and Starlett. “If you chaps have any property you’ve wanted to unload for half a lifetime, here’s the free-handed plunger to buy it.”
“How’s that?” Bobby wanted to know, guessing instantly at the humiliating truth.
“That Westmarsh swamp belonged to Trimmer,” laughed Mr. Smythe, so bubbling with the hugeness of the joke that he could not keep his secret; “and when Thorne, after pumping your puffy man, told my clever father-in-law you wanted it, he promptly bought it from himself in the name of Miles, Eddy and Company and put up the price to three hundred an acre. Besides taking the property off his shoulders you’ve given him nearly a ten-thousand-dollar advance for it. Fine business!”
“Great!” agreed blunt Jack Starlett. “Almost as good a joke as refusing to pay a poker debt because it isn’t legal.”
Bobby smiled his thanks for the shot, but inside he was sick. The game they were playing was a parting set-to, for the three others were leaving in the morning for Stanley’s hunt, but Bobby was glad when it was over. In the big, lonely house he sat in the study for an hour before he went to bed, looking abstractedly up at the picture of old John Burnit and worrying over this new development. It cut him to the quick, not so much that he had been made a fool of by “clever” real-estate men, had been led, imbecile-like, to pay an extra hundred dollars per acre for that swamp land, but that the advantage had gone to Silas Trimmer.
Moreover, why had Silas put a prohibitive valuation upon that north eight acres? Why did he want to keep it? It must be because Silas really expected that his tract would be drained free of charge, and that he would thus have the triumph of selling it for an approximate six thousand dollars an acre in the form of building lots. In the face of such a conclusion, the thought of the cement wall that he had ordered built was a great satisfaction.
It was a remarkably open winter that followed, and outdoor operations could thereby go on uninterrupted. In the office, the pompous Applerod, in his frock-coat and silk hat, ground Johnson’s soul to gall dust; for he had taken to saying “Mr. Johnson” most formally, and issuing directions with maddening politeness and consideration. An arrangement had been effected with Applerod, whereby that gentleman, for having suggested the golden opportunity, was to reap the entire benefit of the improvement on his own twenty acres, Bobby financing the whole deal and charging Applerod’s share of it against his account. Applerod stood thereby to gain about seventy-six thousand dollars over and above the price he had paid for his twenty acres; and, moreover, Bobby had decided to call the improved tract the Applerod Addition! When that name began to appear in print, coupled with flaming advertisements of Applerod’s devising, there was grave danger of the rosy-cheeked old gentleman’s losing every button from every fancy vest in his possession.
In the meantime, thoroughly in love with the vast enterprise which he had projected, Bobby spent his time outdoors, fascinated, unable to find any peace elsewhere than upon his Titanic labor. His evenings he spent in such social affairs as he could not avoid; with Agnes Elliston; with Biff Bates; in an occasional game of billiards at the Idlers’; but his days, from early morning until the evening whistle, he spent amid the clang of pick and shovel, the rattling of the trams, the creaking of the crane. It was an absorbing thing to see that enormous groove cut down through the big hill, and to watch the growth of the great mounds which grew up out of the marsh. The ditch that should drain off all this murky water was, of course, the first thing to be achieved, and, from the base of the hill through which it was to be cut, the engineer ran a tram bridge straight across the swamp to the new retaining wall; and from this, with the aid of a huge, long-armed crane which lifted cars bodily from the track, the soil was dumped on either side as it was removed from the cut. By the latter part of December the ditch had been completed and connected with the special sewer which, by permission of the city, had been built to carry the overflow to the river, and, the open weather still holding, the stagnant pool which had been a blot upon the landscape for untold ages began to flow sluggishly away, displaced by the earth from the disappearing hill.
The city papers were teeming now with the vast energy and public-spirited enterprise of young Robert Burnit and Oliver P. Applerod, and there were many indications that the enterprise was to be a most successful one. Even before they were ready to receive them, applications were daily made for reservations in the new district, and individual home-seekers began to take Sunday trips out to where the big undertaking was in progress.
