Young Wallingford

Blackie Daw, still keeping out of the way of federal officers who knew exactly where to find him, met J. Rufus on the street a week after his arrival, and, learning from him of his marriage to Fannie, came around to Wallingford’s hotel to “look her over.” Fannie marveled at Signor Matteo’s rapid advance in English, especially his quick mastery of the vernacular, but she found him very amusing.

“You win,” declared Blackie with emphasis, when he and Wallingford had retired to a cozy little corner in the bar café. Fannie had inspired in him the awed respect that men of his stamp always render to good women. “You certainly got the original prize package. You and I are awful skunks, Jim.”

“She makes me feel that way, too, now and then,” admitted Wallingford. “I’d be ashamed of myself for marrying her if I hadn’t taken her from such a dog’s life.”

“She seems to enjoy this one,” said Blackie. “You’re spending as much money on her as you used to on Beauty Phillips.”

“Just about,” agreed Wallingford. “However, papa-in-law is paying for the honeymoon.”

“Does he know it?” asked Blackie.

Wallingford chuckled.

“Not yet,” he admitted. “I’d like to see him when he finds it out.”

Blackie also grinned.

“That little Blakeville episode was the happiest period of my life,” he declared. “By the way, J. Rufus, what was your game down there? I never understood.”

“As simple as a night-shirt,” explained Wallingford. “I merely hunted through the postal guide for the richest little town I could find that had no bank. Then I went there and had one started so I could borrow its money.”

Blackie nodded comprehendingly.

“Then you bought a piece of property and raised it to a fictitious value to cover the loan,” he added. “Great stunt; but it seems to me they can get you for it. If they catch you up in one lie they can prove the whole thing to have been a frame-up. Suppose they find out?”

Wallingford swelled up with righteous indignation.

“Vittoreo Matteo,” he charged, “you are a rascally scoundrel! I met you in New York and you imposed upon me with a miserable pack of lies. I have investigated and I find that there is no Etrusca, near Milan, Italy, no Etruscan black pottery, no Vittoreo Matteo. You induced me to waste a lot of money in locating and developing a black mud-swamp. When you had gained my full confidence you came to me in Blakeville with a cock-and-bull story that your mother was dying in Genoa, and on the strength of that borrowed a large sum of money from me. You are gone – I don’t know where. I shall have to make a clean breast of this matter to Jonas Bubble, and tell him that if I can not pay that note when it falls due he will have to foreclose. You heartless villain! Waiter, ice us another bottle of that ninety-three.”

When Wallingford returned to his wife he found her very thoughtful.

“When are we going to Blakeville, Jim?” she asked.

He studied her curiously for a moment. She would have to know him some time or other. He had hoped to put it off while they were leading this unruffled existence, but now that the test had come he might as well have it over with.

“I’m not going back,” he declared. “I’m through with Blakeville. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she admitted, pondering it slowly. “I could be happy here always, or, if not here, wherever you are. But your business back there, Jim?”

He chuckled.

“I have no business there,” he told her. “My business is concluded. I borrowed forty-five thousand dollars on that forty acres of sticky mud, and I think I’ll just let the bank foreclose.”

She looked at him a moment, dry-eyed and dry-lipped.

“You’re joking,” she protested, in a low voice.

“Not at all,” he seriously assured her.

They looked at each other steadily for some moments, and gradually Wallingford saw beneath those eyes a spirit that he might conquer, but, having conquered, would always regret.

“It’s – it’s a swindle!” she gasped, as the true situation began to dawn upon her. “You don’t mean, Jim, that you are a swindler!”

“No, I wouldn’t call it that,” he objected, considering the matter carefully. “It is only rather a shrewd deal in the game of business. The law can’t touch me for it unless they should chase down Vittoreo Matteo and find him to be a fraud, and prove that I knew it!”

She was thoughtful a long time, following the intricate pattern of the rug in their sitting-room with the toe of her neatly-shod foot. She was perfectly calm, and he drew a sharp breath of relief. He had expected a scene when this revelation should come; he was more than pleased to find that she was not of the class which makes scenes. Presently she looked up.

“Have you thought of what light this puts me in at home? Have you thought how I should be regarded in the only world I have ever known? Why, there are a thousand people back in Blakeville who know me, and even if I were never to meet one of them again – Jim, it mustn’t be! You must not destroy my self-respect for ever. Have you spent any of that money?”

