The Wealth of Timmy Zimmerman

I

TIMMY ZIMMERMAN’S case is that of a wise man and his money.

It took Timmy thirty-three years to become a full-fledged ‘case’ and a week more to become an enlightened citizen. To tell you all about it, I shall need at least twenty minutes. Pray do not assume that you won’t care for him because he was an ordinary little tobaccoman with extraordinary luck. I like him myself, and hope to show you why. It will be my fault if you do not see it.

Timmy began rolling tobacco at thirteen, and his friend, Kit Hankey, almost as early. Timmy was twentyfour and both of them were working for his cousin Gus, down-river in Tanopolis, Tennessee, when Gus Zimmerman fell into financial difficulties.

Timmy and Kit regarded themselves seriously as capitalists, each having saved some fourteen hundred dollars. They pooled these moneys, borrowed two thousand dollars at the bank with the factory as security, and bought out Gus Zimmerman’s business, to his satisfaction and their own surprise. Kit, meagre, dry, and keen, set himself to working out some ideas he had about scientific management. Timmy undertook the advertising.

Timmy was the fox-terrier type of young German, small and stocky, with red checks, shrewd little blue eyes under heavy lids that lifted whimsically, an insignificant, tipped-up nose, a clean-cut, strong jaw, and good-natured mouth. He looked physically fit and positively quivering with eagerness to get ahead on the moment’s job, whatever that might be. At twentyfour it was money-making.

From the very beginning Timmy aimed at reaching the Ultimate Consumer with economy and dispatch. He believed in the Ultimate Consumer; it might almost be said that he loved him. Certainly he never doubted for a moment that the Ultimate Consumer had the intelligence to respond generously to generous treatment.

Naturally the new firm had no money for big advertising. What Timmy did was to get bill-board space in the poorer parts of town, which he filled with Us BOYS’ PLUG in red and black and white. Three thousand labels, similarly printed, Zimmerman & Hankey sat up nights to paste with their own hands on small manila bags holding two good-sized sample chews.

Us Boys’ Plug was a rather coarse but full-flavored tobacco; the bars were perceptibly larger for the money than in other brands of a similar quality. As his advertising appropriation for the quarter was now exhausted, Timmy himself carried these samples to the doors of every factory in town. When the gates opened and his Ultimate Consumers poured out at night, tired, hungry, grimy, irritable, there stood Timmy, head a little to one side, a cheerful grin on his pert small face, dexterously dropping into their hands as they passed, those comforting, generous chews. He was the best possible advertisement for his own wares.

There was an increasing demand for Us Boys’ Plug almost from the beginning; but not until he had stood at the factory gates of three cities, handing his samples direct to the men he desired to reach, did Timmy Zimmerman engage assistance in his advertising.

After Us Boys’ Plug came Baked Beans Brand, The Swellest Smoke. The business grew, and it grew, and it grew. Five years after Zimmerman & Hankey bought out Cousin Gus with fear and trembling, they were drawing four hundred dollars a day apiece from their business. A year later they sold out to a combination for three million dollars in stock, and Timmy was retained as manager at twenty thousand a year. If I had been inventing this, I should have made it more probable.

Timmy promptly disposed of most of his stock at par, getting real money for it. He invested this carefully at six per cent, and then he pinched himself. Was this snub-nosed millionaire of thirty, with perplexed eyes, whom he saw in the mirror, really little Timmy Zimmerman? His eyes were perplexed because he did not know what ought to come next. Poverty he knew, and work he knew. Both were good friends of his. But what were riches?

Sometimes it would sweep over him with the freshness of a great spring wind blowing across his face, that earth held nothing which he might not buy. In such moments he tasted the wonderful promise of existence, and knew that it was for him. There grew upon him a longing to enter on his inheritance.

‘Kit,’ he confided to his friend, ‘I’m going to cut out business after my contract with the combine expires. What do I want a job for, now?’

‘Don’t you do it!’

‘I’d like to know why not!’

Kit looked secretive.

‘Twenty thousand is some money.’

‘But what do I want any more plunks for? I don’t aim to be one of these grasping pi-rates the high-brow papers are always side-swiping, the fellers that don’t know when their trough is full. That ain’t me! I got all I want. From now on, you watch me saunter down Easy Street. I expect to cut some swathe.’

‘I’m not saying we have n’t got a good bit for as young as we are,’ admitted Kit cautiously. Kit had married Bertha Krankreich three years before. He admired tremendously his wife’s pink cheeks, cold eyes, and executive ability. But Bertha was not exactly a cozy little woman. ‘The real thing’s this, Timmy. You know I bought an interest in the delicatessen factory that Bertha’s brother runs. I got tired hanging round the house. A man has got to have a place to set.’

‘ You, not me! ’ Timmy chuckled joyously. ‘A bachelor don’t have to go away from home to set still in peace!’

‘A bachelor ain’t got a home to set in,’ retorted Kit.

‘ I mean to have a swell home if I am a bachelor,’ boasted Timmy. ‘ I feel like I wanted it. It’s just another game, I guess. But I ’ll play a lone hand. I don’t reckon a man can be ready for matrimony when it sends cold shivers down his spine just to think of it, do you?”

Kit lowered his voice.

