Chapter 9

AGNES DELIVERS BOBBY A NOTE FROM OLD JOHN BURNIT--IN A GRAY ENVELOPE

That night, at the Traders' Club, Bobby was surprised when Mr. Trimmer walked over to his table and dropped his pudgy trunk and his lean limbs into a chair beside him. His yellow countenance was creased with ingratiating wrinkles, and the smile behind his immovable mustache became of perfectly flawless circumference as his muddy black eyes peered at Bobby through thick spectacles. It seemed to Bobby that there was malice in the wrinkles about those eyes, but the address of Mr. Trimmer was most conciliatory.

"I have a fuss to pick with you, young man," he said with clumsy joviality. "You beat me upon the purchase of that Westmarsh property. Very shrewd, indeed, Mr. Burnit; very like your father. I suppose that now, if I wanted to buy it from you, I'd have to pay you a pretty advance." And he rubbed his hands as if to invite the opening of negotiations.

"It is not for sale," said Bobby, stiffening; "but I might consider a proposition to buy your eight acres." He offered this suggestion with reluctance, for he had no mind to enter transactions of any sort with Silas Trimmer. Still, he recalled to himself with a sudden yielding to duty, business is business, and his father would probably have waved all personal considerations aside at such a point.

"Mine _is_ for sale," offered Silas, a trifle too eagerly, Bobby thought.

"How much?" he asked.

"A thousand dollars an acre."

"I won't pay it," declared Bobby.

"Well," replied Mr. Trimmer with a deepening of that circular smile which Bobby now felt sure was maliciously sarcastic, "by the time it is drained it will be worth that to any purchaser."

"Suppose we drain it," suggested Bobby, holding both his temper and his business object remarkably well in hand. "Will you stand your share of the cost?"

"It strikes me as an entirely unnecessary expense at present," said Silas and smiled again.

"Then it won't be drained," snapped Bobby.

Later in the evening he caught Silas laughing at him, his shoulders heaving and every yellow fang protruding. The next morning, keeping earlier hours than ever before in his life, Bobby was waiting outside Jimmy Platt's door when that gentleman started to work.

"The first thing you do," he directed, still with a memory of that aggravating laugh, "I want you to build a cement wall straight across the north end of my Westmarsh property."

Mr. Platt smiled and shook his head.

"Evidently you can not buy that north eight acres, and don't intend to drain it," he commented, stroking sagely the sparse beginning of those slow professional whiskers. "It's your affair, of course, Mr. Burnit, but I am quite sure that spite work in engineering can not be made to pay."

"Nevertheless," insisted Bobby, "we'll build that wall."

The previous afternoon Jimmy Platt had made a scale drawing of the property from city surveys, and now the two went over it carefully, discussing it in various phases for fully an hour, proving estimates of cost and general feasibility. At the conclusion of that time Bobby, well pleased with his own practical manner of looking into things, telephoned to Johnson and asked for Applerod. Mr. Applerod had not yet arrived.

"Very well," said Bobby, "when he comes have him step out and secure suitable offices for us," and this detail despatched he went out with his engineer to make a circuit of the property and study its drainage possibilities.

From profiles that Platt had made they found the swamp at its upper point to be much lower than the level of the river, which ran beyond low hills nearly a mile away; but the river made a detour, including a considerable fall, coming back again to within a scant half-mile of the southern end of the tract, where it was much lower than the marsh. Between marsh and river at the south was an immense hill, too steep and rugged for any practical purpose, and this they scaled.

The west end of the city lay before them crowding close to the river bank, and already its tentacles had crept around and over the hills and on past Westmarsh tract. Young Platt looked from river to swamp, his eyes glowing over the possibilities that lay before them.

"Mr. Burnit," he announced, after a gravity of thought which he strove his best to make take the place of experience, "you ought to be able to buy this hill very cheaply. Just through here we'll construct our drainage channel, and with the excavation fill your marsh. It is one of the neatest opportunities I have ever seen, and I want to congratulate you upon your shrewdness in having picked out such a splendid investment."

This, Bobby felt, was praise from Caesar, and he was correspondingly elated.

He did not return to the study until in the afternoon. He found Johnson livid with abhorrence of Applerod's gaudy metamorphosis. That gentleman wore a black frock-coat, a flowered gray waistcoat, pin-striped light trousers, shining new shoes, sported a gold-headed cane, and on the table was the glistening new silk hat which had reposed upon his snow-white curls. His pink face was beaming as he rose to greet his partner.

