It was during the year spent by John March in Europe that Suez first began to be so widely famous. It was then, too, that the Suez Courier emerged into universal notice. The average newspaper reader, from Maine to Oregon, spoke familiarly of Colonel Ravenel as the writer of its much-quoted leaders; a fact which gave no little disgust to Garnet, their author.

Ravenel never let his paper theorize on the causes of Suez's renown or the Courier's vogue.

"It's the luck of the times," he said, and pleasantly smiled to see the nation's eyes turned on Dixie and her near sisters, hardly in faith, yet with a certain highly commercial hope and charity. The lighting of every new coke furnace, the setting fire to any local rubbish-heap of dead traditions, seemed just then to Northern longings the blush of a new economic and political dawn over the whole South.

"You say you're going South? Well, now if you want to see a very small but most encouraging example of the changes going on down there, just stop over a day in Suez!" Such remarks were common—in the clubs—in the cars.

"Now, for instance, Suez! I know something of Suez myself." So said a certain railway passenger one day when this fame had entered its second year and the more knowing journals had begun to neglect it. "I was an officer in the Union army and was left down there on duty after the surrender a short while; then I went out West and fought Indians. But Suez—I pledge you my word I wouldn't 'a' given a horseshoe-nail for the whole layout! Now!—well, you'd e'en a'most think you was in a Western town! The way they're a slappin' money, b' Jinks, into improvements and enterprises—quarries, roads, bridges, schools, mills—'twould make a Western town's head swim!"

"What kind of mills?" asked his listener, a young man, but careworn.

"O, eh, saw-mills—tanbark mills—to start with. Was you ever there?"

"Yes, I—before the changes you speak of I——"

"Before! Hoh! then you've never seen Lover's Leap coal mine, or Bridal Veil coal mine, or Sleeping Giant iron mine, or Devil's Garden coke furnaces! They're putting up smelting works right opposite the steamboat landing! You say you're going South—just stop over a day in Suez. It'll pay you! You could write it up!—call it 'What a man just back f'm Europe saw in Dixie'—only, you don't want to wave the Bloody Shirt, and don't forget we're dead tired hearing about the 'illiterate South.' I say, let us have peace; my son's in love with a Southern girl! Why, at Suez you'll see school-houses only five miles apart, from Wildcat Ridge—where the niggers and mountaineers had that skirmish last fall—clean down to Leggettstown! School-houses, why,"—the speaker chuckled at what was coming—"one of 'em stands on the very spot where in '65 I found a little freckled boy trying to poke a rabbit out of a log with an old bayon——"

"No!" exclaimed the careworn listener, in one smile from his hat to his handsome boots.

He would have said more, but the story-teller lifted a finger to intimate that the bayonet was not the main point—there was better laughing ahead. "Handsome little chap he was—brave eyes—sweet mouth. Thinks I right there, 'This's going to be somebody some day.' He reminded me of my own son at home. Well, he clum up behind my saddle and rode with me to the edge of Suez, where we met his father with a team of mules and a wagon of provisions. Talk about the Old South, I'll say this: I never see so fine a gentlemen look so techingly poor. Hold up, let me—now, let me—just wait till I tell you. That little rat—if it hadn't been for that little barefooted rat with his scalp-lock a-stickin' up through a tear in his hat, most likely you'd never so much as heard—of Suez! For that little chap was John March!"

The speaker clapped his hands upon his knees, opened his mouth, and waited for his hearer's laughter and wonder; but the hearer merely smiled, and with a queer look of frolic in the depths of his handsome eyes, asked,

"How lately were you in Suez?"

"Me? O—not since '65; but my son's a commercial tourist—rattling smart fellow—you've probably met him—I never see anybody that hadn't—last year he was in New England—this year he's tryin' Dixie. He sells this celebrated 'Hoptonica' for the great Cincinnati house of Pretzels & Bier. Funny thing—he's been mistaken for John March. A young lady—Southern girl—up in New England about a year ago—it was just for an instant—O of course—Must you go? Well, look here! Try to stop over a day in Suez—That's right; it'll pay you!"

The two travelers parted. The Union veteran went on westward, while the other—March by name—John March—was ticketed, of course, for Suez.

