Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905

“The mine would have been my nephew’s at my death, naturally, Richards,” Mr. Wade explained, with some dignity. “He is coming into his own a little sooner, that is all. And if he chooses to remain – ”

“As he does,” Hastings laughed, genially, “and to learn all about his mine from its competent manager.”

Mr. Richards’ face did not express any extreme joy.

“If you’ll take my advice, you’ll go home with your uncle and leave your mine in my hands, Mr. Hastings,” he said, bluffly. “It’s a rough country, and hard, dangerous work – work that you don’t know anything about, and that it will take you years to learn. And – I beg your pardon, but I’ll speak plainly – while you are learning you’ll want to give orders, and you’ll make bad mistakes – expensive mistakes. They’re easy to make and hard to right. Not that it will be your fault. I should if I tried to run Mr. Wade’s bank. If you want your mine to keep on being a good paying proposition, leave it in the hands of men who made it one. Isn’t that business, Mr. Wade? I’ve satisfied you, haven’t I?” His manner had a certain brusque appeal.

“Perfectly,” said Mr. Wade, suavely.

Then he looked at Hastings. He was standing by the table heaped with books and magazines, and there was something in the alertness of his virile figure, well poised enough for a soldier; something in the lines of his well-cut features, something in the steadiness and frankness of the cool gray eyes, that suggested not only the strength of youth, but the strength of the spirit. It came to Mr. Wade suddenly that he was going to miss him, that the young fellow ought to have a chance to live with his own class.

“And my nephew may suit himself,” Mr. Wade went on, steadily. “The mine is his without condition” – he spoke the words slowly – “and if he chooses to leave it in your hands, and return East with me, he is quite at liberty to do so.”

Hastings smiled at him cheerfully.

“I shall stay, of course,” he said, decidedly. “But I’ll try not to make my mining education too expensive.”

“I’ve got a carriage outside,” said Mr. Richards, rising abruptly. “I s’pose you’d like to drive around town and out to the mine, to look around a little. Then if you’ll take dinner with me at the Raegan House, you’ll have quite an idea what it’s like out here.”

Mr. Livingstone Wade surveyed the landau into which he stepped with scant favor; and the look which he gave to the ragged darky who held the reins was only equaled by the one he bestowed on the two battered equines who were to serve as their means of locomotion.

As they swung into the main street of the little town, Hastings laughed with a perfectly genuine amusement.

“I might open an architect’s office here, on the side,” he said. “They certainly need it.”

Mr. Wade’s eyes were upon an up-to-date trap, drawn by a well-matched, high-stepping pair. The middle-aged man who was driving turned on them a look of amused curiosity as they passed.

“Whom do those horses belong to?” demanded Mr. Wade, sharply.

“Belong to Carrington,” said Richards, shortly. “That was his man. That’s his house at the other end of the street – that big one on the hill.” He jerked his head to indicate that it was back of them, and they turned to see it. It had a large, comfortable, hospitable look, more suggestive of the South than of the North.

“The hotel’s good enough for me,” said Richards, dryly.

Mr. Wade wondered why this sentiment, which had seemed so admirable to him in New York, lost its flavor here on the ground.

As they passed a blacksmith’s shop, the smith was shoeing a Kentucky thoroughbred, who looked at them with an airy unconcern.

“Carrington’s,” said Richards to Mr. Wade’s uplifted eyebrows.

The expression on Mr. Wade’s face was a curious one. Your tourist in Europe now and then wears its twin, on discovering that the United States is renting a second-rate building for an embassy, when other governments own pretentious ones.

“Tell you what,” said Hastings, suddenly. “I think I shall buy a neat little touring car to run around here. Pretty bad grades, but there are half a dozen makes that could take them easily.”

Mr. Wade looked at him with the ever-growing conviction that he was the kind of nephew to have. In spite of his conservatism, he had adopted the auto as he had the telephone.

