The Making of Bobby Burnit

Still undecided, but carrying seriously the thought that he must overlook no opportunity if he was to prove himself the successful man that his father had so ardently wished him to become, Bobby dropped into the Idlers’ Club for lunch, where Nick Allstyne and Payne Winthrop hailed him as one returned from the dead.

“Just the chap,” declared Nick. “Stan Rogers has written me that I’m to scrape the regular crowd together and come up to his new Canadian lodge for a hunt. Stag affair, you know. Real sport and no pink-coat pretense.”

“Sorry, Nick,” said Bobby, pluming himself a trifle upon his steadfastness to duty, “but I know what Stan’s stag affairs are like. It would mean two weeks at least, and I could not spare that much time from the city.”

“Business again!” groaned Payne in mock dismay. “This grasping greed for gain is blighting the most promising young men of our avaricious country. Why, it’s positively shameful, Bobby, when your father must have left you over three million.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand, so far as I’m allowed to inquire just now,” corrected Bobby; “and I’m ordered to go into business with that and prove that I’m not such a blithering idiot that I can’t be trusted with the rest of it, whatever there is.”

“But I thought you’d had your trial by fire and pulled out of it,” interposed Nick. “I heard that you had sold your interests or something, and when I saw a new sign over the store I knew that it was true. Sensible thing, I call it.”

“Sensible!” winced Bobby. “You’re allowing me a mighty pleasant way out of it, but the fact of the matter is that I lost in such a stinging way I’m bound to get back into the game and do nothing else until I win,” and he explained how Silas Trimmer had performed upon him a neat and delicate operation in commercial surgery.

They were properly sympathetic; not that they cared much about business, but if Bobby had entered any game whatsoever in which he had been soundly beaten, they could quite understand his desire to stay in that game until he could show points on the right side.

“Nevertheless,” Nick urged, “you ought to take a little breathing spell in between.”

All through lunch, and through the game of billiards which followed, they strove to make him see the error of his ways, but Bobby was obdurate, and at last they gave him up as a bad job, with the grave prediction that later he would find himself nothing more nor less than a beast of burden. When he left them Bobby was surprised at himself. For a time he had feared that in his declaration of such close attention to business he might be posing; but he found that to miss a stag hunting party, which heretofore had been one of his keenest delights, weighed upon him not at all; found actually that he would far rather stay in the city to engage in the game of finance which was unfolding before him! He came upon this surprising discovery while he was on his way across to a side street, where, on the fourth floor of a store and warehouse building, he let himself in at a wide door with a latch-key and entered the gymnasium of Biff Bates. That gentleman, in trunks, sweater and sandals, was padding all alone around and around the edge of the hall at a steady jog, which, after twenty solid minutes, had left no effect whatever upon his respiration.

“Getting fat as a butcher again,” he announced as he trotted steadily around to Bobby, suddenly stopping short with an expansive grin across his wide face and a handshake that it took an athlete to withstand. “Got to cut it down or it’ll put me on the blink. What’s the best thing you know, chum?”

“How does this hit you?” asked Bobby, taking from his pocket the check Johnson had given him that morning.

Mr. Bates looked at it with his hands behind him.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said to the slip of paper, nodding profoundly.

“Oh, everybody’s friendly to these,” said Bobby, indorsing the check. “It is for the new gymnasium,” he explained. “Now, partner, turn loose and monopolize the physical training business of this city.”

“Partner!” scorned Mr. Bates. “Look here, old pal, there’s only one way I’ll take this big ticket, and that is that you’ll drag down your split of the profits.”

“But don’t I on this place?” protested Bobby.

“Nit!” retorted Mr. Bates with infinite scorn. “You put them right back into the business, but that don’t go any more. If we start this big joint it’s got to be partners right, see? Or else take back this wealthy handwriting. I don’t guess I want it, anyhow. From past performances you need all the money in the world, and ten thousand simoleons will put a crimp in any wad.”

“No,” laughed Bobby; “you’re saving it for me when you take it. I’ve just read a very nice note, left for me by the governor, that I’ll be a fool and lose anyhow.”

Mr. Bates grinned.