"Mr. Burnit," said he, shaking hands with almost trembling gravity and importance, "this day is the apex of my life, and I'm happy to have the son of my old and revered employer as my partner."

"I hope that it may prove fortunate for both of us," replied Bobby, repressing his smile at the acquisition of the "make-up" which Applerod had for years aspired to wear legitimately.

Johnson, humped over the desk that had once been Bobby's father's, snorted and looked up at the stern portrait of old John Burnit; then he drew from the index-file which he had already placed upon the back of that desk a gray-tinted envelope which he handed to Bobby with a silence that was more eloquent than words. It was inscribed:

_To my Son if he is Fool Enough to Take up With Applerod's Swamp Scheme_

Rather impatiently Bobby tore it open, and on the inside he found:

"When shrewd men persist in passing up an apparently cinch proposition, don't even try to find out what's the matter with it. In this six-cylinder age no really good opportunity runs loose for twenty-four hours."

"If the governor had only arranged to leave me his advice beforehand instead of afterward," Bobby complained to Agnes Elliston that evening, "it might have a chance at me."

"The blow has fallen," said Agnes with mock seriousness; "but you must remember that you brought it on yourself. You have complained to _me_ of your father's carefully-laid plans for your course in progressive bankruptcy, and he left in my keeping a letter for you covering that very point."

"_Not_ in a gray envelope, I hope," groaned Bobby.

"_In_ a gray envelope," she replied firmly, going across to her own desk in the library.

"I had feared," said Bobby dismally, "that sooner or later I should find he had left letters for me in your charge as well as in Johnson's, but I had hoped, if that were the case, that at least they would be in pink envelopes."

She brought to him one of the familiar-looking missives, and Bobby, as he took it, looked speculatively at the big fireplace, in which, as it was early fall, comfortable-looking real logs were crackling.

"Don't do it, Bobby," she warned him smiling. "Let's have the fun together," and she sat beside him on the couch, snuggling close.

The envelope was addressed:

_To My Son Upon his Complaining that His Father's Advice Comes too Late!_

He opened it, and together they read:

"No boy will believe green apples hurt him until he gets the stomach-ache. Knowing you to be truly my son, I am sure that if I gave you advice beforehand you would not believe it. This way you will."

Bobby smiled grimly.

"I remember one painful incident of about the time I put on knickerbockers," he mused. "Father told me to keep away from a rat-trap that he had bought. Of course I caught my hand in it three minutes afterward. It hurt and I howled, but he only looked at me coldly until at last I asked him to help. He let the thing squeeze while he asked if a rat-trap hurt. I admitted that it did. Would I believe him next time? I acknowledged that I would, and he opened the trap. That was all there was to it except the raw place on my hand; but that night he came to my room after I had gone to bed, and lay beside me and cuddled me in his arms until I went to sleep."

"Bobby," said Agnes seriously, "not one of these letters but proves his aching love for you."

"I know it," admitted Bobby with again that grim smile. "Which only goes to prove another thing, that I'm in for some of the severest drubbings of my life. I wonder where the clubs are hidden."

He found one of them late that same night at the Idlers'. Clarence Smythe, Silas Trimmer's son-in-law, drifted in toward the wee small hours in an unusual condition of hilarity. He had a Vandyke, had Mr. Smythe, and was one who cherished a mad passion for clothes; also, as an utterly impossible "climber," he was as cordially hated as Bobby was liked at the Idlers', where he had crept in "while the window was open," as Nick Allstyne expressed it. Ordinarily he was most prim and pretty of manner, but to-night he was on vinously familiar terms with all the world, and, crowding himself upon Bobby's quiet whist crowd, slapped Bobby joyously on the shoulder.

"Generous lad, Bobby!" he thickly informed Allstyne and Winthrop and Starlett. "If you chaps have any property you've wanted to unload for half a lifetime, here's the free-handed plunger to buy it."

"How's that?" Bobby wanted to know, guessing instantly at the humiliating truth.