“Well, no,” he reluctantly replied. “I have plenty of money besides that.”

“Good!” said she with a gasp of relief. “Write father that, as you will be unable to carry out your projects, you are sending him the money to take up that note.”

Wallingford was silent a long time. Wonderful the influence this girl had over him. He was amazed at himself.

“I can’t remember when I ever gave up any money,” he finally said, with an attempt at lightness; “but, Fannie, I think I’ll do it just this once – for you – as a wedding present.”

“You’ll do it right away, won’t you?”

“Right this minute.”

He walked over and stooped down to kiss her. She held up her lips submissively, but they were cold, and there was no answering pressure in them. Silently he took his hat and started down-stairs.

“By the way,” he said, turning at the door, “I’m going to make your father a present of that bay team.”

He scarcely understood himself as he dictated to the public stenographer a letter to Jonas Bubble, so far different from the one he had planned to write. It was not like him to do this utterly foolish thing, and yet, somehow, he felt that he could not do otherwise. When he came back up-stairs again, the letter written and a check inclosed in it and the whole mailed, he found her in the same chair, but now she was crying. He approached her hesitantly and stood looking down at her for a long, long time. It was, perhaps, but one minute, but it seemed much longer. Now was the supreme test, the moment that should influence all their future lives, and he dreaded to dissolve that uncertainty.

He knelt beside her and put his arm about her. Still crying, she turned to him, threw both arms around his neck and buried her head on his shoulder – and as she cried she pressed him more tightly to her!

CHAPTER XXIV

CASTING ABOUT FOR A STRAIGHT BUSINESS, PATENT MEDICINE PROVIDES THE ANSWER

That was a glorious honeymoon! They traveled from one gay summer resort to another, and when Fannie expressed the first hint of fatigue, Wallingford, who had grown to worship her, promptly provided her with complete and unique rest, by taking her to some one of the smaller inland cities of the type which he loved, installing her in a comfortable hotel, and living, for a week or so, a quiet, lazy existence consisting largely of mere eating and sleeping, and just enough exercise to keep in good health. In all this time there was not one jarring thought, one troubled moment, nor one hint of a shadow. J. Rufus took his wife into all sorts of unique experiences, full of life and color and novelty, having a huge pride in her constant wonder and surprise.

It happened, while upon one of these resting sojourns, that they one night paused on the edge of a crowd which stood gaping at a patent medicine faker. Suddenly recognizing an old acquaintance in the picturesque orator with the sombrero and the shoulder-length gray hair, Wallingford drew closer.

Standing behind the “doctor,” upon the seat of his carriage where the yellow light of a gasolene torch flared full upon it, was a gaudy, life-size anatomical chart, and with this as bait for his moths he was extolling the virtues of Quagg’s Peerless Sciatacata.

“Here, my friends,” he declared, unfolding one of the many hinged flaps of the gory chart, “you bee-hold the intimate relation of the stomach with all the inn-ternal organs, and above all with the blood, which, pumped by the heart through these abb-sorbing membranes, takes up that priceless tonic, Doctor Quagg’s Peerless Sciatacata. This, acting dii-rectly upon the red corpuscles of the vital fluid, stimm-ulates the circulation and carries its germ-destroying properties to every atom of the human frame, casting off imm-purities, clean-sing the syst-em, bringing ee-lasticity to the footsteps, hope to the heart, the ruddy glow of bounding health to pale cheeks, and the sparkle of new life to tired and jaded eyes!”

Wallingford turned to his wife with a chuckle,

“Just stand here a minute, Fannie,” said he. “I must wade in and speak to the old scout. We stopped a week at the same hotel over in New Jersey and got as chummy as two cell-mates.”

Fannie smiled doubtfully in response, and watched her husband with a slight trace of concern as he forced his way through the crowd and up to the wheel of the carriage.

“How are you, Doctor?” said he, holding up his plump palm. “Where are you stopping?”

The doctor’s wink at J. Rufus was scarcely perceptible to that large young gentleman himself, much less to the bystanders, as with professional gravity he reached down for a hearty handshake.

“Benson House. Come around and see me to-morrow morning.” Then, with added gravity and in a louder voice: “I scarcely knew you, friend, you are so changed. How many bottles of the Sciatacata was it you took?”

