Juggernaut: A Veiled Record

Abner Hildreth alone understood, and he was satisfied to be silent.

VIII

As the sun rose after his night of tramping and troubled reminiscence, Edgar Braine resolutely put the past out of his mind, and turned to the future.

"The old Edgar is dead," he said; "let us see what we can do for the new Edgar."

But before attacking that problem, he cleared his head by going out to the little shed that served him for a bath house, filling his home-made shower-bath with fresh water and drenching himself in the chill air of the June morning. When dressed, all the weariness of watching was gone, his pulse was full and his mind clear.

He called across the street and bade the negro caterer bring him a cup of coffee, and not until it came did he permit himself to think of anything more important than the beauty of the morning, and a pet scheme he had of persuading the aldermen of Thebes to offer citizens some sort of inducement to plant more permanent trees among the quick growing and quick decaying cotton-woods of the streets.

When the coffee came, he dismissed all these things, and set himself to work out some problems.

"Hildreth thinks he has made himself my master," he thought, "and Duncan and the Boston crowd are sure of it. They intend to make me serviceable to them, and kindly mean to toss a financial bone or two to me now and then. Thank you very much, gentlemen, but the relation you propose doesn't suit me. I prefer to occupy the place of master myself. It suits my peculiar temperament better."

Saying this in imagination, he began to think earnestly of means.

His first task was to discover as accurately as possible what the plans of the speculative combination were, – to spy out the camp which he meant to conquer.

The levee, which the Common Council was about to cede to the Central Railroad, covered the whole water-front of Thebes available for steamboat-landings, wharfs, grain-elevators, warehouses, and the like. To Thebes, the loss of the ground-rents and wharf-charges would be a great sacrifice, but the value of the privilege in that way was clearly not enough to account for the eagerness of the railroad people to secure it. They had other things in mind-indeed, there had been a reference to other things in Duncan's letter. It was Edgar Braine's first care to find out what those other things were.

He reflected that another railroad – the Northern – was in process of extension to Thebes. Upon consideration, he saw that the grant of the levee to the Central would effectually cut off the Northern from a terminus on the river. "That," he said to himself, "will enormously depress Northern stock, as soon as the effects of the cession are understood. Then, this crowd will buy it up for a song, consolidate with the Central and make a Union Depot at the Point. Yes – I see. That's the first part of the game. Then there's the Southern connection. They mean to build the twenty-five miles of road between here and Columbia on the other side of the river, and probably lease the whole system from that point, south. That will give them complete control of a vast system all centring here in Thebes. They'll establish a railroad ferry across the river, of course. Oh, by Jove!" he cried, starting up in excitement, "There are two sides to this river!"

With that he hastily finished his toilet by putting on a paper collar, thinking, as he did so: "I must take to linen, I suppose, now that I am to be a great financier."

After he was dressed, he hastily wrote a note to Helen, which began with the greeting he sent her every morning, and continued with a few loving words as to their approaching marriage.

"I have leased the little cottage, with the bed of sweet-williams in front, dear – by the way, I expect you to call them sweet Edgars in your splendid loyalty – with an option of buying it at the end of two years. It will be good property to own, but you shall not live there long, dear. I have grown ambitious since you consented to be my partner. I shall make money and reputation, and surround you with every luxury – for which you do not in the least care. I shall place you where your superior intellectual and social gifts will have play. You don't care for that either? Ah! but you will, when you find how greatly your social supremacy will aid me in my more masculine ambitions. When you are my wife, I shall be not twice, but ten times the man I am now. But first, I must teach you to appreciate yourself, dear, and convince you that I am not the infatuated lover you think me, when I tell you how superior you are to other women. Abner Hildreth told me yesterday that I have a remarkable head for business; well, the best justification my vanity has for accepting his opinion, is that I have had the shrewdness to recognize your worth, and to secure you for my partner. That's a joke not to my taste, Helen dear, but I haven't time to write this sheet over. You know I marry you simply because I love you, and that I would not profane my thought of you by associating you, even in my mind, with the things of this world. But I do want to see you shine. I want everybody to know your superiority as well as I do. I am ambitious for you, because I love you and wish to exalt you."

A little later, Edgar Braine, with a gun and game-bag, crossed the river in a skiff. It was his custom to shoot a little in the woods beyond the great stream twice or thrice a week, for exercise and for love of the woodland odors that brought back memories of his boyhood. But he was not thinking of exercise or odors this morning, or of the squirrels with which his sport usually filled his bag. When he landed, he walked immediately to the cabin occupied by Waverley Cooke. There he was greeted by Waverley, a tall and once very fine-looking man, whose broad brow was now marked with blotches which had run over as it were, from his brandy-pimpled nose.

