Kitabı oku: «Young Wallingford», sayfa 11
CHAPTER XIX
WHEREIN BLAKEVILLE HAS OPPORTUNITY TO BECOME A GREAT ART CENTER
The next morning Wallingford requisitioned the services of Bob and the little sorrel team again, and drove out to Jonas Bubble’s swamp. Arrived there he climbed the fence, and, taking a sliver of fence rail with him, gravely prodded into the edge of the swamp in various places, hauling it up in each case dripping with viscid black mud, which he examined with the most minute care, dropping tiny drops upon the backs of clean cards and spreading them out smoothly with the tip of his finger, while he looked up into the sky inquiringly, not one gesture of his conduct lost upon the curious Bob.
When he climbed back into the buggy, Bob, finding it impossible longer to restrain his quivering curiosity, asked him:
“What’s it good for?”
“I can’t tell you just yet,” said Wallingford kindly, “but if it is what I think it is, Bob, I’ve made a great discovery, one that I am sure will not only increase my wealth but add greatly to the riches of Blakeville. Do you know where I could find Jonas Bubble at this hour?”
“Down at the mill, sure.”
“Drive down there.”
As they drove past Jonas Bubble’s house they saw Miss Fannie on the back porch, in an old wrapper, peeling potatoes, and heard the sharp voice of the second Mrs. Bubble scolding her.
“Say,” said Bob, “if that old rip was my stepmother I’d poke her head-first into that swamp back yonder.”
Wallingford shook his head.
“She’d turn it black,” he gravely objected.
“Why, it is black,” protested Bob, opening his eyes in bewilderment.
In reply to this Wallingford merely chuckled. Bob, regarding him in perplexity for a while, suddenly saw that this was a joke, and on the way to the mill he snickered a score of times. Queer chap, this Wallingford; rich, no doubt, and smart as a whip; and something mysterious about him, too!
Wallingford found Jonas Bubble in flour-sifted garments in his office, going over a dusty file of bills.
“Mr. Bubble,” said he, “I have been down to your swamp and have investigated its possibilities. I am now prepared, since I have secured the right to purchase this land, to confide to you the business search in which I have for some time been engaged, and which now, I hope, is concluded. Do you know, Mr. Bubble, the valuable deposit I think I have found in my swamp?”
“No!” ejaculated Bubble, stricken solemn by the confidential tone. “What is it?”
Wallingford took a long breath, swelling out his already broad chest, and, leaning over most impressively, tapped his compelling finger upon Jonas Bubble’s knee. Then said he, with almost tragic earnestness:
“Black Mud!”
Jonas Bubble drew back astounded, eying Wallingford with affrighted incredulity. He had thought this young man sane.
“Black – ” he gasped; “black – ” and then hesitated.
“Mud!” finished Wallingford for him, more impressively than before. “High and low, far and near, Mr. Bubble, I have searched for a deposit of this sort. Wherever there was a swamp I have been, but never until I came to Blakeville did I find what I believe to be the correct quality of black mud.”
“Black mud,” repeated Jonas Bubble meaninglessly, but awed in spite of himself.
“Etruscan black mud,” corrected Wallingford. “The same rare earth out of which the world famous Etruscan pottery is manufactured in the little village of Etrusca, near Milan, Italy. The smallest objects of this beautiful jet-black pottery retail in this country from ten dollars upward. With your permission I am going to express some samples of this deposit to the world-famous pottery designer, Signor Vittoreo Matteo, formerly in charge of the Etruscan Pottery, but who is now in Boston waiting with feverish impatience for me to find a suitable deposit of this rare black mud. If I have at last found it, Mr. Bubble, I wish to congratulate you and Blakeville, as well as myself, upon the acquisition of an enterprise which will not only reflect vast credit on your charming and progressive little town, but will bring it a splendid accession of wealth.”
Mr. Bubble rose from his chair and shook hands with young Wallingford in great, though pompous, emotion.
“My son,” said he, “go right ahead. Take all of it you want – that is,” he hastily corrected himself, “all you need for experimental purposes.” For, he reflected, there was no need to waste any of the rare and valuable Etruscan black mud. “I think I’ll go with you.”
“I’d be pleased to have you,” said Wallingford, as, indeed, he was.
On the way, Wallingford stopped at Hen Moozer’s General Merchandise Emporium and Post-Office, where he bought a large tin pail with a tight cover, a small tin pail and a long-handled garden trowel which he bent at right angles; and seven people walked off of Hen Moozer’s porch into the middle of the street to see the town magnate and the resplendent stranger, driven by the elated Bob Ranger, whirl down Maple Street toward Jonas Bubble’s swamp.