‘Timmy, listen a minute. I’ll tell you something. A man never gets over feelin’ that way about it. He just has to kind of chloroform them feelings an’ hurry along with it. Because there ain’t no doubt it is the thing to do.’

This hoary confidence, which man has made to man since time began, affected Timmy as a revelation of great novelty and impressiveness, and he stowed it away in his mind for further consideration. But he took no steps looking toward the married life, nor did he accept Kit’s advice as to retaining his job. At the expiration of his contract he resigned, with the definite intention of learning how to spend his money so as to get out of it whatever might be in it — for him.

Older, cleverer, far more cultivated men have failed to make a large income buy what they really wanted. Timmy supposed the opening moves in the game of getting your money’s worth were simple. One must have food, clothes, shelter. Wealth enables you to acquire these in their superlative degree: richer food, costlier clothes, more expensive shelter. Then there is the matter of amusement. When a very plain man is out for a good time, he has only a few ideas on the subject of how to get it. Had Timmy thought out pleasure as carefully as he had thought out work, he would have known better than to accept the ideas of the man in the street; it was a new problem to him.

After the first joy of spending faded, his leisure seemed to lack savor. Outside his abandoned work, he did not know where to look for the mental stimulus it had furnished. So he threw himself into the details of food, clothes, shelter, and amusement, with rabid earnestness.

He ordered an adequate wardrobe from a good tailor, and found the possession of it an undiluted satisfaction.

In matters of eating and drinking, he rioted joyously for a season. It required time for even the richest food to affect him adversely. But the change did come. In the course of months he became acquainted with biliousness and recognized to his surprise that there is no spoil-sport like a discontented liver. He ceased giving frequent dinners to the boys and took to the Athletic Club, alternating strenuous exercise with Turkish baths. As for drinking, he reached this sound conclusion: —

‘My neck’s too short,’ he explained to Kit Hankey. ‘D’ye see? I have to drink twice as much as anybody else to get the full of the taste in my throat. And twice as much as anybody is more’n I can carry. I don’t like them little explosions in the top of my head the times I take too much.’

‘I told you to stick to a job! Work stiddies anybody.’

‘My flat’s just done,’ observed Timmy, changing the subject pointedly. ‘Don’t you want to have a peek at it?’

Kit assented eagerly. Timmy had been reticent as to the details of his expensive effort to acquire a ‘swell home.’ Leasing floor-space in a down-town building, ‘so’s not to get too far away from the boys,’ he had turned it over to architect and decorator. At first the extent and expensiveness of the decorator’s imagination stimulated Timmy greatly, but as the work went merrily on and he began to guess the result as a whole, he stood about with his hands in his pockets, a perturbed expression and an extinguished cigar. He was now ready to speak his mind.

Unlocking the door, he ushered Kit through something rich and stiff in hall-effects, into a very large Louis Quatorze drawing-room paneled in satinwood and pale brocade.

‘That wall-paper cost twenty-five dollars a yard,’said Timmy with an embittered glance. ‘This is a “period” room. It’ll put a finish to me all right. Little Timmy don’t feel at home.’

‘ It’s right handsome,’ said Kit, much impressed by the price.

‘The decorator says those Lewises cut up high. I told him it was because they did n’t like their furniture. It ain’t cozy enough for the money. See, this is my bedroom.’

The walls here were bright pink satin; rosy nymphs and cupids wreathed the ceiling, carrying garlands and pointlace frills around a frieze.

‘Looks like it was designed for the Original Human Sweetmeat, don’t it?— and me a bachelor, too!’ said Timmy sadly.

’Well, get over it then. ’T ain’t a permanent disability,’ grunted Kit, surveying the dazzling scene with approval. It far outshone anything Bertha Hankey’s ambitions had brought to pass in his own house. He felt distinctly superior to Timmy for once because he, Kit, could see the beauty to which Timmy was obviously blind.

Timmy shook his head.

‘Same old story,’ he said shortly. ‘Them as ’ll have me, I won’t have. Young Parvenoo turns down the daughters of Mrs. Horseleech. When it comes to marryin’ a grafter, Timmy says nay, nay, Pauline.’

Kit opened the door into the bathroom. Onyx and marble and silver had been used to startling effect. It was a spectacular, not to say melodramatic, bathroom. The tub was a sunken pool.

‘Too much like the drop-scene at a theayter,’ growled Timmy. ‘Don’t you think it ought to look more secluded? That decorator, he had the nerve to tell me, once I saw the tub set, I couldn’t hardly wait till Saturday night for a bath. I told him to keep that old gag for the newly-rich. I was brought up to go into a swimmin’ pool whenever my mother did n’t know I did it. This place needs an old Roman like I saw at the play, all draped in a counterpane, with a beak on him like Sammy Rosenberg, going down them steps into the water an’ saying, “Here,slave, where’s the soap?” — The kitchen ain’t bad, though, an’ I like the dining-room.’

The latter was in low-toned browns and blues, with dark carved furniture. It is a little harder to get ugly designs in Aubusson tapestries at eighty dollars a yard than in Spitalfields silks at twenty-five.

‘Ain’t it just my blamed luck that the only homelike place in the flat is the feed-stall — and me eating too much a’ready?’ demanded the owner. ‘Kit, if I had to live in this flat, I know I’d sit in the dining-room and eat till I bust — the other rooms make me so homesick.’