“You will, all right, all right, if you’re going into business,” he admitted, and stuffed the check in the upturned cuff of his sweater. “After these profit-and-loss artists get your goat on all the starts your old man left you, maybe I’ll have to put up the eats and sleeps for you anyhow; huh?” and Mr. Bates laughed with keen enjoyment of this delicately expressed idea. “How are you going to divorce yourself from the rest of it, Bobby?”

“I’m not quite sure,” said Bobby. “You know that big stretch of swamp land, out on the Millberg Road?”

“Where Paddy Dolan fell in and died from drinkin’ too much water? Sure I do.”

“Well, it has been suggested to me that I buy it, drain it, fill it, put in paved streets, cut it up into building lots and sell it.”

“And build it full of these pale yellow shacks that the honest working slob buys with seventeen years of his wages, and then loses the shack?” Biff incredulously wanted to know.

“You guessed wrong, Biff,” laughed Bobby. “Just selling the lots will be enough for me. What do you think of it?”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Bates thoughtfully. “I know they frame up such stunts and boost ’em strong in the papers, and if any of these real-estate sharps is working just for their healths they’ve been stung from all I’ve seen of ’em. But the main point is, who’s the guy that’s tryin’ to lead you to it?”

“Oh, that part’s all right,” replied Bobby with perfect assurance. “The man who wants me to finance this, and who has already bought some of the land, was one of my father’s right-hand men for nearly thirty years.”

“Then that’s all right,” agreed Mr. Bates. “But say!” he suddenly exclaimed as a new thought struck him; “it’s a wonder this right-mitt mut of your father’s didn’t make the old man fall for it long ago, if it’s such a hot muffin.”

“He did try it,” confessed Bobby with hesitation for the second time that day; “but the governor always complained that he had too many other irons in the fire.”

“He did, did he?” Mr. Bates wanted to know, fixing accusing eyes on Bobby. “Then don’t be the fall guy for any other touting. Your old man knew this business dope from Sheepshead Bay to Oakland. You take it from me that this tip ain’t the one best bet.”

Bobby left the gymnasium with a certain degree of dissatisfaction, not only with Mr. Applerod’s scheme but with the fact that wherever he went his father’s business wisdom was thrown into his teeth. That evening, drawn to the atmosphere into which events had plunged him, he dined at the Traders’ Club. As he passed one of the tables Silas Trimmer leered up at him with the circular smile, which, bisected by a row of yellow teeth and hooded with a bristle of stubby mustache, had now come to aggravate him almost past endurance. To-night it made him approach his dinner with vexation, and, failing to find the man he had sought, he finished hastily. As he went out, Silas Trimmer, though looking straight in his direction, did not seem to be at all aware of Bobby’s approach. He was deep in a business discussion with his priggish son-in-law.

“It’s a great opportunity,” he was loudly insisting. “If I can secure that land I’ll drain and improve it and cut it up into building lots. This city is ripe for a suburban boom.”

That settled it with Bobby. No matter what arguments there might be to the contrary, if Silas Trimmer had his eye on that piece of property, Bobby wanted it.

Applerod, though eagerness brought him early, had no sooner entered the study next morning than Bobby, who was already dressed for business and who had his machine standing outside the door, met him briskly.

“Keep your hat on, Applerod,” he ordered. “We’ll go right around and buy the rest of that property at once.”

“I thought those figures I left last night would convince you,” beamed Mr. Applerod.

There is no describing the delight and pride with which that highly-gratified gentleman followed the energetic young Mr. Burnit to the curb, nor the dignity with which, a few minutes later, he led the way into the office of one Thorne, real-estate dealer.

“Mr. Thorne, Mr. Robert Burnit,” said Mr. Applerod, hastening straight to business. “Mr. Burnit has come around to close the deal for that Westmarsh property.”

Mr. Thorne was suavity itself as he shook hands with Mr. Burnit, but the most aching regret was in his tone as he spoke.

“I’m very sorry indeed, Mr. Burnit,” he stated; “but that property, which, by the way, seems very much in demand, passed out of my hands yesterday afternoon.”

“To whom?” Mr. Applerod excitedly wanted to know. “I think you might have let us have time to turn around, Thorne. I spoke about it to you yesterday morning, you know, and said that I felt quite hopeful Mr. Burnit would buy it.”