“Four,” replied J. Rufus clearly, with not even a twinkle in his eye.

“Only four bottles,” declaimed Doctor Quagg. “My friends, this is one of my most marvelous cures. When I met this gentleman in Columbus, Ohio, he was a living skeleton, having suffered for years from sciatic rheumatism. He bought from me one night at my carriage, just as he is standing now, six bottles of the Peerless Sciatacata. He took but four bottles, and look at him to-day!”

With one accord they looked. There was some slight tittering among them at first, but the dignity and gravity with which the towering J. Rufus, hale and hearty and in the pink of condition, withstood that inspection, checked all inclination to levity. Moreover, he was entirely too prosperous-looking to be a “capper.”

“I owe you my life, Doctor,” said Wallingford gratefully. “I never travel without those other two bottles of the Sciatacata,” and with the air of a debt of honor paid, he pressed back through the crowd to the sidewalk.

His wife was laughing, yet confused.

“I don’t see how you can make yourself so conspicuous,” she protested in a low voice.

“Why not?” he laughed. “We public characters must boost one another.”

“And the price,” they heard the doctor declaiming, “is only one dollar per bottle, or six for five dollars, guar-an-teed not only to drive sciatic rheumatism from the sys-tem, but to cure the most ob-stin-ate cases of ague, Bright’s disease, cat-a-lepsy, coughs, colds, cholera, dys-pepsia, ery-sip-e-las, fever and chills, gas-tritis” —

“And so on down to X Y Z, etc.,” commented Wallingford as they walked away.

His wife looked up at him curiously.

“Jim, did you honestly take four bottles of that medicine?” she wanted to know.

“Take it?” he repeated in amazement. “Certainly not! It isn’t meant for wise people to take. It wouldn’t do them any good.”

“It wouldn’t do anybody any good,” she decided with a trace of contempt.

“Guess again,” he advised her. “That dope has cured a million people that had nothing the matter with ’em.”

At the Hotel Deriche in the adjoining block they turned into the huge, garishly decorated dining-room for their after-theater supper. They had been in the town only two days, but the head waiter already knew to come eagerly to meet them, to show them to the best table in the room, and to assign them the best waiter; also the head waiter himself remained to take the order, to suggest a delicate, new dish and to name over, at Wallingford’s solicitation, the choice wines in the cellar that were not upon the wine-list.

This little formality over, Wallingford looked about him complacently. A pale gentleman with a jet-black beard bowed to him from across the room.

“Doctor Lazzier,” observed Wallingford to his wife. “Most agreeable chap and has plenty of money.”

He bent aside a little to see past his wife’s hat, and exchanged a suave salutation with a bald-headed young man who was with two ladies and who wore a dove-gray silk bow with his evening clothes.

“Young Corbin,” explained Wallingford, “of the Corbin and Paley department store. He had about two dollars a week spending money till his father died, and now he and young Paley are turning social flip-flaps at the rate of twenty a minute. He belongs to the Mark family and he’s great pals with me. Looks good for him, don’t it?”

“Jim,” she said in earnest reproval, “you mustn’t talk that way.”

“Of course I’m only joking,” he returned. “You know I promised you I’d stick to the straight and narrow. I’ll keep my word. Nothing but straight business for me hereafter.”

He, too, was quite serious about it, and yet he smiled as he thought of young Corbin. Another man, of a party just being shown to a table, nodded to him, and Mrs. Wallingford looked up at her husband with admiration.

“Honestly, how do you do it?” she inquired. “We have only been here a little over forty-eight hours, and yet you have already picked up a host of nice friends.”

“I patronize only the best saloons,” he replied with a grin; then, more seriously: “This is a mighty rich little city, Fannie. I could organize a stock company here, within a week, for anything from a burglar’s trust to a church consolidation.”

“It’s a pretty place,” she admitted. “I like it very much from what I have seen of it.”

He chuckled.

“Looks like a spending town,” he returned; “and where they spend a wad they’re crazy to make one. Give me one of these inland society towns for the loose, long green. New York’s no place to start an honest business,” and again he chuckled. “By the way, Fannie,” he added after a pause, “what do you think of my going into the patent medicine line?”

“How do you mean?” she inquired, frowning.

“Oh, on a big scale,” he replied. “Advertise it big, manufacture it big.”

