my dear carry:
i should have written you sooner, save that the developments here have given me so little that is pleasant to write about. my experience with grierson's agent has been too exasperating for description, and i should have given up and have got out at once had it not been for the missouri in me, and had i not got a feeling of encouragement from other experiences.
to begin with: when i reached missouri, i lit out for the southwestern part of the state by train. at springfield i fell in with some english fellows who are over at joplin in the interests of a welsh company. they had an expedition all planned to take in some of the southwest by team on their way back to joplin, and as they were going to push down pretty close to my objective point, i joined the expedition. there was a great deal of enthusiasm among us about zinc,--jack they call it down here,--and the talk at first was all of the stupidity of missourians in not getting at this part of their state, as well as the section about joplin, in the search for ore. i noticed that as we got into the rough-going of the ridge roads, and the hills got steeper and the woods denser and the rocks thicker, the opinion seemed to grow upon us that missourians might understand their country better than we did. we had a driver who knew the roads well, when he could find them. we had a geological expert who got sadder and sadder every time we spilled out of the waggons and speared around in the rocks for a little while. and we had a great deal of bacon. still, when we reached bessietown, where we struck the steam-cars, the joplin crowd broke for the train on a run. from bessie there was a straight trail over the ridge to canaan and i decided to make the trip on horseback. i had got stubborn.
well, by and by, and more and more full of bacon, i was at canaan, and had found crittenton madeira, that agent with whom we had the correspondence. i walked in upon madeira with a pretty little notion that you and i had had something to do with the projection of a plan for developing and mining the tigmores; i could have sworn that we originated the idea of hypothecating my heirship to the canaan tigmores; i remembered that in new york the fact that i would inherit from grierson seemed to make my association with any enterprise for the development of the tigmores of vital importance. i had not forgotten that that was our argument, and i was nursing a feeling that i was fairly necessary to any permanency of operations in the tigmores. i am all straightened out on that score now, thanks to madeira. the situation that i find here is this: madeira has calmly taken over our ideas, and his plans of organisation are about complete. he is qualified to act for grierson absolutely. the company that he will organise is to be known as the canaan mining and development company. he appreciates stingily that it may be some advantage to have me associated with the company, for the purpose of imparting a feeling of confidence to investors, but he does not begin to attach the importance to me that you and i did. he will let me in if i want to come in, but it is quite evident that he can get along without me, and yet more evident that if he takes me in, i must resign myself to his dictation,--dictating is his strong suit. to the gentleman who expected to be the president of the steering-grierson company, that is not a pleasant programme; yet, my dear carington, my circumstances are so precarious that i might attempt to fill it, if i did not see through madeira's lack of principle, negatively speaking,--rascality, positively speaking. now, i may have winked one eye occasionally during my business career, but i have never yet been able to shut both at once. it may be taste and it may be morals. heretofore i have taken business too casually really to know how i am equipped for it. i have never before really met myself, spoken to myself, as i hustled through the few commercial hours of each day of my life. but out here business has become a thing of wider import on the instant, and already i am face to face with something stiff and hard on the inside of me that promises not to be very malleable under madeira's hands. madeira's hands, my dear boy, are pot-black. the plan that with us was a fair and square enterprise has become with him a clap-trap scheme to rob investors. i don't know how he means to do it, but he will do it. there is a chance that the company may get good money out of the canaan tigmores in zinc, but there is a much richer chance that madeira will get good money out of the company, zinc or no zinc.
so here i am in a pleasant situation. i can take my choice between a block of shares in the new company, my vote to be in madeira's control, and a place far back, where i can watch madeira operate my land to his profit while i wait for old grierson to die. i am holding off as yet, dazzled by both prospects. meantime the organisation of madeira's company is being effected among the local capitalists, the store-keepers and the substantial farmers, and it's only a question of a few days until the directorate shuts in my face. madeira is to take me over to joplin to-morrow,--to let the showing there have its effect upon me, to let me catch the ore fever, i suspect.
immediately upon my arrival here, i looked into the history of my relationship to grierson, and also looked up the record of the peele will. grierson is the grandson of one of the sisters of old bruce peele, while i am the great-great-grandson of another sister. my great-grandfather did not like pioneer life and went back east to live and cultivate the steering family-tree into me, as the last, topmast, splendid blossom. the grierson family stayed in missouri and petered out into this bruce grierson. he is of my grandfather's generation, though he is a much younger man than a grandfather of mine could possibly be with the record of my age and my father's age to be accounted for.
