It would be a pleasure to record that
Capital found Bruce’s personality so irresistible
that his need of funds met with instant response, that
the dashing picturesqueness of his appearance and charm
of his unconventional speech and manner was so fascinating
that Capital violated all the rules observed by experienced
investors and handed out its checks with the cheery
“God bless you m’ boy!” which warms
the heart toward Capital in fiction. Such, however,
was not the case.
It took only one interview to disabuse
Bruce’s mind of any faint, sneaking idea he
may have had that he was doing Capital a favor for
which it would duly thank him. The person whom
he honored with his first call strongly conveyed the
impression after he had stated his case that he considered
that he, Bruce, had obtained valuable time under false
pretenses. Certainly the last emotion which he
seemed to entertain for the opportunity given him
was gratitude, and his refusal to be interested amounted
to a curt dismissal.
The second interview, during which
Bruce was cross-examined by a cold-eyed gentleman
with a cool, impersonal voice, was sufficient to make
him realize with tolerable clearness his total unpreparedness.
What engineer of recognized standing had reported
upon the ground? None! To what extent, then,
had the ground been sampled? How many test-pits
had been sunk, and how far to bed-rock? What
was the yardage? Where were his certified assay
sheets, and his engineer’s estimate for hydro-electric
installation? What transportation facilities?
Bruce, still dazed by the onslaught,
had turned and looked at the door which had closed
behind him with a briskness which seemed to say “Good
riddance,” and muttered, thinking of the clerk’s
one sanguine suggestion: “Personality!
I might as well be a hop-toad.”
But in his chagrin he went to extremes
in his contemptuous estimate of himself, for there
was that about him which generally got him a hearing
and a longer one than would have been accorded the
average “promoter” with nothing more tangible
upon which to raise money than his unsupported word.
His Western phraseology and sometimes humorous similes,
his unexpected whimsicalities and a certain naïveté
secretly amused many of those whom he approached,
though they took the best of care not to show it lest
he mistake their interest in himself for interest
in his proposition.
One or two went so far as to pass
him on by giving him the name of a friend, but, mostly,
they listened coldly, critically, and refused with
some faint excuse or none. There was no harder
task that Bruce could have set himself than applying
to such men for financial help for, underneath, he
was still the sensitive boy who had bolted from the
dinner-table in tears and anger to escape his father’s
ridicule, and, furthermore, he was accustomed to the
friendly spirit and manner of the far West.
The chilling stiffness, the skepticism
and suspicion, the curtness which was close to rudeness,
at first bewildered, then hurt and humiliated him,
finally filling him with a resentment which was rapidly
reaching a point where it needed only an uncivil word
or act too much to produce an explosion.
But if he was like that boy of other
days in his quick pride, neither had he lost the tenacity
of purpose which had kept him dragging one sore, bare
foot after the other to get to his mother when the
gulches he had to pass were black and full of ghostly,
fearsome things that the hired man had seen when staying
out late o’ nights. This trait now kept
him trudging grimly from one office to another, offering
himself a target for rebuffs that to him had the sting
of insults.
He had come to know so well what to
expect that he shrank painfully from each interview.
It required a strong effort of will to turn in at the
given number and ask for the man he had come to see,
and when he saw him it required all his courage to
explain the purpose of his call. Bruce understood
fully now how he was handicapped by the lack of data
and the fact that he was utterly unknown, but so long
as there was one glimmer of hope that someone would
believe him, would see the possibilities in his proposition
as he saw them, and investigate for himself Bruce would
not quit. The list of names the clerk had given
him and many others had long since been exhausted.
Looking back it seemed to him that he was a babe in
swaddling clothes when he started out with his telegram
and his addresses, so full of high hopes and the roseate
expectations of inexperience.
Day after day he plodded, his dark
face set in grim lines of purpose, following up clews
leading to possible investors which he obtained here
and there, and always with the one result. What
credentials had he? To what past successes could
he point? None? Ah, good-day.
