Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 18
MOREOVER, that love affair of Henry's required a great deal of attention. His passion for Billie Boland was fed by every meeting with her that he could contrive and he became exceedingly skilful at such contrivance. For one of these; that new five-thousand-dollar chase-about came, and Miss Boland had to teach him how to drive it. He proved a very dull pupil. He required an enormous amount of instruction each day. It seemed as if he never would learn to drive that car alone. Long before the mysteries of its control had been solved for him, he was calling Miss Boland Billie and she was calling him Henry.
Meanwhile Hornblower had come back to town. His presence gave timid souls the shudders. Despite the general belief that any structure built upon the signature of John Boland was impregnable, the fulminations of the shyster and the mystery of the vault robberies had raised a vague fear in many minds. But if Hornblower became a more and more sinister figure in the community, there was on the other hand the luminous character of Harrington growing taller and taller.
Hitherto a few crumple-winged souls had sensed that young man's fine capacity for sympathy and leadership and looked up to and trusted him. Now all at once everybody seemed to look up to and trust him.
It became the fashion to retain Henry in litigation. After the first disconcerting reverse on Hurricane Island, of which only four persons knew—everything that his hand touched had prospered! Everything.
And his public spirit was recognized. Did a question affecting community interest arise? The people turned to Henry. Did a crisis threaten? They slanted an eye first at Harrington to learn if it were serious, before they lifted it higher to the throne where Old Two Blades reigned supreme.
Henry was tinglingly happy in all this popularity, in all this wide opportunity for public service. He had been transformed from a lackadaisical idler into a person of industry and potency. No career had ever boomed along as his boomed. It was pleasant to be trusted, as for instance, the Boland General Staff trusted him in everything; as the Shell Point Indians trusted him when one day they gave him their signed (or marked) and witnessed petition to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for permission to sell their joint inheritance to John Boland; as Gaylord trusted him when one day—Hornblower again!
For the shyster had become blatant and blustering once more. Egged on by him, represented by him, Adolph Salzberg of the Socialist Local had filed a suit in ejectment against the First National Bank, basing his allegation on that absurd title he had bought at auction for twenty-four dollars; and Gaylord proving either that he had forgiven that smack upon his jaw or that he had come to have the same deep-grounded faith in Henry Harrington that others had, selected him to defend the suit.
The trial was another Hornblower farce. Harrington did not permit it to become anything else. Hornblower based his entire contention upon the boundary calls of the Salisheutte reservation as laid down by the treaty of 1855, which treaty reserved to those Indians, "all lands between Harper's Basin and the Pacific Ocean southward to and including the South Inlet to the said basin." Hornblower's points were:
First, that the survey of the said land boundaries was not made until thirty-five years after the date of the treaty.
Second, that the late John Wilkinson, in making this survey, erred in running it along the shore, not of the south inlet, but of the middle inlet, which had been ever since erroneously called South Inlet, while the real South Inlet had got down on the maps as Squaw River.
Third, that by this mistake—or fraud perhaps—there had been excluded from the just inheritance of the Salisheutte Indians and opened to United States patent—which Boland had secured—all that vast acreage of timber upon which his fortunes rested and upon a portion of the soil of which the town of Edgewater was built.
That was the case.
Henry coolly dynamited it by admitting that Squaw River was indeed the real south inlet to Harper's Basin, but proved by testimony that the Salisheutte Indians had actually never ranged south of the middle inlet and in their own nomenclature always referred to it as South Inlet; that, therefore, when the old treaty said "South Inlet" it meant middle inlet and the survey was properly run and the land patented to Boland was properly so patented.
This was so perfectly obvious, so much a matter of common knowledge, so highly palatable to the public, that it was easy to make a joke of Hornblower's contention and a laughing-stock of him. The fat, pasty-faced, wily-eyed attorney, opposed and confronted by the man who had saved his life, fretted and fumed and blustered. He based the Salzberg title on a deed purporting to be signed by certain purported chiefs of the Salisheuttes as trustces, conveying all right, title and interest, etc., in the said described lands to Julius Hornblower. This deed Julius now ostentatiously offered in evidence, after having a few days previously offered it for record at the courthouse.
Henry held this deed up to ridicule. He read the names of its signers, Chief Left-Hand, Chief Charlie White, Chief Jim McDonald, Chief White Seal, calling each name loudly, demanding that these chiefs be subpenaed and that the subpenas be served; and when the sheriff could not find them Henry had the court bailiff page them loudly in the corridors. When these vociferous bawlings sounded from without, each empty echo a witness to the emptiness of Hornblower's case, the spectators tittered, the jury smiled and venerable Judge Allen with difficulty kept his mask of solemn dignity. The jury found for the defendant without leaving its box.
"We didn't have a chance—not a chance in this court," muttered Hornblower sullenly. "But we'll take it, by God, to where we do have a chance. We'll appeal!"
"Naturally," smiled Henry.
It was this victory in the court which raised the public clamor for Henry to represent the seventy-first assembly district in the legislature to a chorus which could hardly be denied. Yet Henry did deny it—until one morning Billie came into his office—came as the accredited representative of the Women's Club of Socatullo County to ask him to seek the nomination.
Perfectly radiant, Billie was this morning, and never quite so beautiful, Henry thought. He instantly pressed his suit. "Aren't you willing to love me yet, dear?" he pleaded tenderly. "Aren't you?"
