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THE PRICE

BY

FRANCIS LYNDE

AUTHOR OF
THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN, ETC.

[Illustration]

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Published by Arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons


COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published May, 1911

[Illustration]


To

MR. LATHROP BROCKWAY BULLENE

SOLE FRIEND OF MY BOYHOOD, WHO WILL RECALL BETTER
THAN ANY THE YOUTHFUL MORAL AND SOCIAL SEED-TIME
WHICH HAS LED TO THIS LATER HARVESTING OF CONCLUSION,
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                PAGE

      I. AT CHAUDIERE'S                   1

     II. SPINDRIFT                        9

    III. THE RIGHT OF MIGHT              16

     IV. _IO TRIUMPHE!_                  26

      V. THE _BELLE JULIE_               34

     VI. THE DECK-HAND                   44

    VII. GOLD OF TOLOSA                  53

   VIII. THE CHAIN-GANG                  59

     IX. THE MIDDLE WATCH                68

      X. QUICKSANDS                      75

     XI. THE ANARCHIST                   84

    XII. MOSES ICHTHYOPHAGUS             94

   XIII. GRISWOLD EMERGENT              110

    XIV. PHILISTIA                      116

     XV. THE GOTHS AND VANDALS          126

    XVI. GOOD SAMARITANS                143

   XVII. GROPINGS                       154

  XVIII. THE ZWEIBUND                   165

    XIX. LOSS AND GAIN                  175

     XX. THE CONVALESCENT               187

    XXI. BROFFIN'S EQUATION             201

   XXII. IN THE BURGLAR-PROOF           218

  XXIII. CONVERGING ROADS               234

   XXIV. THE FORWARD LIGHT              248

    XXV. THE BRIDGE OF JEHENNAM         260

   XXVI. PITFALLS                       274

  XXVII. IN THE SHADOWS                 286

 XXVIII. BROKEN LINKS                   295

   XXIX. ALL THAT A MAN HATH            312

    XXX. THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES        332

   XXXI. NARROWING WALLS                347

  XXXII. THE LION'S SHARE               354

 XXXIII. GATES OF BRASS                 368

  XXXIV. THE ABYSS                      375

   XXXV. MARGERY'S ANSWER               384

  XXXVI. THE GRAY WOLF                  396

 XXXVII. THE QUALITY OF MERCY           408

XXXVIII. THE PENDULUM-SWING             416

  XXXIX. DUST AND ASHES                 428

     XL. APPLES OF ISTAKHAR             438

    XLI. THE DESERT AND THE SOWN        448




THE PRICE

I

AT CHAUDIERE'S


In the days when New Orleans still claimed distinction as the only
American city without trolleys, sky-scrapers, or fast trains--was it
yesterday? or the day before?--there was a dingy, cobwebbed cafe in an
arcade off Camp Street which was well-beloved of newspaperdom;
particularly of that wing of the force whose activities begin late and
end in the small hours.

"Chaudiere's," it was called, though I know not if that were the name of
the round-faced, round-bodied little Marseillais who took toll at the
desk. But all men knew the fame of its gumbo and its stuffed crabs, and
that its claret was neither very bad nor very dear. And if the walls
were dingy and the odors from the grille pungent and penetrating at
times, there went with the white-sanded floor, and the marble-topped
tables for two, an Old-World air of recreative comfort which is rarer
now, even in New Orleans, than it was yesterday or the day before.

It was at Chaudiere's that Griswold had eaten his first breakfast in the
Crescent City; and it was at Chaudiere's again that he was sharing a
farewell supper with Bainbridge, of the _Louisianian_. Six weeks lay
between that and this; forty-odd days of discouragement and failure
superadded upon other similar days and weeks and months. The breakfast,
he remembered, had been garnished with certain green sprigs of hope; but
at the supper-table he ate like a barbarian in arrears to his appetite
and the garnishings were the bitter herbs of humiliation and defeat.

Without meaning to, Bainbridge had been strewing the path with fresh
thorns for the defeated one. He had just been billeted for a run down
the Central American coast to write up the banana trade for his paper,
and he was boyishly jubilant over the assignment, which promised to be a
zestful pleasure trip. Chancing upon Griswold in the first flush of his
elation, he had dragged the New Yorker around to Chaudiere's to play
second knife and fork at a small parting feast. Not that it had required
much persuasion. Griswold had fasted for twenty-four hours, and he would
have broken bread thankfully with an enemy. And if Bainbridge were not a
friend in a purist's definition of the term, he was at least a friendly
acquaintance.