‘ If you had to live in this flat! ’ echoed Kit stupidly as they strolled back into the chilly drawing-room. ‘ Whatta you mean? Ain’t it good enough for you?’

Zimmerman cast a backward glance at the glories they were leaving.

’Not for Timmy. This ain’t my house. I don’t know much, but I know that.’

Kit Hankey picked up his hat and moved toward the door. ‘Well, I think you’re crazy,’ he said shortly. ‘What you going to do next?’

Timmy Zimmerman shut the front door sadly on marvels for which he had no use. His keen little face was thoughtful and depressed. He did not care to confide even to Kit how deep this disappointment in his home-making went, but, in truth, it had shaken his confidence in gold itself.

‘Thirty thousand dollars gone to thunder!’ he said. ‘But it can’t be helped. I’m going to take out fire and burglar insurance, lock the door, and start round the world next week.’

II

In that first trip around the world, Timmy Zimmerman touched what was to be for long his high-water mark of pleasure in his fortune. Cathedrals might leave him cold and museums pass him by, but the streets of the great world called him. In them he found his own. From San Francisco to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Liverpool — O wonderful streets! They were swarming with Ultimate Consumers of every race and color, each making his bargain with another, and he watched them all with insatiable curiosity and delight. A man’s education must catch him where it can. Such cultivation as he was ready for caught Timmy in the shops of New Bond Street, under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, among the bazaars of Algiers, on the streets of Tokyo. Because he came of wholesome country stock, the land, too, had its speech with him. He learned from the paddy-fields of Japan, the vineyards of France, the sweet English meadows. And what he learned was good.

When he came back to Tanopolis, he glanced contemptuously at his flat; he had long talks with Kit Hankey, still advising matrimony and a ’job’; he hung about his favorite Turkish baths a while, and then, like a shot, was off around the world again.

He could not regain his first rapture. Failing to renew the joy of his initial journey, he amused himself by making speed. He stopped longer in France than elsewhere, held there by the lure of the machine. It was early days in the history of automobiles. Timmy bought a ten-thousand-dollar, brightred French car, and brought it home to play with.

From this period of his return with the machine dates what may be called the Zimmerman myth. It is true that he looked older and his face was a little harder; true, too, he was deeply bored if there was not something doing every minute; true that he used his car recklessly as a safety-valve for his temperament. Still, he was not the devil he was painted. He did not deliberately run over children or make a point of knocking old people down. Neither was it strictly on purpose that his machine climbed into the exhibition-window of a big department store during the spring opening, knocking down Paris models and making chaff of pattern hats. When he drove down the flight of sixty steps between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Avenues, it was not for sheer deviltry, but to avoid a drop down the bank. But automobiles were few in those days, and Timmy’s lurid driving passed into legend with speed and inaccuracy.

Nevertheless, when one has said all that one can for him, he did many hideously selfish things. He was a speedfiend of the outrageous type of those early days, never satisfied save with impossible feats. Even his old friends dropped his old name at this time. There is something cheerful, considerate, human, about ‘Timmy Zimmerman,’ but in these evil days he was ‘Tim Zim’ or even ‘T. Z.’

When his ill-repute was at its height, he crossed the river one Saturday afternoon and took the Missawoppa pike, an excellent country road. To reach Missawoppa, you must pass through the hamlets of Webster, Venice, and Hell’s Kitchen. Tim Zim did so with pomp and circumstance. It may be said that those villages knew some one had gone by. But not until he reached Missawoppa did he really let himself out. Missawoppa is a drowsy little county-seat with its courthouse in the middle of a square. The Court-park is railed in with gas-pipe to which are hitched a hundred or two teams any pleasant Saturday afternoon. Timmy whizzed joyously into the town, beheld the peaceable, sunny square with its lines of tired horses, stamping a little at flies, munching a little at nose-bags, noted the crowds on the sidewalks, and yielded to the temptation that assailed him. Cutting out his muffler, he raced joyously twice around that square at a speed of fifty-five miles an hour, as close to the backs of the wagons as he might. His idle chauffeur, looking behind, saw the long lines of terrified animals rise at the gas-pipe in one long wave of horse-flesh that reared its crest sharply and fell back, broken and confused. It was a sight to remember long.

Tim Zim, slowing up on the Missawoppa pike, remarked casually, ‘A place ain’t got no business to look so blamed peaceful, has it, Williams? It’s too blamed tempting.’

Usually Tim Zim knew better than to recross an old trail. But in this lovely autumn weather he was reckless as well as bored. The following Saturday afternoon found the big red car again approaching Missawoppa. It went through Webster, Venice, and Hell’s Kitchen with sufficient energy to make them aware of its passing, but on the roads outside the pace fell off. Williams was driving, while Tim Zim stared rather sulkily at the autumn landscape. He was, in fact, trying to figure out, as he often did, why the world had not kept its promise of happiness to him.

Half-way between Hell’s Kitchen and Missawoppa, a solitary girl’s figure appeared, emerging from an orchard. She stood, gazed, then sped across the road, waving some scarlet aerial thing directly in their path.

‘Stop! Stop!’ she cried.

The car halted a little beyond her, and she ran toward them lightly, shading her face with her hand. Tim Zim turned in his seat.

‘You-all are Mr. Timothy Zimmerman?' she affirmed rather than asked.