“You sure have got ’em going, Bobby,” confessed the finally-convinced Biff Bates after a visit of inspection. “Here’s where you put the hornet on one Silas Tight-Wad Trimmer all right, all right. But the bones don’t roll right that the side bet don’t go for Johnson instead of Applegoat. He’s a shine, for me. I think he’s all to the canary color inside, but this man Johnson’s some man if he only had a shell to put it in. Me for him!”
The unexpressed friendship that had sprung up between the taciturn bookkeeper and the loquacious ex-pugilist was both a puzzle and a delight to Bobby, and it was one of his great joys to see them together, they not knowing why they liked such companionship, not having a single topic of conversation in common, but unconsciously enjoying that vague, sympathetic man-soul they found in each other.
CHAPTER X
AGNES AND BOBBY DISCERN DIAMOND-STUDDED SPURS FOR THE LATTER
About the first of February the filling and grading were finished and the construction of the streets began, and the middle of March saw the final disappearance of everything, except that dark, eight-acre spot of Silas Trimmer’s, which might remind one of the tract once known as the Westmarsh. In its place lay a broad, yellow checker-board, formed by intersecting streets of asphalt edged with cement pavements, and in the center, at the crossing of broad Burnit and Applerod Avenues, there arose, over a spot where once frogs had croaked and mosquitoes clustered in crowds, a pretty club-house, which was later to be donated to the suburb; and a great satisfaction fell upon the soul of Bobby Burnit like a benediction.
Also one Oliver P. Applerod added two full inches to his strut. He seldom came out to the scene of actual operations, for there was none there except workmen to see his frock-coat and silk hat; but occasionally, from a sense of duty inextricably mingled with self-assertiveness, he paid a visit of inspection, and upon one of these his eyes were confronted by a huge new board sign, visible for half a mile, that overlooked the Applerod Addition from the hills to the north. It bore but two words: “Trimmer’s Addition.” Applerod, holding his broadcloth tight about him to keep it from yellow contamination as a car rumbled by, looked and wiped his glasses and looked again, then, highly excited, he called Bobby to him.
“Why didn’t you tell me of this?” he demanded, pointing to the sign.
Bobby, happy in sweater and high boots and liberal decorations of clay, only laughed.
“The sign went up only yesterday,” he stated.
“But it is competition. Unfair competition! He is stealing our thunder,” protested Applerod.
“He has a perfect right to lay out a subdivision if he wants,” said Bobby. “But don’t worry, Applerod. I’ve been over there and the thing is a joke. The tract is one-fourth the size of ours, it is uphill and downhill, only a little grading is being done, streets are cut through but not paved, and a few cheap board sidewalks are being put down. He’s had to pay a lot more for his land than we have, and can not sell his lots any cheaper.”
“There’s no telling what Silas Trimmer will do,” said Applerod, shaking his head.
“Nonsense,” said Bobby; “there is no chance that people will pass by our lots and buy one of his.”
Applerod walked away unconvinced. Had it been any one else than Silas Trimmer who had set up this opposition he would not have minded so much, but Applerod had come to have a mighty fear of John Burnit’s ancient enemy, and presently he came back to Bobby more panic-stricken than ever.
“I’m going to sell my interest in the Applerod Addition the minute I find a buyer,” he declared, “and I’d advise you to do the same.”
“Don’t be foolish,” counseled Bobby, frowning. “You can’t lose.”
“But man!” quavered Applerod. “I have four thousand dollars of my own cash, all I’ve been able to scrape together in a lifetime, tied up in this thing, and I mustn’t lose!”
Bobby regarded his father’s old confidential clerk more in sorrow than in anger. He was not used to dealing with men of any age so utterly lacking in gameness.
“Four thousand,” he repeated, then he looked across his big checker-board. “I’ll give you ten thousand for it right now.”