One morning Bruce opened his eyes
and the conviction that he had failed leaped into
his mind as though it had been waiting like a cat at
a mouse hole to pounce upon him the instant of his
return to consciousness.
“You have failed! You have
got to give up! You are done!” The words
pounding into his brain affected him like hammer blows
over the heart. He laid motionless, inert, his
face grown sallow upon the pillow, and he thought
that the feelings of a condemned man listening to the
building of his gallows must be something like his
own.
Those who have struggled for something,
tried with all their heart and soul, fought to the
last atom of their strength, and failed, know something
of the sickening heaviness, the dull, aching depression
which takes the vitality and seems actually to slow
up the beating of the heart.
Out in the world, he told himself,
where men won things by their brains, he had failed
like any pitiable weakling; that he had been handicapped
by unpreparedness was no palliation of the crime of
failure. Ignorance was no excuse. In humiliation
and chagrin he attributed the mistakes of inexperience
to lack of intelligence. His mother had over-estimated
him, he had over-estimated himself. It was presumption
to have supposed he was fitted for anything but manual
labor. Sprudell had been right, he thought bitterly,
when he had sneered that muscle was his only asset.
He could see himself loading his belongings
into Slim’s old boat, his blankets and the tattered
soogan and bobbing through the rapids with the blackened
coffee-pot, the frying pan, and lard cans jingling
in the bottom, while Sprudell, with his hateful, womanish
smile, watched his ignominious departure. Bruce
drew his sleeve across his damp forehead. If
there was any one thing which could goad him to further
action it was this picture.
He arose and dressed slowly.
Bruce had known fatigue, the weakness of hunger, but
never anything like the leaden, heavy-footed depression
which comes from intense despondency and hopelessness.
As his finances had gone down he had
gone up, until he was now located permanently on the
top floor of the hotel where the hall carpets and
furniture were given their final try-out before going
into the discards. The only thing which stopped
him from going further was the roof. He had no
means of judging what the original colors in his rug
had been save by an inch or two close to the wall,
and every brass handle on the drawers of his dresser
came out at the touch. The lone faucet of cold
water dripped constantly and he had to stand on a
chair each time he raised the split green shade.
When he wiped his face he fell through the hole in
the towel; he could never get over a feeling of surprise
at meeting his hands in the middle, and the patched
sheets on his bed looked like city plots laid out
in squares.
He loathed the shabbiness of it, and
the suggestion of germs, decay, down-at-the-heel poverty
added to his depression. He never had any such
feelings about his rough bunk filled with cedar boughs
and his pine table as he had about this iron bed,
with its scratched enamel and tin knobs, which deceived
nobody into thinking them brass, or the wobbly dresser
that he swore at heartily each time he turned back
a fingernail trying to claw a drawer open.
Bruce had vowed that so long as a
stone remained unturned he would stay and turn it,
but-he had run out of stones. Three
untried addresses were left in his note-book and he
looked at them as he ate his frugal breakfast speculating
as to which was nearest.
“If I’d eaten as much
beef as I have crow since I came to this man’s
town,” he meditated as he dragged his unwilling
feet up the street, “I’d be a ‘shipper’
in prime A1 condition. I’ve a notion I haven’t
put on much weight since it became the chief article
of my diet. If thirty days of quail will stall
a man what will six weeks of crow do to him? I
doubt if I will ever entirely get my self-respect
back unless,” he added with the glimmer of a
smile, “I go around and lick some of them before
I leave.”
“I suppose,” his thoughts
ran on, “that it’s a part of the scheme
of life that a person must eat his share of crow before
he gets in a position to make some one else eat it,
but dog-gone!” with a wry face, “I’ve
sure swallowed a double portion.” Then he
fell to wondering if-he consulted his note-book-J.
Winfield Harrah had specialized at all upon his method
of serving up this game-bird which knows no closed
season?
As he sat in Harrah’s outer
office on a high-backed settee of teak-wood ornate
with dragons and Chinese devils, with his feet on a
rug which would have gone a long way toward installing
a power-plant, looking at pictures of Jake Kilrain
in pugilistic garb and pose, the racing yacht Shamrock
under full sail, and Heatherbloom taking a record smashing
jump, the spider-legged office boy came from inside
endeavoring to hide some pleasurable excitement under
a semblance of dignity and office reticence.
