Honest Joe

by Roy Norton

 

"I've made moneys but I've paid the price!"

 

HONEST JOE

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Drawings by Robert W. Amick By ROY NORTON

Being the fourth of a aeries of stories, based on truth,
of those who refused to surrender.

FOR more than thirty years in his part of the desert and mountain world men had known him as Honest Joe. Some of the older men knew him before that honorable and distinguishing sobriquet had been fastened to him as a title of probity, and when he was merely Joe Barnes. And a few of them could remember his beginnings in what was then a country of hardship and peril where such as he, teamsters, and packers were the only means of communication between isolated mining camps in the tortuous, twisted, rugged mountains. In time, by bout or brawl, drought or drink, they, the trailmen, disappeared, and only Death made note of their endings. Yet, forever cheery, forever frugal, forever indomitable, and forever honest, Joe Barnes lived on.

There were still a few of those who had mined, "back there in the hills," who could remember when Joe made his first essay into commercial ventures; could remember the rambling log structure he built in a camp already well established, and the somewhat meager stock with which he started his "General Store." Almost legendary was the tale of that heroic struggle between the ex-packer and the big commercial company that had regarded the field as peculiarly its own, whose manager promised to send Joe back to his burro train, broke, within a sixmonth; but by frank honesty, an indefatigable endeavor to please, and tireless patience under vicissitude the latter kept on.

It was in the time of his and the camp's prosperity that Joe Barnes married. No one ever understood why, unless it was possible that the simple, candid man with the searching eyes saw something in the woman of his choice that others might not see, some attribute of soul to which others were blind; for his bride was the last that would have been selected for physical beauty of face or form. Her birthplace was the West, her parentage obscure, and her one commanding attribute an unfaltering fidelity to the man who had found her struggling for an honest living as a menial in the old adobe city where he bought his supplies. Childless though they remained, he seemed somehow to dignify her when he addressed her as "Maw," and the camp too came to express something of respect and affection when it spoke of her as Mary Ann. Ugly of face, squat of body, heavy handed, though she was, there died in many quarters of the earth in later years those who remembered her as an angel of kindness who unostentatiously devoted her life to the ill and afflicted, be they ruffian or scarlet woman, clean prospector or graceless rogue.

THE camp climbed to its apex and heyday of activity, wavered there for its brief spell of glory, and then slipped gently over to the other side and the inevitable decline. Prosperous and venturesome spirits with scarcely less means than Joe Barnes trailed away with their winnings to enter other fields. Some came to grief, others to millions; some inflated and burst; others expanded to become prominent characters in the great money marts,—dominant, austere, forgetful, and lonely. Some of them, departing from that camp high up in the Sierras, tried to induce Honest Joe to seek other fields; but his answer was characteristic:

"Once I could have gone," he said reminiscently, leaning over his counter and smiling out at the half-deserted street; "but now you see there's a lot of poor devils that lean on me for lots of things,—grub, sympathy, courage,—and so I can't go. They stood by me when I had nothin' and they had a lot; so now I've got to stand by them. Yes, Sir, to the last ditch!"

He told the truth, and perhaps saw the future in anything but a golden glow; but his splendid, kindly, faithful folly held him to the end, and instead of retiring with a fortune he was the last man to dwell in that deserted place of crumbling cabins and dance halls, falling chimneys and grass-grown dumps.

The grass had grown over the main street, which in the olden days had been torn and rutted by heavy wagons. The grass grew green and rank round the feet of the hitching posts in front of Honest Joe's general store, where once there were pits worn by many hoofs. One place only it never conquered,—the "front yard" of the huge, weather-worn log house that Honest Joe had built to house his wife,—for there, ever seeking something to do, "Maw" fought it with homely flower beds and climbing rose bushes.

"It does seem to me sometimes," she occasionally complained, "that I have just as much to do; only, somehow, it don't seem to amount to so much. Just pifflin' work—just pifflin'!"

And if ever these complaints sounded half sincere, it was Honest Joe's wont to tug at his white mustache and say, "Well, Maw, maybe we'd best pack the goods, have 'em freighted down into the valley, and close the old shebang for good and all. They've seen their best days, the old store and the old house have."

