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CHAPTER III
OLD JOHN BURNIT’S ANCIENT ENEMY POINTS OUT THE WAY TO GRANDEUR

Mr. Johnson had no hair in the very center of his head, but, when he was more than usually vexed, he ran his fingers through what was left upon both sides of the center and impatiently pushed it up toward a common point. His hair was in that identical condition when he knocked at the door of Bobby’s office and poked in his head to announce Mr. Silas Trimmer.

“Trimmer,” mused Bobby. “Oh, yes; he is the John Burnit Store’s chief competitor; concern backs up against ours, fronting on Market Street. Show him in, Johnson.”

Jack Starlett, who had dropped in to loaf a bit, rose to go.

“Sit down,” insisted Bobby. “I’m conducting this thing all open and aboveboard. You know, I think I shall like business.”

“They tell me it’s the greatest game out,” commented Starlett, and just then Mr. Trimmer entered.

He was a little, wiry man as to legs and arms, but fearfully rotund as to paunch, and he had a yellow leather face and black eyes which, though gleaming like beads, seemed to have a muddy cast. Bobby rose to greet him with a cordiality in no degree abashed by this appearance.

“And what can we do for you, Mr. Trimmer?” he asked after the usual inanities of greeting had been exchanged.

“Take lunch with me,” invited Mr. Trimmer, endeavoring to beam, his heavy, down-drooping gray mustache remaining immovable in front of the deeply-chiseled smile that started far above the corners of his nose and curved around a display of yellow teeth. “I have just learned that you have taken over the business, and I wish as quickly as possible to form with the son the same cordial relations which for years I enjoyed with the father.”

Bobby looked him contemplatively in the eye, but had no experience upon which to base a picture of his father and Mr. Trimmer enjoying perpetually cordial relations with a knife down each boot leg.

“Very sorry, Mr. Trimmer, but I am engaged for lunch.”

“Dinner, then – at the Traders’ Club,” insisted Mr. Trimmer, who never for any one moment had remained entirely still, either his foot or his hand moving, or some portion of his body twitching almost incessantly.

Inwardly Bobby frowned, for, so far, he had found no points about his caller to arouse his personal enthusiasm; and yet it suddenly occurred to him that here was doubtless business, and that it ought to have attention. His father, under similar circumstances, would find out what the man was after. He cast a hesitating glance at his friend.

“Don’t mind me, Bobby,” said Starlett briskly. “You know I shall be compelled to take dinner with the folks to-night.”

“At about what time, Mr. Trimmer?” Bobby asked.

“Oh, suit yourself. Any time,” responded that gentleman eagerly. “Say half-past six.”

“The Traders’,” mused Bobby. “I think the governor put me up there four or five years ago.”

“I seconded you,” the other informed him; “and I had the pleasure of voting for you just the other day, on the vacancy made by your father. You’re a full-fledged member now.”

“Fine!” said Bobby. “Business suit or – ”

“Anything you like.” With again that circular smile behind his immovable mustache, Mr. Trimmer backed out of the room, and Bobby, dropping into a chair, turned perplexed eyes upon his friend.

“What do you suppose he wants?” he inquired.

“Your eye-teeth,” returned Jack bluntly. “He looks like a mucker to me.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” returned Bobby, a trifle uneasily. “You see, Jack, he isn’t exactly our sort, and maybe we can’t get just the right angle in judging him. He’s been nailed down to business all his life, you know, and a fellow in that line don’t have a chance, as I take it, to cultivate all the little – well, say artificial graces.”

“Your father wasn’t like him. He was as near a thoroughbred as I ever saw, Bobby, and he was nailed down, as you put it, all his life.”

“Oh, you couldn’t expect them all to be like the governor,” responded Bobby instantly, shocked at the idea. “But this chap may be no end of a good sort in his style. No doubt at all he merely came over in a friendly way to bid me a sort of welcome into the fraternity of business men,” and Bobby felt quite a little thrill of pride in that novel idea. “By George! Wait a minute,” he exclaimed as still another brilliant thought struck him, and going into the other room he said to Johnson: “Please give me the letter addressed: ‘To My Son Robert, Upon the Occasion of Mr. Trimmer’s First Call.’”