Arrived there, who so active in direction as Jonas Bubble?
“Bob,” he ordered, protruding his girth at least three inches beyond its normal position, “hitch those horses and jump over in the field here with us. Mr. Wallingford, you will want this sample from somewhere near the center of the swamp. Bob, back yonder beyond that clump of bushes you will find that old flatboat we had right after the big rainy season. Hunt around down there for a long pole and pole out some place near the middle. Take this shovel and dig down and get mud enough to fill these two buckets.”
Bob stood unimpressed. It was not an attractive task.
“And Bob,” added Wallingford mildly, “here’s a dollar, and I know where there’s another.”
“Sure,” said Bob with the greatest of alacrity, and he hurried back to where the old flatboat, water-soaked and nearly as black as the swamp upon which it rested, was half submerged beyond the clump of bushes. When, after infinite labor, he had pushed that clumsy craft afloat upon the bosom of the shallow swamp, Mr. Bubble was on the spot with infinite direction. He told Bob, shouting from the shore, just where to proceed and how, down to the handling of each trowelful of dripping mud, and even to the emptying of each small pailful into the large pail.
“I don’t know exactly how I’ll get this boxed for shipping,” hinted Wallingford, as Bob carried the pail laboriously back to the buggy.
“Right down at the mill,” invited Mr. Bubble with great cordiality. “I’ll have my people look after it for you.”
“That’s very kind of you,” replied Wallingford. “I’ll give you the address,” and upon the back of one of his own cards he wrote: Sig. Vittoreo Matteo, 710 Marabon Building, Boston, Mass., U. S. A., care Horace G. Daw.
That night he wrote a careful letter of explanation to Horace G. Daw.
Two weeks to wait. Oh, well, Wallingford could amuse himself by working up a local reputation. It was while he was considering this, upon the following day, that a farmer with three teeth drove up in a dilapidated spring-wagon drawn by a pair of beautiful bay horses, and stopped in front of Jim Ranger’s livery and sales stable to talk hay. Wallingford, sitting in front of the hotel in lazy meditation, walked over and examined the team with a critical eye. They were an exquisite match, perfect in every limb, with manes and tails and coats of that peculiar silken sheen belonging to perfect health and perfect care.
“Very nice team you have,” observed Wallingford.
“Finest match team anywhere,” agreed Abner Follis, plucking at his gray goatee and mouthing a straw, “an’ I make a business o’ raisin’ thoroughbreds. Cousins, they are, an’ without a blemish on ’em. An’ trot – you’d ought to see that team trot.”
“What’ll you take for them?” asked Wallingford.
The response of Abner Follis was quick and to the point. He kept a careful appraisement upon all his live stock.
“Seven hundred and fifty,” said he, naming a price that allowed ample leeway for dickering.
It was almost a disappointment to him that Wallingford produced his wallet, counted over the exact amount that had been asked, and said briefly:
“Unhitch them.”
“Well!” said Abner, slowly taking the money and throwing away his straw in petulance. It was dull and uninteresting to have a bargain concluded so quickly.
Wallingford, however, knew what he was about. Within an hour everybody in town knew of his purchase. Speculation that had been mildly active concerning him now became feverish. He was a rich nabob with money to throw away; had so much money that he would not even dicker in a horse deal – and this was the height of human recklessness in Blakeville. Wallingford, purchasing Jim Ranger’s new buggy and his best set of harness, drove to the Bubbles’, the eyed of all observers, but before he had opened the gate Mrs. Bubble was on the porch.
“Jonas ain’t at home,” she shrilled down at him.
“Yes, I know,” replied Wallingford; “but I came to see Miss Fannie.”
“She’s busy,” said Mrs. Bubble with forbidding loftiness. “She’s in the kitchen getting dinner.”
Wallingford, however, strode quite confidently up the walk, and by the time he reached the porch Miss Fannie was in the door, removing her apron.
“What a pretty turnout!” she exclaimed.
“It’s a beauty,” agreed Wallingford. “I just bought it from Abner Follis.”
She smiled.
“I bet he beat you in the bargain.”
“So long as I’m satisfied,” retorted Wallingford, smiling back at her, “I don’t see why we shouldn’t all be happy. Come on and take the first ride in it.”
She glanced at her stepmother dubiously.
