# Bart Harrington, Genius

To his own great surprise, the assistant Sunday editor waited until his caller was prepared to speak. Harrington shook his head again, slowly. Then he tapped his forehead with the second finger of his right hand. "I have it heah," he said slowly, referring evidently to the brow he had indicated, and speaking with a slight drawl and the strongly marked accent of the southern mountaineer. "I 'lowed I wouldn't write it till I knew you-all wanted it. I'd like to tell it. Then if——"
"It's a good thing, suh," he said, "and I can tell you-all about it in a sentence. I'm goin' to commit suicide to-day, an' I agree to write the experience foh you, up to the last minute, if you-all will have me buried decently. I don't cayah to be shoveled into the Pottah's Field."
BART HARRINGTON, GENIUS
By Elizabeth Jordan
THE assistant Sunday editor of the New York Searchlight was busy. This was not an unusual condition, but it frequently included unusually irritating features. His superior, Wilson, the Sunday editor, was a gentleman with a high brow and a large salary, who, having won a reputation as "a Napoleon of Journalism," had successfully cultivated a distaste for what he called "details." His specialty was the making of suggestions in editorial council, in cheery expectation that they would be carried out by his associates—an expectation so rarely realized that Mr. Wilson's visage had almost a habit of hurt wonder. "Details" continued to absorb the activity of The Sunday Searchlight office, and Maxwell, the assistant editor, attended to them all, murmuring bitterly against his chief as he labored.
On this special morning, moreover, he was receiving telephoned bulletins of the gradual disintegration of his biggest "special," scheduled for the coming Sunday edition, which was to tell with sympathetic amplitude of a beautiful French maiden who had drowned herself because some young man no longer loved her. The active reporter assigned to the case had telephoned first his discovery that the girl never had a lover, but cheerily suggested that this explained her suicide as well as the earlier theory, and wasn't so hackneyed, sagely adding that he would get the story, anyhow. Subsequently, he had rung up the office to report, with no slight disgust, that there was no suicide to explain as the girl was not dead. She had merely gone to visit friends in the country, and the people in the house, missing her, had decided that the peaceful waters of the Hudson——
Maxwell hung up the receiver with a few crisp remarks addressed to space, and absorbed in awestruck silence by a young woman at the other end of the room, who eased her typewriting labor by pausing to hear them fully. It was at this inauspicious moment that the card of Mr. Bart Harrington was brought in by an office boy. Maxwell surveyed it with strong disfavor.
"Who is he?" he asked, regarding the office boy severely.
The office boy avowed deprecatingly that he didn't know.
"He ain't never been here before," he submitted in extenuation. "He says he's got a Sunday story."
Maxwell resigned himself to the waste of five minutes of precious time.
"Show 'm in," he commanded testily. He sat down at his desk and turned toward the door an expression that reminded callers of the value of time and the brevity of life. Mr. Harrington, who had followed the boy through the door with conviction of these two things, dropped into a chair beside the editor's desk and surveyed Maxwell with a smile so young, so trustful, and withal so engaging, that unconsciously the stern features of that functionary relaxed. Nevertheless, he was not jarred out of his routine.
"Got your story with you, Mr. Harrington?" he asked briskly, holding out his hand for the manuscript. "If you'll leave it, I'll read——"
Harrington interrupted him with an impressive shake of his head. Then he settled back in his chair, crossed one leg comfortably over the other, plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his very shabby overcoat, and continued to regard the editor with his singularly boyish, dimpling smile. With one swift glance Maxwell took him in, from the broken boot on the foot he was gently swinging to and fro, to the thick, curly locks on his handsome head. He had a complexion like a girl's, a dimple in each cheek, and a jaw like a bulldog's. He was all of six feet tall, and his badly made clothes could not wholly conceal the perfect lines of his figure. He was about twenty-two years old. Maxwell decided, and, notwithstanding his dimples, his complexion, his youth, and his smile, he conveyed a vivid impression of masculinity and strength. He was wholly self-possessed, and his manner suggested that the business which had brought him where he was was of such urgent value and importance that the busy world itself might well hush its noisy activities long enough to hear of it. To his own great surprise, Maxwell waited until his caller was prepared to speak.