“Mr. Harrah has been detained
and won’t be here for perhaps an hour.”
“I’ll wait,” Bruce replied laconically.
The office boy lingered. He fancied
Bruce because of his size and his hat and a resemblance
that he thought he saw between him and his favorite
western hero of the movies; besides, he was bursting
with a proud secret. He hunched his shoulders
and looked cautiously behind toward the inner offices.
Between his palms he whispered:
“He’s been arrested.”
It delighted him that Bruce’s eyes widened.
“Third time in a month-speedin’
in Jersey-his new machine is 80 horse-power !
A farmer put tacks in the road and tried to kill him
wit’ a pitchfork. Say! my boss et
him. I bet he’ll get fined the limit.”
His red necktie swelled palpably and he swaggered proudly.
“Pooh! he don’t care. My boss, he-
“Willie!”
“Yes ma’am.”
The stenographer’s call interrupted further confidences
from Willie and he scuttled away, leaving Bruce with
the impression that the boy’s admiration for
his boss was not unmixed with apprehension.
The hour had gone when the door opened
and a huge, fiery-bearded, dynamic sort of person
went swinging past Bruce without a glance and on to
the inner offices. The office boy’s husky
“That’s him!” was not needed to
tell him that J. Winfield Harrah had arrived.
The air suddenly seemed charged electrically.
The stenographer speeded up and dapper young clerks
and accountants bent to their work with a zeal and
assiduity which merited immediate promotion, while
“Willie,” Bruce noticed, came from a brief
session in the private office with the dazed look
of one who has just been through an experience.
When Bruce’s turn came Harrah
sat at his desk like an expectant ogre; there was
that in his attitude which seemed to say: “Enter;
I eat promoters.” His eyes measured Bruce
from head to foot in a glance of appraisement, and
Bruce on his part subjected Harrah to the same swift
scrutiny.
Without at all being able to explain
it Bruce felt instantly at his ease, he experienced
a kind of relief as does a stranger in a strange land
when he discovers someone who speaks his tongue.
Harrah appeared about Bruce’s
age, perhaps a year or two older, and he was as tall,
though lacking Bruce’s thickness and breadth
of shoulder. His arms were long as a gorilla’s
and he had huge white fists with freckles on the back
that looked like ginger-snaps. Fiery red eyebrows
as stiff as two toothbrushes bristled above a pair
of vivid blue eyes, while his short beard resembled
nothing so much as a neatly trimmed whisk broom, flaming
in color. His skin was florid and his hair, which
was of a darker shade than his beard, was brushed straight
back from a high, white forehead. A tuft of hair
stood up on his crown like the crest on a game-cock.
Everything about him indicated volcanic temperament,
virility, and impulsiveness which amounted to eccentricity.
Harrah represented to Bruce practically
his last chance, but there was nothing in Harrah’s
veiled, non-committal eyes as he motioned Bruce to
a chair and inquired brusquely: “Well-what
kind of a wild-cat have you got?” which
would have led an observer to wager any large amount
that his last chance was a good one.
Bruce’s eyes opened and he stared
for the fraction of a second at the rudeness of the
question, then they flashed as he answered shortly.
“I’m not peddling wild-cats,
or selling mining stock to widows and orphans-if
you happen to be either.”
Capital is not accustomed to tart
answers to its humor caustic, from persons in need
of financial assistance for their enterprises.
Harrah raised his toothbrush eyebrows and once more
he favored Bruce with a sweeping glance of interest,
which Bruce, in his sensitive pride, resented.
“Who sent you?” Harrah demanded roughly.
“Never mind who sent me,”
Bruce answered in the same tone, reaching for his
hat which he had laid on the floor beside him, “but
he had his dog-gone nerve directing me to an ill-mannered
four-flusher like you.”