“I’m very busy,” she replied; “and I’d have to change my dress.”
“You look good enough just as you are,” he insisted. “Come right on. Mrs. Bubble can finish the dinner. I’ll bet she’s a better cook, anyhow,” and he laughed cordially.
The remark was intended as a compliment, but Mrs. Bubble took distinct umbrage. This was, without doubt, a premeditated slur. Of course he knew that she had once been Mr. Bubble’s cook!
“Fannie can’t go,” she snapped.
Wallingford walked straight up to Mrs. Bubble, beaming down upon her from his overawing height; and for just one affrighted moment Fannie feared that he intended to uptilt her stepmother’s chin, or make some equally familiar demonstration. Instead, he only laughed down into that lady’s belligerent eyes.
“Yes, she can,” he insisted with large persuasiveness. “You were young once yourself, Mrs. Bubble, and not so very long ago.”
It was not what he said, but his jovial air of secret understanding, that made Mrs. Bubble flush and laugh nervously and soften.
“Oh, I reckon I can get along,” she said.
Miss Fannie, with a wondering glance at Wallingford, had already flown up-stairs, and J. Rufus set himself deliberately to be agreeable to Mrs. Bubble. When Fannie came tripping down again in an incredibly short space of time, having shaken herself out of one frock and into another with an expedition which surprised even herself, she found her stepmother actually giggling! And when the young couple drove away in the bright, shining new rig behind the handsome bays, Mrs. Bubble watched after them with something almost like wistfulness. She had been young herself, once – and not so very long ago!
Opposite the Bubble swamp Wallingford stopped for a moment.
“I hope to be a very near neighbor of yours,” said he, waving his hand out toward the wonderful deposit of genuine Etruscan black mud. “Did your father tell you about the pottery studios which may be built here?”
“Not a thing,” she confessed with a slightly jealous laugh. “Papa never tells us anything at home. We’ll hear it on the street, no doubt, as we usually do.”
“Your father is a most estimable man, but I fear he makes a grave mistake in not telling you about things,” declared Wallingford. “I believe in the value of a woman’s intuition, and if I were as closely related to you as your father I am sure I should confide all my prospects to you.”
Miss Fannie gave a little inward gasp. That serious tide in the talk, fraught with great possibilities, for which every girl longs and which every girl dreads, was already setting ashore.
“You might get fooled,” she said. “Father don’t think any woman has very much gumption, and least of all me, since – since he married again.”
“I understand,” said Wallingford gently, and drove on. “Just to show you how much differently I look at things from your father, I’m going to tell you all about the black pottery project and see what you think of it.”
Thereupon he explained to her in minute detail, a wealth of which came to him on the spur of the moment, the exact workings of the Etruscan pottery art. He painted for her, in the gray of stone and the yellow of face brick and the red of tiling, the beautiful studio buildings that were to be erected yonder facing the swamp; he showed her through cozy, cheerfully lighted apartments in those studios, where the best trained artists of Europe, under the direction of the wizard, Vittoreo Matteo, should execute ravishments of Etruscan black pottery; he showed her, as the bays pranced on, connoisseurs and collectors coming from all over the country to visit the Blakeville studios, and carrying away priceless gems of the ceramic art at incalculable prices!
The girl drank in all these details with thirsty avidity.
“It’s splendid! Perfectly grand!” she assured him with vast enthusiasm, and in her memory was stored every precious word that this genius had said; and they were stored in logical order, ready to reproduce on the slightest provocation, which was precisely the result which Wallingford had intended to produce.
It was nearing noon now, and making a détour by the railway road they drove up in front of the mill with the spanking bays just as Jonas Bubble was coming out of his office to go to dinner. Hilariously they invited him into the carriage, and in state drove him home.
Wallingford very wisely kept away from the Bubble home that afternoon and that evening, and by the next morning every woman in town had told all her men-folk about the vast Etruscan black pottery project!
CHAPTER XX
WALLINGFORD BEGINS TO UTILIZE THE WONDERFUL ETRUSCAN BLACK MUD
Wallingford was just going in to dinner when a tall, thin-visaged young lady, who might have been nearing thirty, but insisted on all the airs and graces of twenty, came boldly up to the Atlas Hotel in search of him, and, by her right of being a public character, introduced herself. She was Miss Forsythe, principal over one other teacher in the Blakeville public school; moreover, she was president of the Women’s Culture Club!
