The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (best reads .TXT) 📕

gullible as a schoolboy, he had managed, with his sharp eye and knowing air and twisted blond mustaches, to pass himself off for an astute financier, and the Denver papers respectfully referred to him as the Rothschild of Cripple Creek.

Dr. Archie stopped the Captain on his way to breakfast. “Must see you a minute, Captain. Can’t wait. Want to sell you some shares in the San Felipe. Got to raise money.”

The Captain grandly bestowed his hat upon an eager porter who had already lifted his fur coat tenderly from his arm and stood nursing it. In removing his hat, the Captain exposed a bald, flushed dome, thatched about the ears with yellowish gray hair. “Bad time to sell, doctor. You want to hold on to San Felipe, and buy more. What have you got to raise?”

“Oh, not a great sum. Five or six thousand. I’ve been buying up close and have run short.”

“I see, I see. Well, doctor, you’ll have to let me get through that door. I was out last night, and I’m going to get my bacon, if you lose your mine.” He clapped Archie on the shoulder and pushed him along in front of him. “Come ahead with me, and we’ll talk business.”

Dr. Archie attended the Captain and waited while he gave his order, taking the seat the old promoter indicated.

“Now, sir,” the Captain turned to him, “you don’t want to sell anything. You must be under the impression that I’m one of these damned New England sharks that get their pound of flesh off the widow and orphan. If you’re a little short, sign a note and I’ll write a check. That’s the way gentlemen do business. If you want to put up some San Felipe as collateral, let her go, but I shan’t touch a share of it. Pens and ink, please, Oscar,”⁠—he lifted a large forefinger to the Austrian.

The Captain took out his checkbook and a book of blank notes, and adjusted his nose-nippers. He wrote a few words in one book and Archie wrote a few in the other. Then they each tore across perforations and exchanged slips of paper.

“That’s the way. Saves office rent,” the Captain commented with satisfaction, returning the books to his pocket. “And now, Archie, where are you off to?”

“Got to go East tonight. A deal waiting for me in New York.” Dr. Archie rose.

The Captain’s face brightened as he saw Oscar approaching with a tray, and he began tucking the corner of his napkin inside his collar, over his ascot. “Don’t let them unload anything on you back there, doctor,” he said genially, “and don’t let them relieve you of anything, either. Don’t let them get any Cripple stuff off you. We can manage our own silver out here, and we’re going to take it out by the ton, sir!”

The doctor left the dining-room, and after another consultation with the clerk, he wrote his first telegram to Thea:⁠—

Miss Thea Kronborg, Everett House, New York.

Will call at your hotel eleven o’clock Friday morning. Glad to come. Thank you.

Archie

He stood and heard the message actually clicked off on the wire, with the feeling that she was hearing the click at the other end. Then he sat down in the lobby and wrote a note to his wife and one to the other doctor in Moonstone. When he at last issued out into the storm, it was with a feeling of elation rather than of anxiety. Whatever was wrong, he could make it right. Her letter had practically said so.

He tramped about the snowy streets, from the bank to the Union Station, where he shoved his money under the grating of the ticket window as if he could not get rid of it fast enough. He had never been in New York, never been farther east than Buffalo. “That’s rather a shame,” he reflected boyishly as he put the long tickets in his pocket, “for a man nearly forty years old.” However, he thought as he walked up toward the club, he was on the whole glad that his first trip had a human interest, that he was going for something, and because he was wanted. He loved holidays. He felt as if he were going to Germany himself. “Queer”⁠—he went over it with the snow blowing in his face⁠—“but that sort of thing is more interesting than mines and making your daily bread. It’s worth paying out to be in on it⁠—for a fellow like me. And when it’s Thea⁠—Oh, I back her!” he laughed aloud as he burst in at the door of the Athletic Club, powdered with snow.

Archie sat down before the New York papers and ran over the advertisements of hotels, but he was too restless to read. Probably he had better get a new overcoat, and he was not sure about the shape of his collars. “I don’t want to look different to her from everybody else there,” he mused. “I guess I’ll go down and have Van look me over. He’ll put me right.”

So he plunged out into the snow again and started for his tailor’s. When he passed a florist’s shop he stopped and looked in at the window, smiling; how naturally pleasant things recalled one another. At the tailor’s he kept whistling, “Flow gently, Sweet Afton,” while Van Dusen advised him, until that resourceful tailor and haberdasher exclaimed, “You must have a date back there, doctor; you behave like a bridegroom,” and made him remember that he wasn’t one.

Before he let him go, Van put his finger on the Masonic pin in his client’s lapel. “Mustn’t wear that, doctor. Very bad form back there.”

II

Fred Ottenburg, smartly dressed for the afternoon, with a long black coat and gaiters was sitting in the dusty parlor of the Everett House. His manner was not in accord with his personal freshness, the good lines of his clothes, and the shining smoothness of his hair. His attitude was one of deep dejection, and