University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
LAND AND LOVE.

MR. MINORKEY and the fat gentleman found
much to interest them as the coach rolled over
the smooth prairie road, now and then crossing
a slough. Not that Mr. Minorkey or his fat friend
had any particular interest in the beautiful outline
of the grassy knolls, the gracefulness of the water-willows
that grew along the river edge, and whose paler green was the
prominent feature of the landscape, or in the sweet contrast at
the horizon where grass-green earth met the light blue northern
sky. But the scenery none the less suggested fruitful themes
for talk to the two gentlemen on the back-seat.

“I've got money loaned on that quarter at three per cent
a month and five after due. The mortgage has a waiver in
it too. You see, the security was unusually good, and that
was why I let him have it so low.” This was what Mr. Minorkey
said at intervals and with some variations, generally
adding something like this: “The day I went to look at that
claim, to see whether the security was good or not, I got
caught in the rain. I expected it would kill me. Well, sir,
I was taken that night with a pain—just here—and it ran

through the lung to the point of the shoulder-blade—here. I
had to get my feet into a tub of water and take some brandy.
I'd a had pleurisy if I'd been in any other country but this.
I tell you, nothing saved me but the oxygen in this air. There!
there's a forty that I lent a hundred dollars on at five per
cent a month and six per cent after maturity, with a waiver in
the mortgage. The day I came here to see this I was nearly
dead. I had a—”

Just here the fat gentleman would get desperate, and, by
way of preventing the completion of the dolorous account,
would break out with: “That's Sokaska, the new town laid
out by Johnson—that hill over there, where you see those
stakes. I bought a corner-lot fronting the public square, and a
block opposite where they hope to get a factory. There's a
brook runs through the town, and they think it has water
enough and fall enough to furnish a water-power part of the
day, during part of the year, and they hope to get a factory
located there. There'll be a territorial road run through from
St. Paul next spring if they can get a bill through the legislature
this winter. You'd best buy there.”

“I never buy town lots,” said Minorkey, coughing despairingly,
“never! I run no risks. I take my interest at three
and five per cent a month on a good mortgage, with a waiver,
and let other folks take risks.”

But the hopeful fat gentleman evidently took risks and
slept soundly. There was no hypothetical town, laid out hypothetically
on paper, in whose hypothetical advantages he did
not covet a share.

“You see,” he resumed, “I buy low—cheap as dirt—and
get the rise. Some towns must get to be cities. I have a

little all round, scattered here and there. I am sure to have
a lucky ticket in some of these lotteries.”

Mr. Minorkey only coughed and shook his head despondently,
and said that “there was nothing so good as a mortgage with
a waiver in it. Shut down in short order if you don't get
your interest, if you've only got a waiver. I always shut down
unless I've got five per cent after maturity. But I have the
waiver in the mortgage anyhow.”

As the stage drove on, up one grassy slope and down
another, there was quite a different sort of a conversation going
on in the other end of the coach. Charlton found many things
which suggested subjects about which he and Miss Minorkey
could converse, notwithstanding the strange contrast in their way
of expressing themselves. He was full of eagerness, positiveness,
and a fresh-hearted egoism. He had an opinion on everything;
he liked or disliked everything; and when he disliked
anything, he never spared invective in giving expression to
his antipathy. His moral convictions were not simply strong
—they were vehement. His intellectual opinions were hobbies
that he rode under whip and spur. A theory for everything,
a solution of every difficulty, a “high moral” view of politics,
a sharp skepticism in religion, but a skepticism that took hold
of him as strongly as if it had been a faith. He held to his
non credo with as much vigor as a religionist holds to his creed.

Miss Minorkey was just a little irritating to one so
enthusiastic. She neither believed nor disbelieved anything
in particular. She liked to talk about everything in a cool
and objective fashion; and Charlton was provoked to find
that, with all her intellectual interest in things, she had no
sort of personal interest in anything. If she had been a

disinterested spectator, dropped down from another sphere,
she could not have discussed the affairs of this planet with
more complete impartiality, not to say indifference. Theories,
doctrines, faiths, and even moral duties, she treated as Charlton
did beetles; ran pins through them and held them up where
she could get a good view of them—put them away as curiosities.
She listened with an attention that was surely flattering
enough, but Charlton felt that he had not made much impression
on her. There was a sort of attraction in this repulsion.
There was an excitement in his ambition to impress this impartial
and judicial mind with the truth and importance of
the glorious and regenerating views he had embraced. His
self-esteem was pleased at the thought that he should yet
conquer this cool and open-minded girl by the force of his
own intelligence. He admired her intellectual self-possession
all the more that it was a quality which he lacked. Before
that afternoon ride was over, he was convinced that he sat
by the supreme woman of all he had ever known. And who
was so fit to marry the supreme woman as he, Albert Charlton,
who was to do so much by advocating all sorts of reforms
to help the world forward to its goal?

He liked that word goal. A man's pet words are the key to
his character. A man who talks of “vocation,” of “goal,”
and all that, may be laughed at while he is in the period of
intellectual fermentation. The time is sure to come, however,
when such a man can excite other emotions than mirth.

And so Charlton, full of thoughts of his “vocation” and
the world's “goal,” was slipping into an attachment for a woman
to whom both words were Choctaw. Do you wonder at
it? If she had had a vocation also, and had talked about

goals, they would mutually have repelled each other, like two
bodies charged with the same kind of electricity. People with
vocations can hardly fall in love with other people with
vocations.

But now Metropolisville was coming in sight, and Albert's
attention was attracted by the conversation of Mr. Minorkey
and the fat gentleman.

“Mr. Plausaby has selected an admirable site,” Charlton
heard the fat gentleman remark, and as Mr. Plausaby was his
own step-father, he began to listen. “Pretty sharp! pretty
sharp!” continued the fat gentleman. “I tell you what, Mr.
Minorkey, that man Plausaby sees through a millstone with
a hole in it. I mean to buy some lots in this place. It'll be
the county-seat and a railroad junction, as sure as you're
alive. And Plausaby has saved some of his best lots for me.”

“Yes, it's a nice town, or will be. I hold a mortgage on
the best eighty—the one this way—at three per cent and five
after maturity, with a waiver. I liked to have died here one
night last summer. I was taken just after supper with a
violent——”

“What a beauty of a girl that is,” broke in the fat gentleman,
“little Katy Charlton, Plausaby's step-daughter!” And
instantly Mr. Albert Charlton thrust his head out of the coach
and shouted “Hello, Katy!” to a girl of fifteen, who ran to
intercept the coach at the hotel steps.

“Hurrah, Katy!” said the young man, as she kissed him
impulsively as soon as he had alighted.

“P'int out your baggage, mister,” said Jim, interrupting
Katy's raptures with a tone that befitted a Superior Being.

In a few moments the coach, having deposited Charlton

and the fat gentleman, was starting away for its destination at
Perritaut, eight miles farther on, when Charlton, remembering
again his companion on the front seat, lifted his hat and
bowed, and Miss Minorkey was kind enough to return the
bow. Albert tried to analyze her bow as he lay awake in
bed that night. Miss Minorkey doubtless slept soundly. She
always did.