It was warmer outside than in, but Porter pretended that it was pleasanter out of doors, and insisted that there was always a breeze on the hill at night. He ran on in drawling monologue about the weather conditions, and how much cooler it was in Clarkson than at the summer places which people foolishly sought at the expense of home comforts. He made his shy boy report his experiences of the day. In addressing the lad he fell into his quizzical manner, but the boy understood it and yielded to it with the same submission that his father"s customers adopted when they sought a loan and knew that Porter must prod them with immaterial questions, and irritate them with petty ironies, before he finally scribbled his initials in the corner of their notes and pa.s.sed them over to the discount clerk.
Raridan appeared at the step presently. They all rose as he came up, and he said to Saxton as he shook hands with him last: "I see you"ve found the way to headquarters. All roads lead up to this Alpine height,--and I fear--I fear--that all roads lead down again," he added, with a doleful sigh, and laughed. He drew out his cigarettes and began making himself greatly at home. He a.s.sured Mr. Porter, with amiable insolence, that his veranda chairs were the most uncomfortable ones he knew, and went to fetch himself a better seat from the hall.
"Mr. Raridan likes to be comfortable," said Miss Porter in his absence.
"But he finds pleasure in making others comfortable, too," Saxton ventured.
"Oh, he"s the very kindest of men," Miss Porter affirmed.
"What a nuisance you are, Warry," said Porter, as the young man fussed about to find a place for his chair. "We were all very easy here till you came. Even the breeze has died out."
"Father insists that there has been a breeze," said Miss Porter. "But it really has gone."
"_Et tu, Brute?_ What we ought to do, Mr. Porter," said Raridan, who had at last settled himself, "is to organize a company to supply breezes.
"The Clarkson Breeze Company, Limited." I can see the name on the factory now, in my mind"s eye. We"d get up an ice trust first, then bring in the ice cream people and make vast fortunes out of it, besides becoming benefactors of our kind. The ice and the ice cream would pay for the cold air; our cold air service would bring a clear profit. We"d guarantee a temperature through the summer months of, say, seventy degrees."
"Then," Porter drawled, "the next thing would be to get the doctors in, for a pneumonia branch; and after that the undertakers would demand admission, and then the tombstone people. You"re a bright young man, Warry. I heard you stringing that Englishman at the club the other day about your scheme for piping water from the Atlantic Ocean to irrigate the American desert, and he thought you meant it."
"Then we"ll all suffer," Miss Porter declared, "for he"ll go home and put it in a book, and there"ll be no end of it."
Raridan was in gay spirits. He had come from a call on a young married couple who had just gone to housekeeping. He had met there a notoriously awkward young man, who moved through Clarkson houses leaving ruin in his wake.
"There ought to be some way of insuring against Whitely," said Raridan, musingly. "Perhaps a social casualty company could be formed to protect people from his depredations. You know, Mr. Saxton, they"ve really had to cut him off from refreshments at parties,--he was always spilling salads on the most expensive gowns in town. And these poor young married things, with their wedding loot huddled about them in their little parlors! There is a delightful mathematical nicety in the way he sweeps a tea table with his coat tails. He never leaves enough for a sample.
But this was the worst! You know that polar bear skin that Mamie Shepard got for a wedding present; well, it makes her house look like a menagerie. Whitely was backing out--a thing I"ve begged him never to try--and got mixed up with the head of that monster; kicked all the teeth out, started to fall, gathered in the hat rack, broke the gla.s.s out of it, and before Shepard could head him off, he pulled down the front door shade."
"But Mr. Whitely sings beautifully," urged Miss Porter.
"He"d have to," said Warry, "with those feet."
"You needn"t mind what Raridan says," Mr. Porter remarked. "He"s very unreliable."
"The office of social censor is always an ungrateful one," Raridan returned, dolefully. "But I really don"t know what you"d do without me here."
"I notice that you never give us a chance to try," said Mr. Porter, dryly.
"That is the unkindest cut; and in the shadow of your own house, too."
Saxton got up to go presently and Raridan rose with him, declaring that they had been terribly severe and that he could not be left alone with them.
"I hope you"ll overlook that little slip of mine," said Mr. Porter, as he shook hands with Saxton. "You"d better not tell Raridan about it. It would be terrible ammunition in his hands."
"And we"ll all do better next time," said Miss Porter; "so do come again to show that you don"t treasure it against us."
"I don"t know that anything"s happened," pleaded John, "except that I"ve had a remarkably good time."
"I fear that"s more generous than just; but the next time I hope the maid will do better."
"And next time I hope I shan"t frighten you," Saxton went on. Raridan and Mr. Porter had walked down the long veranda to the steps, and Saxton and Miss Porter were following.