"That Westmarsh swamp belonged to Trimmer," laughed Mr. Smythe, so bubbling with the hugeness of the joke that he could not keep his secret; "and when Thorne, after pumping your puffy man, told my clever father-in-law you wanted it, he promptly bought it from himself in the name of Miles, Eddy and Company and put up the price to three hundred an acre. Besides taking the property off his shoulders you've given him nearly a ten-thousand-dollar advance for it. Fine business!"

"Great!" agreed blunt Jack Starlett. "Almost as good a joke as refusing to pay a poker debt because it isn't legal."

Bobby smiled his thanks for the shot, but inside he was sick. The game they were playing was a parting set-to, for the three others were leaving in the morning for Stanley's hunt, but Bobby was glad when it was over. In the big, lonely house he sat in the study for an hour before he went to bed, looking abstractedly up at the picture of old John Burnit and worrying over this new development. It cut him to the quick, not so much that he had been made a fool of by "clever" real-estate men, had been led, imbecile-like, to pay an extra hundred dollars per acre for that swamp land, but that the advantage had gone to Silas Trimmer.

Moreover, why had Silas put a prohibitive valuation upon that north eight acres? Why did he want to keep it? It must be because Silas really expected that his tract would be drained free of charge, and that he would thus have the triumph of selling it for an approximate six thousand dollars an acre in the form of building lots. In the face of such a conclusion, the thought of the cement wall that he had ordered built was a great satisfaction.

It was a remarkably open winter that followed, and outdoor operations could thereby go on uninterrupted. In the office, the pompous Applerod, in his frock-coat and silk hat, ground Johnson's soul to gall dust; for he had taken to saying "_Mr._ Johnson" most formally, and issuing directions with maddening politeness and consideration. An arrangement had been effected with Applerod, whereby that gentleman, for having suggested the golden opportunity, was to reap the entire benefit of the improvement on his own twenty acres, Bobby financing the whole deal and charging Applerod's share of it against his account. Applerod stood thereby to gain about seventy-six thousand dollars over and above the price he had paid for his twenty acres; and, moreover, _Bobby had decided to call the improved tract the Applerod Addition_! When that name began to appear in print, coupled with flaming advertisements of Applerod's devising, there was grave danger of the rosy-cheeked old gentleman's losing every button from every fancy vest in his possession.

In the meantime, thoroughly in love with the vast enterprise which he had projected, Bobby spent his time outdoors, fascinated, unable to find any peace elsewhere than upon his Titanic labor. His evenings he spent in such social affairs as he could not avoid; with Agnes Elliston; with Biff Bates; in an occasional game of billiards at the Idlers'; but his days, from early morning until the evening whistle, he spent amid the clang of pick and shovel, the rattling of the trams, the creaking of the crane. It was an absorbing thing to see that enormous groove cut down through the big hill, and to watch the growth of the great mounds which grew up out of the marsh. The ditch that should drain off all this murky water was, of course, the first thing to be achieved, and, from the base of the hill through which it was to be cut, the engineer ran a tram bridge straight across the swamp to the new retaining wall; and from this, with the aid of a huge, long-armed crane which lifted cars bodily from the track, the soil was dumped on either side as it was removed from the cut. By the latter part of December the ditch had been completed and connected with the special sewer which, by permission of the city, had been built to carry the overflow to the river, and, the open weather still holding, the stagnant pool which had been a blot upon the landscape for untold ages began to flow sluggishly away, displaced by the earth from the disappearing hill.

The city papers were teeming now with the vast energy and public-spirited enterprise of young Robert Burnit and Oliver P. Applerod, and there were many indications that the enterprise was to be a most successful one. Even before they were ready to receive them, applications were daily made for reservations in the new district, and individual home-seekers began to take Sunday trips out to where the big undertaking was in progress.

"You sure have got 'em going, Bobby," confessed the finally-convinced Biff Bates after a visit of inspection. "Here's where you put the hornet on one Silas Tight-Wad Trimmer all right, all right. But the bones don't roll right that the side bet don't go for Johnson instead of Applegoat. He's a shine, for me. I think he's all to the canary color inside, but this man Johnson's some man if he only had a shell to put it in. Me for him!"

The unexpressed friendship that had sprung up between the taciturn bookkeeper and the loquacious ex-pugilist was both a puzzle and a delight to Bobby, and it was one of his great joys to see them together, they not knowing why they liked such companionship, not having a single topic of conversation in common, but unconsciously enjoying that vague, sympathetic man-soul they found in each other.