Success

Success

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Success, by Samuel Hopkins Adams
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Title: Success A Novel
Author: Samuel Hopkins Adams
Release Date: March 21, 2005 [EBook #15431]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Success
BY SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
Author of "The Clarion," "Common Cause," etc.
1921

CONTENTS

PART I. ENCHANTMENT

PART II. THE VISION

PART III. FULFILLMENT

SUCCESS

PART I
ENCHANTMENT

CHAPTER I
The lonely station of Manzanita stood out, sharp and unsightly, in the
keen February sunlight. A mile away in a dip of the desert, lay the town,
a sorry sprawl of frame buildings, patternless save for the one main
street, which promptly lost itself at either end in a maze of cholla,
prickly pear, and the lovely, golden-glowing roseo. Far as the eye could
see, the waste was spangled with vivid hues, for the rare rains had come,
and all the cacti were in joyous bloom, from the scarlet stain of the
ocatilla to the pale, dream-flower of the yucca. Overhead the sky shone
with a hard serenity, a blue, enameled dome through which the
imperishable fires seemed magnified as they limned sharp shadows on
the earth; but in the southwest clouds massed and lurked darkly for a
sign that the storm had but called a truce.
East to west, along a ridge bounding the lower desert, ran the railroad, a
line as harshly uncompromising as the cold mathematics of the
engineers who had mapped it. To the north spread unfathomably a
forest of scrub pine and piñon, rising, here and there, into loftier growth.

It was as if man, with his imperious interventions, had set those thin
steel parallels as an irrefragable boundary to the mutual encroachments
of forest and desert, tree and cactus. A single, straggling trail squirmed
its way into the woodland. One might have surmised that it was
winding hopefully if blindly toward the noble mountain peak
shimmering in white splendor, mystic and wonderful, sixty miles away,
but seeming in that lucent air to be brooding closely over all the varied
loveliness below.
Though nine o'clock had struck on the brisk little station-clock, there
was still a tang of night chill left. The station-agent came out, carrying
a chair which he set down in the sunniest corner of the platform. He
looked to be hardly more than a boy, but firm-knit and self-confident.
His features were regular, his fairish hair slightly wavy, and in his
expression there was a curious and incongruous suggestion of
settledness, of acceptance, of satisfaction with life as he met it, which
an observer of men would have found difficult to reconcile with his
youth and the obvious intelligence of the face. His eyes were masked
by deeply browned glasses, for he was bent upon literary pursuits,
witness the corpulent, paper-covered volume under his arm. Adjusting
his chair to the angle of ease, he tipped back against the wall and made
tentative entry into his book.
What a monumental work was that in the treasure-filled recesses of
which the young explorer was straightway lost to the outer world! No
human need but might find its contentment therein. Spread forth in its
alluringly illustrated pages was the whole universe reduced to the
purchasable. It was a perfect and detailed microcosm of the world of
trade, the cosmogony of commerce in petto. The style was brief, pithy,
pregnant; the illustrations--oh, wonder of wonders!--unfailingly apt to
the text. He who sat by the Damascus Road of old marveling as the
caravans rolled dustily past bearing "emeralds and wheat, honey and oil
and balm, fine linen and embroidered goods, iron, cassia and calamus,
white wool, ivory and ebony," beheld or conjectured no such wondrous
offerings as were here gathered, collected, and presented for the
patronage of this heir of all the ages, between the gay-hued covers of
the great Sears-Roebuck Semiannual Mail-Order Catalogue. Its happy

possessor need but cross the talisman with the ready magic of a postal
money order and the swift genii of transportation would attend, servile
to his call, to deliver the commanded treasures at his very door.
But the young reader was not purposefully shopping in this vast
market-place of print. Rather he was adventuring idly, indulging the
amateur spirit, playing a game of hit-or-miss, seeking oracles in those
teeming pages. Therefore he did not turn to the pink insert, embodying
the alphabetical catalogue (Abdominal Bands to Zither Strings),