“It is about the latter that I came to see you, Mr. Wallingford,” she said, pushing back a curl which had been carefully trained to be wayward. “The Women’s Culture Club meets this coming Saturday afternoon at the residence of Mrs. Moozer. It just happens that we are making an exhaustive study of the Italian Renaissance, and we have nothing, positively nothing, about the renaissance of Italian ceramics! I beg of you, Mr. Wallingford, I plead with you, to be our guest upon that afternoon and address us upon Etruscan Pottery.”
Wallingford required but one second to adjust himself to this new phase. This was right where he lived. He could out-pretend anybody who ever made pretensions to having a pretense. He expanded his broad chest and beamed.
He knew but little about art, being only the business man of the projected American Etruscan Black Pottery Studios, but he would be more than pleased to tell them that little. He would, in fact, be charmed!
“You don’t know how kind, how good you are, and what a treat your practical talk will be, I am sure,” gurgled Miss Forsythe, biting first her upper lip and then her lower to make them redder, and then, still gurgling, she swept away, leaving Wallingford chuckling.
Immediately after lunch he went over to the telegraph office and wired to the most exclusive establishment of its sort in New York:
Express three black pottery vases Etruscan preferred but most expensive you have one eighteen inches high and two twelve inches high am wiring fifty dollars to insure transportation send balance C. O. D.
Not the least of J. Rufus’ smile was that inserted clause, “Etruscan preferred.” He had not the slightest idea that there was such pottery as Etruscan in the world, but his sage conclusion was that the big firm would think they had overlooked something; and his other clause, “most expensive you have,” would insure proper results. That night he wrote to Blackie Daw:
Whatever you do, don’t buy vase either twelve or eighteen inches high. Send one about nine.
Saturday morning the package came, and the excess bill was two hundred and forty-five dollars, exclusive of express charges, all of which J. Rufus cheerfully paid. He had that box delivered unopened to the residence of Mrs. Henry Moozer. That afternoon he dressed himself with consummate care, his gray frock suit and his gray bow tie, his gray waistcoat and his gray spats, by some subtle personality he threw about them, conveying delicately the idea of an ardent art amateur, but an humble one, because he felt himself insufficiently gifted to take part in actual creation.
Was Miss Forsythe there? Miss Forsythe was there, in her pink silk, with cascade after cascade of ruffled flounces to take away the appalling height and thinness of her figure. Was Mrs. Moozer there? Dimly discernible, yes, backed into a corner and no longer mistress of her own house, though ineffectually trying to assert herself above a determined leadership. Also were there Mrs. Ranger, who was trying hard to learn to dote; Mrs. Priestly, who prided herself on a marked resemblance to Madame Melba, and had a high C which shattered chandeliers; and Mrs. Hispin, whose troublesome mustache in nowise interfered with her mad passion for the collection of antiques, which, fortunately consisting of early chromos, could be purchased cheaply in the vicinity of Blakeville; and Mrs. Bubble, whose specialty was the avoidance of all subjects connected with domestic science. Many other equally earnest and cultured ladies flocked about J. Rufus, as bees around a buckwheat blossom, until the capable and masterly president, by a careful accident arranging her skirts so that one inch of silken hose was visible, tapped her little silver gavel for order.
There ensued the regular reports of committees, ponderous and grave in their frivolity; there ensued unfinished business – relating to a disputed sum of thirty-nine cents; there ensued new business – relating to a disputed flaw in the constitution; there ensued a discussion of scarcely repressed acidity upon the right of the president to interfere in committee work; and then the gurgling president – with many a reference to the great masters in Italian art, with a wide digression into the fields of ceramics in general and of Italian ceramics in particular, with a complete history of the plastic arts back to the ooze stage of geological formation – introduced the speaker of the day.
J. Rufus, accepting gracefully his prominence, bowed extravagantly three times in response to the Chautauqua salute, and addressed those nineteen assembled ladies with a charming earnestness which did vast credit to himself and to the Italian ceramic renaissance. He invented for them on the spot a history of Etruscan pottery, a process of making it, a discovery of the wonderful Etruscan under-glaze, and the eye-moistening struggles and triumphs of the great Vittoreo Matteo from obscurity as a poor little barefooted Italian shepherd boy who was caught constructing wonderful figures out of plain mud.
He regretted very much that he had been unable to secure, at such short notice, samples of the famous Etruscan pottery which this same Vittoreo Matteo had made famous, but he had secured the next best thing, and with renewed apologies to Mrs. Moozer, who had kindly consented to have a litter made upon her carpet, he would unpack the vases which had come that morning. With a fine eye for stage effect, Wallingford had had the covers of the boxes loosened, but had not had the excelsior removed. Now he had the box brought in and placed it upon the table, and then, from amid their careful wrappings, the precious vases were lifted!