“Quite right, Laurence,” he said, complacently. “When you order the one you prefer, have the bill sent to me.”

“Going to import a show-fure?” queried Richards, with ironic pleasantry.

Hastings shook his head.

“Never saw one I couldn’t run yet,” he said, cheerfully, “and when I do I’ll send it back to the factory as defective.”

“If he’ll just put in his time running it, it’s all I’ll ask of him,” communed Richards with himself.

* * * * *

At two o’clock of that day Mr. Wade had concluded that all he had ever heard of the enormities of the West was far below the actual fact.

His first grievance had been the dilapidated conveyance; his second the fact that Richards, who for reasons of his own had not tried to make the expedition a bed of roses, had insisted on his getting out a dozen times to see certain offices, the shaft house, and a number of other buildings, about whose use he was extremely hazy. And these pilgrimages had necessitated his walking through fine red dust, which not only reduced his immaculate footgear to its lowest terms, but bordered the bottom of his pale gray trouser legs with a deep red band, which Richards assured him was indelible.

But the crowning enormity came with the dinner at Raegan’s Hotel, which invitation Mr. Wade had felt he could hardly refuse in courtesy.

At the moment they entered the dining room Richards was called to the phone.

“Take these gentlemen down to my table, Maggie,” he said to the head waitress as he turned away.

Mr. Wade regarded this young woman disapprovingly. The curve of her pompadour and the curves of her figure were too aggressively spherical. That her overgenerous bulk could be compressed to the dimensions of her waist seemed to indicate that whalebone had been unduly overlooked in modern mechanics. It hinted, too, though not to Mr. Wade, of a forcefulness of spirit which, seeing in a handkerchief-sized, knife-pleated white apron a legitimate adornment, adjusted the physical, Spartan-like, to its requirements. But Mr. Wade’s mere passive and impersonal dislike quickened to an active rage in that awful moment when she tucked her arm comfortably in his, and promenaded him the length of the dining room to an untidy looking table already occupied by a portly Hibernian, who was engaged in extensive molar exploration with a diminutive wooden pick.

“Friends of Mr. Richards, Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” she said, glibly, and Mr. Wade felt himself released from her muscular arm only to feel the front of a chair pressed with energetic purpose against the back of his knees.

As certain muscles automatically relaxed to enable him to be seated, his stunned sense of propriety recovered consciousness enough to enable him to decide that of all outrages ever perpetrated on a gentleman, this last was the worst.

“Mr. Richards’ friends are my friends,” responded Mr. O’Shaughnessy, cordially.

Mr. Wade looked at Hastings, who was seating himself with outer sobriety and inward hilarity. He comforted himself by taking that sobriety for disgust.

“I suppose you are not out here for your health?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy opined, genially.

“No,” said Mr. Wade, icily.

“What line ar-re you in?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy pursued.

“I fail to understand you,” said Mr. Wade, stiffly.

“What house are you thravelin’ for? What are you selling?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy explained.

That he, Mr. Livingstone Wade, should be taken for a traveling salesman!

“I am a banker,” said Mr. Wade. He felt it due to himself to say as much as that.

“Faro and that face of yours ar-re twins the world over,” said Mr. O’Shaughnessy, genially, closing one eye and looking intelligently at Hastings through the other. Then he cast the toothpick on the floor. “Have a cigar?” he said, hospitably, throwing a couple carelessly on the table as he rose to depart. “Drop in and see me if you get thirsty while you’re here. The palm garden. Two doors up. The house is good for a few yet.”

He stopped to joke with the head waitress a moment on his way out.

Richards, returning, decided that Mr. Wade was pretty well fagged. He had become monosyllabic.

The catsup bottle in the middle of the table, the greasy, lukewarm soup in stone-china bowls, the tasteless profusion of canned vegetables, the dubious-looking water, and the muddy mixture, bitter from long boiling, which the Raegan House called coffee, were only additional affronts to a man already at the limit of his endurance.