Waverley Cooke was a Virginian, whose dignified courtesy of manner had been inherited from ancestors of the old stately school. In his youth he had been promising far beyond the common; in his young manhood he had quickly won distinction as an advocate whose eloquence was singularly persuasive. All doors to success had seemed open to him once; now, all were forever closed. Drink had mastered him before he reached his thirtieth year, and now at fifty, he was old, broken, and hopeless. His patrimony had been wasted, and he had come some years before to live upon the wild waste lands he owned opposite Thebes.

It had been his hope to develop this property, to build up a city there, which should share with Thebes the prosperity that had always been predicted for that town, and was now at last approaching.

But fortune had tarried too long for Waverly Cooke. Hope deferred had made his heart sick, and sorrow and solitude and drink had made wreck of his once buoyant nature. He had no longer any capacity to hope, and all the plans he had cherished lay dead now in his enfeebled hands.

Among these plans had been one to make the river his toll-gate whenever commerce should begin to cross it. In anticipation of that time he had secured in perpetuity the ferry franchise from his own miles of desolate river front to the shore where Thebes had then stood, a half-drowned hamlet waiting to become a city.

In the conviction that some day railroads from the north would meet railroads from the south at this place, he had seized upon this strategic point; this ferry franchise should make him rich, while the building of a town upon his land – it must be there, because there alone was a landing possible for many miles – should make his wealth princely.

But Waverley Cooke had not been able to wait, and all that remained of his project was the plying of his skiff – sometimes rowed by his own hands, and sometimes by a negro man, once his slave, who had remained his faithful attendant in his decay, – to carry infrequent passengers across the stream for hire.

It was to purchase this ferry franchise that Edgar Braine had crossed the river that morning. When the matter was mentioned to Cooke, a sad, dreamy look came into the poor fellow's face, and for a time he said nothing. He poured and drank some undiluted spirit – courteously motioning an invitation to his guest, for he could not speak – and then passed into the rear room of his house.

After a few moments he returned, erect, and with a touch of his old stateliness in his manner, and said: —

"Pardon me, Braine, but it is not a pleasant thing for a man to contemplate a wrecked life, when that life is his own. I quite understand the value this franchise will have some day, and until this hour I have hoped myself to reap the advantage of its possession. It was weak and foolish to cherish such a delusion, but until now I have never frankly admitted to myself the completeness of the ruin I have wrought. I know now that if there were a dozen railroads seeking ferry accommodations here, I could not arrange to provide them. I should have to go to Thebes to negotiate for the means, and I should get helplessly drunk there and part with everything to the first man that found out I had anything. I would rather sell to you, an honest man, and better still, a brave one. I have loved you with a knightly admiration, boy, ever since that affair with Summers. We Virginians cherish our inherited respect for personal courage, Braine. We hold it the chief virtue of manhood. This money-grubbing age laughs at our chivalric folly and mocks it; but our chivalric folly scorns this money-grubbing age, and so we are quits with it."

After a little further conversation, the wrecked Virginian took another drink, and said:

"Why not face the facts? That is my master" – pointing to the bottle. "I drink whiskey before breakfast; I get up in the night to drink it. I cannot go on in that way much longer, and I should go off at once if I quitted it. It's a sorry thing to joke about, isn't it? No matter. What I have in mind is this: I'm a wreck. I shall never do any good to myself or anybody else. My wife is buried out there in the swamp that poisoned her with its miasms. My children lie by her side. There remains for me only a brief period of wretchedness, and then death and oblivion. Why should I stay here in this pestilential wilderness? Why not sell out the whole thing to you, – land – there's seven thousand acres of it – all worthless at present – ferry franchise, railroad charter, and all? You are young and vigorous. You will make something of it. You will realize my dreams, and I have a sentimental pleasure in thinking of that. Sentiment is out of fashion, I know, but never mind. I'm out of fashion too."

"But I haven't money enough for so large a transaction, Mr. Cooke," said Braine.

"Money? It won't take much. If you were to pay me a thousand dollars now, or five thousand, do you know what I would do? I would go over to Thebes, get drunk and die probably. What would be the use of giving me money in large sums? I can't be helped in that way. But I'll tell you how you can buy me out, and at the same time do the best thing there is to be done for me. The home of my fathers in Virginia is vacant – abandoned as worthless since the war. The man who owns it will let me have the use of it, he says, for a song, and the offer has brought a great longing over me. I want to go home again."

