Part 3

Over in a corner was Mitchell's guest and vast superior, Malden H. Hale, the president of the twelve thousand miles of shining steel which made up the Great South-western Railway System, in which Mitchell's little road nestled like a rabbit in the maw of a python. Mr. Hale was signing some letters dictated yesterday to John, finding them paragraphed and punctuated to his complete satisfaction, with here and there a word better than his own looming up in the context. For a time there was no sound save the scratching of his pen and the fillip of the sheets as he turned them over. Then he chuckled softly, and presently spoke.

"Bob," he said, "that's an odd genius, that stenographer out there."

"Yes," replied Mr. Mitchell absently, without looking up from his work, and then suddenly he stabbed the atmosphere with a significant rising inflection: "Genius?"

"Well, yes," affirmed Mr. Hale. "Genius! He impresses you first as absurdly incompetent, but his workmanship is really superior, and later you get a suggestion of something back of him, something buried that might come out, you know."

"I used to think so," the General Freight Agent replied, with a tone which indicated loss of interest in the subject, but being tardily overtaken in his reading by a sense that he had not quite done justice to the big stenographer, he broke the silence to add: "He is a fine character. He has very high thoughts,"--vacancy was in his eye for a moment,--"so high they're cloudy."

And that was all. Mr. Hale made no further comment. Mr. Mitchell, a just man, was satisfied that he had done justice. Thus in the minds of two arbiters of the destinies of many men, John Hampstead, loyal, laborious, who had served faithfully for seven years, was lifted for a moment until the sun of prospect flashed upon him,--lifted and then dropped. And they did not even know that nature, too, had dropped him,--that he was blind.

But just then a privileged person knocked and entered without waiting for an invitation. The newcomer was Doctor Gallagher, the "Company" oculist, his fine, dark eyes aglow with sympathy and importance.

"That boy Hampstead," he began abruptly, "is in bad shape."

"Hampstead!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell antagonistically, as if it were impossible that lumbering mass of bone and muscle could ever be in bad shape.

"Yes," affirmed the physician, with the air of one who announces a sensation, "he's likely to go blind!"

"No!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell, in still more emphatic tones of disbelief, though his blue eyes opened wide and grew round with shock and sympathetic apprehension.

"Yes," explained Doctor Gallagher volubly. "Continual transcription, the sweep of the eye from the notebook page to the machine and back, year in and year out, for so long, has broken down the muscular system of the eye. He had a blind spell last night. He can see all right this morning. But to let him go to work would be criminal. I have him in the Company Hospital for two weeks of absolute rest, and then he will be all right. But the typewriter, never again! You can put him on the outside to solicit freight, or something like that."

A broad grin overspread the features of the General Freight Agent. "You don't know John," he said. "That boy would die of nervousness the first day out. He's afraid of people. Besides," went on Mitchell, "we couldn't get along without him. He knows too much that nobody else knows."

"Well, anyway, never again the typewriter!" commanded the doctor from the door, getting out quickly and hurrying away with the consciousness of duty extremely well performed. He knew that he had exaggerated the extent of John's eye-trouble; but he believed that it was necessary to exaggerate it, both to Hampstead and to Mr. Mitchell.

In his darkened room at the hospital, John was feeling somehow suddenly honored of destiny. People were thinking, talking, caring about him. There was exaltation just in that. But also he was fuming. He wasn't ill. He was simply confined. He could not read. He could not write. He could do nothing but sit in a darkened room according to prescription, and wait. But on the third day Doctor Gallagher said:

"As soon as it is dusk, you may go out for a swift walk. That's to get exercise. Keep off the main streets; keep away from bright lights, do not try to read signs, to recognize people, or in fact to look at anything closely."

