The Man in Lower Ten | Page 3

to
go to Richmond on Sunday. I - I want to see a girl."
"Oh, don't mind me," I observed politely. "Personally, I wouldn't
change places with you. What's her name - North? South?"
"West," he snapped. "Don't try to be funny. And all I have to say,
Blakeley, is that if you ever fall in love I hope you make an egregious
ass of yourself."
In view of what followed, this came rather close to prophecy.
The trip west was without incident. I played bridge with a furniture
dealer from Grand Rapids, a sales agent for a Pittsburg iron firm and a
young professor from an eastern college. I won three rubbers out of
four, finished what cigarettes McKnight had left me, and went to bed at
one o'clock. It was growing cooler, and the rain had ceased. Once,
toward morning, I wakened with a start, for no apparent reason, and sat
bolt upright. I had an uneasy feeling that some one had been looking at
me, the same sensation I had experienced earlier in the evening at the
window. But I could feel the bag with the notes, between me and the
window, and with my arm thrown over it for security, I lapsed again
into slumber. Later, when I tried to piece together the fragments of that
journey, I remembered that my coat, which had been folded and placed

beyond my restless tossing, had been rescued in the morning from a
heterogeneous jumble of blankets, evening papers and cravat, had been
shaken out with profanity and donned with wrath. At the time, nothing
occurred to me but the necessity of writing to the Pullman Company
and asking them if they ever traveled in their own cars. I even
formulated some of the letter.
"If they are built to scale, why not take a man of ordinary stature as
your unit?" I 'wrote mentally. "I can not fold together like the traveling
cup with which I drink your abominable water."
I was more cheerful after I had had a cup of coffee in the Union Station.
It was too early to attend to business, and I lounged in the restaurant
and hid behind the morning papers. As I had expected, they had got
hold of my visit and its object. On the first page was a staring
announcement that the forged papers in the Bronson case had been
brought to Pittsburg. Underneath, a telegram from Washington stated
that Lawrence Blakeley, of Blakeley and McKnight, had left for
Pittsburg the night before, and that, owing to the approaching trial of
the Bronson case and the illness of John Gilmore, the Pittsburg
millionaire, who was the chief witness for the prosecution, it was
supposed that the visit was intimately concerned with the trial.
I looked around apprehensively. There were no reporters yet in sight,
and thankful to have escaped notice I paid for my breakfast and left. At
the cab-stand I chose the least dilapidated hansom I could find, and
giving the driver the address of the Gilmore residence, in the East end, I
got in.
I was just in time. As the cab turned and rolled off, a slim young man in
a straw hat separated himself from a little group of men and hurried
toward us.
"Hey! Wait a minute there!" he called, breaking into a trot.
But the cabby did not hear, or perhaps did not care to. We jogged
comfortably along, to my relief, leaving the young man far behind. I
avoid reporters on principle, having learned long ago that I am an easy

mark for a clever interviewer.
It was perhaps nine o'clock when I left the station. Our way was along
the boulevard which hugged the side of one of the city's great hills. Far
below, to the left, lay the railroad tracks and the seventy times seven
looming stacks of the mills. The white mist of the river, the grays and
blacks of the smoke blended into a half-revealing haze, dotted here and
there with fire. It was unlovely, tremendous. Whistler might have
painted it with its pathos, its majesty, but he would have missed what
made it infinitely suggestive - the rattle and roar of iron on iron, the
rumble of wheels, the throbbing beat, against the ears, of fire and heat
and brawn welding prosperity.
Something of this I voiced to the grim old millionaire who was
responsible for at least part of it. He was propped up in bed in his East
end home, listening to the market reports read by a nurse, and he
smiled a little at my enthusiasm.
"I can't see much beauty in it myself," he said. "But it's our badge of
prosperity. The full dinner pail here means a nose that looks like a flue.
Pittsburg without