Here the poor fellow broke down completely, tears streaming from his eyes and his utterance choking. Braine turned and walked apart in respectful sympathy. After a time he returned, and Cooke, having recovered himself, resumed:

"I want to take my wife and children out of the swamp and bury them in the little graveyard back of the garden at home, where the sweet-briar roses grow. I want to sit there by them every day till I die, trying to tell them how I repent me of my sin that ruined their lives. Who knows? Perhaps the wife's spirit might smile upon me then, as she smiled when she believed in me. Perhaps the little ones might remember in their graves the stories I used to tell them, and learn to love me again. I want to live in the old home till I die, and I want nothing else in the world. Edgar Braine, you can make that possible. Do it, and all these accursed possessions of mine, which will be golden possibilities to you, are yours!"

Braine was too deeply moved to speak for a time. Broken down drunkard that this man was, he had a certain nobility of character yet – it was all that remained to him of his inheritance from his fathers. It was a reviving glow of the old inherited courage and love of truth that prompted him thus to face his own condition, and assume the responsibility of his folly without an attempt to excuse or palliate the wrong he had done.

"What do you want, Mr. Cooke?" at last Braine asked.

"I want to go back to the old home to die. I want you to pay my passage and theirs" – motioning toward the graves – "and to pay me enough every month after I get there to provide me with food and clothes – and this," seizing the bottle and hurling it into the corner angrily. "You are not to send the money to me, mind. That would end all at once. You are to send it to some one I will name. A hundred dollars every month will be ample, and it won't be for long, as your debt is to cease with my death. Will you do this? Oh! will you do this, Braine? Will you have pity on me, and give me one breath of the old air, one look at the old hills, one little rest under the old trees, before I die?"

In the great longing that had taken possession of his imagination, the broken man was in panic lest his proposal should be refused.

"The land will be valuable some day, Braine, and so will the ferry franchise. It is absolute and exclusive, and the railroad commerce of this region must cross the river here. Then there is the railroad franchise."

"What is that?" asked Braine. "You mentioned it before, but I do not understand."

"Why, I have a special charter, granted years ago, for a railroad from here to Columbia – and on to the State line, for that matter, but as there is already a line from Columbia south, it is this twenty-five miles that are important. The charter will be very valuable whenever anybody is ready to build the connecting link, as they will be some day, because it grants valuable, exclusive privileges which can't be had under the present constitution. I drew the charter myself with an eye to the future, and legislatures in those days were ready to grant anything, in their eagerness to encourage railroad-building. I can't recall all the legal points now – my head isn't clear – but I'll show you the charter. You'll see for yourself that whoever builds any railroad to connect the lines centring at Thebes with the Southern system, is absolutely obliged to have this charter."

He took the document from his desk, and Braine read it through carefully. Then he said:

"Mr. Cooke, this is a very valuable piece of paper."

"Then you will grant what I have asked?" eagerly interjected the other, almost in accents of prayer.

"I will if you insist. But as an honest man, or one who tries to be tolerably honest" – he remembered his suicide – "I cannot accept your offer without telling you that you are giving greatly more than you imagine. This twenty-five miles of road must be built, and men of enormous means will build it."

"Will they buy the charter on my terms, and now? A month hence it may be too late."

"They would buy it now, and on better terms than I am able to offer, if they knew of its existence," said Braine.

"I tell you there are no better terms possible. I won't have money paid me for it. I should get drunk and die, and never get home with them," again pointing to the graves. "Now listen to me, Edgar Braine. I must start home in three days, with them, or I must drown myself. I cannot live if this thing is not carried out. It is impossible to make better terms for me. All other terms would be worse, infinitely worse."

"Could I not execute a mortgage to you for a sum fairly representing the worth of this?" holding up the paper.

"No! I should trade it off for liquor and die the sooner. I tell you I want one thing and no other. There is nobody to come after me to inherit anything I might leave."

"Very well. Take to-day to think over the matter. You're excited now. If you adhere to your proposal to-morrow, I will accept it."

"No, no, no! It must be now, I tell you. I will execute the papers now, and begin to get ready for home!"

And so it was arranged. Excitement seemed to clear the head of the inebriate, and though his hand trembled, he wrote without a pause until every detail of the transaction was covered in legal form. Then he directed the negro boy, Sam, to harness the horse to the rickety buggy, and drove his visitor to the county seat, ten miles away, where the necessary legal forms of acknowledgment, record, etc., were completed.