"When you have been in New York awhile," said Montague, with a smile, "you will realise that there is nothing incompatible in the two."
Lucy was silent, a little staggered at the remark. "I am told,"
Montague added, with a smile, "that even Ryder"s wife won"t keep her money in the Gotham Trust."
Montague had not antic.i.p.ated the effect of this remark. Lucy gave a sudden start. "His wife!" she exclaimed.
"Why, yes," said Montague. "Didn"t you know that he was married?"
"No," said Lucy, in a low voice. "I did not."
There was a long silence. Finally she asked, "Why was not his wife invited to the dinner?"
"They seldom go out together," said Montague.
"Have they separated?" she asked.
"There is a new and fashionable kind of separation," was the answer.
"They live in opposite sides of a large mansion, and meet on formal occasions."
"What sort of a woman is she?" asked Lucy,
"I don"t know anything about her," he replied.
There was a silence again. Finally Montague said, "There is no cause to be sorry for him, you understand."
And Lucy touched his hand lightly with hers.
"That"s all right, Allan," she said. "Don"t worry. I am not apt to make the same mistake twice."
It seemed to Montague that there was nothing to be said after that.
CHAPTER II
Lucy wanted to come down to Montague"s office to talk business with him; but he would not put her to that trouble, and called the next morning at her apartment before he went down town. She showed him all her papers; her father"s will, with a list of his property, and also the accounts of Mr. Holmes, and the rent-roll of her properties in New Orleans. As Montague had antic.i.p.ated, Lucy"s affairs had not been well managed, and he had many matters to look into and many questions to ask. There were a number of mortgages on real estate and buildings, and, on the other hand, some of Lucy"s own properties were mortgaged, a state of affairs which she was not able to explain. There were stocks in several industrial companies, of which Montague knew but little. Last and most important of all, there was a block of five thousand shares in the Northern Mississippi Railroad.
"You know all about that, at any rate," said Lucy. "Have you sold your own holdings yet?"
"No," said Montague. "Father wished me to keep the agreement as long as the others did."
"I am free to sell mine, am I not?" asked Lucy.
"I should certainly advise you to sell it," said Montague. "But I am afraid it will not be easy to find a purchaser."
The Northern Mississippi was a railroad with which Montague had grown up, so to speak; there was never a time in his recollection when the two families had not talked about it. It ran from Atkin to Opala, a distance of about fifty miles, connecting at the latter point with one of the main lines of the State. It was an enterprise which Judge Dupree had planned, as a means of opening up a section of country in the future of which he had faith.
It had been undertaken at a time when distrust of Wall Street was very keen in that neighbourhood; and Judge Dupree had raised a couple of million dollars among his own friends and neighbours, adding another half-million of his own, with a gentlemen"s agreement among all of them that the road would not ask favours of Northern capitalists, and that its stock should never be listed on the Exchanges. The first president had been an uncle of Lucy"s, and the present holder of the office was an old friend of the family"s.
But the sectional pride which had raised the capital could not furnish the traffic. The towns which Judge Dupree had imagined did not materialise, and the little railroad did not keep pace with the progress of the time. For the last decade or so its properties had been depreciating and its earnings falling off, and it had been several years since Montague had drawn any dividends upon the fifty thousand dollars" worth of stock for which his father had paid par value.
He was reminded, as he talked about all this with Lucy, of a project which had been mooted some ten or twelve years ago, to extend the line from Atkin so as to connect with the plant of the Mississippi Steel Company, and give that concern a direct outlet toward the west. The Mississippi Steel Company had one of the half dozen largest plate and rail mills in the country, and the idea of directing even a small portion of its enormous freight was one which had incessantly tantalised the minds of the directors of the Northern Mississippi.
They had gone so far as to conduct a survey, and to make a careful estimate of the cost of the proposed extension. Montague knew about this, because it had chanced that he, together with Lucy"s brother, who was now in California, had spent part of his vacation on a hunting trip, during which they had camped near the surveying party.