Invariably the result was the same; for invariably, after the sun had dropped down over the wooded western peaks of this hollow in the tops of the high hills, they "made it up," and could have been seen sitting on the worn bench, on the worn porch, in front of the worn old home, he with his arm around her, she gentle-faced, white-headed, quiet, and perhaps saying, "Of course the old camp's gone to smash, Paw; but after all, it's home!"

Always he smiled, quietly, almost secretively, tugged his drooping white mustache some more, twinkled his keen old eyes with satisfaction, and pretended to compromise by saying, "Perhaps we'd better stick it out awhile longer. Business don't amount to much; but we do live, and besides we've got the annuity."

The annuity! That was their great solace. It had been purchased in the bright days when the safe at the old store was filled with gold dust, and the scales on the counter were never at rest. A glib-tongued young man from the Far East had talked them into its purchase, tactfully directing his efforts at Honest Joe's softest spot,—the necessity for caring for Mary Ann if everything else went awry. Thirty thousand dollars hadn't seemed much of a sum in those days; but a hundred dollars a month was now like a million. Thirty thousand dollars? Why, there was double that amount, unpaid, on the books that moldered in the loft above the store, where once had been piled tons of white flour, of sweet-smelling bacon, of acrid dried fruit!

AT rare intervals, now that they had reached three score and more years, they had visitors, mostly always sons of those men who had known the camp when it was a camp, and these youths, weary of globe trotting, had come to see this place where their fathers had laid the foundations of fortune. Some of the young men remained a few days, fishing with elaborate outfits and gloating over the shining rainbow trout that they brought back to the old house for Mary Ann to cook. And on four different occasions there came bent, white-headed old men who did not fish, but reminisced with Honest Joe and his wife, or wandered disconsolately around heaps of logs and stones that once they had called "home," as if searching among those ruins for their lost youth.

One, who had himself been a packer, but was now a distinguished New York financier, Thomas Maples Oakes, known to Honest Joe and Mary Ann as Toluse Tom, seemed the loneliest of all, and his indurated heart softened in the warmth of old memories until he actually displayed characteristics totally unknown and discredited among his business associates,—plain, honest sentiment.

"Perhaps, after all," he said softly on the evening before his departure, "you and Mary, Joe, have done better than I." He sighed and stared sorrowfully off at the peaks which he had so often watched and loved some forty years before. "I've made money; but I've paid the price—God knows I have! And it's not so valuable, after all. If I could square some of the old accounts with it, some of those debts of friendship, some of those—"

His voice broke queerly, and trailed away into a whisper, and his audience, understanding somewhat but wondering, had the delicacy to speak of cheerful things, and let him recover. The spell seemed not to have left him when he boarded the special rig that had come to return him to the world of finance; for even after the driver had lifted his reins to start the great financier leaned out and said:

"Joe, pray God that nothing ever induces you to leave here; but if ever anything goes wrong, remember me, won't you? Somehow, old pardner, I don't think I'm ever coming back here: but—but—"

He straightened suddenly in his seat, looked out at the hills behind Caballeros, and said in a husky voice to the driver, "Go ahead!"

That was all. He neither changed position nor looked back, as the rig whirled him from sight, and Honest Joe, looking fondly at his wife, said:

"Well, well! Maw, what do you think of that? Poor old Toluse! He may be rich in the pocket; but somehow, Maw, I think he's got a starved heart!"

For a long time that evening Honest Joe sat and stared at the sunset, the dusk, and the stars, wishing that he could share with that lonely old comrade of his youth some of the contentment that mellowed his own life, and thanked Heaven that he had never been drawn out into the whirlpool of a world that seemed to have engulfed so many others.

"I may not have all the money I might have, with my ability for such things," he mumbled to a huge old tree in which he confided on rare occasions; "but now that I'm seventy years old money don't look quite as desirable as it did when I was younger. Maybe it don't to Toluse either."

"Joe! Oh, Joe! If you'd quit mumblin' to yourself out there and come in and go to bed, you'd show a heap more sense. It's most ten o'clock, and that's no time for any decent, hard-workin' man to be up," a gentle but complaining voice warned him from the interior of the cabin, and with guilty haste at the thought of being up at such a late hour he knocked the ashes from his pipe and tiptoed heavily to his couch.