“Ah!” – “How ex-quisite!” – “Bee-yewtiful!” Such was the chorus of the enraptured culture club.
Wallingford, smiling in calm triumph, was able to assure the almost fainting worshipers that these were but feeble substitutes for the exquisite creations that were shortly to be turned out in the studios that were to make Blakeville famous. Yes, he might now promise them that definitely! The matter was no longer one of conjecture. That very morning he had received an epoch-making letter from the great Vittoreo Matteo! This letter he read. It fairly exuded with tears – warm, emotional, Latin tears of joy – over the discovery of this priceless, this glorious, this beatific black mud! Already the great Vittoreo was at work upon the sample sent him, modeling a vase after one of his own famous shapes of Etrusca. It would soon be completed, he would have it fired, and then he would send it to his dear friend and successful manager, so that he might himself judge how inexpressibly more than perfect was the wonderful mud of Blakeville.
Mr. Wallingford was himself transported to nearly as ecstatic heights over the prospect as the redoubtable Vittoreo Matteo, and as a memento of this auspicious day he begged to present the largest of these vases to the Women’s Culture Club, to be in the keeping of its charming president. One of the smaller vases he begged to present to the hostess of the afternoon in token of the delightful hour he had spent in that house. The other he retained to present to a very gracious matron, the hospitality of whose home he had already enjoyed, and with whose eminent husband he had already held the most pleasant business relations; whereat Mrs. Jonas Bubble fairly wriggled lest her confusion might not be seen or correctly interpreted.
Close upon the frantic applause which followed these graceful gifts, pale tea and pink wafers were served by the Misses Priestly, Hispin, Moozer and Bubble, and the function was over except for the fluttering. Inadvertently, almost apparently quite inadvertently, when he went away, J. Rufus left behind him the crumpled C. O. D. bill which he had held in his hand while talking. That night Blakeville, from center to circumference, was talking of nothing but the prices of Etruscan vases. Why, these prices were not only stupendous, they were impossible – and yet there was the receipted bill! To think that anybody would pay real money in such enormous dole for mere earthen vases! It was preposterous; it was incredible – and yet there was the bill! Visions of wealth never before grasped by the minds of the citizens of Blakeville began to loom in the immediate horizon of every man, woman and child, and over all these visions of wealth hovered the beneficent figure of J. Rufus Wallingford.
On Sunday J. Rufus, in solemn black frock-coat and shiny top hat, attended church. From church he went to the Bubble home, by the warm invitation of Jonas, for chicken dinner, and in the afternoon he took Miss Fannie driving behind the handsome bays. While she was making ready, however, he took Jonas Bubble in the rig and drove down to the swamp, where they paused in solemn, sober contemplation of that vast and beautiful expanse of Etruscan black mud. Mr. Bubble had, of course, seen the glowing letter of Vittoreo Matteo shortly after its arrival, and he was not unprepared for J. Rufus’ urgency.
“To-morrow,” said J. Rufus, as he swept his hand out over the swamp with pride of possession, “to-morrow I shall exercise my option; to-morrow I shall begin drainage operations; to-morrow I shall order plans prepared for the first wing of the Blakeville Etruscan Studios,” and he pointed out a spot facing the Bubble mansion. “Only one thing worries me. In view of the fact that we shall have a large pay-roll and handle considerable of ready cash, I regret that Blakeville has no bank. Moreover, it grates upon me that the thriving little city of my adoption must depend on a smaller town for all its banking facilities. Why don’t you start a bank, Mr. Bubble, and become its president? If you will start a subscription list to-morrow I’ll take five thousand dollars’ worth of stock myself.”
To become the president of a bank! That was an idea which had not previously presented itself to the pompous Mr. Bubble, but now that it had arrived it made his waistband uncomfortable. Well, the town needed a bank, and a bank was always profitable. His plain civic duty lay before him. President Bubble, of the Blakeville Bank; or, much better still, the Bubble Bank! Why not? He was already the most important man in the community, and his name carried the most weight. President Bubble, of the Bubble Bank! By George! It was a good idea!
