________________________________________________
_ Her mother's wailing could still be heard from overhead, though
more faintly; and old Charley Lohr was coming down the stairs
alone.
He looked at Alice compassionately. "I was just comin' to
suggest maybe you'd excuse yourself from your company," he said.
"Your mother was bound not to disturb you, and tried her best to
keep you from hearin' how she's takin' on, but I thought probably
you better see to her."
"Yes, I'll come. What's the matter?"
"Well," he said, "_I_ only stepped over to offer my sympathy and
services, as it were. _I_ thought of course you folks knew all
about it. Fact is, it was in the evening paper--just a little
bit of an item on the back page, of course."
"What is it?"
He coughed. "Well, it ain't anything so terrible," he said.
"Fact is, your brother Walter's got in a little trouble--well, I
suppose you might call it quite a good deal of trouble. Fact is,
he's quite considerable short in his accounts down at Lamb and
Company."
Alice ran up the stairs and into her father's room, where Mrs.
Adams threw herself into her daughter's arms. "Is he gone?" she
sobbed. "He didn't hear me, did he? I tried so hard----"
Alice patted the heaving shoulders her arms enclosed. "No, no,"
she said. "He didn't hear you-- it wouldn't have mattered--he
doesn't matter anyway."
"Oh, POOR Walter!" The mother cried. "Oh, the POOR boy! Poor,
poor Walter! Poor, poor, poor, POOR----"
"Hush, dear, hush!" Alice tried to soothe her, but the lament
could not be abated, and from the other side of the room a
repetition in a different spirit was as continuous. Adams paced
furiously there, pounding his fist into his left palm as he
strode. "The dang boy!" he said. "Dang little fool! Dang
idiot! Dang fool! Whyn't he TELL me, the dang little fool?"
"He DID!" Mrs. Adams sobbed. "He DID tell you, and you wouldn't
GIVE it to him."
"He DID, did he?" Adams shouted at her. "What he begged me for
was money to run away with! He never dreamed of putting back
what he took. What the dangnation you talking about--accusing
me!"
"He NEEDED it," she said. "He needed it to run away with! How
could he expect to LIVE, after he got away, if he didn't have a
little money? Oh, poor, poor, POOR Walter! Poor, poor,
poor----"
She went back to this repetition; and Adams went back to his own,
then paused, seeing his old friend standing in the hallway
outside the open door.
"Ah--I'll just be goin', I guess, Virgil," Lohr said. "I don't
see as there's any use my tryin' to say any more. I'll do
anything you want me to, you understand."
"Wait a minute," Adams said, and, groaning, came and went down
the stairs with him. "You say you didn't see the old man at
all?"
"No, I don't know a thing about what he's going to do," Lohr
said, as they reached the lower floor. "Not a thing. But look
here, Virgil, I don't see as this calls for you and your wife to
take on so hard about--anyhow not as hard as the way you've
started."
"No," Adams gulped. "It always seems that way to the other party
that's only looking on!"
"Oh, well, I know that, of course," old Charley returned,
soothingly. "But look here, Virgil: they may not catch the boy;
they didn't even seem to be sure what train he made, and if they
do get him, why, the ole man might decide not to prosecute
if----"
"HIM?" Adams cried, interrupting. "Him not prosecute? Why,
that's what he's been waiting for, all along! He thinks my boy
and me both cheated him! Why, he was just letting Walter walk
into a trap! Didn't you say they'd been suspecting him for some
time back? Didn't you say they'd been watching him and were just
about fixing to arrest him?"
"Yes, I know," said Lohr; "but you can't tell, especially if you
raise the money and pay it back."
"Every cent!" Adams vociferated. "Every last penny! I can raise
it--I GOT to raise it! I'm going to put a loan on my factory
to-morrow. Oh, I'll get it for him, you tell him! Every last
penny!"
"Well, ole feller, you just try and get quieted down some now."