The proposed line had to find its way through the Talula swamps, and here was where the uncertainty of the project came in. There were a dozen routes proposed, and Montague remembered how he had sat by the campfire one evening, and got into conversation with one of the younger men of the party, and listened to his grumbling about the blundering of the survey. It was his opinion that the head-surveyor was incompetent, that he was obstinately rejecting the best routes in favour of others which were almost impossible.
Montague had taken this gossip to his father, but he did not know whether his father had ever looked into the matter. He only knew that when the project for the proposed extension had been brought up at a stockholders" meeting, the cost of the work was found so great that it was impossible to raise the money. A proposal to go to the Mississippi Steel Company was voted down, because Mississippi Steel was in the hands of Wall Street men; and neither Judge Dupree nor General Montague had realised at that time the hopelessness of the plight of the little railroad.
All these matters were brought up in the conversation between Lucy and Montague. There was no reason, he a.s.sured her, why they should still hold on to their stock; if, by the proposed extension, or by any other plan, new capitalists could make a success of the company, it would be well to make some combination with them, or, better yet, to sell out entirely. Montague promised that he would take the matter in hand and see what he could do.
His first thought, as he went down town, was of Jim Hegan. "Come and see me sometime," Hegan had said, and Montague had never accepted the invitation. The Northern Mississippi would, of course, be a mere bagatelle to a man like Hegan, but who could tell what new plans he might be able to fit it into? Montague knew by the rumours in the street that the great financier had sold out all his holdings in two or three of his most important ventures.
He went at once to Hegan"s office, in the building of one of the great insurance companies downtown. He made his way through corridors of marble to a gate of ma.s.sively ornamented bronze, behind which stood a huge guardian in uniform, also ma.s.sively ornamented.
Montague generally pa.s.sed for a big man, but this personage made him feel like an office-boy.
"Is Mr. Hegan in?" he asked.
"Do you call by appointment?" was the response.
"Not precisely," said Montague, producing a card. "Will you kindly send this to Mr. Hegan?"
"Do you know Mr. Hegan personally?" the man demanded.
"I do," Montague answered.
The other had made no sign, as far as Montague could make out, but at this moment a dapper young secretary made his appearance from the doors behind the gate. "Would you kindly state the business upon which you wish to see Mr. Hegan?" he said.
"I wish to see Mr. Hegan personally," Montague answered, with just a trifle of asperity, "If you will kindly take in this card, it will be sufficient."
He submitted with what grace he could to a swift inspection at the secretary"s hands, wondering, in the meantime, if his new spring overcoat was sufficiently up-to-date to ent.i.tle him, in the secretary"s judgment, to be a friend of the great man within.
Finally the man disappeared with the card, and half a minute later came back, smiling effusively. He ushered Montague into a huge office with leather-cushioned chairs large enough to hold several people each, and too large for any one person to be comfortable in.
There was a map of the continent upon the wall, across which Jim Hegan"s railroads stretched like scarlet ribbons. There were also heads of bison and reindeer, which Hegan had shot himself.
Montague had to wait only a minute or two, and then he was escorted through a chain of rooms, and came at last to the magnate"s inner sanctum. This was plain, with an elaborate and studied plainness, and Jim Hegan sat in front of a flat mahogany desk which had not a sc.r.a.p of paper anywhere upon it.
He rose as the other came in, stretching out his huge form. "How do you do, Mr. Montague?" he said, and shook hands. Then he sat down in his chair, and settled back until his head rested on the back, and bent his great beetling brows, and gazed at his visitor.
The last time that Montague had met Hegan they had talked about horses, and about old days in Texas; but Montague was wise enough to realise that this had been in the evening. "I have come on a matter of business, Mr. Hegan," he said. "So I will be as brief as possible."
"A course of action which I do my best to pardon," was the smiling reply.
"I want to propose to you to interest yourself in the affairs of the Northern Mississippi Railroad," said the other.
"The Northern Mississippi?" said Hegan, knitting his brows. "I have never heard of it."
"I don"t imagine that many people have," the other answered, and went on to tell the story of the line.