Part 3

Bradlee went on: “It will advance the purpose if I mention who you all are. Jack, Mr. Howell is the president of the I. S. I. & O. Z. D.; Judge Carroll, whom I luckily caught in town for the day, is on the Interstate Commerce Commission; and Mr. Fitzhugh is general counsel of four railways in the West and South. If anybody knows what you want to find out, these gentlemen do.”

“Holy mackerel!” said Jack simply, and flushed scarlet having said it, and murmured etiquettically something about “Certainly am mighty grateful.” But the four, at the awe in the tone, at the untrammelled expletive, at something winning and indescribable in the lad’s embarrassment, broke into sudden laughter, and Bradlee, well pleased, knew that the charm which he had felt in the youngster was working. With that he was telling, what most men like to hear, a fish story—the story of the Scarlet Ibis. Plenty of raps for his autocratic ways the boy got as the large m’sieur told the tale, and once or twice the deep-toned young laughter rang out in a shout which made people all over the dining-room turn and stare and smile. Jack did not see that, but the elder men saw, and laughed too, and loved the boy for it, as older men do love youth and unconsciousness and joy of living.

“So you see,” Mr. Bradlee finished, “Izaak Walton Vance slipped up on the fly and the humble scholar guessed right. But the lad gave me the best time I’ve had for twenty years, bar none, and he taught me how to fish—I consider that worth anywhere from ten to forty million. So I’m his debtor to a large amount, and I want you three gentlemen to help me to pay an instalment on my debt. I want you to help the boy win his case in his moot court up at the Harvard Law School. That’s what you’re here for.”

“Speaking for myself, it will be a pleasure if I can help Mr. Vance,” Fitzhugh enunciated with elaborate Southern courtesy. “And speaking for people in general, they certainly are likely to do what Billion Bradlee asks.”

The lad swung about and flashed a startled look at his host. “Are you—” he began and stopped.

Bradlee frowned slightly. “You’ve heard my nickname, I see,” he said. “You didn’t place me before?”

“Place you—well, I just didn’t, sir,” Jack smiled broadly. “You know, I thought you were so darned extravagant about that Leonard rod.” And Bradlee smiled too, pleased with the comrade-like confidence. He laid a fatherly hand on Jack’s arm.

“State the situation now, Izaak Walton,” he commanded.

So Jack, stammering a bit at first, forgetting himself soon, and, launching out into a perfectly regardless wealth of law language which flowed quaintly from his young mouth, set forth his case. There was a small railroad, it appeared, running twelve miles, from Skaneateles to Skaneateles Junction, wholly within the State. At Skaneateles Junction the road joins the New York Central. A train was made up at Skaneateles, consisting of engine, tender, caboose, four local freight cars, and one freight car billed through to Chicago, via New York Central and Lake Shore. A brakeman on this train was injured between Skaneateles and Skaneateles Junction by the negligence of the railroad company, but also because of his own negligence.

“You see,” finished Jack, addressing the great railway magnates and the interstate commerce commissioner as man to man, “the question to be settled is whether that small road is engaged in interstate commerce, so that the brakeman may recover in an action against it in spite of his contributory negligence.”

Billion Bradlee, whose nod shook Wall Street; Judge Carroll, who, with his associates, decided every day vast questions of national commerce; and the two powerful railway men listened with careful attention. The four pair of keen eyes were fixed on the boy’s face. The boy went on. His whole personality was focussed now on his argument, and, though in the vague margin of consciousness there might have been a knowledge of the incongruity between such an audience and a case in a law-school moot court, yet the glow of his intense interest in his affair reduced such thoughts to a dim fringe. The boy went on, unembarrassed, throwing his free power into his statement.

“You see, sir—you see, Judge Carroll, the act of 1898 speaks of ‘common carriers by railroads, while engaged in commerce between any of the States,’ being liable to any employee for injuries while ‘employed by such carrier in such commerce.’ The fact of contributory negligence does not bar a recovery in such actions.”

Conway Fitzhugh, who handled railroads in three States, spoke consideringly. “It’s an interesting question. I believe it has never been decided,” he said, and the president of the I. S. I. & O. Z. D. followed him up quickly.