Until the twenty-four-hour fast was in some measure atoned for, the
burden of the table-talk fell upon Bainbridge, who lifted and carried it
generously on the strength of his windfall. But no topic can be
immortal; and when the vacation under pay had been threshed out in all
its anticipatory details it occurred to the host that his guest was less
than usually responsive; a fault not to be lightly condoned under the
joyous circumstances. Wherefore he protested.

"What's the matter with you to-night, Kenneth, old man? You're more than
commonly grumpy, it seems to me; and that's needless."

Griswold took the last roll from the joint bread-plate and buttered it
methodically.

"Am I?" he said. "Perhaps it is because I am more than commonly hungry.
But go on with your joy-talk: I'm listening."

"That's comforting, as far as it goes; but I should think you might say
something a little less carefully polarized. You don't have a chance to
congratulate lucky people every day."

Griswold looked up with a smile that was almost ill-natured, and quoted
cynically: "'Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that
which he hath.'"

Bainbridge's laugh was tolerant enough to take the edge from his retort.

"That's a pretty thing to fling at a man who never knifed you or
pistoled you or tried to poison you! An innocent by-stander might say
you envied me."

"I do," rejoined Griswold gravely. "I envy any man who can earn enough
money to pay for three meals a day and a place to sleep in."

"Oh, cat's foot!--anybody can do that," asserted Bainbridge, with the
air of one to whom the struggle for existence has been a mere athlete's
practice run.

"I know; that is your theory. But the facts disprove it. I can't, for
one."

"Oh, yes, you could, if you'd side-track some of your own theories and
come down to sawing wood like the rest of us. But you won't do that."

Griswold was a fair man, with reddish hair and beard and the quick and
sensitive skin of the type. A red flush of anger crept up under the
closely cropped beard, and his eyes were bright.

"That is not true, and you know it, Bainbridge," he contradicted,
speaking slowly lest his temper should break bounds. "Is it my fault, or
only my misfortune, that I can do nothing but write books for which I
can't find a publisher? Or that the work of a hack-writer is quite as
impossible for me as mine is for him?"

Bainbridge scoffed openly; but he was good-natured enough to make amends
when he saw that Griswold was moved.

"I take it all back," he said. "I suppose the book-chicken has come home
again to roost, and a returned manuscript accounts for anything. But
seriously, Kenneth, you ought to get down to bed-rock facts. Nobody but
a crazy phenomenon can find a publisher for his first book, nowadays,
unless he has had some sort of an introduction in the magazines or the
newspapers. You haven't had that; so far as I know, you haven't tried
for it."

"Oh, yes, I have--tried and failed. It isn't in me to do the salable
thing, and there isn't a magazine editor in the country who doesn't know
it by this time. They've been decent about it. Horton was kind enough.
He covered two pages of a letter telling me why the stuff I sent from
here might fit one of the reviews and why it wouldn't fit his magazine.
But that is beside the mark. I tell you, Bainbridge, the conditions are
all wrong when a man with a vital message to his kind can't get to
deliver it to the people who want to hear it."

Bainbridge ordered the small coffees and found his cigar case.

"That is about what I suspected," he commented impatiently. "You
couldn't keep your peculiar views muzzled even when you were writing a
bit of a pot-boiler on sugar-planting. Which brings us back to the old
contention: you drop your fool socialistic fad and write a book that a
reputable publisher can bring out without committing commercial suicide,
and you'll stand some show. Light up and fumigate that idea awhile."

Griswold took the proffered cigar half-absently, as he had taken the
last piece of bread.

"It doesn't need fumigating; if I could consider it seriously it ought
rather to be burnt with fire. You march in the ranks of the well-fed,
Bainbridge, and it is your _metier_ to be conservative. I don't, and
it's mine to be radical."

"What would you have?" demanded the man on the conservative side of the
table. "The world is as it is, and you can't remodel it."

"There is where you make the mistake common to those who cry Peace, when
there is no peace," was the quick retort. "I, and my kind, can remodel
it, and some day, when the burden has grown too heavy to be borne, we
will. The aristocracy of rank, birth, feudal tyranny went down in fire
and blood in France a century ago: the aristocracy of money will go down
here, when the time is ripe."

"That is good anarchy, but mighty bad ethics. I didn't know you had
reached that stage of the disease, Kenneth."

"Call it what you please; names don't change facts. Listen"--Griswold
leaned upon the table; his eyes grew hard and the blue in them became
metallic--"For more than a month I have tramped the streets of this
cursed city begging--yes, that is the word--begging for work of any kind
that would suffice to keep body and soul together; and for more than
half of that time I have lived on one meal a day. That is what we have
come to; we of the submerged majority. And that isn't all. The
wage-worker himself, when he is fortunate enough to find a chance to
earn his crust, is but a serf; a chattel among the other possessions of
some fellow man who has acquired him in the plutocratic redistribution
of the earth and the fulness thereof."