She studied it over in musing silence.

“I don’t mind what you do so long as it is honest,” she finally said.

“Good. I’ll hunt up Quagg to-morrow and spring it on him.”

“You don’t mean that dreadful quack medicine he’s selling on the street, do you?” she protested.

“Why not? I don’t know that it’s worthless, and I do know that Quagg has sold it on street corners for twenty years from coast to coast. He goes back to the same towns over and over, and people buy who always bought before. Looks like a good thing to me. Quagg was a regular doctor when he was a kid; had a real diploma and all that, but no practice and no patience. Joke. Giggle.”

The oysters came on now, and they talked of other things, but while they were upon the meat Doctor Lazzier, having finished, came across to shake hands with his friend of a day, and was graciously charmed to meet Mrs. Wallingford.

“Sit down,” invited J. Rufus. “Won’t you try a glass of this? It’s very fair,” and he raised a practised eyebrow to the waiter.

The doctor delicately pushed down the edge of the ice-wet napkin until he could see the label, and he gave an involuntary smile of satisfaction as he recognized the vintage. The head waiter had timed the exact second to take that bottle out of the ice-pail, had wrapped the wet napkin about it and almost reverently filled glasses. Occasionally he came over and felt up inside the hollow on the bottom of the bottle.

“Delighted,” confessed the doctor, and sat down quite comfortably.

“You may smoke if you like, Doctor,” offered Mrs. Wallingford, smiling. “I don’t seem to feel that a man is comfortable unless he is smoking.”

“To tell the truth, he isn’t,” agreed the doctor with a laugh, and accepting a choice cigar from Wallingford he lit it.

The waiter came with an extra glass and filled for all three of them.

“By the way, Doctor,” said Wallingford, watching the pouring of the wine with a host’s anxiety, “I think of going into the patent medicine business on a large scale, and I believe I shall have to have you on the board of directors.”

“Couldn’t think of it!” objected the doctor hastily. “You know, professional ethics – ” and he shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s so,” admitted Wallingford. “We can’t have you on the board, but we can have you for a silent stock-holder.”

“Open to the same objection,” declared the doctor, with another dubious shrug, as he took up his glass.

He tasted the wine; he took another sip, then another – slow, careful sips, so that no drop of it should hasten by his palate unappreciated. Wallingford did not disturb him in that operation. He had a large appreciation himself of the good things of this world, and the proper way to do them homage.

The doctor took a larger sip, and allowed the delicate liquid to flow gently over his tongue. Wallingford was really a splendid fellow!

“What sort of patent medicine are you going to manufacture?” asked the doctor by way of courtesy, but still “listening” to the taste of the wine.

Wallingford laughed.

“I haven’t just decided as yet,” he announced. “The medicine is only an incident. What we’re going to invest in is advertising.”

“I see,” replied the doctor, laughing in turn.

“Advertising is a great speculation,” went on Wallingford, with a reminiscent smile. “Take Hawkins’ Bitters, for instance; nine per cent. cheap whisky flavored with coffee and licorice, and the balance pure water. Hawkins had closed a fifty-thousand-dollar advertising contract before he was quite sure whether he was going to sell patent medicine or shoe polish. The first thing he decided on was the name, and he had to do that in a hurry to get his advertising placed. Hawkins’ Bitters was familiar to ten million people before a bottle of it had been made. It was only last summer that Hawkins sold out his business for a cool two million and went to Europe.”

“His decoction is terrible stuff,” commented the doctor, more in sorrow than in anger; “but it certainly has a remarkable sale.”

“I should say it has!” agreed Wallingford. “The drug-stores sell it to temperance people by the case, and in the dry states you’ll find every back yard littered with empty Hawkins’ Bitters bottles.”

A half-dozen entertaining stories of the kind Wallingford told his guest, and by the time he was through Doctor Lazzier began himself to have large visions of enormous profits to be made in the patent medicine business. Somehow, the very waistcoat of young J. Rufus seemed, in its breadth and gorgeousness, a guarantee of enormous profits, no matter what business he discussed. But the doctor’s very last remark was upon the sacredness of medical ethics! When he was gone there was a conspicuous silence between Wallingford and his wife for a few minutes, and then she asked:

“Jim, are you actually going to start a patent medicine company?”

“Certainly I am,” he replied.