“Possibly there has been no final test case. But if such a position as Mr. Vance sets forth is maintained—if the brakeman could recover—then there is no such thing as the domestic trade of a State. Congress may take the entire control of the commerce of the country.”

Bradlee, leaning back in his chair, laid down his knife and fork, and the perfectly cooked bird on his plate was left untasted. His keen blue glance swept across the table to Jack’s face. Jack, bright-eyed, flushed, slashed off a manful bit of partridge and stowed it away before he answered.

“There’s that view of it, sir, of course,” he answered the mighty Howell respectfully but firmly—and Bradlee chuckled. He remembered a fishing lesson up a little lost river and the odd sensation of being talked to as a novice. He wondered how Howell would take these fearless tactics. The lad went on: “But there’s a good deal of authority on the other side. ‘The Constitution gives Congress plenary power to regulate interstate commerce,’ you see—doesn’t it, Judge Carroll? I think that’s a quotation from one of your opinions, sir. And you may use the analogy of the Safety Appliance act—under that it has been held that a railroad wholly within a State, not even touching the boundary line, may be engaged in interstate traffic. Then there was an example—let’s see—what was that?—it was a perfect peach,” mused Jack, and the four dignitaries waited, regarding him seriously. “Oh, yes—I know,” he flashed at them joyfully. “You’ll remember this, of course, Judge Carroll. The Senate was monkeying with the question—I mean to say, the question arose in the Senate. Senator Bacon supposed a case—he said, take a purely local train from Richmond to Alexandria. Clearly that train would not be engaged in interstate commerce. A trainman injured must sue under the Virginia law. Now suppose a man at Orange Court House puts on a box of cigars consigned to Baltimore—does that immediately change the character of the train? After that may a trainman injured sue under the United States act? Senator Dolliver seemed to believe he could.”

With that there was a battle of the gods. Even Bradlee dropped his spectator’s attitude and descended into the arena, for the point was one which held a vital interest for each of the four, and the lad had opened the ball with a dance of distinguished authorities. Moreover, he had the literature of the question at his fingers’ ends, and his shining spear, bright and new, flashed back and forth in the thick of the fray so readily, so accurately, that no thought of difference in age entered the minds of the older men any more than it did his own. It was suggestive of certain remarks of Kipling’s calling attention to the fact that

“There is neither East nor West nor border nor breed nor birth When two strong men meet face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.”

So the four captains of industry, men at the very crest of international careers, and the lad not yet at the beginning of his career, bringing only his eager brain and hard-won young knowledge and the tremendous impulse of his enthusiasm, debated together as equals and gave and took pleasure and strength. And the boy soaked in experience and ideas at every delighted pore, till at last the lunch was over, and Jack, due at an engagement, had to leave before the grandees, and stood up to say good-by. In his manly, boyish way he expressed his appreciation of their help, and, as he towered above them all in his young vigor and bright good looks, each one felt, perhaps, that he had unconsciously given as much as he had gotten, and that an impulse of generous new life had swept like a rushing wind into the world-worn minds from his contact.

“I can’t begin to thank you, sir,” he said, his hand in his host’s, and Bradlee’s arm across his shoulder half-caressingly. “I can’t possibly tell you how I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been simply great. I—I’ve never had such a bully time in my life,” he exploded, and the others laughed quiet little laughs of older men, but their eyes were very friendly as they looked at him.

“We shall be interested to hear if you win your case,” the mighty autocrat Howell said. “Bradlee must let us know.”

“Send me a telegram, Jack,” ordered Bradlee.

“I sure will,” promised Jack heartily, “if you’d like it, sir,” and, flushed and radiant and smiling, was gone.

About four o’clock the door in Jim Fletcher’s room up-town—where a club of three law-students held their meetings for study, and where the confrère from Cambridge was expected this afternoon to battle with them over a special question—opened, and three bent heads lifted from a table littered with papers and legal-looking volumes to regard Jack Vance.

“Come in,” Fletcher threw at him. “You’re late. We’re half through. What are you grinning about?”

Jack shut the door inside with an air of reserved electricity which arrested the workers at the table. He came and stood over them and they all stared up at him; there appeared to be something to wait for.

“Gee!” spoke Jack at last. “Guess whom I’ve been lunching with.”