Harrington shook his head again, slowly. Then he tapped his forehead with the second finger of his right hand.
"I have it heah," he said slowly, referring evidently to the brow he had indicated, and speaking with a slight drawl and the strongly marked accent of the southern mountaineer. "I 'lowed I wouldn't write it till I knew you-all wanted it. I'd like to tell it. Then if——"
Maxwell nodded, and glanced at his watch.
"Fire away," he said, elegantly. "But be as quick as you can, please. This is closing day and every minute counts."
Harrington smiled his ingenuous smile. It was a wistful smile—not a happy one—but it seemed, somehow, to illumine the office. Maxwell reflected irritably that there was something unusually likable about the fellow, but he wished he'd hurry up and get out. From force of habit his fingers grasped a blue pencil on his desk, and he began to fumble nervously among the manuscripts that lay before him. Harrington settled back more firmly in his chair, and the swinging of his torn boot was accelerated a trifle, but his voice when he spoke was full of quiet confidence.
"It's a good thing, suh," he said, "and I can tell you-all about it in a sentence. I'm goin' to commit suicide to-day, an' I agree to write the experience foh you, up to the last minute, if you-all will have me buried decently. I don't cayah to be shoveled into the Pottah's Field."
Maxwell dropped the blue pencil and wheeled to look at him. Then his face hardened.
"It's a pretty bad joke," he said, "or a bum sort of bid for charity. In either case you can't waste any more of my——"
But Harrington had sprung to his feet, his blonde young face black with passion.
"Damn you!" he hissed, thrusting his head down close to the other's and clenching his fists. "How dahe you-all say I lie o' ask charity? I'd see you-all in hell befoah I'd take a cent of youah damned money. Ain't you got brains enough in youah haid to see that I've got to the end of mah rope?"
Maxwell was a clever man, educated in the world's university. He knew truth when he met it, and he knew human nature.
"Sit down," he said quietly, "and tell me about it. I'm sorry I spoke as I did, but you must admit that your proposition was rather startling."
Harrington sat down, still breathing hard in his excitement, but evidently making a resolute effort to control himself.
"That's why I brought it heah," he said, answering the other's last words. "You-all like stahtlin' things, don't you? That's what you print. I'm offerin' you a straight bahgain, suh—a business proposition. If you-all don't want it, say so."
Maxwell smiled in his turn, but there was nothing ironic in the smile, nor in the look he turned on his fellow-man.
"It's not quite as simple as you seem to think," he explained gently. "But tell me more about it. What led to this decision? What makes you think suicide is the only way out of your troubles? That's a part of the story, you know. Let me have that first, in a few words.
"It can be told, suh, in three," said the southerner. His smile had returned. His voice was the cool voice of one who discusses abstract things. "I'm a failyuh. This wo'ld ain't no use foh failyuhs. I've given myself all the time and chances I dese'ved, but I cayn't win out, so I've got to git out. The's no one to ca'e. I've no kin, no one dependin' on me in any way. As foh me, I'm ti'ed; life ain't wuth the effo't."
Maxwell regarded him.
"You don't look like a quitter," he said thoughtfully.
The boy's face blazed again, but he kept his temper.
"To quit means to give somethin' up," he said doggedly. "I ain't givin' anythin' up. I ain't got anythin' to give up. Life without wo'k, o' interest, o' fren's, o' ambition, o' love—that ain't livin'! If you-all evah tried it, you'd know. I ain't been so chee'ful in yeahs as I've been sence I made up my mind to 'quit,' as you-all call it."
"You've got health, haven't you?" demanded Maxwell.
"Yes."
Maxwell brought his hand down on the desk with an air of finality.