The color flamed to Harrah’s
cheek bones and over his high, white forehead.
“You’ve got a curious
way of trying to raise money,” he observed.
“I suppose,” dryly, “that’s
what you’re here for?”
“You suppose right,” Bruce
answered hotly as he stood up, “but I’m
no damn pauper. And get it out of your head,”
he went on as the accumulated wrath of weeks swept
over him, “that you’re talking to the office
boy. I’ve found somebody at last that’s
big enough to stand up to and tell ’em to go
to hell! Sabe? You needn’t touch my
proposition, you needn’t even listen to it,
but, hear me, you talk civil!”
As Harrah arose Bruce took a step
closer and looked at him squarely.
A lurking imp sprang to life in Harrah’s
vivid eyes, a dare-devil look which found its counterpart
in Bruce’s own.
“I believe you think you’re a better man
than I am.”
“I can lick you any jump in the road,”
Bruce answered promptly.
Harrah looked at him speculatively,
without resentment, then his lips parted in a grin
which showed two sharp, white, prominent front teeth.
“On the square,” eagerly, “do you
think you can down me?”
“I know it,” curtly-“any
old time or place. Now, if it suits you.”
To Bruce’s amazement Harrah took his hand and
shook it joyfully.
“I wouldn’t be surprised
if you could! You look as hard as nails.
Do you box or wrestle?”
Bruce wondered if he was crazy.
He answered shortly: “Some.”
“Bully!” excitedly.
“The best luck ever! We’ll have a
try-out in private and if you’re the moose I
think you are you can break him in two!”
“Break who in two?”
“The Spanish Bull-dog!
Eureka!” he chuckled gleefully. “I’ll
back you to the limit!”
“What’s the matter with you?” Bruce
demanded. “Are you loco?”
“Close to it!” the eccentric
capitalist cried gaily,-“with joy!
He bested me proper the other night at the Athletic
Club-he dusted the mat with me-and
I want to play even.” Seeing that Bruce’s
face did not lose its look of mystification he curbed
his exuberance: “You see I’ve got
some little reputation as a wrestler so when Billy
Harper ran across this fellow in Central America he
imported him on purpose to reduce the swelling in
my head, he said, and he did it, for while the chap
hasn’t much science he’s so powerful I
couldn’t hold him. But you, by George!
wait till I spring you on him!”
“Say,” Bruce answered
resentfully, “I came East to raise money for
a hydro-electric power plant, not to go into the ring.
It looks as if you’re taking a good deal for
granted.”
“That’s all right,”
Harrah answered easily. “How much do you
want? What you got? Where is it?”
Bruce told him briefly.
Harrah heard him through attentively
and when he was done Harrah said candidly:
“Perhaps you’ve been told
before that without a qualified engineer’s report
it isn’t much of a business proposition to appeal
to a business man.”
“Once or twice,” Bruce answered dryly.
“Nevertheless,” Harrah
continued, “I’m willing to take a chance
on you-not on the proposition as you’ve
put it up to me but on you personally, because I like
you. I’ll head your inscription list with
$5000 and introduce you to some men that will probably
take a ‘flyer’ on my say-so. If you’re
still short of what you think you’ll need I’ll
make up the remainder, all providing”-with
a quick grin-“that you go in and
wallop that Greaser!”
Bruce’s expression was a mixture of many.
Finally he replied slowly:
“Well, it isn’t just the
way I’d figured out to interest Capital and I
reckon the method is unique in mine promotion, but
as I’m at the end of my rope and have no choice,
one more meal of ‘crow’ won’t kill
me.” He went on with a tinge of bitterness,
thinking of Sprudell: “Since muscle is
my only asset I’ll have to realize on it.”
Then his dark face lighted with one of the slow, whimsical
smiles that transformed it-“Unchain
the ‘Spanish Bull-dog,’ feller!”
Harrah rang for the office boy and reached for his
hat.
“William,” he said sternly
when the quaking youth stood before him, “tell
those people outside not to wait. I’m called
away on business-urgent, important business
and I can’t say when I’ll be back.”