Carl Harrison drew a law-book toward him. “Don’t care,” he stated with disapproval. “Get to work, Jack; we’ve got a tough one on to-day.” But Joe Lewis and Jim were interested.

“What’s up?” Joe asked. “Get it out of your system, Johnny. Who?”

Jack stuck a thumb in each waistcoat pocket and looked “chesty.” “Oh,” he flung at them casually with his lips pursed and his eyes dancing. “Nothing uncommon. I simply lunched at the Lawyers’ Club down-town with four of me pals—Billion Bradlee—W. R. H., you know, the railroad king, and Judge Carroll, of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the president of the I. S. I. & O. Z. D., Mr. Howell, and Conway Fitzhugh, the Southern railway magnate—just us five, that’s all. We had some business to talk over.”

And Jack, grinning consumedly, agitating his fingers from the thumb fulcrums, posing his slim figure as near as might be to resemble a bay-windowed alderman, grinned more and watched the effect.

“Come off,” responded Jim Fletcher.

“Stop your monkey-shines,” said Carl.

But Joe Lewis asked curiously: “What do you mean, Jack? Give us straight dope.”

And with that Jack, chuckling very much, told the tale, to the wonder and amusement and awe of the three lads. And then, with a dizzying shift from boyishness to the stress of the battle of life, the shouts of laughter and light-hearted chaffing stopped short, and the four bent, grave and responsible, over the law-books, and the work of the day went on.

And the days went on and the Harvard Law School and its events went on, varying from mere recitations to trials in the moot courts, till a Thursday came, three weeks after the luncheon at the Lawyers’ Club. There was an important meeting that day in the impressive offices of W. R. H. Bradlee. People had travelled from long distances to that meeting; there was a man there from Texas, and Hugh Arkendale had come from San Francisco on purpose, and Conway Fitzhugh had left his home in New Orleans two days before for it. Bradlee, opening the meeting, was making a short speech setting forth its purpose and importance. He had just begun when a rap came at the door. Every one looked up in astonishment; these men were as unaccustomed to being interrupted in their councils as the gods of Olympus.

“Come,” thundered Bradlee in a terrible voice, and an alarmed clerk slid hurriedly in and held out a telegram.

“Orders”—he murmured—“any message from”—and the name was a gurgle and the clerk bolted.

Billion Bradlee flopped the paper open, and, as if a bar of rollicking sunlight had broken into the dull atmosphere, his face lit up, as he read it, with a smile, a most unfitting smile. His clear, keen blue eyes flashed about the company a second, and then, like a boy, quite unlike a great financier plying his mighty trade, he tossed the yellow scrap to Fitzhugh.

“Good news,” he spoke—he was shaking a bit with inward laughter, it seemed. “Read that, Conway.”

The bald-headed general counsel of four railways put on his glasses, while the rest of the august company watched him and waited curiously. With careful, deliberate enunciation, in a businesslike tone and manner, the general counsel read aloud—a picked company of the most important men in America listening—these somewhat bewildering words:

* * * * *

“Landed my trout Scarlet Ibis top of the heap glory be won every blamed thing sure am grateful to you and high mucky-mucks kindly pass on thanks and accept most. J. C. Vance.”

There was a momentary astonishment on the face of Conway Fitzhugh as he stared over the yellow paper at Bradlee; the varied expressions of surprise on the dozen faces of the other men were a psychological assortment; Fitzhugh suddenly arrived with a jostle of quick laughter.

“Oh—that boy!” he said, and handed the telegram back across the table. “That delightful boy—I’m glad he won his case. Give him my congratulations.”

“A youngster—a friend of mine—and of Fitzhugh’s—” Bradlee explained vaguely to no one in particular, but the smile and the look of clean pleasure were still there, and every one felt at once as if a draught of sweet air had found its way into the room and had refreshed them.

“Now, gentlemen,” said W. R. H. Bradlee, “as I was saying—”

THE CAMPAIGN TROUT

THE CAMPAIGN TROUT

Josef and I were lifting our canoe into Lac Lumière from the Dammed Little River when we saw paddles flash up the lake. The “_garçons_,” Blanc and Zoëtique, the brace of younger guides, had been out to the club for mail; as that happened only once in ten days we hustled.