For the first time in days a grin irradiated Johnson’s face.

“Nothing here, sir,” he replied.

“Let me go through that file.”

“Strictly against orders, sir,” said Johnson.

“Indeed,” responded Bobby quizzically; “I don’t like to press the bet, Johnson, but really I’d like to know who has the say here.”

“You have, sir, over everything except my private affairs; and that letter file is my private property and its contents my private trusteeship.”

“I can still take my castor oil like a little man, if I have to,” Bobby resignedly observed. “I remember that when I was a kiddy the governor once undertook to teach me mathematics, and he never would let me see the answers. More than ever it looks like it was up to Bobby,” and whistling cheerfully he walked back into his private office.

Johnson turned to Applerod with a snarl.

“Mr. Applerod,” said he, “you know that I almost never swear. I am now about to do so. Darn it! It’s a shame that Trimmer calls here again on that old scheme about which he deviled this house for years, and we forbidden to give Mr. Robert a word of advice unless he asks for it.”

“Why is it a shame?” demanded Applerod. “I always have thought that Trimmer’s plan was a great one.”

So, all unprepared, Bobby went forth that evening, to become acquainted with the great plan.

At the restless Traders’ Club, where the precise corridors and columns and walls and ceilings of white marble were indicative of great formality, men with creases in their brows wore their derbies on the backs of their heads and ceaselessly talked shop. Mr. Trimmer, more creased of brow than any of them, was drifting from group to group with his eyes turned anxiously toward the door until Bobby came in. Mr. Trimmer was most effusively glad to see the son of his old friend once again, and lost no time in seating him at a most secluded table, where, by the time the oysters came on, he was deep in a catalogue of the virtues of John Burnit; and Bobby, with a very real and a very deep affection for his father which seldom found expression in words, grew restive. One thing held him, aside from his obligations as a guest. He was convinced now that his host’s kindness was in truth a mere graceful act of welcome, due largely to his father’s standing, and the idea flattered him very much. He strove to look as businesslike as possible, and thought again and again upon his father; of how he had sat day after day in this stately dining-hall, honored and venerated among these men who were striving still for the ideal that he had attained. It was a good thought, and made for pride of the right sort. With the entrée Mr. Trimmer ordered his favorite vintage champagne, and, as it boiled up like molten amber in the glasses, so sturdily that the center of the surface kept constantly a full quarter of an inch above the sides, he waited anxiously for Bobby to sample it. Even Bobby, long since disillusioned of such things and grown abstemious from healthy choice, after a critical taste sipped slowly again and again.

“That’s ripping good wine,” he acknowledged.

“There’s only a little over two hundred bottles of it left in the world,” Mr. Trimmer assured him, and then he waited for that first glass to exert its warming glow. He was a good waiter, was Silas Trimmer, and keenly sensitive to personal influences. He knew that Bobby had not been in entire harmony with him at any period of the evening, but after the roast came on – a most careful roast, indeed, prepared under a certain formula upon which Mr. Trimmer had painstakingly insisted – he saw that he had really found his way for a moment to Bobby’s heart through the channel provided by Nature for attacks upon masculine sympathy, and at that moment he leaned forward with his circular smile, and observed:

“By the way, Mr. Burnit, I suppose your father often discussed with you the great plan we evolved for the Burnit-Trimmer Arcade?”

Bobby almost blushed at the confession he must make.

“I’m sorry to say that he didn’t,” he owned. “I never took the interest in such things that I ought, and so I missed a lot of confidences I’d like to have had now.”

