blue smoke out into the rain.
II.
Down at his office, his chief clerk, Mr. Fowler, approached him with his morning smile.
“Looking fine, Mr. Jackson. Nice day if it hadn’t rained.”
“Yeah,” agreed John Jackson cheerfully. “Clear up in an hour. Anybody outside?”
“A lady named Mrs. Ralston.”
Mr. Fowler raised his grizzled eyebrows in facetious mournfulness.
“Tell her I can’t see her,” said John Jackson, rather to his clerk’s surprise. “And let me have a pencil memorandum of the money I’ve given away through her these twenty years.”
“Why—yes, sir.”
Mr. Fowler had always urged John Jackson to look more closely into his promiscuous charities; but now, after these two decades, it rather alarmed him.
When the list arrived—its preparation took an hour of burrowing through old ledgers and check stubs—John Jackson studied it for a long time in silence.
“That woman’s got more money than you have,” grumbled Fowler at his elbow. “Every time she comes in she’s wearing a new hat. I bet she never hands out a cent herself—just goes around asking other people.”
John Jackson did not answer. He was thinking that Mrs. Ralston had been one of the first women in town to bar Ellery Jackson from her house. She did quite right, of course; and yet perhaps back there when Ellery was sixteen, if he had cared for some nice girl——
“Thomas J. MacDowell’s outside. Do you want to see him? I said I didn’t think you were in, because on second thoughts, Mr. Jackson, you look tired this morning——”
“I’ll see him,” interrupted John Jackson.
He watched Fowler’s retreating figure with an unfamiliar expression in his eyes. All that cordial diffuseness of Fowler’s—he wondered what it covered in the man’s heart. Several times, without Fowler’s knowledge, Jackson had seen him giving imitations of the boss for the benefit of the other employes; imitations with a touch of malice in them that John Jackson had smiled at then, but that now crept insinuatingly into his mind.
“Doubtless he considers me a good deal of a fool,” murmured John Jackson thoughtfully, “because I’ve kept him long after his usefulness was over. It’s a way men have, I suppose, to despise anyone they can impose on.”
Thomas J. MacDowell, a big barn door of a man with huge white hands, came boisterously into the office. If John Jackson had gone in for enemies he must have started with Tom MacDowell. For twenty years they had fought over every question of municipal affairs, and back in 1908 they had once stood facing each other with clenched hands on a public platform, because Jackson had said in print what everyone knew—that MacDowell was the worst political influence that the town had ever known. That was forgotten now; all that was remembered of it went into a peculiar flash of the eye that passed between them when they met.
“Hello, Mr. Jackson,” said MacDowell with full, elaborate cordiality. “We need your help and we need your money.”
“How so?”
“Tomorrow morning, in the Eagle, you’ll see the plan for the new Union Station. The only thing that’ll stand in the way is the question of location. We want your land.”
“My land?”
“The railroad wants to build on the twenty acres just this side of the river, where your warehouse stands. If you’ll let them have it cheap we get our station; if not, we can just whistle into the air.” Jackson nodded.
“I see.”
“What price?” asked MacDowell mildly.
“No price.”
His visitor’s mouth dropped open in surprise.
“That from you?” he demanded.
John Jackson got to his feet.
“I’ve decided not to be the local goat any more,” he announced steadily. “You threw out the only fair, decent plan because it interfered with some private reservations of your own. And now that there’s a snag, you’d like the punishment to fall on me. I tear down my warehouse and hand over some of the best property in the city for a song because you made a little ‘mistake’ last year!”
“But last year’s over now,” protested MacDowell. “Whatever happened then doesn’t change the situation now. The city needs the station, and so”—there was a faint touch of irony in his voice—“and so naturally I come to its leading citizen, counting on his well-known public spirit.”
“Go out of my office, MacDowell,” said John Jackson suddenly. “I’m tired.”
MacDowell scrutinized him severely.
“What’s come over you today?”
Jackson closed his eyes.
“I don’t want to argue,” he said after a while.
MacDowell slapped his fat upper leg and got to his feet.
“This is a funny attitude from you,” he remarked. “You better think it over.”
“Good-by.”
Perceiving, to his astonishment, that John Jackson meant what he said, MacDowell took his monstrous body to the door.
“Well, well,” he said, turning and shaking his finger at Jackson as if he were a bad boy, “who’d have thought it from you after all?”
When he had gone Jackson rang again for his clerk.
“I’m going away,” he remarked casually. “I may be gone for some time—perhaps a week, perhaps longer. I want you to cancel every engagement I have and pay off my servants at home and close up my house.”
Mr. Fowler could hardly believe his ears.
“Close up your house?”
Jackson nodded.
“But why—why is it?” demanded Fowler in amazement.
Jackson looked out the high window upon the gray little city drenched now by slanting, slapping rain—his city, he had felt sometimes, in those rare moments when life had lent him time to be happy. That flash of green trees running up the main boulevard—he had made that possible, and Children’s Park, and the white dripping buildings around Courthouse Square over the way.
“I don’t know,” he answered, “but I think I ought to get a breath of spring.”
When Fowler had gone he put on his hat and raincoat and, to avoid anyone who might be waiting, went through an unused filing room that gave access to the elevator. The filing room was actively inhabited this morning, however;