"Then you've got everything. Do you mean to tell me that a fellow like you can't earn enough to support himself? If you do, you're talking rot."
Harrington took this with his wide, guileless grin. He was not offended now, for he felt the friendly interest and sympathy under the other's words. His voice when he replied was gentler.
"I ain't sayin' I can't keep body an' soul together, foh maybe I can," he conceded. "But I'm sayin' that ain't life. I'm sayin' I ain't been fitted fo' wo'k. I ain't been educated. I've lived in a log cabin down in the Virginia mountains all mah life. I left thah six weeks ago, after mah mother died. She was the last of ouah family but me. I ain't never been to school. She taught me to read in the Bible, an' to write. I ain't nevah read anotheh book except the Bible and Mistah Shakespeah's poems, an' Mistah Pluta'ch's Lives of Great Men. I know them b' hea't. I don't know whe' she got them o' whe' she came from. She was different from othah mountain women. I've been No'th six weeks, and I've tried ha'd to find a place whah I could fit in, but th' ain't none. Men must be trained fuh wo'k; I ain't trained. I cyan't go back, foh the's no one thah, an' I hate the mountains."
Maxwell's reply was brief and to the point.
"Think you could learn to run our elevator without killing us all?" he inquired. "Well, you've got to. You've been talking awful guff, you know Now you're going to work, right here. We need a new man. The one we have has been drunk three days. You're going to run the elevator and get fifteen dollars a week to begin with. Here's your first week's salary in advance. I'll arrange about the job with the Superintendent. I'll give you some books, and you can educate yourself. When you're above elevator work we'll give you something better. You'll probably have my job inside of a year," he ended, jocosely.
The hand the mountaineer stretched out to him trembled as Maxwell grasped it.
"You ah the only white man I've found in the No'th," said the southerner breathlessly. "I'll make good, as they say up heah. But I don't know how I can thank you."
"Don't try," said Maxwell, brusquely. "Be here at eight in the morning. By nine there will be a few callers I may want you to throw down the shaft."
Thus began the connection between the Searchlight and Bart Harrington, subsequently its most popular employé. Before the week was over all the reporters and most of the editors had casually sought from Maxwell some details concerning his protégé, but had received few. Harrington was a new man and he came from the Virginia mountains, and was most obliging and altogether engaging. This was all the information acquired even by the indefatigable Miss Mollie Merk, whose success in extracting from individuals information it was their dearest desire to conceal had made her a star member of the Searchlight's staff. It was to Miss Merk, however, that Harrington announced his first important discovery. Leaning across her desk one evening after his successor had taken the "car," the new elevator man touched a subject much upon his mind.
"I got wet the othah day," he began conversationally, "an' mah landlady let me go to the kitchen to dry mah clothes. I obse'ved as I sat by huh stove that the lid of the wash boilah kept liftin' up, all by itself, an' then I saw 't'was raised by the steam of the hot watah inside. I kep' thinkin' 'bout it, an' it seems to me that's an idea thah, a soht of ene'gy, you know, that might be used in big ways. I mus' think it out."
Mollie Merk looked at him, vague memories of one James Watts stirring uneasily in her brain.
"There's a good deal written about steam," she said sympathetically. "I'll bring you a book on it."
She did, for Harrington was already high in her regard; and quite possibly the volume killed in that youth's aspiring soul the germ of a beautiful hope. But he was to the fore very soon with a discovery of equal weight. This time his confidant was Maxwell.
"Why is it," he asked that busy citizen one evening, "that when I get in the bath-tub the water rises highah? Ain't the' some principal the' that is impo'tant? As I think it ovah——"
Maxwell hurriedly assured him that there was, and the volume on steam was followed by a treatise on specific gravity, which gave Mr. Harrington food for reflection for several days. Nevertheless the discovery that others had been before him did not depress him in the least. He gave the Sunday editor an insight into his views on one occasion when that gentleman was able to convince him that Isaac Newton and not Bart Harrington had discovered the law of gravitation while watching an apple fall from a tree.
