“I can’t bear to look at him.”
“I guess he’s used to that. He don’t seem to expect to be looked at. Well! we’re all just where we started. I wonder how long it will keep up.”
Mrs. Lapham reported to her husband when he came home at night—he had left his business to go and meet her, and then, after a desolate dinner at the house, had returned to the office again—that Penelope was fully as bad as Irene. “And she don’t know how to work it off. Irene keeps doing; but Pen just sits in her room and mopes. She don’t even read. I went up this afternoon to scold her about the state the house was in—you can see that Irene’s away by the perfect mess; but when I saw her through the crack of the door I hadn’t the heart. She sat there with her hands in her lap, just staring. And, my goodness! she jumped so when she saw me; and then she fell back, and began to laugh, and said she, ‘I thought it was my ghost, mother!’ I felt as if I should give way.”
Lapham listened jadedly, and answered far from the point. “I guess I’ve got to start out there pretty soon, Persis.”
“How soon?”
“Well, tomorrow morning.”
Mrs. Lapham sat silent. Then, “All right,” she said. “I’ll get you ready.”
“I shall run up to Lapham for Irene, and then I’ll push on through Canada. I can get there about as quick.”
“Is it anything you can tell me about, Silas?”
“Yes,” said Lapham. “But it’s a long story, and I guess you’ve got your hands pretty full as it is. I’ve been throwing good money after bad—the usual way—and now I’ve got to see if I can save the pieces.”
After a moment Mrs. Lapham asked, “Is it—Rogers?”
“It’s Rogers.”
“I didn’t want you should get in any deeper with him.”
“No. You didn’t want I should press him either; and I had to do one or the other. And so I got in deeper.”
“Silas,” said his wife, “I’m afraid I made you!”
“It’s all right, Persis, as far forth as that goes. I was glad to make it up with him—I jumped at the chance. I guess Rogers saw that he had a soft thing in me, and he’s worked it for all it was worth. But it’ll all come out right in the end.”
Lapham said this as if he did not care to talk any more about it. He added casually, “Pretty near everybody but the fellows that owe me seem to expect me to do a cash business, all of a sudden.”
“Do you mean that you’ve got payments to make, and that people are not paying you?”
Lapham winced a little. “Something like that,” he said, and he lighted a cigar. “But when I tell you it’s all right, I mean it, Persis. I ain’t going to let the grass grow under my feet, though—especially while Rogers digs the ground away from the roots.”
“What are you going to do?”
“If it has to come to that, I’m going to squeeze him.” Lapham’s countenance lighted up with greater joy than had yet visited it since the day they had driven out to Brookline. “Milton K. Rogers is a rascal, if you want to know; or else all the signs fail. But I guess he’ll find he’s got his comeuppance.” Lapham shut his lips so that the short, reddish-grey beard stuck straight out on them.
“What’s he done?”
“What’s he done? Well, now, I’ll tell you what he’s done, Persis, since you think Rogers is such a saint, and that I used him so badly in getting him out of the business. He’s been dabbling in every sort of fool thing you can lay your tongue to—wildcat stocks, patent-rights, land speculations, oil claims—till he’s run through about everything. But he did have a big milling property out on the line of the P.Y. & X.—sawmills and gristmills and lands—and for the last eight years he’s been doing a land-office business with ’em—business that would have made anybody else rich. But you can’t make Milton K. Rogers rich, any more than you can fat a hidebound colt. It ain’t in him. He’d run through Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Tom Scott rolled into one in less than six months, give him a chance, and come out and want to borrow money of you. Well, he won’t borrow any more money of me; and if he thinks I don’t know as much about that milling property as he does he’s mistaken. I’ve taken his mills, but I guess I’ve got the inside track; Bill’s kept me posted; and now I’m going out there to see how I can unload; and I shan’t mind a great deal if Rogers is under the load when it’s off once.”
“I don’t understand you, Silas.”
“Why, it’s just this. The Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad has leased the P.Y. & X. for ninety-nine years—bought it, practically—and it’s going to build car-works right by those mills, and it may want them. And Milton K. Rogers knew it when he turned ’em in on me.”
“Well, if the road wants them, don’t that make the mills valuable? You can get what you ask for them!”
“Can I? The P.Y. & X. is the only road that runs within fifty miles of the mills, and you can’t get a foot of lumber nor a pound of flour to market any other way. As long as he had a little local road like the P.Y. & X. to deal with, Rogers could manage; but when it come to a big through line like the G.L. & P., he couldn’t stand any chance at all. If such a road as that took a fancy to his mills, do you think it would pay what he asked? No, sir! He would take what the road offered, or else the road would tell him to carry his flour and lumber to market himself.”
“And do you suppose he