Charley held out his hand in parting. "You and your wife just
quiet down some. You AIN'T the healthiest man in the world, you
know, and you already been under quite some strain before this
happened. You want to take care of yourself for the sake of your
wife and that sweet little girl upstairs, you know. Now,
good-night," he finished, stepping out upon the veranda. "You
send for me if there's anything I can do."
"Do?" Adams echoed. "There ain't anything ANYBODY can do!" And
then, as his old friend went down the path to the sidewalk, he
called after him, "You tell him I'll pay him every last cent!
Every last, dang, dirty PENNY!"
He slammed the door and went rapidly up the stairs, talking
loudly to himself. "Every dang, last, dirty penny! Thinks
EVERYBODY in this family wants to steal from him, does he?
Thinks we're ALL yellow, does he? I'll show him!" And he came
into his own room vociferating, "Every last, dang, dirty penny!"
Mrs. Adams had collapsed, and Alice had put her upon his bed,
where she lay tossing convulsively and sobbing, "Oh, POOR
Walter!" over and over, but after a time she varied the sorry
tune. "Oh, poor Alice!" she moaned, clinging to her daughter's
hand. "Oh, poor, POOR Alice to have THIS come on the night of
your dinner--just when everything seemed to be going so well--at
last--oh, poor, poor, POOR----"
"Hush!" Alice said, sharply. "Don't say 'poor Alice!' I'm all
right."
"You MUST be!" her mother cried, clutching her. "You've just GOT
to be! ONE of us has got to be all right--surely God wouldn't
mind just ONE of us being all right--that wouldn't hurt Him----"
"Hush, hush, mother! Hush!"
But Mrs. Adams only clutched her the more tightly. "He seemed
SUCH a nice young man, dearie! He may not see this in the
paper--Mr. Lohr said it was just a little bit of an item--he MAY
not see it, dearie----"
Then her anguish went back to Walter again; and to his needs as a
fugitive--she had meant to repair his underwear, but had
postponed doing so, and her neglect now appeared to be a detail
as lamentable as the calamity itself. She could neither be
stilled upon it, nor herself exhaust its urgings to self-
reproach, though she finally took up another theme temporarily.
Upon an unusually violent outbreak of her husband's, in
denunciation of the runaway, she cried out faintly that he was
cruel; and further wearied her broken voice with details of
Walter's beauty as a baby, and of his bedtime pieties throughout
his infancy.
So the hot night wore on. Three had struck before Mrs. Adams
was got to bed; and Alice, returning to her own room, could hear
her father's bare feet thudding back and forth after that. "Poor
papa!" she whispered in helpless imitation of her mother. "Poor
papa! Poor mama! Poor Walter! Poor all of us!"
She fell asleep, after a time, while from across the hall the
bare feet still thudded over their changeless route; and she woke
at seven, hearing Adams pass her door, shod. In her wrapper she
ran out into the hallway and found him descending the stairs.
"Papa!"
"Hush," he said, and looked up at her with reddened eyes. "Don't
wake your mother."
"I won't," she whispered. "How about you? You haven't slept any
at all!"
"Yes, I did. I got some sleep. I'm going over to the works now.
I got to throw some figures together to show the bank. Don't
worry: I'll get things fixed up. You go back to bed. Good-bye."
"Wait!" she bade him sharply.
"What for?"
"You've got to have some breakfast."
"Don't want 'ny."
"You wait!" she said, imperiously, and disappeared to return
almost at once. "I can cook in my bedroom slippers," she
explained, "but I don't believe I could in my bare feet!"
Descending softly, she made him wait in the dining-room until she
brought him toast and eggs and coffee. "Eat!" she said. "And
I'm going to telephone for a taxicab to take you, if you think
you've really got to go."
"No, I'm going to walk--I WANT to walk."
She shook her head anxiously. "You don't look able. You've
walked all night."
"No, I didn't," he returned. "I tell you I got some sleep. I
got all I wanted anyhow."
"But, papa----"
"Here!" he interrupted, looking up at her suddenly and setting
down his cup of coffee. "Look here! What about this Mr.
Russell? I forgot all about him. What about him?"
