The Three Partners

“Oh, a day or two. You see, Kitty”—

Stacy checked him with a movement of his pencil in the air, and then wrote down, “‘Day or two.’ Wife with you?”

“Yes; and oh, Stacy, our boy! Ah!” he went on, with a laugh, knocking aside the remonstrating pencil, “you must listen! He’s just the sweetest, knowingest little chap living. Do you know what we’re going to christen him? Well, he’ll be Stacy Demorest Barker. Good names, aren’t they? And then it perpetuates the dear old friendship.”

Stacy picked up the pencil again, wrote “Wife and child S. D. B.,” and leaned back in his chair. “Now, Barker,” he said briefly, “I’m coming to dine with you tonight at 7.30 sharp. THEN we’ll talk Heavy Tree Hill, wife, baby, and S. D. B. But here I’m all for business. Have you any with me?”

Barker, who was easily amused, had extracted a certain entertainment out of Stacy’s memorandum, but he straightened himself with a look of eager confidence and said, “Certainly; that’s just what it is—business. Lord! Stacy, I’m ALL business now. I’m in everything. And I bank with you, though perhaps you don’t know it; it’s in your Branch at Marysville. I didn’t want to say anything about it to you before. But Lord! you don’t suppose that I’d bank anywhere else while you are in the business—checks, dividends, and all that; but in this matter I felt you knew, old chap. I didn’t want to talk to a banker nor to a bank, but to Jim Stacy, my old partner.”

“Barker,” said Stacy curtly, “how much money are you short of?”

At this direct question Barker’s always quick color rose, but, with an equally quick smile, he said, “I don’t know yet that I’m short at all.”

“But I do!”

“Look here, Jim: why, I’m just overloaded with shares and stocks,” said Barker, smiling.

“Not one of which you could realize on without sacrifice. Barker, three years ago you had three hundred thousand dollars put to your account at San Francisco.”

“Yes,” said Barker, with a quiet reminiscent laugh. “I remember I wanted to draw it out in one check to see how it would look.”

“And you’ve drawn out all in three years, and it looks d–d bad.”

“How did you know it?” asked Barker, his face beaming only with admiration of his companion’s omniscience.

“How did I know it?” retorted Stacy. “I know YOU, and I know the kind of people who have unloaded to you.”

“Come, Stacy,” said Barker, “I’ve only invested in shares and stocks like everybody else, and then only on the best advice I could get: like Van Loo’s, for instance,—that man who was here just now, the new manager of the Empire Ditch Company; and Carter’s, my own Kitty’s father. And when I was offered fifty thousand Wide West Extensions, and was hesitating over it, he told me YOU were in it too—and that was enough for me to buy it.”

“Yes, but we didn’t go into it at his figures.”

“No,” said Barker, with an eager smile, “but you SOLD at his figures, for I knew that when I found that YOU, my old partner, was in it; don’t you see, I preferred to buy it through your bank, and did at 110. Of course, you wouldn’t have sold it at that figure if it wasn’t worth it then, and neither I nor you are to blame if it dropped the next week to 60, don’t you see?”

Stacy’s eyes hardened for a moment as he looked keenly into his former partner’s bright gray ones, but there was no trace of irony in Barker’s. On the contrary, a slight shade of sadness came over them. “No,” he said reflectively, “I don’t think I’ve ever been foolish or followed out my OWN ideas, except once, and that was extravagant, I admit. That was my idea of building a kind of refuge, you know, on the site of our old cabin, where poor miners and played-out prospectors waiting for a strike could stay without paying anything. Well, I sunk twenty thousand dollars in that, and might have lost more, only Carter—Kitty’s father—persuaded me—he’s an awful clever old fellow—into turning it into a kind of branch hotel of Boomville, while using it as a hotel to take poor chaps who couldn’t pay, at half prices, or quarter prices, PRIVATELY, don’t you see, so as to spare their pride,—awfully pretty, wasn’t it?—and make the hotel profit by it.”

“Well?” said Stacy as Barker paused.

“They didn’t come,” said Barker.

“But,” he added eagerly, “it shows that things were better than I had imagined. Only the others did not come, either.”

“And you lost your twenty thousand dollars,” said Stacy curtly.