Bainbridge applauded in dumb show.

"Turn it loose and ease the soul-sickness, old man," he said
indulgently. "I know things haven't been coming your way, lately. What
is your remedy?"

Griswold was fairly started now, and ridicule was as fuel to the flame.

"The money-gatherers have set us the example. They have made us
understand that might is right; that he who has may hold--if he can. The
answer is simple: there is enough and to spare for all, and it belongs
to all; to him who sows the seed and waters it, as well as to him who
reaps the harvest. That is a violent remedy, you will say. So be it: it
is the only one that will cure the epidemic of greed. There is an
alternative, but it is only theoretical."

"And that?"

"It may be summed up in seven words: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself.' When the man who employs--and rules--uses the power that money
gives him to succor his fellow man, the revolution will be indefinitely
postponed. But as I say, it's only a theory."

Bainbridge glanced at his watch.

"I must be going," he said. "The _Adelantado_ drops down the river at
eleven. But in passing I'll venture a little prophecy. You're down on
your luck now, and a bit hot-hearted in consequence; but some day you
will strike it right and come out on top. When you do, you'll be a hard
master; tattoo that on your arm somewhere so you'll be reminded of it."

Griswold had risen with his entertainer, and he put his hands on the
table.

"God do so to me, and more, if I am, Bainbridge," he said soberly.

"That's all right: when the time comes, you just remember my little
fortune-telling stunt. But before we shake hands, let's get back to
concrete things for a minute or two. How are you fixed for the present,
and what are you going to do for the future?"

Griswold's smile was not pleasant to look at.

"I am 'fixed' to run twenty-four hours longer, thanks to your
hospitality. For that length of time I presume I shall continue to
conform to what we have been taught to believe is the immutable order of
things. After that----"

He paused, and Bainbridge put the question. "Well, after that; what
then?"

"Then, if the chance to earn it is still denied me, and I am
sufficiently hungry, I shall stretch forth my hand and take what I
need."

Bainbridge fished in his pocket and took out a ten-dollar bank-note. "Do
that first," he said, offering Griswold the money.

The proletary smiled and shook his head.

"No; not to keep from going hungry--not even to oblige you, Bainbridge.
It is quite possible that I shall end by becoming a robber, as you
paraphrasers would put it, but I sha'n't begin on my friends.
Good-night, and a safe voyage to you."




II

SPINDRIFT


The fruit steamer _Adelantado_, outward bound, was shuddering to the
first slow revolutions of her propeller when Bainbridge turned the key
in the door of the stuffy little state-room to which he had been
directed, and went on deck.

The lines had been cast off and the ship was falling by imperceptible
inches away from her broadside berth at the fruit wharf. Bainbridge
heard the distance-softened clang of a gong; the tremulous murmur of the
screw became more pronounced, and the vessel forged ahead until the
current caught the outward-swinging prow. Five minutes later the
_Adelantado_ had circled majestically in mid-stream and was passing the
lights of the city in review as she steamed at half-speed down the
river.

Bainbridge had no mind to go back to the stuffy state-room, late as it
was. Instead, he lighted a fresh cigar and found a chair on the port
side aft where he could sit and watch the lights wheel past in orderly
procession as the fruit steamer swept around the great crescent which
gives New Orleans its unofficial name.

While the comfortable feeling of elation, born of his unexpected bit of
good fortune, was still uppermost to lend complacency to his
reflections, he yet found room for a compassionate underthought having
for its object the man from whom he had lately parted. He was honestly
sorry for Griswold; sorry, but not actually apprehensive. He had known
the defeated one in New York, and was not unused to his rebellious
outbursts against the accepted order of things. Granting that his
theories were incendiary and crudely subversive of all the civilized
conventions, Griswold the man was nothing worse than an impressionable
enthusiast; a victim of the auto-suggestion which seizes upon those who
dwell too persistently upon the wrongs of the wronged.

So ran Bainbridge's epitomizing of the proletary's case; and he knew
that his opinion was shared with complete unanimity by all who had known
Griswold in Printing House Square. To a man they agreed in calling him
Utopian, altruistic, visionary. What milder epithets should be applied
to one who, with sufficient literary talent--not to say genius--to make
himself a working name in the ordinary way, must needs run amuck among
the theories and write a novel with a purpose? a novel, moreover, in
which the purpose so overshadowed the story as to make the book a mere
preachment.

As a matter of course, the publishers would have nothing to do with the
book. Bainbridge remembered, with considerable satisfaction, that he had
confidently predicted its failure, and had given Griswold plentiful good
advice while it was in process of writing. But Griswold, being quite as
obstinate as he was impressionable, had refused to profit by the
advice, and now the consequences of