UNHERALDED, unsuspected, the Goddess of Change came one night in the fall a year later, with a fire-brand in her hand, and when Honest Joe, dazed, sat up in bed and looked at the light on his wall and then at the little, small-paned window, and rushed out, the old moss-covercd roof of the store was just falling in, and a shower of sparks shot upward as from a funeral pyre over long-dead youth. Mary Ann, after wringing her hands, and crying a little in silence, brought out a red blanket and threw it over him as he sat, bewildered, almost uncomprehending, and dejected on a nearby boulder. Mary Ann also courageously rallied him to help beat out little starts of twining flame that threatened to make their way to the pine needles and forests that stood, as if appalled, in a circle round the little flat in the valley.

"There! There! No use in grievin' over it, Paw," she said softly, laying her smudged, wrinkled, old hand gently on his bowed head as he leaned over the table in the "front room" after it was all over. "It ain't made any money for most fifteen years, and besides we got the annuity."

He lifted his head and looked at her with something in his eyes that she had rarely seen in all their lives, a look of terrible suffering, and said almost brokenly, "It ain't the money, Maw. It's—it's—why, it's just like seein' one's best friend buried out of sight! It's a funeral! It's—it's—" and did not finish; for, seeing the tears in her eyes, he got to his feet and put his arms around her, and held and patted her as she cried against his breast.

"Sure, Girl, we've got the annuity, and I reckon I can build another store. Of course it won't be like the old one, so homelike and all; but we'll build another one. Now let's get breakfast. No use cryin' over spilt milk!"

It seemed as if the loss of the store had for a few days crippled his spirits beyond recovery; for he walked around through the charred ashes, picking up here and there a scrap of crockery, a piece of twisted iron, or a chunk of melted glass, identifying each in turn, telling when it came to his possession, how many decades it had been in stock, how much it had cost, and what he had asked for it. He grieved over each one; but for his account books containing all that was due him throughout his whole life he never murmured. The slate was cleaned, and all accounts settled.

Then, this occupation at an end, and for want of something better to do, he began to fell trees and hew logs for another store building: not with any great hope that there would ever be any business at Caballeros, but because he was lost and lonely without that pretense of being "busy over at the store." Also, deep in his heart, he feared that unless he did build another one there would be an end to those gossipy visits of men scattered sparsely through the hills within a radius of ten or fifteen miles.

News traveled slowly in that fastness; but wherever it reached men laid aside their work and rode across to Caballeros to give encouragement to Honest Joe. Some of them, from their scanty savings, wanted to lend him money for another start, and all volunteered for a "house raising." As Honest Joe frequently declared to his wife, "Beats all how a man has to have some tough luck to know how good friends he has! Seems like everybody in all these mountains had come across and said things—things I didn't think some of 'em would say. I tell you, Maw, it's a mighty good world, after all, ain't it?"

THEN one fine spring day, when there were almost logs enough, a man riding through and bringing the mail from the valley below surprised himself and Honest Joe by bringing a letter in a long envelop. Both Joe and his wife carefully studied the outside, and speculated as to what attorneys could have any business with them, and finally he opened it. It was an announcement that the company in which they had bought the annuity had failed without much assets. Honest Joe tried to pocket the letter, but could not, and then scratched his head with a trembling hand, and wiped his glasses, and stammered, and strove to think of some way of breaking the news to his wife, who stood and studied his face sympathetically. He might as well have tried to pull curtains over bis soul; for she read him as plainly as he had read the letter.

"Joe," she said, coming close to him and staring at his face, "Joe, it's powerful bad news. I know it without you tellin' me. It's somethin' that's happened to our money."

He did not speak, but sank weakly into a chair, with drooping head, and hands swinging helplessly at his sides, and of a sudden his sturdy old shoulders appeared to have shriveled, and rounded, and bent. The letter fell from his fingers, which seemed to have lost the power of holding anything, and Mary Ann picked it up, and rummaged around on one of the many shelves in the room to find her steel-bowed spectacles, adjusted them to her nose, looked over them at her husband, shook her head sadly, and then slowly read. She too seemed to have suddenly aged, and she leaned against the wall for support, and gasped, and almost automatically read the letter again.