‘That’s me.’

As the girl stood silent, looking him up and down, he inquired so mildly that it hardly seemed impertinence, —

‘Did you just want to see what I looked like, ma’am, or have you business to transact?’

‘Both,’ said the girl haughtily.

Tim clambered down with ostentatious politeness.

‘At your service, miss,’ he declared.

She was a bit of a blonde girl with eyebrows like wings, above eyes that looked to Tim Zim like acetylene headlights. Her lips were as scarlet as her chiffon scarf; her chin was very firm.

‘You must turn back,’ she said. ‘They’re laying for you a few miles down the road. Somebody telephoned out from Webster and said you’d gone through, coming this way. The boys were looking for a kettle of tar and a feather-bed when I saddled my horse and came away.’

‘Ain’t that a little hasty? What have I done to them? ’ inquired Tim blandly.

‘I don’t blame them for a minute! You deserve it all and more. But I was afraid if they got hold of you there might be a killing. Some of the boys are mighty quick with their guns.’

As Tim stared at her, she added, flushing a wonderful, dusky red, ‘I don’t much like killings.’

‘Me? Kill me? O bother! It would be awful hard to kill me. I’m tough. And I ain’t done anything.’ It really seemed necessary to say something to justify himself to those young, disdainful eyes.

‘You’re Timothy Zimmerman, are n’t you?’

‘Well, what of it? That’ll never hang me,’ drawled Tim Zim comfortably.

‘The Timothy Zimmerman who made millions in tobacco and does n’t know how to spend ’em except by blowing them in? The Timothy Zimmerman who does n’t care how he drives nor who he hurts, and is no good to anybody but himself? Out our way the women scare their babies, telling ’em Tim Zim ’ll get them if they are n’t good child’en.’

Tim Zim flinched. Crude as was the picture of himself, it was hardly a caricature, and yet he knew its essential injustice. If she had not been such a scrap of a girl, so little, so big-eyed, so positive, her sketch would have angered him. As it was, he glanced at her small clenched hand and shook his head.

‘That ain’t me. I’m a man with troubles of my own’ he returned gravely.

But the excited girl went on rapidly, —

‘Why, after you-all raced round Missawoppa square last Saturday, there were eighteen broken thills and a dozen wheels twisted off, and nine cracked axles that I heard of myself. Every horse on the square was plumb scared out of its wits. They all tried to climb over the railing and some of ’em did it. Quite a few were badly hurt. I guess there must have been a hundred dozen eggs that went to smash out of the backs of buggies around that courthouse. The ground looked like a giant had been fixing an omelet.'

At this T. Z. tried unsuccessfully to smother a grin. The girl saw it, and again that scornful scarlet rushed into her face.

‘If that was all!’ she cried. ‘You cert’nly are a worthless brute — and now I’m going to give you the straight of it!’

‘ Tut! Tut! Why, say, for a girl that’s saving my life, you’re an awful little spitfire, ain’t you?’

‘Your life’s not worth saving, but I don’t want any better man to spoil his, killing you!’ she cried.

At this T. Z. flushed. ‘I don’t know as I have to take this off of you.' he warned quietly. ‘I’m not the worst man that ever came down this pike.’ Oddly enough, he was, still, more curious and interested than angry.

‘Listen to me! ’ she said fiercely. ‘Jim Peters’s old mother was just climbing into the wagon when their horses reared. She fell and broke her hip and ankle. She’s way past seventy, and the doctor says the bones will never knit. Brenkerhoff’s horse kicked over the dashboard and hit one of the children, glancing. She was unconscious two days, and they did n’t believe she’d ever come to. But the worst was Sally Briggs. She was taking a basket of butter from under the seat when you came by, and the buggy cramped, and threw her down. They’ve been married fifteen years and no children until now. The baby was born that night, and born dead. She raves and says its blood is on your hands and on your head, and she’ll curse you to hell forever! The doctor is n’t sure she’ll live herself. Quite likely not, because she does n’t want to.’

Under its coating of summer tan, T. Z.’s smooth cheek turned pale. Her words had cut through at last.

‘Well, miss, I certainly did n’t mean to do nothing like those things,’he said slowly. ‘Take it from me, I never did.’

‘That does n’t do any good!’ she cried bitterly, and was still.

Like some austere, avenging Fate, she stood upon the hill-crest in the level rays of the October sun. Her face was twisted with pain. She was beyond herself; she seemed to feel in her own heart the sorrows that she told him of, and, like knife-thrusts, Tim Zim felt them too. The girl had the gift of evocation. Visions sprang up at her words. He had a strange, swift consciousness as of an all-embracing Mind that gathers and hides and holds the bitter cries of the wantonly injured; that holds them as thunder-clouds hold a slowly gathering storm until the due hour of its dreadful release.

Tim Zim moved abruptly to the car.

‘Drive up the road and wait for me,’ he ordered sharply.

When Williams was out of sight, he turned a white and shaken face upon the girl.

‘Who are you, anyway?’ he demanded. ‘I never saw a girl like you, in any place.’

