The Spenders | Page 8

up a train there fur Montana City. Was he--"
"Dan'l J. has been took home--the noozepaper says."
They turned back down the trail, the old man astride Billy Brue's horse,

followed by his pack-mule and preceded by Billy.
Already, such was his buoyance and habit of quick recovery and
readjustment under reverses, his thoughts were turning to his grandson.
Daniel's boy--there was the grandson of his grandfather--the son of his
father--fresh from college, and the instructions of European travel,
knowing many things his father had not known, ready to take up the
work of his father, and capable, perhaps, of giving it a better finish. His
beloved West had lost one of its valued builders, but another should
take his place. His boy should come to him and finish the tasks of his
father; and, in the years to come, make other mighty tasks of
empire-building for himself and the children of his children.
It did not occur to him that he and the boy might be as far apart in
sympathies and aims as at that moment they were in circumstance. For,
while the old man in the garb of a penniless prospector, toiled down the
steep mountain trail on a cheap horse, his grandson was reading the
first news of his father's death in one of the luxurious staterooms of a
large steam yacht that had just let down her anchor in Newport Harbour.
And each--but for the death--had been where most he wished to be--one
with his coarse fare and out-of-doors life, roughened and seamed by the
winds and browned by the sun to mahogany tints; aged but playing
with boyish zest at his primitive sport; the other, a strong-limbed,
well-marrowed, full-breathing youth of twenty-five, with appetites all
alert and sharpened, pink and pampered, loving luxury, and prizing
above all things else the atmosphere of wealth and its refinements.
CHAPTER IV.
The West Against the East
Two months later a sectional war was raging in the Bines home at
Montana City. The West and the East were met in conflict,--the old and
the new, the stale and the fresh. And, if the bitterness was dissembled
by the combatants, not less keenly was it felt, nor less determined was
either faction to be relentless.
A glance about the "sitting-room" in which the opposing forces were

lined up, and into the parlour through the opened folding-doors, may
help us to a better understanding of the issue involved. Both rooms
were large and furnished in a style that had been supremely luxurious
in 1878. The house, built in that year, of Oregon pine, had been quite
the most pretentious piece of architecture in that section of the West. It
had been erected in the first days of Montana City as a convincing
testimonial from the owner to his faith in the town's future. The
plush-upholstered sofas and chairs, with their backs and legs of carved
black walnut, had come direct from New York. For pictures there were
early art-chromos, among them the once-prized companion pieces,
"Wide Awake" and "Fast Asleep." Lithography was represented by
"The Fisherman's Pride" and "The Soldier's Dream of Home." In the
handicrafts there were a photographic reproduction of the Lord's Prayer,
illustrated originally by a penman with uncommon genius for
scroll-work; a group of water-lilies in wax, floating on a mirror-lake
and protected by a glass globe; a full-rigged schooner, built cunningly
inside a bottle by a matricide serving a life-sentence in the penitentiary
at San Quinten; and a mechanical canarybird in a gilded cage, acquired
at the Philadelphia Centennial,--a bird that had carolled its death--lay in
the early winter of 1877 when it was wound up too hard and its little
insides snapped. In the parlour a few ornamental books were grouped
with rare precision on the centre-table with its oval top of white marble.
On the walls of the "sitting-room" were a steel engraving of Abraham
Lincoln striking the shackles from a kneeling slave, and a framed
cardboard rebus worked in red zephyr, the reading of which was "No
Cross, No Crown."
Thus far nothing helpful has been found.
Let us examine, then, the what-not in the "sitting-room" and the choice
Empire cabinet that faces it from the opposite wall of the parlour.
The what-not as an American institution is obsolete. Indeed, it has been
rather long since writers referred to it even in terms of opprobrious
sarcasm. The what-not, once the cherished shrine of the American
home, sheltered the smaller household gods for which no other
resting-place could be found. The Empire cabinet, with its rounding

front of glass, its painted Watteau scenes, and its mirrored back, has
come to supplant the humbler creation in the fulfilment of all its tender
or mysterious offices.
Here, perchance, may be found a clue in symbol to the family