Her lip trembled a little, but she controlled it before she
spoke. "Well, what about him, papa?" she asked, calmly enough.
"Well, we could hardly----" Adams paused, frowning heavily. "We
could hardly expect he wouldn't hear something about all this."
"Yes; of course he'll hear it, papa."
"Well?"
"Well, what?" she asked, gently.
"You don't think he'd be the--the cheap kind it'd make a
difference with, of course."
"Oh, no; he isn't cheap. It won't make any difference with him."
Adams suffered a profound sigh to escape him. "Well--I'm glad of
that, anyway."
"The difference," she explained--"the difference was made without
his hearing anything about Walter. He doesn't know about THAT
yet."
"Well, what does he know about?"
"Only," she said, "about me."
"What you mean by that, Alice?" he asked, helplessly.
"Never mind," she said. "It's nothing beside the real trouble
we're in--I'll tell you some time. You eat your eggs and toast;
you can't keep going on just coffee."
"I can't eat any eggs and toast," he objected, rising. "I
can't."
"Then wait till I can bring you something else."
"No," he said, irritably. "I won't do it! I don't want any dang
food! And look here"--he spoke sharply to stop her, as she went
toward the telephone --"I don't want any dang taxi, either! You
look after your mother when she wakes up. I got to be at WORK!"
And though she followed him to the front door, entreating, he
could not be stayed or hindered. He went through the quiet
morning streets at a rickety, rapid gait, swinging his old straw
hat in his hands, and whispering angrily to himself as he went.
His grizzled hair, not trimmed for a month, blew back from his
damp forehead in the warm breeze; his reddened eyes stared hard
at nothing from under blinking lids; and one side of his face
twitched startlingly from time to time;--children might have run
from him, or mocked him.
When he had come into that fallen quarter his industry had partly
revived and wholly made odorous, a negro woman, leaning upon her
whitewashed gate, gazed after him and chuckled for the benefit of
a gossiping friend in the next tiny yard. "Oh, good Satan!
Wha'ssa matter that ole glue man?"
"Who? Him?" the neighbour inquired. "What he do now?"
"Talkin' to his ole se'f!" the first explained, joyously. "Look
like gone distracted--ole glue man!"
Adams's legs had grown more uncertain with his hard walk, and he
stumbled heavily as he crossed the baked mud of his broad lot,
but cared little for that, was almost unaware of it, in fact.
Thus his eyes saw as little as his body felt, and so he failed to
observe something that would have given him additional light upon
an old phrase that already meant quite enough for him.
There are in the wide world people who have never learned its
meaning; but most are either young or beautifully unobservant who
remain wholly unaware of the inner poignancies the words convey:
"a rain of misfortunes." It is a boiling rain, seemingly
whimsical in its choice of spots whereon to fall; and, so far as
mortal eye can tell, neither the just nor the unjust may hope to
avoid it, or need worry themselves by expecting it. It had
selected the Adams family for its scaldings; no question.
The glue-works foreman, standing in the doorway of the brick
shed, observed his employer's eccentric approach, and doubtfully
stroked a whiskered chin.
"Well, they ain't no putticular use gettin' so upset over it," he
said, as Adams came up. "When a thing happens, why, it happens,
and that's all there is to it. When a thing's so, why, it's so.
All you can do about it is think if there's anything you CAN do;
and that's what you better be doin' with this case."
Adams halted, and seemed to gape at him. "What --case?" he said,
with difficulty. "Was it in the morning papers, too?"
"No, it ain't in no morning papers. My land! It don't need to
be in no papers; look at the SIZE of it!"
"The size of what?"
"Why, great God!" the foreman exclaimed. "He ain't even seen it.
Look! Look yonder!"
Adams stared vaguely at the man's outstretched hand and pointing
forefinger, then turned and saw a great sign upon the facade of
the big factory building across the street. The letters were
large enough to be read two blocks away.
"AFTER THE FIFTEENTH OF NEXT MONTH
THIS BUILDING WILL BE OCCUPIED BY
THE J. A. LAMB LIQUID GLUE CO. INC."