John leaped eagerly at this permission, but there was design in his devotion to the new prescription of which the doctor knew nothing. On the fifth day of his confinement, Tayna and Dick, who had been coming every afternoon to sit for an hour in the semi-darkness with their uncle, surprised the interned one doing odd contortions in the depths of his room: twisting his wrists; standing on one foot like a stork and twirling his great heel and toe from the knee in some eccentric imitation of a ballet dancer; then creeping to and fro across the room in a silly series of bowings and scrapings and salutings that threw Dick into irrepressible laughter. Caught shamefacedly in the very midst of these absurdities, John confessed to the two of them what he would at the moment have confessed to no other living being--last of all to Bessie.

"I am taking lessons," he said, "from an actor. He is going to make me easy and graceful, so people won't call me awkward any more--nor homely," and he looked significantly at Tayna.

"Oh," the children both gasped respectfully, and repeated with a kind of awe in their voices: "From an actor!"

"Yes. Every evening the doctor lets me go for a walk. On every other one of these walks I go to the actor's hotel, and he teaches me."

"Awh! An actor-r-r!" breathed Dick again, his features depicting profoundness both of impression and speculation.

"Say!" he proposed presently. "I would rather you would be an actor than a president, anyway."

John laughed. "I am not going to be an actor," he said, "I am only going to be polished till I shine like a human diamond." And then he devoted himself to the entertainment of his callers.

"Remember! Never again the typewriter!" the physician adjured sternly, when the fortnight of John's captivity was done. For although conveying this verdict immediately to Mitchell, the doctor had postponed its announcement to his patient till his discharge from the hospital. John was stunned. The typewriter was his bread. At first he rebelled, but with a rush like the swirl of waters over his head, the memory of that night when he was blind for an hour came to him and humbled him.

With the trembling courage of a coward, he opened the door of room 513; saw with sickening heart the strange face at his desk, shook the flabby hand of Heitmuller, and inwardly braced himself to enter for the last time between the double doors, where presently he confessed his plight as if it had been a crime.

"You don't imagine we would let you go, do you?" Mr. Mitchell asked, while an expression of amazement grew upon his face till it became a laugh. "Why, Jack"--Mr. Mitchell had never called him Jack before--"we should have to pay you a salary just to stick around and keep the rest of us straight."

The stenographer gulped. It was not the first note of praise he had ever received from this kindly railroad man, but it was the first time Mr. Mitchell or any one else in that whole office had ever acknowledged to John that he was valuable for what he knew as well as for what he beat out of his finger-tips.

"You are going to be my private secretary," explained Mr. Mitchell, still chuckling at the simplicity of John. "I have few letters to write, and you know enough to do most of them without dictation. You keep me reminded of things; handle my telephone calls and appointments. Gallagher says your eyes will probably give you no trouble whatever under these conditions. The salary will be fifteen dollars more a month."

The big awkward man was too confusedly grateful and overwhelmed even to attempt to murmur his thanks. Instead, he did a thing of unheard-of boldness. He reached over and touched the General Freight Agent on the arm,--just stabbed him in the upper, fleshy part of the arm with a thrust of his stiff fingers, accompanying the act with a monosyllabic croak. It was a clumsy touch, and it was presuming; but to a man of understanding, it was eloquent.

After one month in this new position, John found himself seeing the transportation business through new glasses. He had passed from details to principles, and the change stimulated his mind enormously.

One of his new duties now was to sit at the General Freight Agent's elbow in conferences, and later to make summaries of the arguments pro and con. In transcribing Mr. Mitchell's part of these talks, it interested John to elaborate a little. Soon he ventured to make the General Freight Agent's points stronger when he felt it could be done, and then waited, after laying the transcript on the big man's desk, for some word of reproof. Reproof did not come, and yet John thought the changes must be noticed.

But one day H. B. Anderson, Assistant General Freight Agent of the San Francisco and El Paso, a rival line, was in the office.

"Mitchell," Anderson began, "I am compelled to admit your argument reads a blamed sight stronger than it sounded to me the other day."

At this the General Freight Agent laughed complacently.

"The point about the demurrage especially," went on Anderson. "I didn't remember that somehow."

"Um," said the General Freight Agent in a puzzled way and picked up the transcript of the argument. As he scanned it, his face grew more puzzled; then light broke. "Yes," he replied emphatically, "that's the strongest point, in my judgment."