“Too bad,” sympathized Mr. Trimmer, now quite sure of his ground, since he had found that Bobby was not posted. “It was a splendid plan we had. You know, your building and mine are precisely the same width and precisely in a line with each other, back to back, with only the alley separating us, the Trimmer establishment fronting on Market Street and the Burnit building on Grand. The alley is fully five feet below our two floor lines, and we could, I am quite sure, get permission to bridge it at a clearance of not to exceed twelve feet. By raising the rear departments of your store and of mine a foot or so, and then building a flight of broad, easy steps up and down, we could almost conceal the presence of this bridge from the inside, and make one immense establishment running straight through from Grand to Market Streets. The floors above the first, of course, would bridge over absolutely level, and the combined stores would comprise by far the largest establishment in the city. Of course, the advantage of it from an advertising standpoint alone would be well worth while.”

Bobby could instantly see the almost interminable length of store area thus presented, and it appealed to his sense of big things at once.

“What did father say about this?” he asked.

“Thought it a brilliant idea,” glibly returned Mr. Trimmer. “In fact, I think it was he who first suggested such a possibility, seeing very clearly the increased trade and the increased profits that would accrue from such an extension, which would, in fact, be simply the doubling of our already big stores without additional capitalization. We worked out two or three plans for the consolidation, but in the later years your father was very slow about making actual extensions or alterations in his merchandising business, preferring to expend his energies on his successful outside enterprises. I feel sure, however, that he would have come to it in time, for the development is so logical, so much in keeping with the business methods of the times.”

Here again was insidious flattery, the insinuation that Bobby must be thoroughly aware of “the business methods of the times.”

“Of course, the idea is new to me,” said Bobby, assuming as best he could the air of business reserve which seemed appropriate to the occasion; “but I should say, in a general way, that I should not care to give up the identity of the John Burnit Store.”

“That is a fine and a proper spirit,” agreed Mr. Trimmer, with great enthusiasm. “I like to see it in a young man, but I’ve no doubt that we can arrange that little matter. Of course, we would have to incorporate, say, as the Burnit-Trimmer Mercantile Corporation, but while having that name on the front of both buildings, it might not be a bad idea, for business as well as sentimental reasons, to keep the old signs at the tops of both, just as they now are. Those are little details to discuss later; but as the stock of the new company, based upon the present invoice values of our respective concerns, would be practically all in your hands and mine, this would be a very amicable and easily arranged matter. I tell you, Mr. Burnit, this is a tremendous plan, attractive to the public and immensely profitable to us, and I do not know of anything you could do that would so well as this show you to be a worthy successor to John Burnit; for, of course, it would scarcely be a credit to you to carry on your father’s business without change or advance.”

It was the best and the most crafty argument Mr. Trimmer had used, and Bobby carried away from the Traders’ Club a glowing impression of this point. His father had built up this big business by his own unaided efforts. Should Bobby leave that legacy just where he had found it, or should he carry it on to still greater heights? The answer was obvious.

CHAPTER IV
AGNES EMPHATICALLY DECIDES THAT SHE DOES NOT LIKE A CERTAIN PERSON

At the theater that evening, Bobby, to his vexation, found Agnes Elliston walking in the promenade foyer with the well-set-up stranger. He passed her with a nod and slipped moodily into the rear of the Elliston box, where Aunt Constance, perennially young, was entertaining Nick Allstyne and Jack Starlett, and keeping them at a keen wit’s edge, too. Bobby gave them the most perfunctory of greetings, and, sitting back by himself, sullenly moped. He grumbled to himself that he had a headache; the play was a humdrum affair; Trimmer was a bore; the proposed consolidation had suddenly lost its prismatic coloring; the Traders’ Club was crude; Starlett and Allstyne were utterly frivolous. All this because Agnes was out in the foyer with a very likely-looking young man.

She did not return until the end of that act, and found Bobby ready to go, pleading early morning business.

“Is it important?” she asked.

“Who’s the chap with the silky mustache?” he suddenly demanded, unable to forbear any longer. “He’s a new one.”

The eyes of Agnes gleamed mischievously.

“Bobby, I’m astonished at your manners,” she chided him. “Now tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself.”