Her husband's chair legs scraped harshly on the worn floor as he turned and looked at her. She was still leaning against the wall; but now her eyes were closed, and her lips moved as if in prayer. He was at her side in an instant, and leading her toward the door, all his great quality of protection aroused, all his desire to comfort and shield her surging to his lips.

"Let's go out on the old seat and sit down, Maw," he said scarcely above a whisper, the very heartiness of his voice sounding weakened and lost by this terrific tragedy. "There! There! Don't cry, Girl. It's sort of—sort of tough: but it's got to be faced, and—somehow it's mighty hard for me to understand it—yet. It's as if—as if there were no bedrock left to stand on, as if we'd been cleaned out without knowin' it."

For but a minute he looked absentmindedly at the familiar outside world, as if it had become suddenly strange, or as if he saw floating in the clouds above it a dreary, horrifying presentment of destitute old age, and then slowly gripped himself and turned to his wife.

"It's tough luck," he declared; "but we won't let it worry us, Maw. We'll find a way to get back again. Sho! I reckon we'll live longer for havin' to think and work harder. I've been gettin' lazy these last few years without ever knowin' it. Besides, maybe it won't be as bad as the letter says. There's probably quite a lot left. Things always are a little better than they seem at first."

"It ain't about myself I worry, Joe," Mary Ann asserted. "It's about you. Of course we'll get along all right. My goodness! I clean forgot that mess of pork and beans. They'll most likely burn," and with this excuse she fled into the kitchen lest she should break completely in his presence, and he fled the opposite way and out to the solemn woods lest his face betray his anxieties.

And thus bravely they dissembled throughout the evening, and each heard the other rolling restlessly and sleeplessly in bed throughout the night, and each declared they had slept well when the morning sun stared down to see if they were still there,

THE most singular quality of true courage is that it grows, though it may be compelled to feed upon itself. And thus it was that when the first shock of their min was over both Honest Joe Barnes and his wife merely accepted the past as done with, and began planning for the future, each in individual ways. Mary Ann thought that there must be some place where she could secure employment as a good plain cook, or that if they could get money enough together to go down to the city that had sprung up in the valley fifty miles away, she could open a boarding house. She also thought of chicken farms, garden plots, hospital nursing, and various other unpractical occupations for one whose life had been passed in serene simplicity there in the tops of the hills.

But to old Joe Barnes, daily trudging out into the forests where he could be alone, and think, and talk directly to Heaven in his distress, the fact was sifted out in his own mind that he was too old to begin life again by the ordinary methods of work, that employment was scarce for a man of seventy, and that his sole capital was his reputation for being a "straight, square man" who had done his best all his life. Only the trees, the streams, and the snow-covered peaks in the tops of Sierras witnessed his sufferings, his doubts, his perplexities, and his appeals for guidance; for to his wife or any living man he made no confession of fear. His face look on new lines, his eyes clouded with thought, his old free laugh was silenced, and his steps became almost aimless for a few days—and then his courage mounted supreme for the great battle of his life. He had found his inspiration!

"I've thought it all over, Maw," he announced one evening with a note of tenderness in his voice, "and know that it would kill you to leave here, where we've been happy so long. Why, it would be like runnin' away from one's friends for us to desert this!" and he waved his glowing pipe round in a circle toward the sky line. "So I'm goin' tomorrow to ask Sam Bigg's wife from over the divide to come and live with you for a month or so to keep you company while I'm gone."

He felt her gasp and shudder there in the starlit darkness that surrounded them; but, obeying his resolution, continued:

"Sam told me, last time I saw him, maybe he'd ask us to let her stay here, while he went up to Plumas County to do some assessment work, and— Poor thing! she's not well enough to travel."

He added this last with a sharp peer at Mary Ann, knowing that her compassion always leaped to assist anyone in distress, and in the gloom he smiled to himself when he saw her start, and heard her say, "I ought to go right over there and see her if she's sick. I'll go with you tomorrow, Joe."

IT was a dreadful parting. For more than twenty years they had never been far separated when darkness fell, and for each, now divided by miles, there was a vast loneliness which filled the hours with terror and foreboding.