“FIFTY thousand,” said Barker, “for of course it had to be a larger hotel than the other. And I think that Carter wouldn’t have gone into it except to save me from losing money.”

“And yet made you lose fifty thousand instead of twenty. For I don’t suppose HE advanced anything.”

“He gave his time and experience,” said Barker simply.

“I don’t think it worth thirty thousand dollars,” said Stacy dryly. “But all this doesn’t tell me what your business is with me to-day.”

“No,” said Barker, brightening up, “but it is business, you know. Something in the old style—as between partner and partner—and that’s why I came to YOU, and not to the ‘banker.’ And it all comes out of something that Demorest once told us; so you see it’s all us three again! Well, you know, of course, that the Excelsior Ditch Company have abandoned the Bar and Heavy Tree Hill. It didn’t pay.”

“Yes; nor does the company pay any dividends now. You ought to know, with fifty thousand of their stock on your hands.”

Barker laughed. “But listen. I found that I could buy up their whole plant and all the ditching along the Black Spur Range for ten thousand dollars.”

“And Great Scott! you don’t think of taking up their business?” said Stacy, aghast.

Barker laughed more heartily. “No. Not their business. But I remember that once Demorest told us, in the dear old days, that it cost nearly as much to make a water ditch as a railroad, in the way of surveying and engineering and levels, you know. And here’s the plant for a railroad. Don’t you see?”

“But a railroad from Black Spur to Heavy Tree Hill—what’s the good of that?”

“Why, Black Spur will be in the line of the new Divide Railroad they’re trying to get a bill for in the legislature.”

“An infamous piece of wildcat jobbing that will never pass,” said Stacy decisively.

“They said BECAUSE it was that, it would pass,” said Barker simply. “They say that Watson’s Bank is in it, and is bound to get it through. And as that is a rival bank of yours, don’t you see, I thought that if WE could get something real good or valuable out of it,—something that would do the Black Spur good,—it would be all right.”

“And was your business to consult me about it?” said Stacy bluntly.

“No,” said Barker, “it’s too late to consult you now, though I wish I had. I’ve given my word to take it, and I can’t back out. But I haven’t the ten thousand dollars, and I came to you.”

Stacy slowly settled himself back in his chair, and put both hands in his pockets. “Not a cent, Barker, not a cent.”

“I’m not asking it of the BANK,” said Barker, with a smile, “for I could have gone to the bank for it. But as this was something between us, I am asking you, Stacy, as my old partner.”

“And I am answering you, Barker, as your old partner, but also as the partner of a hundred other men, who have even a greater right to ask me. And my answer is, not a cent!”

Barker looked at him with a pale, astonished face and slightly parted lips. Stacy rose, thrust his hands deeper in his pockets, and standing before him went on:—

“Now look here! It’s time you should understand me and yourself. Three years ago, when our partnership was dissolved by accident, or mutual consent, we will say, we started afresh, each on our own hook. Through foolishness and bad advice you have in those three years hopelessly involved yourself as you never would have done had we been partners, and yet in your difficulty you ask me and my new partners to help you out of a difficulty in which they have no concern.”

“Your NEW partners?” stammered Barker.

“Yes, my new partners; for every man who has a share, or a deposit, or an interest, or a dollar in this bank is my PARTNER—even you, with your securities at the Branch, are one; and you may say that in THIS I am protecting you against yourself.”

“But you have money—you have private means.”

“None to speculate with as you wish me to—on account of my position; none to give away foolishly as you expect me to—on account of precedent and example. I am a soulless machine taking care of capital intrusted to me and my brains, but decidedly NOT to my heart nor my sentiment. So my answer is, not a cent!”

Barker’s face had changed; his color had come back, but with an older expression. Presently, however, his beaming smile returned, with the additional suggestion of an affectionate toleration which puzzled Stacy.

“I believe you’re right, old chap,” he said, extending his hand to the banker, “and I wish I had talked to you before. But it’s too late now, and I’ve given my word.”

“Your WORD!” said Stacy. “Have you no written agreement?”

“No. My word was accepted.” He blushed slightly as if conscious of a great weakness.

“But that isn’t legal nor business. And you couldn’t even hold the Ditch Company to it if THEY chose to back out.”