"I obse'ved it, too, suh," argued Harrington sturdily, defending his position as a scientific discoverer. "Of co'se I see the fo'ce of you'h rema'k that the othah man was first. That is unfo'tunate foh me. But does it affect the value of my discovery? It does not, suh."
"There's a good deal in it," Wilson conceded to Maxwell after he had delightedly repeated this conversation. "Of course, the fellow has an unusual mind. It's a pity he's always a few hundred years behind the time, but, as he hints, that needn't dim our admiration for the quality of his brain fibre."
Maxwell laughed uneasily.
"I can't make up my mind," he admitted in his turn, "whether he's a genius or a plain fool. He lost his dinner last night explaining to me how the power of Niagara could be applied to practical uses. He was horribly depressed when I told him it not only could be, but was. I let him talk, though, to see what his ideas were, and they were very practical."
"I call that mighty encouraging," said the chief, optimistically. "He's getting down to modern times. After he has discovered the telephone and telegraph and cable and wireless telegraphy he may tackle telepathy and give us something new."
But Harrington indulged in an unexplained digression at this point. He discovered literature and became acquainted with the works of one Charles Dickens, of whose genius he made himself the sounding trumpet-call for the ears of an indifferent world.
"The's a book called 'David Coppe'field,'" he confided to Maxwell one night when he had lingered for a chat with his benefactor. "It's great, suh. You should read it sometime, Mistah Maxwell; you would appreciate its wo'th." He outlined the plot then and there, and Maxwell good-naturedly listened, finding his compensation in the enthusiast's original comments on character and situation. This, however, established a bad precedent, and Maxwell was subsequently obliged to hear a careful synopsis of "Little Dorrit," "Old Curiosity Shop" and "Oliver Twist," in quick succession, followed by the somewhat painful recitation of most of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"—for Harrington was now entering the daisied field of poetry.
It was at this point that Maxwell felt himself constrained to give his protégé a few words of advice, the city editor having objected to an enforced hearing of the plot of "Ivanhoe," and Mollie Merk having admitted that she had climbed six flights of stairs twice a day for a week in preference to hearing the final eighteen stanzas of "Paradise Lost."
Maxwell explained the situation to his friend as gently as he could one morning when Harrington had interrupted a talk between himself and a distinguished western editor who was spending a few days in New York.
"You see, old man," he ended kindly, "this is a big, new world to you, but the rest of us have been living in it all our lives. We've taken in these things you're discovering—or we've had them driven into us at school. So—er—they're not new, and while we appreciate them we haven't got time to go over them all again. When you get up to modern fiction—the things people are reading to-day——"
With one expressive gesture of the hand Mr. Harrington demolished modern fiction.
"I ain't got time foh that, Mistah Maxwell," he said, respectfully. "I read one, an I regret to say, suh, that it was too much. I have looked into othe's, but I go no fu'thah. I have tried to open to you gentlemen the great wo'ks I have disco ve'ed, an' youah reply is that you-all have read them, suh. I am surprised. Do you give one glance at a picture an' nevah look again? Do you listen once to music, o' must it be something new and mode'n ev'ry time? Last night I heard the composition of a musician named Beethoven, who, I have learned, has been dead foh yeahs. Yet people still listen to his notes. Why don't they read these books, of Mistah Dickens and Mistah Scott and Mistah Shakespeah?"
Maxwell murmured feebly that a few did. A fitting response to Harrington's arraignment somehow eluded him, and before he had found the words he wanted an unexpected interruption came from the western editor, who had been listening to the conversation with almost painful interest.
"Mr. Harrington," he asked abruptly, "can you write?"
Harrington looked surprised and boyishly injured.
"Yes, suh," he replied stiffly. I can read and write."
"Oh, of course, of course," explained the other hastily. "I don't mean that. Can you write for the press? Have you tried to write anything for other people to read?"