He went directly to the county seat, and to the new stone building that had grown as if by magic on a spot where once he, as a packer, had been accustomed to camp with his burros. The recorder wondered why old Honest Joe wanted the records of some of the most useless land in the back hills and was apparently pleased to learn that it was still the property of the government and open to location. Also the banker, who had known him for so many years, wondered why he wanted to borrow money, and was amazed when told that he had no security to offer beyond his personal note. A young engineer was visited, a United States commissioner of lands, a county surveyor, and for two or three weeks Old Joe disappeared from the city.

When he returned he wrote a long letter to his wife, and boarded a railway train. He was so plainly ignorant of travel that for the first forty-eight hours he rode in the smoking car, and it was only through the advice of a kindly hearted drummer who sat next him, and noted his weariness, that he dared wander back to a sleeping car. Second class that it was, to Honest Joe it was a place of mysterious luxury.

"Times do change, I'll swear they do!" he muttered to himself luxuriously in his berth, and the next he knew was when the curtains were drawn aside the following morning and he was asked if he wanted to eat. He tried the dining car; but the thoughtless laughed at him, and he thereafter bashfully subsisted from lunch counters where the train stopped, and felt more at home. He had never taken such a trip before. He had not appreciated that it was so far from California to New York. He had vaguely surmised that the latter city must be very crowded and very busy; but when he stood on Manhattan island he was helplessly bewildered and lost. Small boys jeered him. and a policeman, recognizing that he "was skeered, plumb skeered stiff!" turned him over to a messenger boy and directed that he be taken to a small hotel that once existed not far from the quiet reaches of Gramercy Park.

THERE in his room for a day the ancient adventurer trembled and fought his desire to bolt, and fortified his courage by mental lashings, and struggled against that terrible homesickness which made him yearn for his own big hills, trees, and mountain air. He looked down from his window at the crowds in the street. They did not look like the human beings he had known all his life: they were clothed differently, they were in a perpetual rush. Honest Joe wondered if he had not better buy new clothing, and then snorted at himself and spoke aloud:

"You'll buy nothin'! Spend money you borrowed on fancy duds! What's the matter with you? Ashamed to be seen in your old white hat and with your pants tucked in your boots, when Maw's waitin' for you, in her gingham, away off out there—"

His voice broke and he gulped heavily; then, determined, he clapped the old hat with the four dents on his head, walked down the five flights of stairs, and confronted the clerk behind the desk.

"Can you tell me where I'll find Toluse Oakes; that is, Thomas Maples Oakes?" he asked.

The clerk looked somewhat puzzled. It seemed impossible that this "old jay" could mean that he wanted to see the famous financier. "What is he, a banker, corporation man?"

"I reckon that must be him," assented Honest Joe. The clerk consulted a telephone book. "If it's the one you mean," he said, smiling to himself, "there is such a man at No. A Wall street."

At the dubious look on his guest's face he suggested not unkindly, "It's a long walk for a young man, let alone an— Maybe you'd best take a taxi."

"Nope," answered the Westerner. "Walkin'll do. I can't spare the money for any fool rides. Just tell me how to get there, and I'll find it."

In hours, after being jostled, and shoved, and lost, and asking many times for directions, he came to the huge skyscraper in the narrow street, and, somewhat afraid of the elevators, climbed twenty flights of painful stairs, which robbed him of breath at intervals and necessitated rests on landings. He gave a troubled sigh when he saw that nearly all the doors bore the name of his friend, and at last in desperation tried one. He was sent to another, and there found himself confronted by a smart young man who sniffed at him superciliously and asked to know his business. He started quite guilelessly to tell what had brought him there; but the important youth impolitely interrupted him in the midst of a sentence and disappeared through a door while some of those in the waiting room snickered audibly. In but a minute a very busy appearing clerk came out and said curtly:

"Mr. Thomas Oakes is not here; but perhaps you could explain your business to me and save time."