I ought to mention that the Dammed Little River is not so named entirely for love of blasphemy, but because it is little and is dammed—it was over that dam that we lifted the canoe. I’ll grant you, however, that it may add a tang to the harmless stream to call it by the fierce name, and also it makes you feel pleasantly like a perfect devil to swear that way without sin. Anyhow that’s where we were that September afternoon, Josef and I, just back from a two days’ hunting-trip to Lac Sauvage country. I’d missed a moose, and I knew I was going to get jeered when I got back to camp and told my brother Walter, who never leaves much to reproach himself with when there’s an opening for jeerings. But I might as well face the music; and besides, there was the first mail for ten days a mile ahead between two glints of sunlight coming and going—the paddles. So we hustled, as aforesaid.

But Blanc and Zoëtique paddling the home-stretch are hard to beat, and they had landed minutes before we got there, and were making oration with Walter on the porch. He detached himself with difficulty to greet me.

“Hello, Bob,” he threw at me, and “_Bon jour_, Josef. Glad to see you. Any luck? Wait a moment and I’ll talk to you.”

I sat myself on a bench and stretched my hunting-boots over the landscape and waited per order. It’s good for the soul to hear Walter talk French. He was enthroned in the one store chair, a red rocker, in the middle of the big camp porch, and I’ll tell how he looked, for local color’s sake. He’s a lot older than I to begin with—over forty, while I’m only at Yale—and they made him a judge the minute he cut his teeth—the youngest in the State. He sat there appearing pretty prosperous, with his nice beefy color, and his dark-gray clothes, and his dark-gray hair, for his honors have gone to the outside of his head only. He’s a trifle too embonpointish around the hips, but great men often have a rush of dignity to the waist-line, I notice. The light splashed on his spectacles so that they were all you could see of his eyes, but the glasses seemed full of earnestness, and there was a deep line in the middle of his forehead which comes when he’s most awfully serious. He was this time. I’d have bet on it, when I saw his pipe sitting on his knee like an interrogation-point upside down.

Before him stood Zoëtique and Blanc, dressed in odds and ends; trousers under their armpits, multiple suspenders, slouch hats, a red bandanna, an axe in Zoëtique’s belt, and a caribou-skin knife-sheath with buckskin fringe in Blanc’s. Rummage-sale effects. For all that Zoëtique’s got a figure which any athlete might envy, deep-shouldered, small-waisted, musclely—and Blanc moves like a greyhound, all steel springs and lightness. They stood respectfully in front of the red rocking-chair, and behind them two miles of lake stretched from the camp porch to the everlasting hills. In musical, incorrect French, with the nice polite manner all these _habitants_ have, Zoëtique was getting to the end of a story, as I gathered, about a fish. That made it clear why Walter’s soul-depths were bubbling and he couldn’t pay attention to me. He’s keen for fishing. He’d rather fish than be President—rather than shoot the biggest bull moose on record. He had the package of letters in his hands, the first in ten days; around him were piled rolls of newspapers, and he hadn’t heard a new in all that time—but nothing mattered. Nothing but Zoëtique’s fish-story.

When Zoëtique’s crisp, rippling sort of low voice stopped, Walter leaned forward and got ready with anxious care to talk. To talk French was a necessity, for the men didn’t understand English, and I could see him working his intellect. He usually helps himself to the French dictionary and kicks it, and calls that conversation, but this was different. This was about a fish—it was important to be understood.

“_Si je comprenne_, Zoëtique. _Comme celà. Vous l’avez view sortir à le Remous Doré, yune gros poison—gros grosse—vous disons celà?_”

I yelped a short yelp. The guides canvassed the sentence with perfect gravity. I could see them guessing. “View” they recognized as “_vu_,” I was sure; and “yune poison,” was a fish, “_un poisson_”; these transformations they’d run up against before. But “_sortir_” stumped them a minute. They looked at each other trying to remember if they’d seen a big fish go out—_sortir_. Then Blanc got it—it was “jump”—“_sauter_.”

“But, yes, M’sieur, it is true that one saw a big fish jump—at the Golden Pool—as one passed. A very big one—_b’en gros_—_gros de même_”—and the knotty hands of Blanc measured a hearty three feet.

“Great Scott!” gasped Walter excitedly, taking it all verbatim as he does a fish-story. “Holy Moses! it’s a six-pounder, at least!”

