HENNION knew Wood's organisation intimately enough. He had been a part of it on the outside. Wood had been chairman of the “General Committee,” a body that had total charge of the party's municipal campaigns, including admission to caucuses, and local charge in its general campaigns. Local nominations were decided there. It was only less active between elections than during them. It had an inner ring which met by habit, socially, in Wood's office. Whatever was decided in Wood's office, it was understood, would pass the Committee, and whatever passed the Committee would pass the City Council, and be welcomed by a mayor who had been socially at the birth of the said measure. Port Argent was a ring-led city, but it claimed to have a better ring than ordinary. Probably it had. Probably this was due in the main to something peculiar in Wood.

Hennion's election to the chairmanship was followed by a meeting in his office that forced a sudden investment in chairs. It was Thursday. Carroll was there; Mayor Beckett, a neatly dressed man with a long neck and close-trimmed black beard, talkative, casuistical, a lawyer by profession; Ranald Cam, President of the Council, solid, grim, rugged, devoid of grammar, grown grey in the game of politics, and for some reason unmatched in his devotion to Wood's memory; John Murphy, saloon-keeper from East Argent, not now in any office, an over-barbered, plastered, and gummy-looking person, boisterous and genial; J. M. Tait, small, thin, dry, of bloodless complexion, sandy hair, and infrequent speech, a lawyer, supposed to represent corporate interests; Major Jay Tuttle, President of the School Board, white-moustached and pompous.

Port Argent's school system was thought too military by the teachers who suffered under it. The Major stood high among Masons and G. A. R.'s. Endless gossip and detail might be given of all these men. Hen-nion knew them well, some of them as far back as he could remember. Each of them held the corner threads of a spreading network of influences and personal interests. In Hennion's office they smoked and discussed. They varied discussion with anecdotes of Wood.

Major Tuttle wanted two of the ward schools enlarged, and offered plans and estimates of competing architects.

“Any preference, Major?” asked Hennion.

“I have given it some consideration,” said the Major puffily, and stated considerations.

“Well,” Hennion suggested, “why not give one to Smith and one to Hermon, and tell them to compete for glory. It might stir them up.”

The circle laughed and nodded.

The North Shore R. R. had put in a large proposition involving a new bridge and station, street crossings, and various rights of way. Tait read a document signed “Wm. R. Macclesfield, President.” Hennion suggested that they offer a counter-proposition.

“We don't want any more grade crossings down there. What makes him expect his right of way for a gift?”

“You know what they chipped in this spring?” said Tait, looking up.

“Pretty much. But Wood never sold out that way, did he?” He turned to Ranald Cam.

“Marve Wood ain't never made the city a bad bargain yet,” growled Cam, “for all they gas about it.” Tait was silent. The others disputed at length on obscure historic points in Wood's policy. The shadowy influence of the “old man” was still so strong in the circle that no one ventured to put any doubt on the guiding wisdom of whatever he had done. They only disputed points of fact.

“He kept things solid,” said Carroll, “that's the point.”

“I should say Macclesfield would have to come up,” said Hennion at last. “I'll bring you in a counter-estimate next week.”

When the circle broke up an hour later, Tait lingered behind the rest. Tuttle, Beckett, and Cam went up Hancock Street together.

“I guess Dick's going to shut down on Tait,” said Beckett. “Suit me all right if he does. Depends on how he handles Macclesfield, don't it? He's rather prompt, eh? I wouldn't exactly say brusque, but it won't do to rough Macclesfield. Guess you'd better advise him, Major. Say, why not?” Hennion seemed to him not so companionable, so comfortable as Wood.

“Possibly, possibly,” said the Major.

Ranald Cam growled in his beard. Wood's death was a heavy blow to him. Both the elder men had felt the touch of Hennion's deference toward them. They did not like Tait.

“Want to go over there with me, Hennion?” said Tait, puffing his black cigar rather fast. “See Macclesfield?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Suppose I bring him over here?” Hennion stared at the top of his desk for a full moment. “All right. Come in an hour.”

Tait went out, and Hennion fell to figuring.

William R. Macclesfield was a cultivated gentleman, whose personal courtesies to all men seemed to be returned by fortune in personal courtesies to him. Macclesfield's attractiveness would be evident at first knowledge. Persuasion of his astuteness would follow not long after. Precipitate judgments on his character, based on the interview which here dropped into Hennion's experience of men and things, were as well unmade. Hennion preferred to whistle and consider it.

