Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford

Hour after hour he spent in trying to think of some one to whom he could appeal, and the conviction gradually burned itself in upon him that at last he was "up against it." It was a bad mess. He had made no deposit whatever in the local bank upon which he had drawn that check, though he had intended to do so. Moreover, Meers, to prove fraudulent intent, could show his intended bad faith in the other matter between them; and besides all that the alderman cigar dealer had a "pull" of no mean proportions. It had seemed impossible, the night before, that he who had dealt only in thousands and hundreds of thousands should be made a felon for a paltry hundred. It had seemed too absurd to be true, an anomalous situation that a day would clear up and at which he could afterwards laugh. Even now he joked with the turnkey, and that guardian of social recalcitrants was profoundly convinced that in J. Rufus Wallingford he had the swellest prisoner upon whom he had ever slid a bolt. The policeman who arrested him and the judge who next morning remanded him for trial shared that opinion, but it was a very melancholy satisfaction. After his preliminary hearing he went from the city prison to a more "comfortable" cell in the county jail, to think a number of very deep thoughts. Not a friendly eye had been turned on him but that of Joseph O. Meers, who had come around to see the fun. Mr. Meers had been quite jovial with him, had handed him a good cigar and told him the latest developments in the Retail Cigar Dealers' Consolidation. He was reorganizing it himself. It was really a good "stunt," and he thanked J. Rufus most effusively for having started it. This was "kidding" of a broad-gauge type that Wallingford, for the same reason that a gambler tries to look pleased when he loses his money, was bound to enjoy very much, and with right good wit he replied in kind; but in this exchange of humor he was very much handicapped, for really Meers had all the joke on his side.

Another restless night and another dreary day, and then, just as he had begun to sincerely pity himself as a forlorn castaway upon the barrenest shore of all living things, there came visitors for him, and the turnkey with much deference threw open his cell and led him out to the visitor's cage. His wife! Well, he had expected her, and he had expected, too, since this great new tenderness had come upon her, to find her eyes suffused with bravely suppressed tears as they now were; but he had never expected to see again the man who was with her. E. B. Lott! the man to whom he had once sold rights of way to a traction line which he had never intended to build! one of his most profitable victims!

"So they got you at last, did they, Wallingford?" said Lott briskly, and shook hands with him, positive pleasure in the meeting beaming from his grizzled countenance. "I expected they would. A nice little game you played on me up in Battlesburg, wasn't it? Well, my boy, it was worth the money. You really had a valuable right of way, with valuable franchises and concessions, and the Lewisville, Battlesburg and Elliston Traction Line is doing a ripping business; so I'll forgive you, especially since you're not an individual criminal at all. You're only the logical development of the American tendency to 'get there' no matter how. It is the national weakness, the national menace, and you're only an exaggerated molecule of it. You think that so long as you stay inside the law you're all right, even morally; but a man who habitually shaves so close to the narrow edge is going to slip off some time. Now you've had your dose and I shouldn't wonder but it might make a man of you. Your fine little wife here, who hunted me up the minute she found out your real predicament, swears that it will, but I'm not sure. You're too valuable, though, to coop up in a penitentiary, and I'm going to buy you off. I can use you. I've been in the traction business ever since the first trolley touched a wire, and I never yet have seen a man who could go out and get a right of way for nothing, as you did, nor get it in so short a space of time, even for money. We expect to open up two thousand miles of lines this coming year and I'm going to put you on the job. I can't fix it to make you such quick riches as you can rake in on crooked deals, but I'll guarantee you will have more in the end. It's a great chance for you, my boy, and just to protect you against yourself I'm going to hire a good man to watch you."

Wallingford had already regained his breadth of chest, and now he began to laugh. His shoulders heaved and the hundred jovial wrinkles about his eyes creased with the humor of the thought that had come to him.

"You'd better hire three," he suggested, "and work them in eight-hour shifts."

Nevertheless there was a bit of moisture in his eyes, and his hand, dropping down, sought his wife's. Perhaps in that moment he vaguely promised himself some effort toward a higher ideal, but the woman at his side, though knowing what she knew, though herself renewed and made over wholly with that great new reason, though detecting the presence of the crippled moral sense that was falling back baffled from its feeble assault upon his soul, pressed her other palm over his hand protectingly and shook her head – for at last she understood!

Upon thistles grow no roses.

THE END