“But I don’t think they will,” said Barker simply. “And you see my word wasn’t given entirely to THEM. I bought the thing through my wife’s cousin, Henry Spring, a broker, and he makes something by it, from the company, on commission. And I can’t go back on HIM. What did you say?”

Stacy had only groaned through his set teeth. “Nothing,” he said briefly, “except that I’m coming, as I said before, to dine with you to-night; but no more BUSINESS. I’ve enough of that with others, and there are some waiting for me in the outer office now.”

Barker rose at once, but with the same affectionate smile and tender gravity of countenance, and laid his hand caressingly on Stacy’s shoulder. “It’s like you to give up so much of your time to me and my foolishness and be so frank with me. And I know it’s mighty rough on you to have to be a mere machine instead of Jim Stacy. Don’t you bother about me. I’ll sell some of my Wide West Extension and pull the thing through myself. It’s all right, but I’m sorry for you, old chap.” He glanced around the room at the walls and rich paneling, and added, “I suppose that’s what you have to pay for all this sort of thing?”

Before Stacy could reply, a waiting visitor was announced for the second time, and Barker, with another hand-shake and a reassuring smile to his old partner, passed into the hall, as if the onus of any infelicity in the interview was upon himself alone. But Stacy did not seem to be in a particularly accessible mood to the new caller, who in his turn appeared to be slightly irritated by having been kept waiting over some irksome business. “You don’t seem to follow me,” he said to Stacy after reciting his business perplexity. “Can’t you suggest something?”

“Well, why don’t you get hold of one of your board of directors?” said Stacy abstractedly. “There’s Captain Drummond; you and he are old friends. You were comrades in the Mexican War, weren’t you?”

“That be d–d!” said his visitor bitterly. “All his interests are the other way, and in a trade of this kind, you know, Stacy, that a man would sacrifice his own brother. Do you suppose that he’d let up on a sure thing that he’s got just because he and I fought side by side at Cerro Gordo? Come! what are you giving us? You’re the last man I ever expected to hear that kind of flapdoodle from. If it’s because your bank has got some other interest and you can’t advise me, why don’t you say so?” Nevertheless, in spite of Stacy’s abrupt disclaimer, he left a few minutes later, half convinced that Stacy’s lukewarmness was due to some adverse influence. Other callers were almost as quickly disposed of, and at the end of an hour Stacy found himself again alone.

But not apparently in a very satisfied mood. After a few moments of purely mechanical memoranda-making, he rose abruptly and opened a small drawer in a cabinet, from which he took a letter still in its envelope. It bore a foreign postmark. Glancing over it hastily, his eyes at last became fixed on a concluding paragraph. “I hope,” wrote his correspondent, “that even in the rush of your big business you will sometimes look after Barker. Not that I think the dear old chap will ever go wrong—indeed, I often wish I was as certain of myself as of him and his insight; but I am afraid we were more inclined to be merely amused and tolerant of his wonderful trust and simplicity than to really understand it for his own good and ours. I know you did not like his marriage, and were inclined to believe he was the victim of a rather unscrupulous father and a foolish, unequal girl; but are you satisfied that he would have been the happier without it, or lived his perfect life under other and what you may think wiser conditions? If he WROTE the poetry that he LIVES everybody would think him wonderful; for being what he is we never give him sufficient credit.” Stacy smiled grimly, and penciled on his memorandum, “He wants it to the amount of ten thousand dollars.” “Anyhow,” continued the writer, “look after him, Jim, for his sake, your sake, and the sake of—PHIL DEMOREST.”

Stacy put the letter back in its envelope, and tossing it grimly aside went on with his calculations. Presently he stopped, restored the letter to his cabinet, and rang a bell on his table. “Send Mr. North here,” he said to the negro messenger. In a few moments his chief book-keeper appeared in the doorway.

“Turn to the Branch ledger and bring me a statement of Mr. George Barker’s account.”

“He was here a moment ago,” said North, essaying a confidential look towards his chief.

“I know it,” said Stacy coolly, without looking up.

“He’s been running a good deal on wildcat lately,” suggested North.

“I asked for his account, and not your opinion of it,” said Stacy shortly.

The subordinate withdrew somewhat abashed but still curious, and returned presently with a ledger which he laid before his chief. Stacy ran his eyes over the list of Barker’s securities; it seemed to him that all the wildest schemes of the past year stared him in the face. His finger, however, stopped on the Wide West Extension. “Mr. Barker will be wanting to sell some of this stock. What is it quoted at now?”