Something in the clerk's impatient attitude warned Honest Joe that to talk would be to find dismissal, and for an instant he was perplexed. "No, young man. you won't do at all," he said. "Nobody'll do but Mr. Oakes. It's him I come to see. He's an old friend of mine, and—"

He was surprised and angry when the young man shrugged and deliberately walked away. He could not know that there were scores of applicants each day, impecunious, who made similar and unfounded pretexts for gaining the great financier's ear. Another clerk came after a time, a most haughty young person, who wanted to know what he was waiting for, asked if he had an appointment, and when told that he had not said he must get one, but did not explain how. Noon name, and for a time Honest Joe had the reception room to himself. Afternoon crept around, and new faces appeared and disappeared. The sun worked westward, and still he sat, until he was the last one waiting, still patient, but very distressed. Office boys grinned at him, clerks passing through the room stared and smiled, and at last the first smart youth he had met got his hat from a wardrobe and said cheerily

"Well, Mister, I'm afraid you'll have to get out. We're done for the day."

"But about seein' Toluse—I mean Mr. Oakes?" protested Honest Joe, palpably disappointed.

"Oh, he's gone hours ago," carelessly replied the youth, slamming a little gate that barred his precinct from the public.

For a moment the queer visitor looked at the floor, and then out at the window, and up at the clock. "All right," he said. "I'll have to come tomorrow. Of course I know that Toluse must be mighty busy; but it don't seem quite like him to keep me waitin' so long without even comin' out to say howdy. I'll come tomorrow, Son."

AND he did, just two hours before the offices were opened: for seven o'clock meant time to open the store out where he lived and considered himself a business man. Patiently he put in another whole day: but night found him annoyed to the point of anger, and obstinate. On the next day he appeared and declared himself.

"Son," he said sharply, "I'm goin' to see Oakes, just to tell him what I think of him, if nothin' else. When I come here I want to see Oakes—do you understand that?"

The boy looked into the old man's face and disappeared. In a few minutes he returned accompanied by the busy young man who once before had ignored him: but now this young man was very polite, and studied the visitor's eyes with much care before saying he would see what could be done about it, and departed. There was another wait, and a man in the uniform of a private officer appeared and asked the visitor curtly what he wanted to see Mr. Oakes for. In spite of his anger Honest Joe saw that this man proposed to give him an impartial hearing. He began to explain that the wanted Mr. Oakes was a friend of his in the old days. The officer looked troubled and cut him short. He too disappeared.

"That old guy out there's no crank!" he snorted contemptuously, as he made his report to the clerk who had summoned him. "You fellers here get scared stiff every time you see somebody who looks different from everybody else. Quickest and easiest way to get rid of that old cuss is to let him see the boss, tell what he's come for, get turned down, and then he'll go peaceable. I don't want to chuck that poor old rube out for nothin' at all."

TEN minutes later the youth that guarded the door appeared. "Mr. Oakes will see you for five minutes. Come this way."

Honest Joe's heart leaped with joy. Surely Toluse would listen to him longer than five minutes could he but reach him! And then he was shocked to a standstill: for he found himself in a luxurious office, staring at a clean-cut, crisp-looking man of about thirty-five, who swung round toward him and said:

"I'm Mr. Oakes. What do you wish?"

It took Honest Joe nearly a minute to recover himself, and then he said, "You're Mr. Oakes? Pshaw! They's some mistake, The man I want to see is a heap older. It's Thomas Maples Oakes I want to talk to."

"That," said the young man impatiently, "is my father. He is in Europe. I attend to everything when he is absent, and most of the time when he is here. If it is anything of a business nature, and he were here, he would probably refer you to me. Now what is it you wish, Mr.—"

"Barnes—Joe Barnes from Caballeros."

The younger man stared at him steadily for an instant, and then smiled a little to himself. "It does seem to me that I have heard my father speak of you. But that's not quite the name. Do they call you—"

"Maybe he said Honest Joe."

The young man smiled more broadly, and with a more kindly air directed his visitor to a seat, into which, distressed beyond measure, disappointed, tired, the old man sunk. All his trip had come to this, that he must tell his plans to strange and probably unsympathetic ears! This younger man in front of him was a development of new times, new ideas, where old friendships carried no weight, and all was measured by dollars. But surely there must be some traits of the old blood here! This must be a son of the father, and moreover he could do nothing else than try to explain his proposals, now that Toluse was far beyond reach. He rallied himself to the effort.