"Well," confessed Anderson, "it knocks me out. I am now agreeable to your construction."

The private secretary listened from his little cubby-hole with mingled exultation and apprehension. When the visitor had gone, the General Freight Agent walked in and tossed the transcript upon the secretary's table. John looked up timidly. The Mitchell brow was ridged and thoughtful.

"Hampstead," he declared with an air of grave reluctance, "I guess I'll have to lose you, after all."

"What, sir," gasped John, guilty terror shaking him somewhere inside.

At the change in John's face, Mitchell threw back his head and laughed; one of those huge, hearty, bellowing laughs at his own humor, from which he extracted so much enjoyment.

"Yes," he specified, "I am going to put you in the rate department. You have the making of a great railroad man in you. What you need now is the fundamentals. That's where you get 'em. Your brains are coming out, John. I always thought you had 'em,--but it certainly took you a long time to get any of them into the show window."

"It was seven years before you let me get to the window at all," suggested John, meaning to be a little bit vengeful.

"Nobody's fault but yours, my boy," said the G.F.A. brusquely, over his shoulder. "By the way," he remarked, turning back again, "you aren't afraid of people any more, either."

John flushed with pleasure. This was really the most desirable compliment Mitchell could bestow.

"I think I am getting a little more confidence in myself," the big man confessed, glowing modestly.

This was what three months of Kenton and "old Delsarte", as the actor called the great French apostle of intelligible anatomy, had done for John.

But Kenton and "old Delsarte" were doing something else to John that was vastly more serious, but of which Robert Mitchell received no hint until nearly a year later, when the knowledge came to him suddenly with a shock that jarred and almost disconcerted him. It was somewhere about noon of a day in February, and he had just touched the button for John Hampstead, rate clerk. Instead of John, Heitmuller answered the summons, laughing softly.

Now in the rate department John had made an amazing success. In six months gray-headed clerks were seeking his opinions earnestly. At the present moment he was in charge of all rates west of Ogden, Albuquerque, and El Paso, and half the department took orders from him.

"John's away at rehearsal," explained Heitmuller, still chuckling.

"At rehearsal?"

"Yes,--he's going to play Ursus, the giant, in _Quo Vadis_, with Mowrey's Stock Company at the Burbank next week."

"The hell!" ejaculated the General Freight Agent, while a look of blank astonishment came upon his usually placid features. "When did that bug bite him?"

"I can't tell yet whether it's a bite or only an itch," grinned Heitmuller. "For a while he was reciting at smokers and parties and things, and then I heard he was teaching elocution at home nights. Now he's got a small dramatic company and goes out around giving one-act plays and scenes from Shakespeare. Pretty good, too, they say!"

"Well, I be damned," Mitchell commented, when Heitmuller had finished.

"He's only away from eleven-thirty to one-thirty," explained Heitmuller. "He was so anxious and does so much more work than any two men that I couldn't refuse him."

"Of course not," assented Mitchell.

"Besides," added the chief clerk, "he might have gone, anyway. John's getting a little headstrong, I've noticed, since he's coming out so fast."

"Naturally," observed Mitchell drily, after which he dismissed Heitmuller and appeared to dismiss the subject by turning again to his desk.

*CHAPTER IV*

*ADVENT AND ADVENTURE*

But the General Freight Agent took care that Mrs. Mitchell, Bessie, and himself were in a box at the Burbank on the following Monday night, when the curtain went up on the Mowrey Stock Company's sumptuous production of _Quo Vadis_, which for more than nine days was the talk of the town in the city of angels, oranges, atmosphere, and oil. The Mitchells strained their eyes for a sight of their late-grown protege, but it appeared he was not "on." However, in the midst of a garden scene with Roman lords, ladies, soldiers in armor and slaves decking the view, there appeared a huge barbarian, long of hair and beard, his torso bound round with an immense bearskin, his sandals tied with thongs, his sinewy limbs apparently unclad, savage bands of silver upon his massy, muscled arms, the alpine ruggedness of his countenance and the light of a fanatical devotion that gleamed in his eye contributing in their every detail to make the creature appear the thing the programme proclaimed him, "Ursus, a Christian Slave."