[illustration: two branches of the family tree.]
i got profoundly excited in studying out the two branches of the family that are involved in the entail. here is a map of the relationship for your benefit.
you can understand from that, can't you, carington?[1]
the peele will is simple. old bruce peele lived a long life as a bachelor, with a strong aversion to matrimony. toward the end he suffered one of those revolutions in valuations that sometimes upturn people of extreme prejudices. his will sets forth emphatically that he came tardily to realise that posterity is the best thing a man can leave behind him. he had two sisters, both of whom were well along in life, unmarried, and possessed of their brother's disinclination to marry. to encourage them to cross the rubicon he made the will that entailed the canaan tigmores to the heirs, first of one and then the other, under the following provisions: the land was to go to the male heirs of his sister nancy peele, from oldest son to oldest son so long as there were male heirs, provided that in each generation the oldest male representative of nancy married before he reached the age of thirty-five. if, in any generation, nancy's representative fails to marry at thirty-five, the canaan tigmores pass to the male representative of kate peele, upon the death of the man who failed. nancy peele married a grierson, and so pronounced was the inherited aversion to matrimony in the house of grierson that compliance with the terms of the will has lasted through two generations only. the present bruce grierson let the time-limit overtake and pass him twenty years ago, but, unmarried and grouchy, he has stood between me and the canaan tigmores ever since. i don't count until he dies, and not then unless i am married before i am thirty-five. (however, i feel that i might be more disposed to meet the will's requirements than the griersons have been.)
the present grierson is utterly unapproachable. he has not lived in this section for many years. he is particularly unapproachable on the subject of the canaan tigmores because he spent a great part of his youth prospecting through these hills, hoping and being disappointed. at last he turned his back upon canaan, bitterly disillusioned, and he has been a wanderer upon the face of the earth ever since, sometimes hunting gold in the rockies, sometimes after silver in mexico. half the time even madeira does not know where he is.
the queerest thing about the mining business, carington, is the "hunches." the englishmen told me that down at joplin a man would rather have a dream that he walks two miles sou'-sou-west, turns around three times on his heels and finds ore under his left heel, than to have a geologist assure him that his house sits on a ledge of cherokee limestone that ought to be all right for zinc. i have met great numbers of miners who are hunchers. the most interesting is a man named bernique, an old chap of education and refinement from st. louis. he has a hunch about the canaan tigmores--at least so far in my intercourse with him i have not found anything more tangible than a hunch. i fell in with him just before i reached canaan, and though he then declared his intention of being absent for some days, he did not go away, sought me out in canaan next day and has spent a good deal of time with me ever since. he is a splendid old character. missouri is chuck full of character, for the matter of that. besides old bernique, i have made another friend, named piney. isn't that a pretty nice name? he is a sort of gipsy lad who roams the woods in company with old bernique. i have seen him nearly every day since i have been here, because old bernique and i ride about the tigmores, and piney is sure to fall in with us somewhere along the road. i have also met some others.
you can have no conception, carry, of the strength of pull that missouri can exert over a fellow. you stand up on a hill and look at her, and something, your dead forefathers maybe, comes up to you in waves of influence. "come back to your own!" says the something, "i am waiting for you! by me conquer!" the longer i stay in missouri, the longer i mean to stay. i have accepted the challenge of this great unconquered, waiting land. it is my own country.
sorry to have kept you so long over all this, but i thought that you ought to know. shall write you the out-look after the joplin trip. i have a notion that things will be adjusted toward the future after that.
give my love to the fellows.
yours, b. s.
p. s. please express me one of those fold-up, carry-around-with-you
bath-tubs.
when carington, in the office down on nassau street, had read that, all of it, he turned over the last sheet and looked blankly at its blankness, quoted from the first paragraph, "had i not got a feeling of encouragement from other experiences"; reread the entire letter, and was still afflicted with a sense of something lacking.
"now where the dickens did he get the encouragement?" cried carington fretfully. "psha! he has not put that in at all!"
as a matter of entity and quiddity, it is well-nigh impossible to put into a letter the little quivering lift of spirit that may come to a man just because a girl's hair is lustrous, her eyes winey, her voice delicious, her smile one of gay fellowship.
footnote:
[1] carington could not.