‘ I’m Molly Betterton.’ She hesitated. The whole town knew it was a complex affair to be Molly Betterton in Missawoppa. Why should she tell a stranger the things she never forgot? Yet something seemed to push the words from her unready lips. ‘Father was young Roger Betterton. Mother was Mizpah Dicky. The Bettertons thought the Dickys no ’count poor whites. The Dickys thought the Bettertons lawless and proud. I don’t know what any of ’em would have thought of me. They’re all dead. I’ve no folks at all on either side. Uncle Joe and Aunt ’Liza are just the Wittys, who took me when I was a baby and brought me up.’

She hardly knew how much her explanation explained. For Mizpah Dicky’s father had been an itinerant preacher in the mountains, ignorant and poor, but pious to fanaticism and aflame with the wild oratory of his kind; young Roger Betterton’s father, with all the vices of his day and caste, had been one of the bar’s finer ornaments. The best of both strains was visible in Molly Betterton. In the later light of eugenics, possibly young Roger’s marriage was not such a mésalliance as the whole county had thought it to be.

Tim nodded. Faintly he recalled a decision of old Judge Betterton in an important tobacco case long ago. So he had left behind him this morsel of incarnate justice to put the world to rights!

‘Well — I’d like a little talk with you. Would you mind setting down on the rock for a few minutes?’

Dropping carelessly on the flat stone under the big butternut tree, Molly Betterton looked full into his face.

‘ Why, I ’ ve hurt you! ’ she cried. ‘ Of course — I meant to hurt you, but not like that! Oh, I am rude and cruel! I did n’t know you’d care! I thought — why, I thought you did those terrible things just because you liked to do them!’

‘You’ve got another guess coming then,’ said Tim Zim grimly.

He sat down beside her, elbows on knees, chin in hands, intensely concentrated and frowning. A long-impending crisis had been precipitated in his inner world by this event. Sick disgust of his life and all its ways swept over him.

‘I’m no good!’ he cried sharply. ‘No good! An’ yet I mean well enough. Things don’t work out right for me. Say, kid, I’m going to tell you something I never let on to anybody before. My money worries me. What do you know about that?’

‘Worries you? How?’

‘I’m getting the bad of it — an’ I ain’t getting the good of it. If you was me, what would you do?’

‘Do?’ the girl echoed uncertainly.

‘Yes. Do. I don’t mean about this affair. I can settle up for eggs an’ broken buggies. The things I can’t settle up for will be put on my bill all right, I reckon. Somebody seems to see to that! But it ain’t just this matter that’s chewing me, bad as it makes me feel. An’ it does make me feel plain sick. It’s the whole blamed proposition. — I ain’t a good talker, but I’ll try to put it to you straight. You say I’m a selfish fool with a lot of money he blundered into, just throwin’ it away on whatever comes along. Now, that ain’t me at all. I made that money myself. I expect I got too much of it, but it took some thinkin’ to do it, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I thought gettin’ rid of it was goin’ to be more fun yet. But it ain’t. I ain’t got the hang of the game. I never played a game before that I could n’t learn the rules of. But whether there’s too much of the money or not enough of me, the rules they hand out don’t fit me. Mostly I’ve been blowing myself for things I did n’t want. There’s nothing but the car that’s really fun. And here you come along an’ tell me I ’m ruining people’s lives and getting myself cussed black an’ blue, playing with that. It makes me just desperate! It seems pretty clear I’m off the track, ain’t it? There must be some way of spending that gives good results, must n’t there? Well, what I want of you is to get right down to brass tacks. I never saw a woman before who could. Don’t hand me out any canned sentiments. I don’t want ’em. Here’s the proposition: I ’ve got forty or fifty years of life comin’ to me; I’ve got a million and a half of money; I’ve got Tim Zimmerman just as he is. Them’s my tools. What shall I do with ’em?’

The girl followed his words with intensest seriousness, her eyes on the square, rugged little face which looked so much less depraved than she had expected. She drew an amazed breath at the end.

‘You too! You need help and pity, too!’ she murmured.

‘ Great Scott! I should say I do. The Good Book is all right on some points. It just looks as if a camel could go through a needle’s eye sooner than me have a little peace and quiet and good time,’ mourned Tim Zim desperately.

She looked at him wide-eyed. It had never occurred to her before that a rich man might be the victim of his money, or a strong man of his power. But having grasped the fact that the monstrous Tim Zim was, in some sort, an object of commiseration no less than his victims, she herself became instantly transformed. She softened, she shone, she was gentle. Tim, looking at her, beheld morning and evening in her face, and mellow autumn noons in her deep eyes. She assumed his burden at once — it seemed to be a way she had.

‘But what do you like best,’ she demanded, ‘of all the things you’ve seen and tried?’

‘I like people. I like the way things are bought an’ sold. I like land an’ the way things grow. I don’t like books. They worry me.’

She questioned further. Tim replied with amazing case. This intoxicating atmosphere of friendly interest was new to him; it was an astonishment and a revelation. Up from the depths of consciousness rose far-off vicissitudes, forgotten things, rushing to be told. There was such a curious lightness in his mind, such an eager outpouring of all his experience to meet her comprehension, that he felt as if he could talk to her forever and forever!

He desired wonderfully to share with her his meagre boyhood, his hard apprenticeship and swift success, his experiment in home-making, at which he still winced.

He tried to explain his passion for the automobile and the curious feeling it gave him — that on its wings he passed from earth and air on, on, into — some other place. Some great, still, smooth place where he was very safe and very powerful. ‘It’s as if you had only to wish a thing there an’ you got it! Lordy! I plumb can’t get the words, but the feel to it is wonderful!’