Harrington's characteristic smile flashed forth.
"I have submitted sev'al ahticles to Mistah Maxwell," he said with some dignity, "but thus far I have not been fo'tunate enough——"
Maxwell drew a little package of manuscripts from a pigeon-hole in his desk and handed them to the visitor without a word. They spoke for themselves. The latter glanced through them, frowning. Maxwell returned to his work. Harrington waited. At last the westerner handed the papers back to his eastern colleague, shaking his head as he did so.
"These won't do at all," he said decidedly, "but they confirm my impression that this man can write something worth while." He addressed himself to Maxwell now, discussing Harrington as impersonally as if he were absent, but from time to time his keen eyes returned to the southerner's face.
"Here's a man," he began didactically, "who is hundreds of years behind the times. But please to remember that he would have been Watts, Newton, and several other discoverers if he had existed before them. He's as much of a pilgrim on this earth to-day as if he were a visitor from another planet. But he has an extraordinary type of mind and very good taste—a strong, ignorant, instinctive feeling for the best. If he would write a series of short articles giving his point of view to the busy men and women of to-day, they should be 'good stuff'—a sort of artistic voice crying in the commercial wilderness, don't you see. You or some one else may have to put them into shape, until he catches the idea, but he will catch it all right. He's clever enough. If you want to try him, and it turns out as I think it will, I'll buy the material for simultaneous publication in Chicago. What do you say?"
"Agreed," said Maxwell, briefly. "I think you're right. We'll try it, anyhow. I guess we won't have much trouble persuading Harrington to favor us with the opportunity of examining his manuscript." He smiled as he glanced at the other. Harrington's eyes were shining. His words, when he spoke, came breathlessly.
"I'll have the first copy ready in the mo'ning, Mistah Maxwell," he promised. "And I reckon," he added, straightening his splendid shoulders—"I reckon I'll give up the elevatah, suh."
Maxwell laughed, in high good humor.
"Oh, yes," he agreed, "I guess we'll have to give you a successor there, in any event. However this experiment turns out, it's time you had something better than that."
Harrington's first paper was signed A Visitor from Mars, and Maxwell marvelled as he read it. It was not a great production and it was full of small faults; but there was an indescribable naïveté and charm about it to which its quaint, old-time style added the final touch. Harrington's studies of what he called "the olden masters" had not been in vain. Late the next evening, in the peace of his small Harlem flat, Maxwell submitted the manuscript to his wife for criticism. He passed it over without comment, desiring the unprejudiced opinion of the intelligent general reader, and Mrs. Maxwell read it twice, very carefully, before she handed it back. When she did there was a mist over her bright brown eyes.
"The darling thing!" she cried. "Who wrote it, Bob? It's as clever as it can be, and yet there's something about it that makes me feel queer and choky. It's—it's——" her face brightened, "it's something like the feeling I had when little Bobbie wrote me his first letter, that time I went home to take care of mother. One almost expects to see the words staggering down one side of the page in dear little crooked printed letters. It's the manuscript of a grown-up, sophisticated baby."
Maxwell took the copy from her, well pleased at this conjugal confirmation of his own impression.
"It's Harrington's," he explained, "and he's not sophisticated enough to hurt anybody, yet. But he's going to make a success of this job—there's no doubt of that. I'll ask him to come up to dinner to-morrow night, and go over the stuff with me a bit. I don't want to do it in the office."
The western editor was equally enthusiastic the following day. He was also glowing pleasantly in the confirmation of his own keenness of intuition.
"You wouldn't have seen what you had here," he explained to Maxwell, unnecessarily. "This is pretty much like genius. This fellow will be writing his autobiography some day, and perhaps he'll remember his humble discoverers. Meantime, don't you spoil his work by trying to edit it. Let it alone. It's all right."