“I know,” said Mr. Thorne, politely but coldly; “and I told you at the time we talked about it that I never hold anything in the face of a bona fide offer.”

“But who has it?” Bobby insisted, more eager now to get it, since it had slipped away from him, than ever before.

“The larger portion of it, the ninety-two acres adjoining Mr. Applerod’s twenty,” Mr. Thorne advised him, “was taken up by Miles, Eddy and Company. The north eight acres are owned by Mr. Silas Trimmer, and I am quite positive, from what Mr. Trimmer told me, not two hours later, that this parcel is not for sale.”

Bobby’s heart sank. Eight acres of that land had already been gobbled up by Silas Trimmer, and, no doubt, that astute and energetic business gentleman was now after the balance.

“Where is the office of Miles, Eddy and Company?” Bobby asked, with a crispness that pleased him tremendously as he used it.

“Twenty-six Plum Street,” Mr. Thorne advised him.

“Thanks,” said Bobby, and whirled out of the door, followed by the disconsolate Applerod.

At the office of Miles, Eddy and Company better luck awaited them.

Yes, that firm had secured possession of the Westmarsh ninety-two acres. Yes, the property was listed for sale, having been bought strictly for speculative purposes. And its figure? The price was now three hundred dollars per acre.

“I’ll take it,” said Bobby.

There was positive triumph in his voice as he announced this decision. He would show Silas Trimmer that he was awake at last, that he was not to be beaten in every deal.

“Twenty-seven thousand six hundred dollars,” said Bobby, figuring the amount on a pad he picked up from Mr. Eddy’s desk. “Very well. Allow me to use your telephone a moment. Mr. Chalmers,” directed Bobby when he had his new lawyer on the wire, “kindly get into communication with Miles, Eddy and Company and look up the title on ninety-two acres of Westmarsh property which they have for sale. If the title is clear the price is to be three hundred dollars per acre, for which amount you will have a check, payable to your order, within half an hour.”

Then to Johnson – biting his pen-handle in Bobby’s study and wondering where his principal and Applerod could be at this hour – he telephoned to deliver a check in the amount of twenty-seven thousand six hundred dollars to Mr. Chalmers. Never, since he had been plunged into “business,” had Bobby been so elated with himself as when he walked from the office of Miles, Eddy and Company; and, to keep up the good work, as soon as he reached the hall he turned to Applerod with a crisp, ringing voice, which was the product of that elation.

“Now for an engineer,” he said.

“Already as good as secured,” Mr. Applerod announced, triumphant that every necessity had been anticipated. “Jimmy Platt, son of an old neighbor of mine. Fine, smart boy, and knows all about the Westmarsh proposition. Bless you, I figured on this with him every vacation during his schooling!”

An hour later, Bobby, Mr. Applerod and the secretly jubilant Jimmy Platt had sped out Westmarsh way, and were inspecting the hundred and twelve acres of swamp which the new firm of Burnit and Applerod held between them.

“It’s a fine job,” said the young engineer, coveting anew the tremendous task as he bent upon it an admiring professional eye. “This time next year you won’t recognize the place. It’s a noble thing, Mr. Burnit, to turn an utterly useless stretch of swamp like this into habitable land. Have you secured the entire tract?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Bobby confessed with a frown. “The extreme north eight acres are owned by another party.”

“And when you drain your property,” mused Jimmy, smiling, “you will drain his.”

“Not if I can help it,” declared Bobby emphatically.

“You must come to some arrangement before you begin,” warned the engineer with the severe professional authority common to the quite young. Already, however, he was trying to grow regulation engineer’s whiskers; also he immediately planned to get married upon the proceeds of this big job, which, after years of chimerical dreaming, had become too real, almost, to be believed. “Perhaps you could get the owner to stand his proportionate share of the expense of drainage.”

Bobby smiled at the suggestion but made no other answer. He knew Silas Trimmer, or thought that he did, and the idea of Silas bearing a portion of a huge expense like this, when he could not be forced to shoulder it, struck him as distinctly humorous.

CHAPTER IX

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 Cæsar, 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.