“Should I congratulate or commiserate?” said Macclesfield, smiling and shaking hands.

“Commiserate, thank you.”

Macclesfield sat down and talked on pleasantly.

“Yes, yes. Well, it may not be so bad as you think. It calls for great judiciousness. Wood, now, was a remarkable, I should say a judicious, man. I know. Your profession, of course. Times have changed since your father and I met thirty, yes, forty years ago. He was proud of his profession. Rightly so. Of course, rightly so. We enjoyed ourselves, too, we young men. The times were perhaps a little, I might say, rugged. Port Argent has grown. There have been remarkable developments in politics and engineering. Nowadays municipal affairs seem to call for a manager in the background. If he's apt to be there, it must mean he is needed, but it's a peculiar position. You are quite right. But you were Wood's choice, and he was a very judicious man. You find it takes time and labour. Yes, and it calls for ability. Now, it is curious that some people seem to think one in that position ought not to get anything for his trouble. I call that absurd. I always found in railroading that time, labour, and ability had to be paid for. By the way, you learned engineering from your father, I think. Yes, an old friend of mine. I was thinking coming over the street just now with Tait—I was thinking what fine things he did in his profession. Very bold, and yet very safe. Remarkable. And yet engineering was almost in its infancy then.”

“Yes,” said Hennion, “the changes would have interested him.”

“Indeed they would! So—the fact is—I was thinking that, if you cared to submit plans, I should personally like to see you build that bridge of ours. I should personally like to see what Rick Hennion's son can do. An elderly man like me can be forgiven a little sentiment, even in business.”

Hennion laughed. Macclesfield glanced up suddenly, but saw nothing in the young man's somewhat impassive face to trouble him.

“I'd like to build the bridge, of course. You don't think the sentiment needs any forgiveness from me?”

“My dear boy, it's perfectly sincere! You'll submit plans, then?”

“If you continue to want them.”

“Good! Now—oh! Tait said something about the crossings. You think the figures too low. Tait said something of the kind. Perhaps they are a little. I'll look them over again. At the same time, you realise the feasibility depends on expense. We want to be fair. But considering how much more convenient to the public this new station will be, considering the benefit of that arrangement, you think the city ought to be moderate?”

“Moderate in its generosity.”

“Ah—I don't know—I was thinking that we understood each other—that is—the situation.”

Hennion swung in his chair.

“I was thinking, Mr. Macclesfield, of the advantages of candour, and I was wondering what my father would have said about the situation. Wouldn't he have said, in his candid way, that a personal contract and the representative disposal of either city or trust properties were two transactions that had better not be mixed?”

“My dear boy, who's mixing them?”

“Well, I'm proposing to separate them. We'll take your station scheme. Considering the benefit and convenience, as you say, the city can afford to be moderate, but it can't afford any more grade crossings down there. You'll have to come in by a subway.”

Macclesfield shook his head smilingly.

“We can't afford that, you see.”

“Can't? Well, you can afford what you have to. May I ask what you expect to get through for, from Roper's front to Maple Street?”

“Oh, well—isn't this a little inquisitorial?”

“Not necessary, anyway. I know, about.”

He named a figure. Macclesfield looked surprised.

Hennion went on slowly:

“The offer you have made Roper I happen to know that he won't take at all. You'll suspect, then, that the P. and N. are bidding against you. There'll be a mess, and you'd better not be in it. You might as well suspect it now. The P. and N. can afford anything they choose.”

Macclesfield said nothing.

“I'm going to make a suggestion, Mr. Macclesfield, if you like.”

“By all means!”

“I'm going to suggest that you put your bridge a half mile lower down, below the boathouses, and come up back of the Gas Works. If you don't know the holdings down there I'll give them to you.”

He plunged, without waiting, into a stream of ordered and massed figures, following the suggested line from point to point, massed the figures of the Roper's front to Maple Street plan, compared them, and went on.