The column of "The Visitor from Mars" grew to two columns, and became a strong feature of the Sunday Searchlight. Harrington, now in possession of a fair weekly income and unlimited leisure, bought new clothes, rented a sitting-room, bedroom and bath in a comfortable bachelor apartment house, and spent his days browsing in libraries, where he read omnivorously. Incidentally, he discovered not only the telephone, telegraph and other inventions predicted by the Sunday editor, but a locomotive fire-box which had received some favor among railroad officials for ten years, and a superb weapon of destruction which had been used in the Japanese army for six.
"He's getting on," cried Wilson, delightedly, when Maxwell recounted these small disappointments in an otherwise inspiring onward career. "He's learned to dress like a gentleman, speak like a gentleman and look like a gentleman, and he has also learned that there have been a few active minds in the world before his came. Give him time. He'll do something big yet."
Harrington promptly verified this prediction by falling in love, which he did on a scale and with an abandon unprecedented in the history of Park Row. It was a tempestuous upheaval for the emotional southerner, and every other interest in his life retired to the remotest background and remained there, unseen and unsuspected. His choice fell on a woman reporter of the Searchlight, a quiet, refined young girl, whose journalistic activities were confined to reports of meetings of women's clubs and the descriptions of other social events. For her Bart Harrington commanded the morning stars to sing together, and dared the dazzled sun to look upon her like. To him she was Laura, Beatrice, Juliet, Francesca—the essence of all the loves of all the ages in one perfect form. During their brief engagement he called for her in a cab each morning, and drove her to her home each night. He would have laid a carpet of flowers for her from the office to the curb had it been practicable. Also, he discovered Keats and Shelley and Byron and Swinburne, and quoted them until the office boys, who alone remained to listen to him, demanded that increase of salary justly attached to increased nervous strain. Swinburne, Harrington promptly decided, he did not like. There was an earthiness in his verse, he explained to Maxwell, a material side, wholly lacking in the love of the right man for the right woman—in other words, in his own love for Miss Evans. He wrote two columns about this kind of love in his Mars department, and half a million men read it with gurgles of warm appreciation and quoted it at dinner the next night. Then he married Miss Evans and became interested in the price of coal and other household supplies. His absorption in these topics was almost feverish. He talked about them morning, noon and night. His interest in literature flickered and died out. To Maxwell, his first and still his best friend, he finally confided his dilemma.
"You see, old man," he began one morning about six months after the wedding, "we've discovered, Clara and I, that the least we can live on is fifty dollahs a week. And you see I'm only getting forty. It's serious, isn't it? But Clara says that if we buy all ouah canned goods at Lacy's——"
Maxwell stopped him with a gesture of desperation.
"Harrington, if you say another word I shall go crazy," he announced with the calmness of despair. "We'll give you fifty dollars a week. Now consider that settled, and for God's sake get your mind off it. If you don't look out you'll be writing about coal and canned goods in your Mars column. What are you going to write this week, anyhow?" he demanded, with sudden suspicion.
Harrington looked guilty.
"I thought I'd say something about how prices have advanced," he faltered. "Clara says that two yeahs ago——" But Maxwell had taken him by the shoulders.
"No, you don't," he shouted fiercely. "You'll keep on writing about literature and life and lily-pads and love—that's what you'll do. If you don't, you'll lose your job. Don't you dare to introduce a single dollar sign or canned tomato into those columns," he added warningly, as he returned to his work.
Harrington's look of reproach as he went out haunted him for days—so long, in fact, that he bore with extraordinary patience a confidence that gentleman favored him with several months later. He came to the office one morning wearing an expression oddly combined of pride and shame, in which first one and then the other predominated. For a long time he discussed apartments and janitors and domestic supplies, and Maxwell humored him. Then he said:
"I've been an awful ass. Maxwell, but that's no reason why I should keep on being one, is it? I've got to tell you something impo'tant, and I'm going to do it now. I can't write any more about literatuah of the past and lily-pads of the present, as you would say. Who ca'es about 'em? I don't. The wo'ld to-day is interested in the life of to-day. Men think about theah wo'k and theah incomes and theah homes and theah wives and theah children, and that's all they think about. And women think about men, and that's all they think about. And heah I'm writing all the time about literatuah—literatuah." He turned the word over in his mouth and ejected it with supreme contempt.