Some ten days before, in London, having just ended a four weeks' circuit through a region of the Continent where news of Suez was even scarcer than emigrants for Widewood, he had, to his astonishment, met Proudfit. The colonel had just arrived across. He was tipsy, as usual, and a sad wreck, but bound for Carlsbad, bright in the faith that when he had stayed there two months he would go home cured for life of his "only bad habit." March was troubled, and did not become less so when Proudfit explained that his presence was due to the "kind pressu' of Garnet and othe's." He knew that Garnet, months before, had swapped his Land Company stock to Proudfit for the Colonel's much better stock in the Construction Company and succeeded him as president of the latter concern.

"As a matteh of fawm—tempora'ily—du'ing my ill health," said the Carlsbad pilgrim, adding, in an unfragrant stage-whisper, that there was a secret off-setting sale of both stocks back again, the papers of which were in Mrs. Proudfit's custody. Mrs. Proudfit was not with her husband; she was at home, in Blackland.

John knew also how nearly down to nothing the price of his own company's first-mortgage bonds had declined; but the Colonel's tidings of a later fate fell upon him like a thunderbolt. He stood before his informant in the populous street, now too sick at heart for speech, and now throbbing with too resolute a resentment for outward show, but drawn up rigidly with a scowl of indignant attention under his locks that made him the observed of every quick eye. The matter—not to follow Proudfit too closely—was this:

The Construction Company, paid in advance, and in the Land Company's second-mortgage bonds, for its many expensive and recklessly immature works, had promptly sold those bonds to a multitude of ready takers near and far, but principally far. When the promised inpour of millers and miners, manufacturers and operatives, so nearly failed that the Land Company could not pay, nor half pay, the interest on its first-mortgage bonds and they "tumbled," these second-mortgage bonds were, of course, unsalable at any figure. The smallest child will understand this—and worse to follow—at a glance; but if he doesn't he needn't. At this point Ravenel, who had kept his paper very still, "persuaded" Gamble and Bulger to buy, at the prices their holders had paid for them, all that smaller portion of these second-mortgage bonds, as well as all small lots of the Land Company's stock, held in the three counties. "The Courier," he said, with his effectual smile, "couldn't afford to see home folks suffer," and he presently had them all well out of it, Parson Tombs among them.

"Thank God!" rumbled March. "And then what?"

Then Ravenel, as trustee for the three counties—Uncle Jimmie Rankin was the other, but shrewdly let Jeff-Jack speak and act for him—privately combined with the Construction Company, which, Proudfit pathetically reminded John, was a loser by the Land Company in the discounts at which it had sold that Company's second-mortgage bonds. They went on a still hunt after the first-mortgage bonds, "bought," said Proudfit, "the whole bilin' faw a song," foreclosed the mortgage, and at the sale of the Land Company's assets were the only bidders, except Senator Halliday and Captain Shotwell, whom they easily outbid.

"Right smart of us suspicioned those two gentlemen were bidding faw you, John."

March, who was staring aside in fierce abstraction, started. "I reckon not," he said, and stared in the other direction. "So, then, Widewood and all its costly improvements belong half to the three counties and half to Garnet's construc——"

"John"—the Colonel lifted his pallid hand with an air of amiable greatness—"my construc', seel view play! Not Garnet's. I—Proudfit—am still the invisible head of that comp'ny. Garnet acknowledges it privately to me. He and I have what you may call a per-perfect und-und-unde'standing!"

"Perfect und'—O me!" interrupted March, with a broken laugh and a frown. Proudfit liked his air and tried to reproduce it, but got his features tangled, rubbed his mouth, and closed his eyes. March stared into vacancy again.

The tippler interposed with moist emotion. "John, we're landless! My plantation b'longs t' my wife. I can sympathize with you, John. As old song says, 'we're landless! landless!' We are landless, John. But you have price—priceless 'dvant'ge over me in one thing, vice-president; you've still got yo' motheh!"

"O!" groaned March, blazing up and starting away; but Proudfit clung.

"My dea' boy! let me tell you, that tendeh little motheh's been a perfect hero! When I told her—in—in t-tears—how sorry I—and Garnet—and all of us—was,—'O Curl Prou'fit,' says she—with that ca'm, sweet, dizda-ainful smile of hers, you know—'it's no supprise to me; it's what I've expected from the beginning.'"