“Trying to grow up into John Burnit’s truly son,” he told her with some trace of pompous pride, being ready in advance to accept his rebuke meekly, as he always had to do, and being quite ready to cover up his grievous error with a change of topic. “I had no idea that business could so grip a fellow. But what I’d like to find out just now is who is my trustee? It must have been somebody with horse sense, or the governor would not have appointed whoever it was. I’m not going to ask anything I’m forbidden to know, but I want some advice. Now, how shall I learn who it is?”

“Well,” replied Agnes thoughtfully, “about the only plan I can suggest is that you ask your father’s legal and business advisers.”

He positively beamed down at her.

“You’re the dandy girl, all right,” he said admiringly. “Now, if you would only – ”

“Bobby,” she interrupted him, “do you know that we are standing up here in a box, with something like a thousand people, possibly, turned in our direction?”

He suddenly realized that they were alone, the others having filed out into the promenade, and, placing a chair for her in the extreme rear corner of the box, where he could fence her off, sat down beside her. He began to describe to her the plan of Silas Trimmer, and as he went on his enthusiasm mounted. The thing had caught his fancy. If he could only increase the profits of the John Burnit Store in the very first year, it would be a big feather in his cap. It would be precisely what his father would have desired! Agnes listened attentively all through the fourth act to his glowing conception of what the reorganized John Burnit Company would be like. He was perfectly contented now. His headache was gone; such occasional glimpses as he caught of the play were delightful; Mr. Trimmer was a genius; the Traders’ Club a fascinating introduction to a new life; Starlett and Allstyne a joyous relief to him after the sordid cares of business. In a word, Agnes was with him.

“Do you think your father would accept this proposition?” she asked him after he was all through.

“I think he would at my age,” decided Bobby promptly.

“That is, if he had been brought up as you have,” she laughed. “I think I should study a long time over it, Bobby, before I made any such important and sweeping change as this must necessarily be.”

“Oh, yes,” he agreed with an assumption of deep conservatism; “of course I’ll think it over well, and I’ll take good, sound advice on it.”

“I have never seen Mr. Trimmer,” mused Agnes. “I seldom go into his store, for there always seems to me something shoddy about the whole place; but to-morrow I think I shall make it a point to secure a glimpse of him.”

Bobby was delighted. Agnes had always been interested in whatever interested him, but never so absorbedly so as now, it seemed. He almost forgot the stranger in his pleasure. He forgot him still more when, dismissing his chauffeur, he seated Agnes in the front of the car beside him, with Starlett and Allstyne and Aunt Constance in the tonneau, and went whirling through the streets and up the avenue. It was but a brief trip, not over a half-hour, and they had scarcely a chance to exchange a word; but just to be up front there alone with her meant a whole lot to Bobby.

Afterward he took the other fellows down to the gymnasium, where Biff Bates drew him to one side.

“Look here, old pal!” said Bates. “I saw you real chummy with T. W. Tight-Wad Trimmer to-night.”

“Yes?” admitted Bobby interrogatively.

“Well, you know I don’t go around with my hammer out, but I want to put you wise to this mut. He’s in with a lot of political graft, for one thing, and he’s a sure thing guy for another. He likes to take a flyer at the bangtails a few times a season, and last summer he welshed on Joe Poog’s book; claimed Joe misunderstood his fingers for two thousand in place of two hundred.”

“Well, maybe there was a mistake,” said Bobby, loath to believe such a monstrous charge against any one whom he knew.

“Mistake nawthin’,” insisted Biff. “Joe Poog don’t take finger bets for hundreds, and Trimmer never did bet that way. He’s a born welsher, anyhow. He looks the part, and I just want to tell you, Bobby, that if you go to the mat with this crab you’ll get up with the marks of his pinchers on your windpipe; that’s all.”

Early the next morning – that is, at about ten o’clock – Bobby bounced energetically into the office of Barrister and Coke, where old Mr. Barrister, who had been his father’s lawyer for a great many years, received him with all the unbending grace of an ebony cane.

“I have come to find out who were the trustees appointed by my father, Mr. Barrister,” began Bobby, with a cheerful air of expecting to be informed at once, “not that I wish to inquire about the estate, but that I need some advice on entirely different matters.”