As once before, Maxwell was silent in the presence of simple truth. He rallied, however, and voiced a protest.
"I suppose you haven't lost interest in earning your living," he suggested ironically. "How do you propose to do that if you give up this job?"
Harrington flushed a little, and cleared his throat nervously before he spoke. Then he drew a paper from his pocket, and as his fingers touched it his face cleared and happy pride beamed from him.
"I've got something else," he said, simply. "I waited to see how it would tu'n out befoah I told you. It's quite a story. You see," he went on expansively, settling back in his chair, and swinging his foot with the characteristic swing of the boy of two years before, "you see, Clara needed a hat-pin, the kind that would stay in and keep a hat on. None of them do, Clara said. So I made one foh huh, and Clara's brothah saw it and thought it was a good thing. He's a lawyer, you know. He showed it to some man with money, and they took it up and we patented it, and now we've got a facto'y and we're selling it. It's—it's making lots of money." He turned an apologetic eye on his friend and continued more firmly. "They gave me twenty thousand dollars down, and twenty pe' cent. of the stock, and a block of stock foh you, because I insisted on that. I want you in on my luck. Heah it is. E. W. Hubbard is the chief backah, and he says this is wuth ten thousand dollahs. He says every woman in Ame'ica will be wearing one of ouah hat-pins this time next yeah."
He laid the certificate on the table as he spoke, and for a moment Maxwell sat staring at it, speechless. He knew Hubbard—a rich, shrewd financier, and no leader of forlorn hopes. If Hubbard was in the thing the thing was all right. But a hat-pin! Maxwell looked at the certificate and thought of the hat-pin, and reviewed the Harrington of the past two years, and felt a horrible desire to laugh and to cry. Then he pushed the paper toward the inventor.
"It's awfully good of you, old man," he said huskily. "But of course I can't take this. There's no reason why you should give me ten thousand dollars, you know."
Harrington laughed a queer little laugh.
"Ain't they a reason?" he asked, lapsing in his earnestness into the careless grammar he had almost overcome. "Well, I guess I know moah than anyone else 'bout that. Do you remembah the fifteen dollahs you lent me the day I came heah? Well, suh—well, old man, I was sta'ving. I hadn't eaten fo' two days, an' I couldn't get wo'k, an' I couldn't beg. That's why I meant to kill myself. That money saved me. Now heah's this thing. It ain't money. It's an idea. It's an idea out of my haid, an' that haid wouldn't be heah at all if it wasn't fo' you. You've given me mah chance. What I've done ain't much, but it's brought results, and results ah the things that count. So we'll just call it interest, old man, if you don't mind. I think it's goin' to be wuth while. An' you know," he added almost timidly, "we ah friends—ah'nt we, you and I?"
Maxwell wrung his hand. Then he picked up the certificate, folded it again, and put it carefully into his pocket.
"Thanks, old man," he said quietly. "It's the biggest thing that's ever come my way, and I'll take it—from my friend."
Later, when Harrington had taken his jubilant departure, Maxwell related the incident to his chief. Wilson listened with flattering attention. At the end he nodded sympathetically.
"He's all right," he said, "and you needn't worry about him. He's got one quality left that sets him far enough apart from the rabble of to-day." He looked keenly at the young man as he added suddenly: "Of all the fellows you've ever helped, Maxwell—and I know you've helped a lot in one way or another—has any one of them before to-day ever shown you any gratitude?"
Maxwell shook his head. "Don't remember any," he admitted. "But I didn't expect any and don't want any."
"And you don't get it," ended the older man with a sigh. "It's the rarest thing in life. So make the most of it this time, my boy. One doesn't often meet a visitor from Mars!"
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1947, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 76 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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