He babbled in his joy at finding such a listener. Champagne had never so unloosed his tongue. At last he even tried to tell her that incommunicable thing he had dreamed and redreamed all his life.

‘In the back of my mind, I know there’s a thing I can do. But I can’t, make out what it is. — When I study about it more’n common, I have this dream of a figure that flies ahead of me, hidin’ its face. I never come near it, though I run for hours. But I sort of feel if I once could catch up an’ see its face — I’d know what I need to know!— Ain’t that a queer dream for a duck like me?’

The girl drank it all in eagerly, solemnly, her big eyes shining, the fugitive color playing in her lips and cheeks. Submerged in interest and sympathy, only the falling shadows reminded her of herself.

‘Sundown, and me five miles from home! ’

‘I can get you there in fifteen minutes.’

She shook her head. ‘My horse is over in the orchard.’

‘You have n’t told me what to do,’ reproached Tim Zim. ‘ Here you come, wavin’ your scarf an’ tellin’ me they’re goin’ to kill me down the road, an’ I deserve it. They might as well kill me if I can’t find out what I’m to do!’

‘But it’s too big a thing to see through all at once,’ said Molly.

‘Will you come here at four o’clock next Saturday, young lady, and tell me what you’ve thought?’

‘If I can, I will.’

Gravely and awkwardly Timmy mounted her upon her horse.

‘ Miss! ’

‘Yes, Mr. Zimmerman.’

‘I had a awful rush of words to the mouth this afternoon. I guess I gave you the history of my young life all right.’

‘Indeed, you can trust me.’

‘Ain’t I? But what I want you to study on is this: there’s something somewhere I ain’t got hold of. I put it up to you.’

III

‘Great Scott! Timmy, what’s got you?’ demanded Kit Hankey the following Monday morning.

Zimmerman turned upon his friend a white face with hollow, nervous eyes.

‘ I ’ve seen the woman that’s going to marry me—that’s all,’ said Tim Zim bitterly.

He looked so frightened and depressed that Kit was moved to sudden pity.

‘That’s bad — I mean I’m glad to hear it,’ blundered Kit. ‘I hope she ain’t one set in her own way?’

‘Something awful! I never saw such a positive woman!’

‘An’ a great talker?’

‘It was me did the talking. The way I told her all I knew was something fierce. Was you like that with Bertha, Kit?’

‘Me? Naw! What’d I need to talk to a woman for?’

T. Z. could not answer this, though he knew how his own soul had found easement thereby.

‘The way she can express herself’d take you off your feet, Kit. I tell you she’s some lady — and then again, she’s ’most as plain as I am. She’s a wonderful blend, that’s what! Smooth an’ cool, and hot an’ biting, full-flavored an’ delicate, all in one.’

‘Are you promised?’

‘Cæsar, no! I only seen her once. But she’s the one all right. O Kit! She’s as far above me as the stars. I ain’t in any danger of her lookin’ at me.’

Kit’s sharp little face grew suddenly sharper.

‘Then it ain’t too late. Why don’t you make a get-away?’

‘How’s that?’

‘Beat it! Hike out! It’s the only way to do when you see it comin’. That is, of course,’ he added, mindful of his dignity as a family man, ‘if you ain’t got the stren’th of mind to face it and take your medicine like the rest of us. If you can’t do that, cut an’ run!’

‘O Lord, no! I want to see it out. But it seems as if ’t would kill me!’

‘Timmy, I’ll stand by you. Let me telephone down and have ’em fix you up a ticket for San Francisco. You light out again. That’s the thing for you.'

His unhappy friend hesitated. ‘All right,’ he groaned at last. And Kit Hankey turned to the desk and called the city office of a transcontinental line.

IV

Every intelligent person must foresee that Mr. Timothy Zimmerman, carefully attired, reached the butternut tree on the hill at half-past three on Saturday afternoon. Molly Betterton’s horse cantered up the slope at fourthirty.

Though Tim did not know it, the slope was Betterton Hill. The tumbledown house across two fields was Molly’s birthplace. She had chosen the shelter of her ancestral acres, though hers they had never been, for the daring exploit of intercepting and rebuking the terrible Tim Zim.

The termination of that exploit amazed her. That Tim Zim should prove sincere, almost childishly confiding, pitifully anxious to make something that satisfied him out of his life, was a miracle not easy to grasp. This was Molly’s first experience in learning that nobody lacks extenuating circumstances.

Tim came to the meeting wild-eyed and nervous. The week had been one of unspeakable mental stress to him. But underneath his nervousness lay a singular exaltation. There were miracles in the world, and one of them had happened to him. And there is a fearful joy in miracles.

The hour in which he awaited the girl brought reassurance. The autumn air was very still, and the brooding, healing sunshine seemed fixed forever on the gashed and tired fields. Now and then a yellow leaf fell through the amber air, or a field-mouse stirred in the pale corn-stalks across the vineladen fence. The earth swam in a golden trance, and Tim Zim, entranced along with it, found unexpected peace. Town, and its works and ways, fell off his soul and left it innocent and bland, the guileless soul of the boy he had never had time to be. In this mood marriage had no terrors; the thought of a scrap of a girl with eyebrows like wings and the tongue of a prophet even uplifted his heart.