And with that the French language was batted through a game. A Parisian would have sobbed. But Walter got his questions out of his system, and I pulled him from one or two sad holes by the boots. And then the _garçons_ raconté-d over again for me how they had been passing the Golden Pool—the _Remous Doré_—on their way up from the club with the mail and provisions, and had been brought to a dead stop by an enormous splash in the water. Zoëtique specified that it was “_épouvantable_,” and Blanc, with gestures of hands and shoulders, told how he was so scared blue that he spilled into a two-foot hole, and the pack slid off him. Then the trout came up again, and concerning that appearance they gave measurements. They had him half the length of a canoe, and ten pounds heavy, by egging each other on a little, and Walter didn’t doubt a syllable; he didn’t want to.

“_Je vous dites ce que nous faisait_,” he addressed them enthusiastically.

Then he arranged, with further language, that the three, he and Blanc and Zoëtique, should go down to the Golden Pool the next afternoon and collar that fish. Then he let the men loose, and they dissolved into the woods toward their own camp, and Walter glared at me joyfully through his goggles.

“Bob, it’s a sockdologer; it’s the one that nibbled at my fly two weeks ago, and I couldn’t get him on. But it was hot, then, and low water, and lots of flies for the fish to fill up on. Now it’s cold, and they’re gathering in the deep holes, and the flies are frozen out—I’ll get him.”

“Please the pigs, you will,” agreed I. “Sounds like an old he-one, doesn’t it? And Zoëtique never does lie as well as the rest. Give me my letters, won’t you?” and with that he came to.

“Well, Bobby, I haven’t heard about your trip. Did you have a good time? How was the water on _Lac à l’Isles_? Have the beaver raised it? And did you see anything? Get a shot?”

My time was come, so I unbosomed my sorrow, and Walter was decent at first and said we all knew what it was to miss, and likely the sights of my rifle were wrong, as Josef suggested, and shooting from a canoe was hell anyhow, and these Frenchmen couldn’t hold a boat still—and all such things. When you shoot crooked there are just so many excuses from which your friends will choose comfort to offer up to you, and you knew beforehand which. But the feeling left is the same. If you’ve missed, you’ve missed, and nothing alters that fundamental grief and the yearning for blood and one more shot, which remains. And conversely, if you’ve hit you don’t give a button how easy the shot was, or how many times you pumped your gun to do it. There’s a profound peace in the pit of your being that religion is powerless to bestow.

So as Walter ran over the reasons why I couldn’t possibly have hit I appreciated his courtesy, and rejoiced to be let off, but I was sore all the same. Besides, there was a gleam behind the spectacles which gave me a good hunch that I wouldn’t be let off forever. A moose—to miss an old bull moose the size of a barn! I couldn’t forgive myself, whatever Walter said, and even if the rifle was gone queer, which it was. I’ll mention in passing that not long after I killed one bigger than the first, but that’s quite another story. I told about my trip, and began on my letters, and Walter took to the newspapers. I heard him laughing in a few minutes, and I looked at him.

“What’s up?”

He glanced at me over a paper, grinning sheepishly. “They’re talking about me for governor.”

“Hey!” I hurled at him, for I was surprised. “You!” And I got up and kicked before him a little. “You! Hooray! Glory has come upon us. And me associating with you just as free—!” Then I sat down. “Tell me what it says,” said I.

Walter read some paragraphs from different papers, and it sure did appear like a promising young boom.

“Why, look here, Walter,” I gasped. “What’s the likes of you doing in the wilderness? Oughtn’t you to be down there fussing? Why don’t you beat it for the settlements to-morrow—oughtn’t we to go home?”

But Walter frowned evilly. “Go home? Not much. I’m going to take that fish at the Golden Pool to-morrow,” he snapped at me. “Besides, if they need me they’ll let me know. Whatever happens, I mean to get my fish to-morrow.”

Then I addressed him. “That’s too ridiklis,” said I. “An afternoon’s fishing—and us candidates for governor! Why, you make me laugh. I’m in charge of you, my good man—”

“Oh, are you?” he inquired sarcastically.

“I am that. See?” So I punched him about a bit till he yelled for mercy. I can handle him since he got his embonpoint. I’m in training, and he isn’t.