The Price | Page 4

as it
was. Instead, he lighted a fresh cigar and found a chair on the port side
aft where he could sit and watch the lights wheel past in orderly
procession as the fruit steamer swept around the great crescent which
gives New Orleans its unofficial name.
While the comfortable feeling of elation, born of his unexpected bit of
good fortune, was still uppermost to lend complacency to his
reflections, he yet found room for a compassionate underthought
having for its object the man from whom he had lately parted. He was
honestly sorry for Griswold; sorry, but not actually apprehensive. He
had known the defeated one in New York, and was not unused to his
rebellious outbursts against the accepted order of things. Granting that
his theories were incendiary and crudely subversive of all the civilized
conventions, Griswold the man was nothing worse than an
impressionable enthusiast; a victim of the auto-suggestion which seizes
upon those who dwell too persistently upon the wrongs of the wronged.
So ran Bainbridge's epitomizing of the proletary's case; and he knew
that his opinion was shared with complete unanimity by all who had
known Griswold in Printing House Square. To a man they agreed in
calling him Utopian, altruistic, visionary. What milder epithets should
be applied to one who, with sufficient literary talent--not to say
genius--to make himself a working name in the ordinary way, must
needs run amuck among the theories and write a novel with a purpose?
a novel, moreover, in which the purpose so overshadowed the story as
to make the book a mere preachment.
As a matter of course, the publishers would have nothing to do with the
book. Bainbridge remembered, with considerable satisfaction, that he
had confidently predicted its failure, and had given Griswold plentiful

good advice while it was in process of writing. But Griswold, being
quite as obstinate as he was impressionable, had refused to profit by the
advice, and now the consequences of his stubbornness were upon him.
He had said truly that his literary gift was novelistic and nothing else;
and here he was, stranded and desperate, with the moribund book on
his hands, and with no chance to write another even if he were so
minded, since one can not write fasting.
Thus Bainbridge reflected, and was sorry that Griswold's invincible
pride had kept him from accepting a friendly stop-gap in his extremity.
Yet he smiled in spite of the regretful thought. It was amusing to figure
Griswold, who, as long as his modest patrimony had lasted had been
most emphatically a man not of the people, posing as an anarchist and
up in arms against the well-to-do world. None the less, he was to be
pitied.
"Poor beggar! he is in the doldrums just now, and it isn't quite fair to
hold him responsible for what he says or thinks--or for what he thinks
he thinks," said the reporter, letting the thought slip into speech. "Just
the same, I wish I had made him take that ten-dollar bill. It might
have-- Why, hello, Broffin! How are you, old man? Where the dickens
did you drop from?"
It was the inevitable steamer acquaintance who is always at hand to
prove the trite narrowness of the world, and Bainbridge kicked a chair
into comradely place for him.
Broffin, heavy-browed and clean-shaven save for a thick mustache that
hid the hard-bitted mouth, replaced the chair to suit himself and sat
down. In appearance he was a cross between a steamboat captain on a
vacation, and an up-river plantation overseer recovering from his
annual pleasure trip to the city. But his reply to Bainbridge's query
proved that he was neither.
"I didn't drop; I walked. More than that, I kept step with you all the way
from Chaudière's to the levee. You'd be dead easy game for an
amateur."

"You'll get yourself disliked, the first thing you know," said Bainbridge,
laughing. "Can't you ever forget that you are in the man-hunting
business?"
"Yes; just as often, and for just as long, as you can forget that you are
in the news-hunting business."
"Tally!" said Bainbridge, and he laughed again. After which they sat in
silence until the Adelantado doubled the bend in the great river and the
last outposts of the city's lights disappeared, leaving only a softened
glow in the upper air to temper the velvety blackness of the April night.
The steamer had passed Chalmette when Broffin said:
"Speaking of Chaudière's reminds me: who was that fellow you were
telling good-by as you came out of the café? His face was as familiar as
a ship's figure-head, but I couldn't place him."
The question coupled in automatically with the reporter's train of
thought; hence he answered it rather more fully and freely than he
might have