Meanwhile, a clean, clear deed and title to forty acres of Jonas Bubble’s black mud was recorded in the Blake County court-house, and J. Rufus went to the city, returning with a discreet engineer, who surveyed and prodded and waded, and finally installed filtration boxes and a pumping engine; and all Blakeville came down to watch in solemn silence the monotonous jerks of the piston which lifted water from the swamp faster than it flowed in. For hours they stood, first on one foot and then on the other, watching the whir of the shining fly-wheel, the exhaust of the steam, the smoke of the stack, and the gushing of the black water through the big rubber nozzle to the stream which had heretofore merely trickled beneath the rickety wooden road culvert. It watched in awed silence the slow recession of waters, the appearance of unexpected little lakes and islands and slimy streams in the shining black bottom of that swamp.
On the very day, too, that this work was installed, there came from Vittoreo Matteo, in Boston, the Etruscan vase. Wallingford, opening it in the privacy of his own room, was intensely relieved to find that Blackie had bought one of entirely different shape and style of decoration from those he had already shown, and he sent it immediately to the house of Mrs. Hispin, where that week’s meeting of the Women’s Culture Club was being held. He followed it with his own impressive self to show them the difference between the high-grade Etruscan ware and the inferior ware he had previously exhibited. He placed the two pieces side by side for comparison. Though they had been made by the same factory, the ladies of the Women’s Culture Club one and all could see the enormous difference in the exquisiteness of the under-glaze. The Etruscan ware was infinitely superior, and just think! this beautiful vase was made from Blakeville’s own superior article of black mud!
Up in Hen Moozer’s General Merchandise Emporium and Post-Office Wallingford arranged for a show window, and from behind its dusty panes he had the eternal pyramid of fly-specked canned goods removed. In its place he constructed a semi-circular amphitheater of pale blue velvet, bought from Moozer’s own stock, and in its center he placed the priceless bit of Etruscan ware, the first splendid art object from the to-be-famous Blakeville Etruscan studios!
In the meantime, Jonas Bubble had found willing subscribers to the stock of the Bubble Bank, and already was installing an impregnable vault in his vacant brick building at the intersection of Maple Avenue and Blake Street. By this time every citizen had a new impulse of civic pride, and vast commercial expansion was planned by every business man in Blakeville. Even the women felt the contagion, and it was one of the sorrows of Miss Forsythe’s soul that her vacation arrangements had already been made for the summer, and that she should be compelled to go away even for a short time, leaving all this inspiriting progress behind her. It would be just like Mrs. Moozer to take advantage of the situation! Mrs. Moozer was vice-president of the Women’s Culture Club.
The Bubble County Bank collected its funds, took possession of its new quarters and made ready for business. Jonas Bubble, changing his attire to a frock suit for good and all, became its president. J. Rufus had also been offered an office in the bank, but he declined. A directorship had been urged upon him, but he steadfastly refused, with the same firmness that he had denied to Jonas Bubble a share in his pottery or even his drainage project. No, with his five thousand dollars’ worth of stock he felt that he was taking as great a share as a stranger might, with modesty, appropriate to himself in their municipal advancement. Let the honors go to those who had grown up with the city, and who had furnished the substantial nucleus upon which their prosperity and advancement might be based.
He intended, however, to make free use of the new banking facilities, and by way of showing the earnestness of that intention he drew from his New York bank half of the sum he had cleared on his big horse-racing “frame up,” and deposited these funds in the Bubble Bank. True enough, three days after, he withdrew nearly the entire amount by draft in favor of one Horace G. Daw, of Boston, but a week later he deposited a similar amount from his New York bank, then increased that with the amount previously withdrawn in favor of Horace G. Daw. A few days later he withdrew the entire account, replaced three-fourths of it and drew out one-half of that, and it began to be talked about all over the town that Wallingford’s enterprises were by no means confined to his Blakeville investments. He was a man of large financial affairs, which required the frequent transfer of immense sums of money. To keep up this rapid rotation of funds, Wallingford even borrowed money which Blackie Daw had obtained in the same horse-racing enterprise. Sometimes he had seventy-five thousand dollars in the Bubble Bank, and sometimes his balance was less than a thousand.
In the meantime, J. Rufus allowed no opportunities for his reputation to become stale. In the Atlas Hotel he built a model bath-room which was to revert to Jim Ranger, without money and without price, when Wallingford should leave, and over his bath-tub he installed an instantaneous heater which was the pride and delight of the village. It cost him a pretty penny, but he got tenfold advertising from it. By the time this sensation had begun to die he was able to display drawings of the quaint and pretty vine-clad Etruscan studio, and to start men to digging trenches for the foundations!