When Molly Betterton’s sorrel cantered briskly up the slope, Tim went forward. She slipped down joyously and faced him with eager confidence. Her great eyes blazed like beacon fires. She was sure she knew the answer to his problem; for she was a child, who had not yet learned that only once in a thousand times does one human being know the answer for another.

Deep within him, Tim Zim’s agonized soul lurched, then righted itself.

‘Young lady, I thank you for coming,’ he said formally. ’I guess I had n’t any right to ask you.’

‘No,’ Molly admitted tranquilly, ‘and I ought n’t to have come. But I had to if I saw you-all again. You can’t come to Missawoppa. When I got back last Saturday the boys had the tar-kettle ready in the Court-park. They were mighty put out that you did n’t ’pear. You can’t ever come to Missawoppa. It won’t be safe.’

Tim set his jaw, but expressed no opinion as he fastened her horse. Probably he owed it to Missawoppa to let them think they could use the tarbrush if they caught him. It would make them feel better. Returning, he sat down beside her. Molly pulled off her heavy riding-gloves and stretched her cramped fingers in the sun.

Hollow-eyed and serious, Tim contemplated her air of happy certainty. He did not feel like that.

‘ That was a great talk-fest I had with you the other day. Did you think over what I said?’

She nodded, smiling. Again he felt the radiance of her interest like soft airs blowing on his cheek. Again a door seemed to open into some wonderland of the spirit where he moved happily and freely, a man with the best of men.

‘It’s perfectly simple,’ she announced confidently.

‘Think of that, now,’ Timmy murmured.

‘This is the way of it,’ she said judicially; she was not a Betterton for nothing. ‘All you need is more work and less money. You like work — why do you try to live without it? There are such lots of lovely things to do! You like land. Get a place like this one, a place that needs money and coddling and care. Make it rich again, and beautiful. It’s such a — such a wonderful thing to do!’

‘I sure do like the land,’ said Tim Zim slowly, ‘ but — me a rube? I can’t quite see it.’

Her face fell, and she suddenly felt shallow and inexperienced, but she went on steadily, —

‘You’ve made more money than you have any comfort with. Your fortune does n’t fit. Cut it down till it does. It’s perfectly easy. I don’t see why you did n’t think of it yourself!’

At this point Tim put his hands in his pockets and whistled.

‘You said you had a million and a half,’ Molly went on with added dignity, for she felt something hostile in the air. ‘If I were you, I’d begin by giving away the half-million. Then, if you still feel too gorged, get rid of half that’s left. That ought to relieve you a lot!’

‘Cæsar’s ghost!’ Tim Zim jumped up and paced back and forth excitedly before his small counselor, for once in his life taken thoroughly aback.

‘Do you mean, me give away two thirds of what I’ve got?’

‘You said it worried you. You said it did n’t do you any good. All I know is what you said. I don’t know if you meant it.’

‘Yes, but it’s money, ain’t it?’

‘Of course, I understand how you feel,’ said Molly rather grandly, ‘for I’ve four hundred a year of my own, and I’d perfectly hate to have anybody tell me to give two thirds of it away. But in my case, you see, after I’ve paid Uncle Joe and Aunt ’Liza for my boa’d (they don’t want to take it, but I make them), there is n’t exactly enough left. So it’s not quite the same as your case, is it?’

Tim drew his knuckles across his eyes confusedly.

‘No, I judge — not,’ he gasped. ‘Still, I’m no Andy Carnegie. ’Tis n’t as if I’d a hundred million, or fifty, or even ten.’

‘Anybody’s Carnegie who’s got more than he spends,’ observed Molly sapiently.

‘Give away a million dollars! Gosh!’ muttered T. Z. ‘Young lady, you’re the most expensive acquaintance I’ve made in all my glad young life.’

‘I’m sorry you don’t like my plan. I thought it seemed very reasonable. But, of course, you’re the judge.’

‘Well, then mebbe I ought to say you’re the doctor! But I can’t! A million dollars! O my soul! Why, I feel as if I’d go to the poor-house next week just from hearing about it!’

‘ But you said — ’

‘Oh, yes! I said, an’ I said! You listen to what I’m sayin’ now. Young lady, I could n’t tell you the way a man feels about the money he’s got together by the hardest. It ’s my blood an’ my bones. It’s my body, an’ I dunno but it’s my soul. I know I had luck and made a lot of it quick. I guess if it’d all come as hard as the first two thousand did I ’d be a miser huggin’ every penny. Thank the Lord, I ain’t quite that. But as for giving of it away — I can’t an’ I won’t! That’s flat!’

Molly Betterton shrank perceptibly. Was this indeed the bed-rock of the man’s nature? She eyed him curiously, for his very face had changed as he spoke. His lids narrowed and his lips grew harsh.

‘I made it,’ he said. ‘I made it. It’s the only thing I ever made. All hell shan’t take it away!’

The girl’s lip quivered and the beacon-fires in her eyes died down. Was this what happened to all young advisers, she wondered miserably. Did the joy of leadership always give way to this awful leaden feeling? She had nothing more to say.

Tim broke the long silence presently, when the gust that had shaken him passed. He tried to be civil.