A gray touring-car had just come to rest before the principal
entrance of the building, and J. A. Lamb himself descended from
it. He glanced over toward the humble rival of his projected
great industry, saw his old clerk, and immediately walked across
the street and the lot to speak to him.
"Well, Adams," he said, in his husky, cheerful voice, "how's your
glue-works?"
Adams uttered an inarticulate sound, and lifted the hand that
held his hat as if to make a protective gesture, but failed to
carry it out; and his arm sank limp at his side. The foreman,
however, seemed to feel that something ought to be said.
"Our glue-works, hell!" he remarked. "I guess we won't HAVE no
glue-works over here not very long, if we got to compete with the
sized thing you got over there!"
Lamb chuckled. "I kind of had some such notion," he said. "You
see, Virgil, I couldn't exactly let you walk off with it like
swallering a pat o' butter, now, could I? It didn't look exactly
reasonable to expect me to let go like that, now, did it?"
Adams found a half-choked voice somewhere in his throat. "Do
you--would you step into my office a minute, Mr. Lamb?"
"Why, certainly I'm willing to have a little talk with you," the
old gentleman said, as he followed his former employee indoors,
and he added, "I feel a lot more like it than I did before I got
THAT up, over yonder, Virgil!"
Adams threw open the door of the rough room he called his office,
having as justification for this title little more than the fact
that he had a telephone there and a deal table that served as a
desk. "Just step into the office, please," he said.
Lamb glanced at the desk, at the kitchen chair before it, at the
telephone, and at the partition walls built of old boards, some
covered with ancient paint and some merely weatherbeaten, the
salvage of a house-wrecker; and he smiled broadly. "So these are
your offices, are they?" he asked. "You expect to do quite a
business here, I guess, don't you, Virgil?"
Adams turned upon him a stricken and tortured face. "Have you
seen Charley Lohr since last night, Mr. Lamb?"
"No; I haven't seen Charley."
"Well, I told him to tell you," Adams began;-- "I told him I'd
pay you----"
"Pay me what you expect to make out o' glue, you mean, Virgil?"
"No," Adams said, swallowing. "I mean what my boy owes you.
That's what I told Charley to tell you. I told him to tell you
I'd pay you every last----"
"Well, well!" the old gentleman interrupted, testily. "I don't
know anything about that."
"I'm expecting to pay you," Adams went on, swallowing again,
painfully. "I was expecting to do it out of a loan I thought I
could get on my glue-works."
The old gentleman lifted his frosted eyebrows. "Oh, out o' the
GLUE-works? You expected to raise money on the glue-works, did
you?"
At that, Adams's agitation increased prodigiously. "How'd you
THINK I expected to pay you?" he said. "Did you think I expected
to get money on my own old bones?" He slapped himself harshly
upon the chest and legs. "Do you think a bank'll lend money on a
man's ribs and his broken-down old knee-bones? They won't do it!
You got to have some BUSINESS prospects to show 'em, if you
haven't got any property nor securities; and what business
prospects have I got now, with that sign of yours up over yonder?
Why, you don't need to make an OUNCE o' glue; your sign's fixed
ME without your doing another lick! THAT'S all you had to do;
just put your sign up! You needn't to----"
"Just let me tell you something, Virgil Adams," the old man
interrupted, harshly. "I got just one right important thing to
tell you before we talk any further business; and that's this:
there's some few men in this town made their money in off-colour
ways, but there aren't many; and those there are have had to be a
darn sight slicker than you know how to be, or ever WILL know how
to be! Yes, sir, and they none of them had the little gumption
to try to make it out of a man that had the spirit not to let
'em, and the STRENGTH not to let 'em! I know what you thought.
'Here,' you said to yourself, 'here's this ole fool J. A. Lamb;
he's kind of worn out and in his second childhood like; I can put
it over on him, without his ever----'"
"I did not!" Adams shouted. "A great deal YOU know about my
feelings and all what I said to myself! There's one thing I want
to tell YOU, and that's what I'm saying to myself NOW, and what
my feelings are this MINUTE!"