“I shall be glad to serve you with any legal advice that you may need,” offered Mr. Barrister, patting his finger-tips gently together.

“Are you the trustee?”

“No, sir” – this with a dusty smile.

“Who is, then?”

“The only information which I am at liberty to give you upon that point,” said Mr. Barrister drily, “is that contained in your father’s will. Would you care to examine a copy of that document again?”

“No, thanks,” declined Bobby politely. “It’s too truthful for comfort.”

From there he went straight to his own place of business, where he asked the same question of Johnson. In reply, Mr. Johnson produced, from his own personal and private index-file, an oblong gray envelope addressed:

To My Son Robert,

Upon His Inquiring About the Trusteeship of My Estate

Opening this in the privacy of his own office, Bobby read:

“As stated in my will, it is none of your present business.”

“Up to Bobby again,” the son commented aloud. “Well, Governor,” and his shoulders straightened while his eyes snapped, “if you can stand it, I can. Hereafter I shall take my own advice, and if I lose I shall know how to find the chap who’s to blame.”

He had an opportunity to “go it alone” that very morning, when Johnson and Applerod came in to him together with a problem. Was or was not that Chicago branch to be opened? The elder Mr. Burnit had considered it most gravely, but had left the matter undecided. Mr. Applerod was very keenly in favor of it, Mr. Johnson as earnestly against it, and in his office they argued the matter with such heat that Bobby, accepting a typed statement of the figures in the case, virtually turned them out.

“When must you have a decision?” he demanded.

“To-morrow. We must wire either our acceptance or rejection of the lease.”

“Very well,” said Bobby, quite elated that he was carrying the thing off with an air and a tone so crisp; “just leave it to me, will you?”

He waded through the statement uncomprehendingly. Here was a problem which was covered and still not covered by his father’s observations anent Johnson and Applerod. It was a matter for wrangling, obviously enough, but there was no difference to split. It was a case of deciding either yes or no. For the balance of the time until Jack Starlett called for him at twelve-thirty, he puzzled earnestly and soberly over the thing, and next morning the problem still weighed upon him when he turned in at the office. He could see as he passed through the outer room that both Johnson and Applerod were furtively eying him, but he walked past them whistling. When he had closed his own door behind him he drew again that mass of data toward him and struggled against the chin-high tide. Suddenly he shoved the papers aside, and, taking a half-dollar from his pocket, flipped it on the floor. Eagerly he leaned over to look at it. Tails! With a sigh of relief he put the coin back in his pocket and lit a cigarette. About half an hour later the committee of two came solemnly in to see him.

“Have you decided to open the Chicago branch, sir?” asked Johnson.

“Not this year,” said Bobby coolly, and handed back the data. “I wish, Mr. Johnson, you would appoint a page to be in constant attendance upon this room.”

Back at their own desks Johnson gloated in calm triumph.

“It may be quite possible that Mr. Robert may turn out to be a duplicate of his father,” he opined.

“I don’t know,” confessed Applerod, crestfallen. “I had thought that he would be more willing to take a sporting chance.”

Mr. Johnson snorted. Mr. Applerod, who had never bet two dollars on any proposition in his life, considered himself very much of a sporting disposition.

Savagely in love with his new assertiveness Bobby called on Agnes that evening.

“I saw Mr. Trimmer to-day,” she told him. “I don’t like him.”

“I didn’t want you to,” he replied with a grin. “You like too many people now.”

“But I’m serious, Bobby,” she protested, unconsciously clinging to his hand as they sat down upon the divan. “I wouldn’t enter into any business arrangements with him. I don’t know just what there is about him that repels me, but – well, I don’t like him!”

“Can’t say I’ve fallen in love with him myself,” he replied. “But, Agnes, if a fellow only did business with the men his nearest women-folks liked, there wouldn’t be much business done.”

“There wouldn’t be so many losses,” she retorted.