“The Gas Works people will be all right. A. J. Lee will make you some trouble. Dennis Dolan, being one of your stockholders, won't. You'll save about half on your right of way. Construction will be considerably more. You get an easy water-front instead of having to bid against the P. and N. By stopping beyond the Gas Works instead of going on to Maple Street you'll save seventy thousand at least. You'll have the marshes to develop your freight yards without much limit. The station's preferable there, probably, from the city's standpoint. It will front on the Boulevard, if the Boulevard ever gets down there, and it will. You have a better curve, same connection with the P. and N., and this one here with the L. and S. You'd have to buy right and left on Maple Street. Here you get your site in a lump from Dolan and the Gas Works. Now, we'll take your approach on the east side.” More details massed and ordered. Macclesfield listened intently. Tait half closed his eyes and swung one nervous foot. Hen-nion concluded and paused a moment.

“Now, Mr. Macclesfield, allow me a little more candour. It amounts to this—first, if you can't touch me with a bridge, you can't touch me with anything.”

“If I seemed to attempt it,” said Macclesfield, “I owe you an apology for my awkwardness.”

“None at all for anything. Secondly, a subway and no grade crossings this side the Gas Works or on Lower Bank Street is final, so far as I can make it so. Thirdly, your proposal that I put in plans for the new bridge can now be very properly withdrawn.”

Macclesfield smoothed his face thoughtfully.

“I don't deny a certain amount of surprise. You have discussed the subject very ably. I'd rather you'd let me have that in the form of a report.”

“All right.”

“And you'll add a preliminary estimate on the bridge? I—don't, in fact, withdraw it.”

He rose and shook hands with Hennion.

“So you think the sentiment wasn't sincere? Well, I don't know. I sometimes have them.”

“Tait,” he said, as they went down the stairs. “That young man—for God's sake don't let's have any trouble with him.”

“Is he going to bite or build?”

“Build! Bless my soul, I hope so! A young man—a—that won't lose his temper! He didn't turn a hair! Bless my soul, Tait, I hope so!”

Hennion was left to swing in his chair, to whistle and consider, to wonder what, in fact, might be the true sentiments of William R. Macclesfield, who had retreated neatly, to say the least. A slippery man, a little fishy, who slid around in a situation as if it were water. Perhaps that was injustice. Whether it were sincerity, or neatness, he had left Hennion with a sense of having done him an injustice.

He turned to his desk and figured and wrote for half an hour; then pushed aside the papers and went out. He thought he would go over to East Argent and see how Kennedy was getting on with the grading. Before he had gone far he changed his mind.

The grading job was not interesting. Kennedy could look after it. It might be better to let him work alone for a day or two, without watching; it would cheer up Kennedy not to feel eternally disgraced for blundering with his sand layer, or to feel that he had to go around acting like a desolate orphan about it.

He took a car down Lower Bank Street, past the boathouses, and there paced the high wet and weedy river bank. Then he turned west through some miles of empty acres. Low marshy lands lay on his right, misty and warm in the distance, vividly green nearby. Now and again he crossed a street that had been thrust out speculatively from the vague verge of the city to tempt inhabitants. Cheap new houses were strung along them at wide intervals. The Gas Works had huge furnaces and a cluster of built-up streets about them. He followed the line of the Boulevard surveys, absorbed, often stopping and making notes. He came through a stretch of cornfield and pasture. If the city bought it in here before it began to develop the section, it would be shrewd investment. The marshes would be crossed by an embankment.

A half mile further on he vaulted over a high fence and plunged into the wet woods and open spaces, scrubby and weedy, of Wabash Park, a stretch of three hundred acres and more, bought spasmodically by the city some years back and then left to its own devices. It was useful now mainly to small boys, who speared frogs in the broad, sluggish creek that twisted through between banks of slippery clay.

The Boulevard was another spasmodic vision of a forgotten commissioner. It was planned to run somewhat in the shape of a half circle, around the city, from a river-bank park on the north to a river-bank park on the south, with Wabash Park midway. Hennion tried to fancy himself a landscape gardener. He stood a long while staring down at the creek, which was brimful with the spring rains. Pools of brown water lay all about the bottom lands and in the brush.

To build a bridge as it should be built, to shape a city as it should be shaped, to make Port Argent famous for its moonshaped Boulevard, to accomplish something worth while, to make a name—it looked like a weedy road to travel in, and no small trick to keep out of the mud. Still, after all, the mud was mostly in the ruts. People said you couldn't get ahead there without splashing through the ruts. Maybe not. There would be blackguarding probably. But Macclesfield had been handled anyway.