“And will Doctor Lazzier take stock in it?”

“He certainly will,” he assured her. “I figure him for from ten to twenty-five thousand.”

CHAPTER XXV

IN WHICH WALLINGFORD ORGANIZES THE DOCTOR QUAGG PEERLESS SCIATACATA COMPANY

At the Benson House J. Rufus found Doctor Quagg with a leg propped up on a chair, and himself in a state of profound profanity.

“What’s the matter, Doc?” asked Wallingford.

“Sciatic rheumatism!” howled the martyr. “It’s gettin’ worse every year. Every time I go on the street for a night I know I’m goin’ to suffer. That’s why I keep it up so late and spiel myself hoarse in the neck. I jumped into town just yesterday and got a reader from these city hall pirates. They charged me twenty-five iron men for my license for the week. I go out and make one pitch, and that’s all I get for my twenty-five.”

“Sciatic rheumatism’s a tough dose,” commiserated Wallingford. “Why don’t you take five or six bottles of the Peerless Sciatacata?”

The answer to this was a storm of fervid expletives which needed no diagram. Wallingford, chuckling, sat down and gloated over the doctor’s misery, lighting a big, fat cigar to gloat at better ease. He offered a cigar to Quagg.

“I daresn’t smoke,” swore that invalid.

“And I suppose you daresn’t drink, either,” observed Wallingford. “Well, that doesn’t stop me, you know.”

Wearily the doctor indicated a push-button.

“You’ll have to ring for a boy yourself,” said he.

When the boy came Wallingford ordered a highball.

“And what’s yours, sir?” asked the boy, turning to the doctor.

“Lithia, you bullet-headed nigger!” roared the doctor with a twinge of pain in his leg. “That’s twice to-day I’ve had to tell you I can’t drink anything but lithia. Get out!”

The boy “got,” grinning.

“Seriously, though, old man,” said Wallingford, judging that the doctor had been aggravated long enough, “your condition must be very bad for business, and I’ve come to make you a proposition to go into the manufacture of the Peerless on a large scale.”

The doctor sat in silence for a moment, shaking his head despondently.

“You can’t get spielers,” he declared. “I’ve tried it. Once I made up a lot of the Sciatacata and sent out three men; picked the best I could find that had made good with street-corner pitches in other lines, and their sales weren’t half what mine would be; moreover, they got drunk on the job, didn’t pay for their goods, and were a nuisance any way you took ’em.”

Wallingford laughed.

“I didn’t mean that we should manufacture the priceless remedy for street fakers to handle,” he explained. “I propose to start a big factory to supply drug-stores through the jobbing trade, to spend a hundred thousand dollars in advertising right off the bat, give you stock in the company for the use of your formula, and a big salary to superintend the manufacture. That will do away with your exposure to the night air, stop the increase of your sciatica, and make you more money. Why, Doc, just to begin with we’ll give you ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock.”

It took Doctor Quagg some time to recover from the shock of that much money.

“I’ve heard of such things,” said he gratefully, “but I never supposed it could happen to me.”

“You don’t need to put up a cent,” went on Wallingford. “And I don’t need to put up a cent. We’ll use other people’s money.”

“Where are you going to get your share?” asked the doctor suspiciously. “Are you going to have a salary, too?”

“No,” said Wallingford. “We’ll pay you thirty-five dollars to start with as superintendent of the manufacturing department, but I won’t ask for a salary; I’ll take a royalty of one cent a bottle as manager of the company. I’ll take five thousand dollars’ worth of stock for my services in promotion, and then for selling the stock I’ll take twenty-five per cent. of the par value for all I place, but will take it out in stock at the market rate. We’ll organize for half a million and begin selling stock at fifty cents on the dollar, and I’ll guarantee to raise for us one hundred and twenty-five thousand net cash – twenty-five thousand for manufacturing and one hundred thousand for advertising.”

The doctor drew a long breath.

“If you can do that you’re a wonder,” he declared; “but it don’t seem to me you’re taking enough for yourself. You’re giving me ten thousand dollars and you’re only taking five; you’re giving me thirty-five dollars a week and you’re only taking a cent a bottle. It seems to me the job of organizing and building up such a company is worth as much as the Sciatacata.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” protested J. Rufus modestly. “I’ll get along all right. I’m satisfied. We’ll organize the company to-day.”