“Bound to have the last word, of course,” he answered, taking refuge in that old and quite false slur against women in general; for a man suffers from his spleen if he can not put the quietus on every argument. “But, honestly, I don’t fear Mr. Trimmer. I’ve been inquiring into this stock company business. We are each to have stock in the new company, if we form one, in exact proportion to the invoices of our respective establishments. Well, the Trimmer concern can’t possibly invoice as much as we shall, and I’ll have the majority of stock, which is the same as holding all the trumps. I had Mr. Barrister explain all that to me. With the majority of stock you can have everything your own way, and the other chap can’t even protest. Seems sort of a shame, too.”

“I don’t like him,” declared Agnes.

The ensuing week Bobby spent mostly on the polo match, though he called religiously at the office every morning, coming down a few minutes earlier each day. It was an uneasy week, too, as well as a busy one, for twice during its progress he saw Agnes driving with the unknown; and the fact that in both instances a handsome young lady was with them did not seem to mend matters much. He was astonished to find that losing the great polo match did not distress him at all. A year before it would have broken his heart, but the multiplicity of new interests had changed him entirely. As a matter of fact, he had been long ripe for the change, though he had not known it. As he had matured, the blood of his heredity had begun to clamor for its expression; that was all.

At the beginning of the next week Mr. Trimmer came in to see him again, with a roll of drawings under his arm. The drawings displayed the proposed new bridge in elevation and in cross section. They showed the total stretch of altered store-rooms from street to street, and cleverly-drawn perspectives made graphically real that splendid length. They were accompanied by an estimate of the cost, and also by a permit from the city to build the bridge. With these were the preliminary papers for the organization of the new company, and Bobby, by this time intensely interested and convinced that his interest was business acumen, went over each detail with contracted brow and with kindling enthusiasm.

It was ten o’clock of that morning when Silas Trimmer had found Bobby at his desk; by eleven Mr. Johnson and Mr. Applerod, in the outer office, were quite unable to work; by twelve they were snarling at each other; at twelve-thirty Johnson ventured to poke his head in at the door, framing some trivial excuse as he did so, but found the two merchants with their heads bent closely over the advantages of the great combined stores. At a quarter-past one, returning from a hasty lunch, Johnson tiptoed to the door again. He still heard an insistent, high-pitched voice inside. Mr. Trimmer was doing all the talking. He had explained and explained until his tongue was dry, and Bobby, with a full sense of the importance of his decision, was trying to clear away the fog that had grown up in his brain. Mr. Trimmer was pressing him for a decision. Bobby suddenly slipped his hand in his pocket, and, unseen, secured a half-dollar, which he shook in his hand under the table. Opening his palm he furtively looked at the coin. Heads!

“Get your papers ready, Mr. Trimmer,” he announced, as one finally satisfied by good and sufficient argument, “we’ll form the organization as soon as you like.”

No sooner had he come to this decision than he felt a strange sense of elation. He had actually consummated a big business deal! He had made a positive step in the direction of carrying the John Burnit Store beyond the fame it had possessed at the time his father had turned it over to him! Since he had stiffened his back, he did not condescend to take Johnson and Applerod into his confidence, though those two gentlemen were quivering to receive it, but he did order Johnson to allow Mr. Trimmer’s representatives to go over the John Burnit books and to verify their latest invoice, together with the purchases and sales since the date of that stock-taking. To Mr. Applerod he assigned the task of making a like examination of the Trimmer establishment, and each day felt more like a really-truly business man. He affected the Traders’ Club now, formed an entirely new set of acquaintances, and learned to go about the stately rooms of that magnificent business annex with his hat on the back of his head and creases in his brow.

Even before the final papers were completed, a huge gang of workmen, consisting of as many artisans as could be crowded on the job without standing on one another’s feet, began to construct the elaborate bridge which was to connect the two stores, and Mr. Trimmer’s publicity department was already securing column after column of space in the local papers, some of it paid matter and some gratis, wherein it appeared that the son of old John Burnit had proved himself to be a live, progressive young man – a worthy heir of so enterprising a father.