But the programme claimed something more: that this Ursus was John Hampstead.

Mitchell gaped and then rocked uneasily. The thing was unbelievable. If the man would only speak, perhaps some tone of voice--but the man did not speak, not even move. He stood half in the background, far up the center of the stage, while the talk and action of the piece went on beneath his lofty brow, like some mountain towering above a lakelet in which ripples sparkle and fish are leaping. At length, however, stage attention does center on Ursus, when the man enacting St. Peter, struck by the nature-man's appearance of gigantic strength, observes:

"Thou art strong, my son?"

The rugged human statue moved. In a voice that was low at first but broke quickly into reverberating tones which filled the theater to the rafters, the answer came:

"Holy Father! I can break iron like wood!"

As the speech was delivered, the eye of Ursus gleamed, the folded arms unbent, and one mighty muscle flexed the forearm through a short but significant arc, after which the figure resumed its pose of respectful but impressive immobility.

In that single speech and gesture Hampstead had achieved a personal success and keyed the play as plausible, for by it he had come to birth before a theater-full as a character equal to the prodigious feats of strength upon which the action turned.

"Go to the stable, Ursus!" commanded an authoritative voice.

The huge head of the hairy man, with its crown of long, wild locks was inclined humbly, and with an odd, rolling stride suggestive of enormous animal-like strength, he swung deliberately across the scene and out of it.

Robert Mitchell, staring fixedly, suddenly nodded his head with satisfaction. At last, in that careening walk, he had seen something that he recognized. That was the walk of Hampstead; but now Mitchell recalled it was long since he had seen that gait, long since he had heard the office door reverberate from a bang of one of those hip joints, long since the big man had made any conspicuous exhibition of the physical awkwardness that once had been so characteristic. And now? Why now John was an actor. Not Nero yonder, harp in hand, looked more nearly like his part. Hampstead had put on the pose, the voice, the walk, as he had put on the bearskin and the beard.

"Isn't he w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l?" breathed Bessie, with a little squeeze of her father's arm.

Mitchell laughed amiably and reached out for the curling lock upon his brow which was his mainstay in time of mental shipwreck and began to twist it, while he waited impatiently to see more of Ursus.

But the play appeared to have forgotten Ursus. A great party was on in the palace of Caesar. The stage was alive with lights and music, and with the movements of many people--senators in togas, generals in armor, women with jewels in their hair and golden bands upon their white, gracefully swelling arms. There was drinking and laughter and high carousal. In right center, Caesar upon his throne was singing and pretending to strike notes from a harp of pasteboard and gilt, notes which in reality proceeded from the orchestra pit. At lower left upon a couch sat Lygia, the Christian maiden, beautiful beyond imagining and being greatly annoyed by the love-makings of the half-intoxicated Roman soldier, Vinicius, who had laid aside his helmet and his sword, and was pleading with the lovely but embarrassed girl, at first upon his knees, then standing, with one knee upon the couch, while he trailed his fingers luxuriously through the glossy blackness of her hair.

As the love-making proceeded, Lygia's apprehension grew. When Vinicius pressed her tresses to his lips, she shrank from him. When, after another cup of wine and just as the whole court was in raptures over the conclusion of Caesar's song, Vinicius attempted to place his kisses yet more daringly, Lygia started up with a cry of terror. Instantly there sounded from the wings a bellowing roar of rage, and like a flying fury, the wild, hairy figure of Ursus came bounding upon the scene.

