LIKE COVERED FIRE.
Much Ado about Nothing; iii.—2.

Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was playing a somewhat difficult game, and she was playing it well. She was entertaining Mr. Greenfield, the Feltonville member, and she had also as a casual guest for the evening, Mr. Erastus Snaffle, and successfully to work the one off against the other was a task from which the cleverest of society women might be excused for shrinking, even had it been presented to her in terms of her own circle.

Greenfield was an honest, straightforward countryman; big, and rather burly, with a clear eye and a curling chestnut beard. He was a man at once of great force of character, and of singular simplicity. He exerted a vast influence in his country neighborhood in virtue of the respect inspired by his invincible integrity, a certain shrewdness which was the more effective at short range from the fact that it was really narrow in its spread, and perhaps most of all of his bluff, demonstrative kindliness. Tom Greenfield's hearty laugh and cordial handshake had won him more votes than many a more able man has been able to secure by the most thorough acquaintance with the questions and interests with which election would make it the duty of a man to be concerned; but it must be added that no man ever used his influence more disinterestedly and honestly, or more conscientiously fulfilled the duties of his position, as he understood them.

Such a man was peculiarly likely to become the victim of a woman like Mrs. Sampson. The plea of relationship on which she had sought his acquaintance disarmed suspicion at the outset. His country manners were familiar with family ties as a genuine bond, and he had no reason whatever to suppose that any ulterior motive was possible to this woman who affected to be so ignorant of politics and public business.

In the weeks which had elapsed since her interview with Alfred Irons, Mrs. Sampson had been making the most of the fraction of the season which remained to her. She had offered excuses which Greenfield's simple soul found satisfactory why she had not sought her cousin's acquaintance early in the winter, and the very irksomeness of the enforced absence from his country home which seized him as spring came on, made him the more susceptible to the blandishments of the mature siren who, with cunning art, was meshing her nets about him.

He had quite fallen into the habit of passing his unoccupied evenings with the widow, and she in turn had denied herself to some of her familiar friends on occasions when she had reason to expect him. Had she known he was likely to come this evening, she would have taken care to guard against his meeting with Snaffle; but as that gentleman was first in the field, she had her choice between sending Greenfield away and seeing them together. Like the clever woman she was, she chose the latter alternative, and found, too, her account in so doing.

Erastus Snaffle was more familiarly than favorably known in financial circles of Boston, as the man who had put afloat more wild-cat stocks than any other speculator on the street. It might be supposed that his connection with any scheme would be enough to wreck its prospects, yet whatever he took hold of floated for a time. There was always a feeling among his victims that at length he had come to the place where he must connect himself with a respectable scheme for the sake of re-establishing his reputation; but this hope was never realized. Perhaps whatever he touched ceased from that moment to be either reliable or respectable. However, since Snaffle was possessed of so inexhaustible a fund of plausibility that he never failed to find investors who placed confidence in his wildest statements, it after all made very little difference to him what his reputation or his financial standing might be.

By one of those singular compensations in which nature seems now and then to make a struggle to adjust the average of human characteristics with something approaching fairness, Snaffle was hardly less gullible than he was skilful in ensnaring others. He was continually making a fortune by launching some bogus stock or other, but it seemed always to be fated that he should lose it again in some equally wild scheme started by a brother sharper. Perhaps between his professional strokes he was obliged to practise at raising credulity in himself merely to keep his hand in; perhaps it was simply that the habit of believing financial absurdities had become a sort of second nature in him; or yet again is it possible that he felt obliged to assume credulity in regard to the falsehoods of his fellow sharpers, as a sort of equivalent for the faith he so often demanded of them; but, whatever may have been the reason, it was at least a fact that his money went in much the same way it came.

In person, Erastus Snaffle was not especially prepossessing. His face would have been more attractive had the first edition of his chin been larger and the succeeding ones smaller, while the days when he could still boast of a waist were so far in the irrevocable past that the imagination refused so long a flight as would be required to reach it. His eyes were small and heavy-lidded, but in them smouldered a dull gleam of cunning that at times kindled into a pointed flame. His dress was in keeping with his person, and his manner quite as vulgar as either.

He was sitting to-night in one corner of the sofa, his corpulent person heaped up in an unshapely mass, talking with a fluency that now and then died away entirely, while he paused to speculate what sort of a game his hostess might be playing with Mr. Greenfield.

"The fact is," Mrs. Sampson was saying, as Snaffle recalled his attention from one of these fits of abstraction, "that I don't know what I shall do this summer; and I don't like to believe that summer is so near that I must decide soon."

"You were at Ashmont last year, weren't you?" Snaffle asked. "Why don't you go there again."

Mrs. Sampson shot him a quick glance which Snaffle understood at once to mean that he was to second her in something she was attempting. He did not yet get his clew clearly enough to understand just how, but the look put him on the alert, as the hostess answered,—

"Oh, it is all spoiled. The railroad has been put through and all the summer visitors are giving it up. I'm sure I don't know what will become of all the poverty-stricken widows that made their living out of taking boarders. That railroad has been an expensive job for Ashmont in every way."

