The Boy Scout | Page 6

get five dollars," he announced to the elevator man, "if you drop
to the street without a stop. Beat the speed limit! Act like the building

is on fire and you're trying to save me before the roof falls."
Senator Barnes and his entire family, which was his daughter Barbara,
were at the Ritz-Carlton. They were in town in August because there
was a meeting of the directors of the Brazil and Cuyaba Rubber
Company, of which company Senator Barnes was president. It was a
secret meeting. Those directors who were keeping cool at the edge of
the ocean had been summoned by telegraph; those who were steaming
across the ocean, by wireless.
Up from the equator had drifted the threat of a scandal, sickening, grim,
terrible. As yet it burned beneath the surface, giving out only an odor,
but an odor as rank as burning rubber itself. At any moment it might
break into flame. For the directors, was it the better wisdom to let the
scandal smoulder, and take a chance, or to be the first to give the alarm,
the first to lead the way to the horror and stamp it out?
It was to decide this that, in the heat of August, the directors and the
president had foregathered.
Champ Thorne knew nothing of this; he knew only that by a miracle
Barbara Barnes was in town; that at last he was in a position to ask her
to marry him; that she would certainly say she would. That was all he
cared to know.
A year before he had issued his declaration of independence. Before he
could marry, he told her, he must be able to support a wife on what he
earned, without her having to accept money from her father, and until
he received "a minimum wage" of five thousand dollars they must wait.
"What is the matter with my father's money?" Barbara had demanded.
Thorne had evaded the direct question.
"There is too much of it," he said.
"Do you object to the way he makes it?" insisted Barbara. "Because
rubber is most useful. You put it in golf balls and auto tires and

galoches. There is nothing so perfectly respectable as galoches. And
what is there 'tainted' about a raincoat."
Thorne shook his head unhappily.
"It's not the finished product to which I refer," he stammered; "it's the
way they get the raw material."
"They get it out of trees," said Barbara. Then she exclaimed with
enlightenment--"Oh!" she cried, "you are thinking of the Congo. There
it is terrible! That is slavery. But there are no slaves on the Amazon.
The natives are free and the work is easy. They just tap the trees the
way the farmers gather sugar in Vermont. Father has told me about it
often."
Thorne had made no comment. He could abuse a friend, if the friend
were among those present, but denouncing any one he disliked as
heartily as he disliked Senator Barnes was a public service he preferred
to leave to others. And he knew besides that, if the father she loved and
the man she loved distrusted each other, Barbara would not rest until
she learned the reason why.
One day, in a newspaper, Barbara read of the Puju Mayo atrocities, of
the Indian slaves in the jungles and back waters of the Amazon, who
are offered up as sacrifices to "red rubber." She carried the paper to her
father. What it said, her father told her, was untrue, and if it were true it
was the first he had heard of it.
Senator Barnes loved the good things of life, but the thing he loved
most was his daughter; the thing he valued the highest was her good
opinion. So when for the first time she looked at him in doubt, he
assured her he at once would order an investigation.
"But, of course," he added, "it will be many months before our agents
can report. On the Amazon news travels very slowly."
In the eyes of his daughter the doubt still lingered.

"I am afraid," she said, "that that is true."
That was six months before the directors of the Brazil and Cuyaba
Rubber Company were summoned to meet their president at his rooms
in the Ritz-Carlton. They were due to arrive in half an hour, and while
Senator Barnes awaited their coming Barbara came to him. In her eyes
was a light that helped to tell the great news. It gave him a sharp,
jealous pang. He wanted at once to play a part in her happiness, to
make her grateful to him, not alone to this stranger who was taking her
away. So fearful was he that she would shut him out of her life that had
she asked for half his