But again she put him off, although it was a very gentle putting off indeed.
"Almost ready," she breathed softly, and seemed to sway to him. "Almost—but not quite," and she swayed away from him again.
His comment was a sigh.
But her smile was more luminous, more full of promise than it had ever been. "You great big growing man," she flattered, "you're going to do something so tremendous some day that the last cool chamber of my heart will be warmed for you. I shall take fire and burn up with love for you—perhaps."
Perhaps. There was always that accursed reservation in her every promise. It maddened Henry now as it had maddened him before, and so he dared to think it accursed; but instantly he forgave, because he knew it was an expression of the girl's fundamental honesty. She had gone far—far this morning. His strategy was to be grateful for so much and he led the conversation back to its beginning with: "And so you think I ought to run for the legislature?"
"I am sure it is your duty," she declared thoughtfully, blue eyes appealing.
And so Henry Harrington ran for the legislature from the Seventy-first district. His sole opponent was Adolph Salzberg. Salzberg received 341 votes; Harrington got 4257.
Harrington made a good impression as a legislator at the State Capitol. Wise old heads marked the young man sagely and said that he would be governor one day. They liked him in Washington too—the bureau chiefs, the commissioner, the congressmen and senators with whom it was necessary to get and keep acquainted in connection with his Shell Point negotiations.
Only once in a while did doubts or misgivings arise about himself or the enterprises upon which he engaged himself. One of these came when he argued by brief before the State Supreme Court, Hornblower's appeal in the case of Adolph Salzberg vs. The First National Bank. Somehow as Henry went over this case the second time, he lost his feeling of lightness concerning it. There might be something in this old treaty and ancient map argument, after all, he reflected. But when he took these misgivings frankly to Mr. Boland, that gentleman laughed.
"Don't you be afraid, Henry," declared Old Two Blades stoutly. "There's nothing to it. You won once and you'll win again. The Supreme Court? Say! Who elects them? The people, don't they? Do you think they are going to upset the title to forty thousand people's homes just for some musty old map and a treaty that nobody understood when they wrote it? Good heavens, no!" And the State Supreme Court confirmed John Boland's faith in it.
"So that's over," Henry said with a sigh of relief to Scanlon. "You know I've thought lately there might be a point in that erroneous survey business."
"Did you, Henry? . . . Did you?" asked Scanlon, tones hoarsely tense, yellow eyes aglow.
"Yes," said Henry. "If it ever got up to the United States Supreme Court. If they took the wrong view"
"If they did God, what a crash!" groaned Scanlon. "Why, it would jerk the bottom out from under everything!" He stared at Henry reproachfully, as if he had been traitorous to suggest such a thing.
"Supposing the Court holds, from the record, that Hornblower did prove his case at the trial, but that local feeling was so strong the jury refused to see the facts," persisted Henry, as if fascinated by such a melancholy prospect.
Scanlon shook himself as if cold. "Henry, you're pessimistic this morning!" he accused.
"Maybe so," sighed Henry; "but a gust of gloom Charlie Clayton was blowing at me has got my mind going on a lot of stuff. Funny Cosby never got any trace of that gold, isn't it? Or the disappearing dead man? You know, Scanlon, those things are more than a year old, those two little matters; but I've never let up on 'em for a minute. Not for a minute."
"Haven't, eh?" grunted Scanlon, expressionlessly, and contemplated the young man as from behind a screen. There were people who thought that Scanlon was getting jealous of Henry. Henry did not suspect it.
"They'll never carry that case to Washington," Scanlon announced out of silence.
"Hope not," said Henry, deep in thought—musing now upon the steady up-towering of the Boland fortune. For all this while that Henry was prospering, Boland General was also prospering. Axes resounded in the forest, trees crashed and donkey engines snaked out the logs to where trains and rivers bore them to the mills. All was bustle and all was prosperity. The three towns hummed with it. The enterprises of John Boland budded, blossomed and fruited with seasonal regularity.
Only one thing lagged. That new shingle mill had not been built. But, all at once it turned out to have been a very lucky thing that the Hurricane Island site was not acquired; for, one morning while Mr. Boland was in the East, the Blade head-lined great news. The Edgewater and Eastern Railway was at last to be built. Sixty miles in length, it would make the three towns branch terminals of a transcontinental line.
It would skirt the southern shores of Harper's Basin, leap Squaw River on a bridge and come trundling north to turn finally west along the south shore of South Inlet. But where the road turned west, just after it crossed Cub Creek, was to be another bridge—a bridge that would span the channel to Hurricane Island, for Hurricane Island was to be the freight terminus of the road. Upon it, in that sheltered entrance to the Basin, deep water docks would be established. There the commerce of the ocean would meet the commerce of the continent.
"So that's what becomes of Adam John's island!" reflected Henry laying down the paper; for a railroad is not like a shingle mill. Private ownership is never permitted to block a railroad's progress. Adam John's island would be condemned, appraised and taken—all by due process of law. But—taken!
"Tough on the old fellow," reflected the occupied Henry, and let the subject slide out of mind. Indeed the next time he thought of it was when Adam John stood before him, his wry face more twisted than usual, his dark eyes filled with pain and wonder. In one hand he held the summons of the court in the condemnation proceedings; in the other his original patent, bearing its official seal. He glanced bewildered from one to the other. Harrington shook his head. "No use, old fellow," he explained and felt very sorry for Adam John. "This is where one law transcends another."