Seizing Vinicius by the shoulders, Ursus shook him till all his harness rattled, then hurled him up stage and crashing to the floor. Lygia was swaying dizzily as if about to faint, but with another leap Ursus had gained her side and swung her into his arms, after which he turned and went hurdling across the stage, running in long, springing strides as lightly as a deer, the fair, delicious form of the girl balanced buoyantly on his arms, while her dark hair streamed out and downward over his shoulder--all of this to the complete consternation of the half-drunken Court of Caesar and the vast and tumultuously expressed delight of the audience, which kept the curtain frisking up and down repeatedly over this climactic conclusion of the second act, while the principals posed and bowed and posed again and bowed again, to the audience, to themselves, and to the scenery. Robert Mitchell even supposed that Ursus was bowing to him, so being naturally polite and somewhat beside himself, the General Freight Agent was on the point of bowing back again when Bessie screamed:

"Oh! Oh! He bowed directly at me."

By this time, however, the curtain had recovered from its frenzy and stayed soberly down while the lights came up so the people could read the advertisements on the front. Immediately the tongues of the audience were all a-buzz, and industriously passing up and down the lines of the seats was the information that John Hampstead was a local character. "Oh, yes, indeed,--instructor in public speaking at the Young Men's Christian Association."

In due course, this piece of interesting information reached the Mitchells in their box.

"I knew it all along," gurgled Bessie proudly.

"I begin to be jealous," announced Mrs. Mitchell, broad of face, expansive of heart, aggressive of disposition. "I want all these people to know that Ursus is our rate clerk."

"And I want them to know," said Mr. Mitchell, by way of venting his disapproval, "that he is spoiling a mighty good rate clerk to make a mighty poor actor."

"But," pouted the loyal Bessie, "he is not a poor actor. He's a w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l actor! You are spoiling the plain truth to make a poor epigram. You," and she looked up pertly at her father, "you are just a bunch of sour grapes! You kept my poor Jack's nose on the grindstone so long that he broke out in a new place, and now you are afraid you'll lose him."

"Your poor Jack!" sneered Mrs. Mitchell merrily.

"Yes--mine!" answered Bessie stoutly. "I always told you Jack Hampstead was a great man in disguise. I saw him first--before he saw himself, almost. I'm going to be his friend for always and for always. Oh, look there!"

The curtain had gone up on an odd, out-of-the-way corner of the imperial city. There had been some colloquy over the gate of a small close, participated in by the vibrant voice of an unseen Ursus and the calmer one of a visible St. Peter, after which the gate opened and Ursus entered, bearing the still fainting form of Lygia in his arms; giving, of course, the desired impression that this fair figure of a woman had been nestling on his great bosom ever since the curtain went down some twelve minutes before, an inference that led some of the clerks in the General Freight Office and other persons scattered through the audience, to envy John. This presumption, however, was some distance from the truth. As a matter of fact, Lygia had but recently resumed her position in the arms of Ursus, while two stage hands, lying prone, had plucked open the gate; and various happenings quite unsuspected of the audience had intervened, at least one of which had been a severe shock to the Puritan nature of John Hampstead.

However, there was the dramatic impression already referred to, and it ate its way like acid into the consciousness of at least one person in the playhouse.

Ursus, after looking about him for a moment in the little yard of the Christian's house to make sure he was entirely surrounded by friends, drew his fair burden closer and, as if by a protective instinct, bent over it with a look of tenderness so long and concentrated that his flaxen beard toyed with the white cheek, and his flaxen locks gleamed for a moment amid the raven ones.

"Well," commented Bessie, in a tone that mingled sharp annoyance with that judicially critical note which is the right of all high-school girls in their last year, "I do not see any dramatic necessity for prolonging this. Why doesn't he stick her face under the fountain there for a moment and then lay her on the grass?"

Mercifully, Bessie was not compelled to contain her annoyance too long. Ursus did eventually relinquish his hold upon the lady, and the piece moved on from scene to scene to the final holocaust of Rome.

With the news instinct breaking out above the critical, the dramatic columns of the morning papers gave the major stickful of type to the performance of that histrionic athlete, John Hampstead, forgetting to mention his connection with the Y.M.C.A., but making clear that in daylight he was a highly respected member of the staff of Robert Mitchell, the well-known railroad man.

But to John, the process of conversion from rate clerk to actor had been even more exciting than the demonstration of the fact proved to his friends.