Greenfield smiled, his big, genial smile which had so much warmth in it.

"That isn't usually the way people look at the effect of a railroad on a town."

This time the look which Mrs. Sampson gave Snaffle told him so plainly what she wanted him to do that he spoke at once, her almost imperceptible nod showing him that he was on the right track.

"Oh, a railroad is always the ruin of a small town," he said, "unless it is its terminus. It sucks all the life out of the villages along the way. You go along any of the lines in Massachusetts, and you will find that while the towns have been helped by the road, the small villages have been knocked into a cocked hat. All the young people have left them; all the folks in the neighborhood go to some city to do their trading, and the stuffing is knocked out of things generally."

Mrs. Sampson looked at Snaffle with a thoroughly gratified expression.

"I don't know much about the business part of the question, of course," she said, "but I do know that a railroad takes all the young men out of a village. A woman I boarded with at Ashmont last year wrote to me the other day in the greatest distress because her only son had left her. She said it was all the railroad, and her letter was really pathetic."

"Oh, that's a woman's way of looking at it," rejoined Greenfield, the greatest struggle of whose life, as Mrs. Sampson was perfectly well aware, was to keep at home his only child, a youth just coming to manhood. "It is easy enough for boys to get away nowadays, and just having a railroad at the door wouldn't make any great difference."

"It does, though, make a mighty sight of difference," Snaffle said, rolling his head and putting his plump white hands together. "Somehow or other, the having that train scooting by day in and day out unsettles the young fellows. The whistle stirs them up, and keeps reminding them how easy it is to go out West or somewhere or other. I've seen it time and again."

"Well," Greenfield returned, a shadow over his genial face, "I have a youngster that's got the Western fever pretty bad without any railroads coming to Feltonville. But what you say is only one side of the question. When a railroad comes it always brings business in one way or another. The increase of transportation facilities is sure to build things up."

"Oh, yes, it builds them up," Snaffle chuckled, as if the idea afforded him infinite amusement, "but how does it work. There are two or three men in the town who start market gardens and make something out of it. They sell their produce in the city and they do their trading there; they hire Irish laborers from outside the village; and how much better off is the town, except that it can tax them a trifle more if it can get hold of the valuation of their property." "Which it generally can't," interpolated Greenfield grimly, with an inward reminder of certain experiences as assessor.

"Or somebody starts a factory," Snaffle went on, "and then the town is made, ain't it? Outside capital is invested, outside operatives brought in to turn the place upside down and to bring in all the deviltries that have been invented, and all the town has to show in the long run is a little advance in real estate over the limited area where they want to build houses for the mill-hands. There's no end of rot talked about improving towns by putting up factories, but I can't see it myself."

Snaffle sometimes said that he believed in nothing but making money, and there was never any reason to suppose he held an opinion because he expressed it. He said what he felt to be politic, and a long and complicated experience enabled him to defend any view with more or less plausibility upon a moment's notice. He was clever enough to see that for some reason the widow wished him to pursue the line of talk he had taken, and he was ready enough to oblige her. He never took the trouble to inquire of himself what his opinions were, because that question was of so secondary importance; he merely exerted himself to make the most of any points that presented themselves to his mind in favor of the side it was for his advantage to support.

"'Pon my word," Greenfield said, with a laugh, "you talk like an old fogy of the first water. I wouldn't have suspected you of looking at things that way."

"Mr. Snaffle is always surprising," Mrs. Sampson said, with her most dazzling smile, "but he is generally right."

"Thank you. I can't help at any rate seeing that there are two sides to this thing, and I am too old a bird to be caught with the common chaff that people talk."

Mr. Greenfield settled himself comfortably in his chair and laughed softly. The discussion was so purely theoretical that he could be amused without looking upon it seriously.

"For my part," he remarked, his big hand playing with a paper-knife on one of the little tables, which, to a practised eye, suggested cards, "I am of the progressive party, thank you. I believe in opening up the country and putting railroads where they will do the most good. A few people get their old prejudices run against, but on the whole it is for the interest of a town to have a railroad, and it is nonsense to talk any other way."

Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson leaned forward to lay her fingers upon the speaker's arm.

"That is just it, Cousin Tom," she said, with a languishing glance. "You always look at things in so large a way. You never let the matter of personal interest decide, but think of the public good,"

The flattery was somewhat gross, but men will swallow a good deal in the way of praise from women. They are generally slow to suspect the fair sex of sarcasm, and allow themselves the luxury of enjoying the pleasure of indulging their vanity untroubled by unpleasant doubts concerning the sincerity of compliments which from masculine lips would offend them. Greenfield laughed with a perceptible shade of awkwardness, but he was evidently not ill pleased.

"Oh, well," he returned, "that is because thus far it has happened that my personal interests and my convictions have worked together so well. You might see a difference if they didn't pull in the same line."