"It's about an irrigation scheme," he said steadily. "I've been watching a canyon out there for along time, and seen the land settle and get valuable, and always thought how easy it'd be to build a reservoir up there in Candle Pass to water maybe a hundred thousand acres of land. I've taken up the place that would do for a reservoir as a homestead, and I've got options for a dollar an acre on a lot of other land we'd need. Also I got an engineer to say how much he thinks the dam could be built for, and, what with spring freshets and the creek, he opines we could make a good thing out of it. I figured out it ought to pay about ten per cent. on all the money it costs.

He paused and rested his keen old eyes on the younger man, whose clipped mustache did not conceal a skeptical smile.

"Well, what do you want of my father?" he demanded, in a bored tone of voice.

"I want him to go in on it—to furnish the money."

The financier calmly adjusted some bronze desk fittings to his satisfaction, glanced at an ornate clock that stood in the corner of his office, and then spoke with averted eyes, as if secretly amused. "Irrigation schemes haven't paid, and haven't been in our line, Mr. Barnes. Besides, my father has retired from active participation in this business for some years. I wouldn't consider it for a moment. My father wouldn't consider it if he were here."

He glanced at Honest Joe, who had settled into his chair momentarily stricken dumb by this curt disposal of his proposition, and was a little irritated by his visitor's air of dogged persistence fighting for another loophole. Steadily the old frontiersman returned to the attack. Time and again his auditor declined to consider the proposal and looked at the clock. At last he spoke irritably, bluntly, harshly:

"Absolutely nothing doing! Besides," he added, wishing to make his refusal distinctly positive, "there is no firm that would think of taking this project up on—well—one man's word. You have practically nothing to offer but—pardon me—practically nothing but your own judgment and reliability." He could not entirely conceal the sneer in his voice, the intolerance for one who came with neither standing, references, nor backing.

SLOWLY the old man's eyes turned full on him with a hurt, puzzled stare, and then cleared to a harsh and angry frown. Even his patience was at an end. "I've waited a long time, a little more'n seventy years," he said sternly, "to have my honesty questioned—and that too by the son of the man who once slept under the same blankets with me! My reliability is somethin' you could have found out by telegraphin' to the West where I come from, out there where—"

He stopped for a moment, reminded by his own words of his great home hunger, of his faithful trust that his old friend would prove his rock of refuge in storm, of the days and nights when they together had shared the trail, and his fierce protest was dissipated in a flood of old memories. The elaborate office, the muffled clangor of streetcars far below, the strange hum and noisy throb of the great maelstrom into which he had wandered unwittingly, were gone, and once more he was back in his young manhood, treading the hills, loving the plain, homely girl that to him would ever be young, working, planning, fighting, side by side with the father of this man who had the power to save, hut withheld even hope in this great emergency when everything, even honorable solvency, was at stake. He spoke almost to himself, indignant, yet sorrowful.

"I've played the game fair, as I saw how. I've owed nothin' I didn't pay. I've made no promises I didn't keep. Other men, all my life, have taken my word. And now in my need for someone to stand behind me, when my back's against the wall, it's the son of Toluse Oakes that turns me away! Somehow, if it had been someone else, it wouldn't have hurt quite so bad. It would have been a leetle easier to go hack home, licked for the first time, and tell Maw that it was someone else that did it."

He got to his feet, a tired, trembling old man, and straightened himself to his gaunt height, and looked down at the embarrassed financier who was watching him.

"I've been a fool!" he said in a thoughtful voice. "I carried all my eggs in one basket because I had faith in a friend, and because I didn't know the ways of men who have so much money in their hands. You've made me see it. But you're not the kind that understands me, nor that I understand. You're not like the men who worked with their hands, as your father did, and as I did, men whose words were worth more than all they had in the bank. I ain't sure that you're to blame for not bein' of and like such men; but, young Mr. Oakes, I'm damned sure I don't want to be like you—though I don't wish your father's son any hard luck!"

Quite dignified and concealing his wounds, he walked to the door, out into the hallway, and down the twenty flight of stairs that led him to the street of the heartless world in which he had been rebuffed.