He struck the table a great blow with his thin fist, and shook
the damaged knuckles m the air. "I just want to tell you,
whatever I did feel, I don't feel MEAN any more; not to-day, I
don't. There's a meaner man in this world than _I_ am, Mr.
Lamb!"
"Oh, so you feel better about yourself to-day, do you, Virgil?"
"You bet I do! You worked till you got me where you want me; and
I wouldn't do that to another man, no matter what he did to me!
I wouldn't----"
"What you talkin' about! How've I 'got you where I want you?'"
"Ain't it plain enough?" Adams cried. "You even got me where I
can't raise the money to pay back what my boy owes you! Do you
suppose anybody's fool enough to let me have a cent on this
business after one look at what you got over there across the
road?"
"No, I don't."
"No, you don't," Adams echoed, hoarsely. "What's more, you knew
my house was mortgaged, and my----"
"I did not," Lamb interrupted, angrily. "What do _I_ care about
your house?"
"What's the use your talking like that?" Adams cried. "You got
me where I can't even raise the money to pay what my boy owes the
company, so't I can't show any reason to stop the prosecution and
keep him out the penitentiary. That's where you worked till you
got ME!"
"What!" Lamb shouted. "You accuse me of----"
"'Accuse you?' What am I telling you? Do you think I got no
EYES?" And Adams hammered the table again. "Why, you knew the
boy was weak----"
"I did not!"
"Listen: you kept him there after you got mad at my leaving the
way I did. You kept him there after you suspected him; and you
had him watched; you let him go on; just waited to catch him and
ruin him!"
"You're crazy!" the old man bellowed. "I didn't know there was
anything against the boy till last night. You're CRAZY, I say!"
Adams looked it. With his hair disordered over his haggard
forehead and bloodshot eyes; with his bruised hands pounding the
table and flying in a hundred wild and absurd gestures, while his
feet shuffled constantly to preserve his balance upon staggering
legs, he was the picture of a man with a mind gone to rags.
"Maybe I AM crazy!" he cried, his voice breaking and quavering.
"Maybe I am, but I wouldn't stand there and taunt a man with it
if I'd done to him what you've done to me! Just look at me: I
worked all my life for you, and what I did when I quit never
harmed you--it didn't make two cents' worth o' difference in your
life and it looked like it'd mean all the difference in the world
to my family--and now look what you've DONE to me for it! I tell
you, Mr. Lamb, there never was a man looked up to another man
the way I looked up to you the whole o' my life, but I don't look
up to you any more! You think you got a fine day of it now,
riding up in your automobile to look at that sign--and then over
here at my poor little works that you've ruined. But listen to
me just this one last time!" The cracking voice broke into
falsetto, and the gesticulating hands fluttered uncontrollably.
"Just you listen!" he panted. "You think I did you a bad turn,
and now you got me ruined for it, and you got my works ruined,
and my family ruined; and if anybody'd 'a' told me this time last
year I'd ever say such a thing to you I'd called him a dang liar,
but I DO say it: I say you've acted toward me like--like a--a
doggone mean--man!"
His voice, exhausted, like his body, was just able to do him this
final service; then he sank, crumpled, into the chair by the
table, his chin down hard upon his chest.
"I tell you, you're crazy!" Lamb said again. "I never in the
world----" But he checked himself, staring in sudden perplexity
at his accuser. "Look here!" he said. "What's the matter of
you? Have you got another of those----?" He put his hand upon
Adams's shoulder, which jerked feebly under the touch.
The old man went to the door and called to the foreman.
"Here!" he said. "Run and tell my chauffeur to bring my car over
here. Tell him to drive right up over the sidewalk and across
the lot. Tell him to hurry!"
So, it happened, the great J. A. Lamb a second time brought his
former clerk home, stricken and almost inanimate. _
Read next: CHAPTER 24
Read previous: CHAPTER 22
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