Mrs. Sampson considered a moment, and then rose, bringing out a decanter of sherry with a supply of glasses and of biscuit from a convenient closet in the bottom of a secretary.

"That's business," Snaffle said, joyously. "Sherry ain't much for a man of my size, but it's better than nothing."

"It is a hint though," the hostess said, filling his glass.

"A hint!" he repeated.

"Yes; a hint that it is getting late, and that I am tired, and you must go home."

"Oh, ho!" he laughed uproariously; "now I won't let you in for that good thing on the Princeton Platinum stock. You'll wish you hadn't turned me out of the house when you see that stock quoted at fifty per cent above par."

"Ah, I know all about Princeton Platinum," she responded, showing her white teeth rather more than was absolutely demanded by the occasion; "besides, I've no money to put into anything."

"What about Princeton Platinum?" Greenfield asked, turning toward the other a shrewd glance. "I've heard a good deal of talk about it lately, but I didn't pay much attention to it."

"Princeton Platinum," the hostess put in before Snaffle could speak, "is Mr. Snaffle's latest fairy story. It is a dream that people buy pieces of for good hard samoleons, and"—

"Good what?" interrupted the country member.

"Shekels, dollars, for cash under whatever name you choose to give it; and then some fine morning they all wake up."

"Well?" demanded Snaffle, to whom the jest seemed not in the least distasteful. "And what then?"

"Oh, what is usually left of dreams when one wakes up in the morning?"

The fat person of the speculator shook with appreciation of the wit of this sally, which did not seem to Greenfield so funny as from the laughter of the others he supposed it must really be. The latter rose when Snaffle did and prepared to say good-night, but Mrs. Sampson detained him. "I want to speak with you a moment," she said. "Good-night, Mr. Snaffle. Bear us in mind when Princeton Platinum has made your fortune, and don't look down on us."

"No fear," he returned. "When that happens, I shall come to you for advice how to spend it."

There was too much covetousness in her voice as she answered jocosely that she could tell him. The struggle of life made even a jesting supposition of wealth excite her cupidity. She sighed as she turned back into the parlor and motioned Greenfield to a seat. Placing herself in a low, velvet-covered chair, she stretched out her feet before her, displaying the black silk stocking upon a neat instep as she crossed them upon a low stool.

"I am sure I don't know how to say what I want to," she began, knitting her brows in a perplexity that was only part assumed. "Something has come to me in the strangest way, and I think I ought to tell you, although I haven't any interest in it, and it certainly isn't any of my business."

Her companion was too blunt to be likely to help her much. He simply asked, in the most straightforward manner,—

"What is it?"

"It's about public business," she said. "Why!" she added, as if a sudden light had broken upon her. "I really believe I was going to be a lobbyist. Fancy me lobbying! What does a lobbyist do?"

"Nothing that you'd be likely to have any hand in," returned Greenfield, smiling at the absurdity of the proposition. "What is all this about?"

"I suppose I should not have thought of it but for the turn the talk took to-night," she returned with feminine indirectness. "It was odd, wasn't it, that we should get to talking of the harm railroads do, when it was about a railroad that I was going to talk."

"There's only one railroad scheme on foot this spring that I know anything about, and that's for a branch of the Massachusetts Outside Railroad through Wachusett. That isn't in the Legislature either."

"That's the one. It's going to be in the Legislature. There's going to be an attempt to change the route."

"Change the route?"

"Yes, so it will go through—but will you promise not to tell this to a living mortal?"

"Of course."

"I suppose," she said, regarding her slipper intently, "that I really ought not to tell you; but I can't help it somehow. Your name is to be used."

"My name?"

"Yes, the men who are planning the thing say that it will be so evident that you'd want the road to go this new way, that if you vote with the Wachusett interest they'll swear you are bought."

"Swear I'm bought? Pooh! Tom Greenfield is too well known for that sort of talk to hold water."

"But through your own town"—

Mrs. Sampson regarded her companion closely as she slowly pronounced these words. They roused him like an electric shock.

"Through Feltonville?"

She nodded, compressing her lips, but saying nothing.

"Phew! This is a tough nut to crack. But are you sure that is to be tried?"

"Yes; there is a scheme for a few monopolists to buy up mill privileges and run factories at Feltonville; and they mean to make the road serve them, instead of its being put where the public need it."

"So that's what Lincoln's been raking up in Boston," Greenfield said to himself. "I knew he was up to some deviltry. Wants to sell off those meadows he's been gathering in on mortgages."

"Of course you'll want to help your town," Mrs. Sampson said, regretfully. "The men that voted for you'll expect you to do it; but it's helping on a sly scheme at the expense of the state. I'm sorry you've got to be on that side."

"Got to be on that side?" he retorted, starting up. "Who says I've got to be on that side? we'll see about that before we get through. The men that voted for me expect me to do what is right, and I don't think they'll be disappointed just yet."

And all things considered, Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson thought she had done a good evening's work.