BEHIND him the financier, product of environment and education, reached for a push button to summon his next visitor—then failed to push it. He wavered in unaccustomed hesitation and incertitude. The room still echoed with that quiet arraignment. It was still filled with a sturdy, patriarchal, trusting figure of honesty that had come across a continent, confident and buoyed by hope through its own rectitude and its ideals of friendship. Without analyzing why, the successful son of a successful father felt suddenly young and weak, abashed and incompetent. Almost impetuously he stepped to the door leading to his private office and said curtly:

"Tell anyone who wants to see me that I shall be busy for sometime," and then, to the amazement of the secretary, added, "I've got a long letter to write to my father, that I think I'll write myself."

CEASELESSLY the maelstrom whirled on, heedless of those caught in its revolutions; ceaselessly the hopes of the hopeful were buffeted, and men rose or fell as chance carried them upward, or threw them downward. More than a month had slipped away across the calendars before Honest Joe dismounted from a friendly wagon where the overgrown trail turned from the main road toward Caballeros Camp, thanked the mountaineer who had given him a "lift," and strode slowly up the familiar way. His eyes roved from tree to tree, some of which he had whimsically named, all of which he had whimsically loved: but from none could he draw consolation. At the very turn where he must step from the cover of the forests out into the open he paused, and fought for words and control. Now or never he must appear cheerful, despite his own defeat! And all he asked was little, the strength to appear courageous and break bad news softly: for clearly, in his own mind, the future was cloud-black and distressed.

He rallied a choking voice to shout a boisterous, loving "Hello!" and twice croaked like a bird of ill omen before he could master it, and swell it to its task. Mary Ann appeared in the shadows of the porch, tremulous, and lifted her hand to her eyes as the sound swept over the clearing, the crumbling heaps of rocks, and the half buried ruins. Bravely he met her and bravely he tried to dissimulate: but it was not until the moon had gained above the eastern peaks and wrought still shadows in the borderland and lacework under the trees, that he sat with her alone, on the worn old seat outside, and confessed the failure of his enterprise.

"I had forgotten," he said softly, "that to those back there in the cities without hearts I am only an unknown old man, trying to make money for his old age, and with nothin' but his own name to work with. I had forgotten that nobody knew me, and none believed. I'd depended too much on their knowin' that I meant to be honest. I had hoped they could tell that I told the truth. So, when I found Toluse was away off beyond reach, and his son wouldn't listen, I tried other men with money. All of them were hard to get to: all of them laughed and—turned me out."

She laid a withered, work-worn hand on his where it rested despondently on his knee, and its gentle pressure encouraged him.

"Well," he said, in a voice scarcely above a murmur, "I've at least tried. In just four days all the options are dead: so the great plan is done. We're a little poorer than we was, because I owe money: but someway, somehow, Maw, we'll find a way out."

He paused, and then in a voice that bordered on despair, but still shouted its fervent belief in the justice of life, "We can't get the worst of it! God don't let them that's done their best, and has bravery to meet all things, get whipped when the game of life is so far gone! There is a way! There must be!"

OUT in the borders of the clearing there was audible to their finely attuned cars, accustomed to the great silences of the hills, an unusual sound. They listened, startled by anything so strange. It was the soft thudding of horses' hoofs, and the crackling of wheels over an occasional twig. Astonished, they got to their feet and stared out into the moonlit night as a mountain wagon drawn by tired horses came into the clearing, crossed it, wound its way past the ghostly ruins of moldering, fallen cabins, and came to a halt in front of where they stood. A very old man crawled stiffly out of the vehicle, and dropped a suitcase with a thump.

"Well, Joe," a decisive, almost petulant voice snarled out, "I'm here! Came as quick as I could, after I got the letter from that fool boy of mine, and now, sure as there's an ounce of fight left in us, you and me'll put her through, Joe, just like we used to! And I ain't so sure, Mary Ann, that after we've won out I ever want to go back there again. This place seems like—well, just like old times! Just like home!"

And all the trees seemed to straighten to the task, and all the world to be young again, and filled with accomplishment and hope. The very breezes of the night rollicked through the pines and shouted that where faith and courage drive, neither age nor misfortune may bar the way!