“What!” objected Applerod, aghast. “Why, Burnit, the work is nearly done and I have already in sight seventy-six thousand dollars of clear profit over my investment.”
Bobby did not remind Applerod that his four thousand dollars represented only a trifling part of the investment required to yield this seventy-six thousand dollars’ profit. Yet, after all, there was no flaw in Applerod’s commercial reasoning.
“I didn’t expect you to accept it,” replied Bobby. “If you were determined to get out, however, you’ve had an offer of six thousand profit, with no risk.”
“I’d be crazy,” declared Applerod. “I can get a better price than that.”
Bobby was thoughtful for an hour after Applerod had left him; then he hurried into the club-house and telephoned to Chalmers. This was in the forenoon. In the afternoon Applerod was served with an injunction based upon an indivisibility of interest, restraining him from disposing of his share; and in his anger he let it slip out that he had already been trying to open negotiations with Trimmer!
“Honestly, it hurts!” said Bobby wearily, telling of the incident to Agnes that night. “I didn’t know there were so many unsportsmanlike people.”
“I think that is precisely what your father wanted you to find out,” she observed.
“I don’t want to know it,” protested Bobby. “I’d stay much happier to believe that everybody in the world was of the right sort.”
She shook her head.
“No, Bobby,” she said gently; “you have to know that there is the other kind, in order properly to appreciate truth and honor and loyalty.”
“I could almost believe I was in a Sunday-school class,” grinned Bobby. “No wonder it’s snowing.”
Agnes looked out of the window with a cry of delight. Those floating flakes were the very first snow of the season; but they were by no means the last. The winter, delayed, but apparently all the more violent for that very reason, burst suddenly upon the city, stopping the finishing touches on both suburban additions. Came rain and sleet and snow, and rain and sleet and snow again, then biting cold that sank deep into the ground and sealed it as if with a crust of iron. March, that had come in like a lamb, went out like a lion, and the lion raged through April and into May. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the belated winter passed away and the warm sun beat down upon the snow-clad hills and swept them clean. It penetrated into the valleys and turned them into rivulets, thousands of which poured into the river and swelled its banks brimming full. The streets of the Applerod Addition were quickly washed with their own white covering and dried, and immediately with this break-up began the great advertising campaign. The papers flamed with full-page and half-page announcements of the wonderful home-making opportunity; circulars were mailed to possible home-buyers by the hundred thousand; every street-car told of the bargain on striking cards; immense electric signs blazoned the project by night; sixteen-sheet posters were spread upon all the bill-boards, and every device known to expert advertising was requisitioned. Not one soul within the city or within a radius of fifty miles but had kept constantly before him the duty he owed to himself to purchase a lot in the marvelous Applerod Addition; and now indeed Oliver P. Applerod, reassured once more, began to reap the fruit of his life’s ambitions as prospective buyers thronged to look at his frock-coat and silk hat.
June the first was set for the date of the “grand opening,” and though it was not to be a month of roses, still the earth looked bright and gay as the time approached, and Bobby Burnit took Agnes out to view his coming triumph. This was upon a bright day toward the end of May, when those yellow squares were tempered to a golden green by the tender young grass that had been sown at the completion of the grading. She had made frequent visits with him through the winter, and now she gloried with him.
“It looks fine, Bobby,” she confessed with glowing eyes. “Fine! It really seems as if you had won your spurs.”
“Diamond-studded ones!” he exulted. “Why, Agnes, the office is besieged with requests for allotments. In spite of the fact that we have over eleven hundred lots for sale at an average price of six hundred dollars, we’re not going to have enough to go around. The receipts will be fully seven hundred thousand dollars, and our complete disbursements, by the time we have sold out, will not amount to over two hundred and twenty-five thousand. Of course, I don’t know – I haven’t asked, and you wouldn’t tell me if I did – just by what promises you are bound, but when I close up this deal you’re going to marry me! That’s flat!”
“You mustn’t be too sure of anything in this world, Bobby,” she warned him, but she turned upon him a smile that made her words but idle breath.