‘Mebbe it’s a grand plan,’ he apologized, ‘but I did n’t know but you could think up some way of enlarging me to fit my income. If you once start cutting down the income to fit me, it might, easy, get down to about thirty cents. Then I’d be like the old farmer’s horse: just as he got him on to a straw a day, he up an’ died.’

Miss Betterton refused to smile at this ancient jest.

‘Everything I said the other day was true, too,’ he urged.

Still the girl kept silence. Tim meditated further.

‘Here’s how it is,’ he pleaded desperately. ‘This world’s a cold, dark, lonesome place, and any minute it’s likely to get more so. Money warms it up. So, no matter what we’ve got tucked away, we think, “If I lost that, I’d need this other to fall back on.”So we tuck away some more. Everybody’s just alike.’

‘It’s not reasonable,’ said Molly at last, coldly.

‘ We don’t want to be reasonable. We want to be safe.’

‘After you’ve tucked away a fortune here and another there, could n’t you rely, finally, on being a man in a world of men?' inquired Miss Betterton in dejected tones.

‘Yes, if I was!’ said Tim Zim. ‘But mostly I’m a pig in a world of pigs. You take it from me, the glad hand is mighty scarce in business unless it’s from a man that’s got a knife up his sleeve.’

Silence again. Tim broke it when it became intolerable to him.

‘Well, have I disgusted you so you ’re done with me?' he demanded. ‘Am I just as low-down an’ mean as you thought I was before you saw me at all? Do you call it fair to drop me hard just because I don’t chuckle when you say, “A million to the scrap-heap an’ you to the plough!” It — it takes a lot of thinking over, such a proposition does.’

The girl rose swiftly to her feet, stretching out her arms in the golden air with a strange gesture, half of renunciation, half of quest. Tim’s heart turned over at the sight.

‘But you’ve disappointed me!’ she cried bitterly. ‘Oh, I thought you were different! I thought I saw you as God made you, — simple, straightforward, and kind, reaching out for worth-while things under all the outside flash and dash. And I—I thought you would see things as I see them. Cities don’t matter, nor money — much. Look across those fields! My father tilled them once. His father before him planted the seeds, and persuaded the harvests in this very spot. To have neither too much nor too little of such land, and to love it and make a home upon it! To let one’s spending be mostly for things that make it rich and beautiful! To learn the new ways and the better ways and teach them to the fields and to one’s neighbors! Why, to own a bit of the earth and to care for it like that is to be a director in the Biggest Corporation, a partner with the seasons and the sun. It’s right wonderful — I guess it is divine!’

Seed-time and harvest and patient service of the generous earth were in his blood no less than hers, and in him, too, the creative thirst. Again, as on that other day, her words evoked the sudden vision. Tim Zina saw blossoming orchards, fertile meadows, and the glistening rows of the fruited corn like an army with banners; he saw a walled garden and a white homestead with sturdy children tumbling on its lawns.

Thus seeing, he suddenly knew she had drawn the veil from the face of his Dream. He beheld it at last!—He, too, was a husbandman and a creator, he, too, a home-builder. At any cost he, too, was fain to make earth yield him her increase, and to cradle little bodies in his arms.

At any cost? The solid world rocked wildly underneath his feet, and all his schedules of value seemed to melt and transform themselves before his very eyes. Money was money,— yes — but it was only money after all!

As this perception cleaved his world, a vast new freedom overspread his spirit. The thing that he had made, he owned. He could deal with it as he would, for it held him bound no longer. What if he chose to toss it yonder like a ball?

Doubtless all decisions that reconstruct a life seem sudden at the end, but doubtless all of them have been growing beneath our conscious life, shaped by the slow accretion of a thousand unexpressed desires. What we do in the hour these hidden longings come to birth may surprise our careless neighbors and even ourselves, but it holds no amazement for the wise. Tim Zim’s reversion to the simpler life had been preparing all his busy days. Shaken to the core of him, he saw what all men come to see at last. Gold is gold only as it furthers the deepest desire. Except man shape his dream with it, he finds it lead within his hands.

He snatched the girl’s hands swiftly, as positive as she had been. His eyes were filled with tears, his shrewd face seemed dissolved in tenderness and longing, its lines all plastic to his spirit. Something within him sang and shouted.

‘Look here!’ he said, ‘I do understand. I may not look it, but somehow I am your kind. I want the things you want. Would you dare go look for them with me? Am I enough your kind to — to do for you? The main thing is, there’s something in me worth your while. Make what you choose of it! The — million — may — go — hang !'

‘Oh, I don’t know! How can I tell? It is n’t the money that matters — it’s the way you feel about it! Will this thing last? Are you a man? ’ demanded Molly Betterton wildly, her own eyes filling.

Great drops of sweat stood out upon his forehead and his lips shook oddly as he faced himself with this demand. What about it? Was he a man within her meaning of the word? Was he moved by the moment’s emotion or by a greater thing? Could he live quietly, deal justly, laugh at gold of his own earning? Could he scorn cities and abjure excitement? Could he make the earth richer for his labor, and love the common lot? — Would he pay this price for his dream?

What he said now, he must hold by forever. Was he a man?

From deeper within himself than he had ever probed, uprushed the answer.

‘ I don’t know as I am. But I swear I wall be. For the God of Harvests, He made me!’ said Timothy Zimmerman.