“Sixty.”

“But I would prefer that Mr. Barker should not offer in the open market at present. Give him seventy for it—private sale; that will be ten thousand dollars paid to his credit. Advise the Branch of this at once, and to keep the transaction quiet.”

“Yes, sir,” responded the clerk as he moved towards the door. But he hesitated, and with another essay at confidence said insinuatingly, “I always thought, sir, that Wide West would recover.”

Stacy, perhaps not displeased to find what had evidently passed in his subordinate’s mind, looked at him and said dryly, “Then I would advise you also to keep that opinion to yourself.” But, clever as he was, he had not anticipated the result. Mr. North, though a trusted employee, was human. On arriving in the outer office he beckoned to one of the lounging brokers, and in a low voice said, “I’ll take two shares of Wide West, if you can get it cheap.”

The broker’s face became alert and eager. “Yes, but I say, is anything up?”

“I’m not here to give the business of the bank away,” retorted North severely; “take the order or leave it.”

The man hurried away. Having thus vindicated his humanity by also passing the snub he had received from Stacy to an inferior, he turned away to carry out his master’s instructions, yet secure in the belief that he had profited by his superior discernment of the real reason of that master’s singular conduct. But when he returned to the private room, in hopes of further revelations, Mr. Stacy was closeted with another financial magnate, and had apparently divested his mind of the whole affair.

CHAPTER II

When George Barker returned to the outer ward of the financial stronghold he had penetrated, with its curving sweep of counters, brass railings, and wirework screens defended by the spruce clerks behind them, he was again impressed with the position of the man he had just quitted, and for a moment hesitated, with an inclination to go back. It was with no idea of making a further appeal to his old comrade, but—what would have been odd in any other nature but his—he was affected by a sense that HE might have been unfair and selfish in his manner to the man panoplied by these defenses, and who was in a measure forced to be a part of them. He would like to have returned and condoled with him. The clerks, who were heartlessly familiar with the anxious bearing of the men who sought interviews with their chief, both before and after, smiled with the whispered conviction that the fresh and ingenuous young stranger had been “chucked” like others until they met his kindly, tolerant, and even superior eyes, and were puzzled. Meanwhile Barker, who had that sublime, natural quality of abstraction over small impertinences which is more exasperating than studied indifference, after his brief hesitation passed out unconcernedly through the swinging mahogany doors into the blowy street. Here the wind and rain revived him; the bank and its curt refusal were forgotten; he walked onward with only a smiling memory of his partner as in the old days. He remembered how Stacy had burned down their old cabin rather than have it fall into sordid or unworthy hands—this Stacy who was now condemned to sink his impulses and become a mere machine. He had never known Stacy’s real motive for that act,—both Demorest and Stacy had kept their knowledge of the attempted robbery from their younger partner,—it always seemed to him to be a precious revelation of Stacy’s inner nature. Facing the wind and rain, he recalled how Stacy, though never so enthusiastic about his marriage as Demorest, had taken up Van Loo sharply for some foolish sneer about his own youthfulness. He was affectionately tolerant of even Stacy’s dislike to his wife’s relations, for Stacy did not know them as he did. Indeed, Barker, whose own father and mother had died in his infancy, had accepted his wife’s relations with a loving trust and confidence that was supreme, from the fact that he had never known any other.

At last he reached his hotel. It was a new one, the latest creation of a feverish progress in hotel-building which had covered five years and as many squares with large showy erections, utterly beyond the needs of the community, yet each superior in size and adornment to its predecessor. It struck him as being the one evidence of an abiding faith in the future of the metropolis that he had seen in nothing else. As he entered its frescoed hall that afternoon he was suddenly reminded, by its challenging opulency, of the bank he had just quitted, without knowing that the bank had really furnished its capital and its original design. The gilded bar-rooms, flashing with mirrors and cut glass; the saloons, with their desert expanse of Turkey carpet and oasis of clustered divans and gilded tables; the great dining-room, with porphyry columns, and walls and ceilings shining with allegory—all these things which had attracted his youthful wonder without distracting his correct simplicity of taste he now began to comprehend. It was the bank’s money “at work.” In the clatter of dishes in the dining-room he even seemed to hear again the chinking of coin.