"Oh, but you didn"t!" the girl laughed at him.
"But you dropped the flowers--"
"But you shouldn"t have noticed! It wasn"t gallant!"
They had reached the others, and Raridan broke in with his good night, and he and Saxton went down the walk together.
"They seem to have struck up an acquaintance," observed Mr. Porter, settling himself to a fresh cigar.
"Mr. Saxton is very nice," said Evelyn.
"Oh, he"s all right," said her father, easily.
CHAPTER IV
AT POINDEXTER"S
John Saxton trotted his pony through a broken gate into a great yard that had once been sown in blue gra.s.s, and at the center of which lay the crumbled ruins of a fountain. This was clearly no ordinary establishment, as he had been warned, and he was uncertain how to hail it. However, before he could make his presence known, a frowsy man in corduroy emerged from the great front door and came toward him.
"My name"s Saxton, and you must be Snyder."
"Correct," said the man and they shook hands.
"Going to stay a while?"
"A day or two." John threw down the slicker in which he had wrapped a few articles from his bag at Great River, the nearest railway station.
"I got your letter all right," said Snyder. "Walk in and help yourself."
He led the pony toward the outbuildings, while Saxton filled his pipe and viewed the pile before him with interest. He had been making a careful inspection of all the properties that had fallen to his care.
This had necessitated a good deal of traveling. He had begun in Colorado and worked eastward, going slowly, and getting the best advice obtainable as to the value of his princ.i.p.als" holdings. Much of their property was practically worthless. t.i.tle had been gained under foreclosure to vast areas which had no value. A waterworks plant stood in the prairie where there had once been a Kansas town. The place was depopulated and the smokestack stood as a monument to blighted hopes.
Ranch houses were inhabited by squatters, who had not been on his books at all, and who paid no tribute to Boston. He was viewed with suspicion by these tenants, and on inquiry at the county seats, he found generally that they were lawless men, and that it would be better for him to let them alone. It was patent that they would not pay rent, and to eject them merely in the maintenance of a principle involved useless expense and violence.
"This certainly beats them all," Saxton muttered aloud.
He had reached in his itinerary what his papers called the Poindexter property. He had found that the place was famous throughout this part of the country for the idiosyncrasies of its sometime owners, three young men who had come out of the East to show how the cattle business should be managed. They had secured an immense acreage and built a stone ranch house whose curious architecture imparted to the Platte Valley a touch of medievalism that was little appreciated by the neighboring cattlemen.
One of the owners, a Philadelphian named Poindexter, who had a weakness for architecture and had studied the subject briefly at his university, contributed the buildings and his two a.s.sociates bought the cattle.
There were one thousand acres of rolling pasture here, much of it lying along the river, and a practical man could hardly have failed to succeed; but theft, disease in the herd and inexperience in buying and selling, had wrought the ranchmen"s destruction. Before their money was exhausted, Poindexter and his a.s.sociates lived in considerable state, and entertained the friends who came to see them according to the best usages of Eastern country life within, and their own mild approximation of Western life without. Tom Poindexter"s preceptor in architecture, an elderly gentleman with a sense of humor, had found a pleasure which he hardly dared to express in the medieval tone of the house and buildings.
"All you need, Tom," he said, "to make the thing complete, is a drawbridge and a moat. The possibilities are great in the light of modern improvements in such things. An electric drawbridge, operated solely by switches and b.u.t.tons, would be worth while." The folly of man seems to express itself naturally in the habitations which he builds for himself; the folly of Tom Poindexter had been of huge dimensions and he had built a fairly permanent monument to it. He and his a.s.sociates began with an ambition to give tone to the cattle business, and if novel ideas could have saved them, they would not have failed. One of their happy notions was to use Poindexter"s coat of arms as a brand, and this was only abandoned when their foreman declared that no calf so elaborately marked could live. They finally devised an insignium consisting of the Greek Omega in a circle of stars.
"There"s a remnant of the Poindexter herd out there somewhere," Wheaton had said to Saxton. "The fellow Snyder, that I put in as a caretaker, ought to have gathered up the loose cattle by this time; that"s what I told him to do when I put him there."
Saxton turned and looked out over the rolling plain. A few rods away lay the river, and where it curved nearest the house stood a group of cottonwoods, like sentinels drawn together for colloquy. Scattered here and there over the plain were straggling herds. On a far crest of the rolling pastures a lonely horseman paused, sharply outlined for a moment against the sky; in another direction, a blur drew his eyes to where a group of the black Polled Angus cattle grazed, giving the one blot of deep color to the plain.