Mr. Opp. Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice

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СКАЧАТЬ she had gone, Mr. Opp ascended the stairway, and entered the room above. A candle sputtered on the table, and in its light he saw the wide, four-poster bed that had been his mother’s, and in it the frail figure of little Miss Kippy. Her hair lay loose upon the pillow, and on her sleeping face, appealing in its helplessness, was a smile of perfect peace. The new doll lay on the table beside the candle, but clasped tightly in her arms was the coat of many checks.

      For a moment Mr. Opp stood watching her, then he drew his shirt-sleeve quickly across his eyes. As he turned to descend, his new shoes creaked painfully and, after he had carefully removed them, he tiptoed down, passed through the sitting-room and out upon the porch, where he sank down on the step and dropped his head on his arms.

      [p50]

      The night was very still, save for the croaking of a bullfrog, and the incessant scraping of a cedar-tree against the corner of the roof. From across the river, faint sparks of light shone out from cabin windows, and, below, a moving light now and then told of a passing scow. Once a steamboat slipped weirdly out of the darkness, sparkling with lights, and sending up faint sounds of music; but before the waves from the wheel had ceased to splash on the bank below, she was swallowed up in the darkness, leaving lonesomeness again.

      Mr. Opp sat staring out into the night, outwardly calm, but inwardly engaged in a mortal duel. The aggressive Mr. Opp of the gorgeous raiment and the seal ring, the important man of business, the ambitious financier, was in deadly combat with the insignificant Mr. Opp, he of the shirt-sleeves and the wilted pompadour, the delicate, sensitive, futile Mr. Opp who was incapable of everything but the laying down of his life for the sake of another.

      [p51]

      A dull line of light hovered on the horizon, and gradually the woods on the opposite shore took shape, then the big river itself, gray and shimmering, with streaks on the water where a snag broke the swift current.

      “Mr. D.,” he heard Aunt Tish calling up the back stairs, “you better git out of baid; hit’s sun-up.”

      He rose stiffly and started back to the kitchen. As he passed through the front room, his eyes fell upon his new suit-case full of the treasured drummers’ samples. Stooping down, he traced the large black letters with his finger and sighed deeply.

      Then he got up resolutely and marched to the kitchen door.

      “Aunt Tish,” he said with authority, “you needn’t mind about hurrying breakfast. I find there’s very important business will keep me here in the Cove for the present.”

[p52]

      V

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here were two methods of communication in Cove City, both of which were equally effective. One was the telephone, which from a single, isolated case had developed into an epidemic, and the other, which enjoyed the dignity of precedence and established custom, was to tell Jimmy Fallows.

      Both of these currents of information soon overflowed with the news that Mr. D. Webster Opp had given up a good position in the city, and expected to establish himself in business in his native town. The nature of this business was agitating the community at large in only a degree less than it was agitating Mr. Opp himself.

      One afternoon Jimmy Fallows stood [p53] with his back to his front gate, suspended by his armpits from the pickets, and conducted business after his usual fashion. As a general retires to a hill-top to organize his forces and issue orders to his subordinates, so Jimmy hung upon his front fence and conducted the affairs of the town. He knew what time each farmer came in, where the “Helping Hands” were going to sew, where the doctor was, and where the services would be held next Sunday. He was coroner, wharf-master, undertaker, and notary, and the only thing in the heavens above or the earth below concerning which he did not attempt to give information was the arrival of the next steamboat.

      As he stood whittling a stick and cheerfully humming a tune of other days, he descried a small, alert figure coming up the road. The pace was so much brisker than the ordinary slow gait of the Cove that he recognized the person at once as Mr. Opp. Whereupon he lifted his voice and hailed a boy who was [p54] just vanishing down the street in the opposite direction:

      “Nick!” he called. “Aw, Nick Fenny! Tell Mat Lucas that Mr. Opp’s uptown.”

      Connection being thus made at one end of the line, he turned to effect it at the other. “Howdy, Brother Opp. Kinder dusty on the river, ain’t it?”

      “Well, we are experiencing considerable of warm weather at this juncture,” said Mr. Opp, affably.

      “Mat Lucas has been hanging round here all day,” said Jimmy. “He wants you to buy out a half-interest in his dry-goods store. What do you think about it?”

      “Well,” said Mr. Opp, thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, “I am considering of a great variety of different things. I been in the dry-goods business twice, and I can’t say but what it ain’t a pretty business. Of course,” he added with a twinge, “my specialty are shoes.”

      “Yes,” said Jimmy; “but the folks [p55] here all gets their shoes at the drug store. Mr. Toddlinger’s been carrying a line of shoes along with his pills and plasters ever sence he went into business.”

      Mr. Opp looked up at the large sign overhead. “If you and Mr. Tucker wasn’t both in the hotel business, I might be thinking of considering that.”

      This proposition tickled Jimmy immensely. Chuckles of amusement agitated his rotund figure.

      “Why don’t you buy us both out?” he asked. “We could sell out for nothing and make money.”

      “Why, there’s three boarders sitting over at Our Hotel now,” said Mr. Opp, who rather fancied himself in the rôle of a genial host.

      “Yes,” said Jimmy. “Old man Tucker’s had ’em hanging out on the line all morning. I don’t guess they got strength enough to walk around much after the meals he give ’em.”

      “Of course,” said Mr. Opp, wholly absorbed in his own affairs, “this is just [p56] temporarily for the time being, as it were. In a year or so, when my financial condition is sorter more established in a way, I intend to put through that oil-wells proposition. The fact that I am aiming at arriving to is what would you think the Cove was at present most in need of?”

      “Elbow-grease,” said Jimmy, promptly. “The only two things that we ain’t got that a city has, is elbow-grease and a newspaper.”

      For a moment there was a silence, heavy with significance. Mr. Fallows’s gaze penetrated the earth, while Mr. Opp’s scanned the heavens; then they suddenly looked at each other, and the great idea was born.

      An editor! Mr. Opp’s whole being thrilled responsive to the call. The thought of dwelling above the sordid bartering of commercial life, of being in a position to exercise those mental powers with which he felt himself so generously endowed, almost swept him off his feet. He had been a reporter [p57] once; for two golden weeks he had handed in police-court reports that fairly scintillated with verbal gems plucked at random from the dictionary. But the city editor had indicated as kindly as possible that СКАЧАТЬ