It was a short cut to his apartments to pass through a smaller public sitting-room popularly known as “Flirtation Camp,” where eight or ten couples generally found refuge on chairs and settees by the windows, half concealed by heavy curtains. But the occupants were by no means youthful spinsters or bachelors; they were generally married women, guests of the hotel, receiving other people’s husbands whose wives were “in the States,” or responsible middle-aged leaders of the town. In the elaborate toilettes of the women, as compared with the less formal business suits of the men, there was an odd mingling of the social attitude with perhaps more mysterious confidences. The idle gossip about them had never affected Barker; rather he had that innate respect for the secrets of others which is as inseparable from simplicity as it is from high breeding, and he scarcely glanced at the different couples in his progress through the room. He did not even notice a rather striking and handsome woman, who, surrounded by two or three admirers, yet looked up at Barker as he passed with self-conscious lids as if seeking a return of her glance. But he moved on abstractedly, and only stopped when he suddenly saw the familiar skirt of his wife at a further window, and halted before it.

“Oh, it’s YOU,” said Mrs. Barker, with a half-nervous, half-impatient laugh. “Why, I thought you’d certainly stay half the afternoon with your old partner, considering that you haven’t met for three years.”

There was no doubt she HAD thought so; there was equally no doubt that the conversation she was carrying on with her companion—a good-looking, portly business man—was effectually interrupted. But Barker did not notice it. “Captain Heath, my husband,” she went on, carelessly rising and smoothing her skirts. The captain, who had risen too, bowed vaguely at the introduction, but Barker extended his hand frankly. “I found Stacy busy,” he said in answer to his wife, “but he is coming to dine with us to-night.”

“If you mean Jim Stacy, the banker,” said Captain Heath, brightening into greater ease, “he’s the busiest man in California. I’ve seen men standing in a queue outside his door as in the old days at the post-office. And he only gives you five minutes and no extension. So you and he were partners once?” he said, looking curiously at the still youthful Barker.

But it was Mrs. Barker who answered, “Oh yes! and always such good friends. I was awfully jealous of him.” Nevertheless, she did not respond to the affectionate protest in Barker’s eyes nor to the laugh of Captain Heath, but glanced indifferently around the room as if to leave further conversation to the two men. It was possible that she was beginning to feel that Captain Heath was as de trop now as her husband had been a moment before. Standing there, however, between them both, idly tracing a pattern on the carpet with the toe of her slipper, she looked prettier than she had ever looked as Kitty Carter. Her slight figure was more fully developed. That artificial severity covering a natural virgin coyness with which she used to wait at table in her father’s hotel at Boomville had gone, and was replaced by a satisfied consciousness of her power to please. Her glance was freer, but not as frank as in those days. Her dress was undoubtedly richer and more stylish; yet Barker’s loyal heart often reverted fondly to the chintz gown, coquettishly frilled apron, and spotless cuffs and collar in which she had handed him his coffee with a faint color that left his own face crimson.

Captain Heath’s tact being equal to her indifference, he had excused himself, although he was becoming interested in this youthful husband. But Mrs. Barker, after having asserted her husband’s distinction as the equal friend of the millionaire, was by no means willing that the captain should be further interested in Barker for himself alone, and did not urge him to stay. As he departed she turned to her husband, and, indicating the group he had passed the moment before, said:—

“That horrid woman has been staring at us all the time. I don’t see what you see in her to admire.”

Poor Barker’s admiration had been limited to a few words of civility in the enforced contact of that huge caravansary and in his quiet, youthful recognition of her striking personality. But he was just then too preoccupied with his interview with Stacy to reply, and perhaps he did not quite understand his wife. It was odd how many things he did not quite understand now about Kitty, but that he knew must be HIS fault. But Mrs. Barker apparently did not require, after the fashion of her sex, a reply. For the next moment, as they moved towards their rooms, she said impatiently, “Well, you don’t tell what Stacy said. Did you get the money?”

I grieve to say that this soul of truth and frankness lied—only to his wife. Perhaps he considered it only lying to HIMSELF, a thing of which he was at times miserably conscious. “It wasn’t necessary, dear,” he said; “he advised me to sell my securities in the bank; and if you only knew how dreadfully busy he is.”