Wabash Park was a scrubby-looking place now. Beckett would have to be sent after the Park Board, to tell them to clean it up. By the way, Macclesfield was on that effortless, or otherwise busy Park Board. The rest of the commissioners didn't know a landscape from a potato patch. Macclesfield was the man. He might be persuaded to have a sentiment on the subject.

Hennion followed the creek out of the park to a lately macadamised road. A wide, straight, half-made highway started from the other side of the road and stretched a half mile across country, with small maples planted regularly on either side. It was all of the Boulevard and the spasmodic commissioner's vision that had ever been realised. So it remained a fragment, of no use to anyone, one of Port Argent's humourous civic capers.

Beyond this, following the surveys, he came through a rough and noisy neighbourhood—factories, and unkempt streets, empty lots strewn with refuse—and came to the canal, the great Interstate Canal, built by Hennion the elder. It was idle now. The water splashed musically from its lock gates, and the towpath was overgrown. Then followed pastures with cattle in them, and fields where men were ploughing. He came to the river bank at last, where Wyandotte Park lay, popular already for Sunday afternoons, popular somewhat on any afternoon in spring and summer for picnics and boating. It was dotted with stalls of the sellers of hard drinks and cigars, sellers of soft drinks and chewing gum. It possessed a band and an incipient menagerie, a merry-go-round, a boathouse, and several flamboyant restaurants. It was the cheerfullest place in Port Argent on a Sunday afternoon.

The day was almost gone. Hennion's notebook was half-full of mysterious jottings, and his shoes caked with clay, the slimy blue mud that sticks and stains and is the mother of harvests. The river had a swifter current here than lower down, and there were marshy islands, steep bluffs on either side, and up-stream a vista of deeply-wooded shores.

He stood near the merry-go-round and watched the crowd. He wondered if it were not peculiar for a man to know so many people as he did, to know almost everyone in Port Argent. It had always been a fact to some extent. But Port Argent was getting to be a large city. Still, he had an impression that strange faces and unnamed were rather an exception. Most faces that he saw were familiar. He looked around him in the park.

Here were three young girls sipping soda water. He did not know them. Wait! They were all three daughters of Kottar, the baker on Maple Street. They'd been growing up. And here came Kottar himself with the rest of the flock, taking an afternoon's pleasure. Here were two men getting on the trolley car. They appeared to be mainly drunk. No use! He knew them too. One of them was Jimmy Shays, shoemaker, on Muscadine Street, east side; the other was Tom Coglan, one time a drayman, another time one of a batch of John Murphy's, which batch Hennion had helped John Murphy to get jobs for with the Traction Company. Coglan and Shays lived in a house on Muscadine Street, with an outside stairway. Hicks, who shot Wood, used to live there too; grocery store underneath, grocer named Wilson. Names of Kottar's children, remembered to have once been so stated by Kottar, Nina, Katherine, Henry, Carl, William, Adela, and Elizabeth. One appeared to remember things useful, like the price per gross of three-inch screws at present quoting, as well as things useless, like the price three years ago. Hennion thought such an inveterate memory a nuisance.

Coglan and Shays appeared to be happy. Everybody appeared to be happy in Wyandotte Park. Hennion concluded that he liked Wyandotte Park and its people. When you knew them, you found they differ little for better or worse from Herbert Avenue people, Secors and Macclesfields—all people, and a mixed, uncertain article to deal in.

He sat down on the roots of a tree. It grew on the edge of a bluff over the river, a survival of that fraternity of trees which had covered the whole section but a few generations back.

“Mighty good luck to be young, Dick,” the “Governor” had said, and died, calling his life on the whole satisfactory, on account of the good times he had had, and the work that he knew he had done as it should be done.

Hennion thought he would go and tell Camilla about the Boulevard. He caught a car and went back to the centre of the town.

When he came to the Champney house late in the evening, Alcott Aidee was there, though about to leave. It struck Hennion that Aidee's being about to leave was not an absolute compensation for his being there, but he did not have time to examine the impression. Camilla had been reading Charlie Carroll's sinister paragraphs on “a certain admired instigator of crime.” She dashed into the subject as soon as Aidee was gone.

“He says he doesn't care about it,” she cried, “but I do!”

“Do you? Why?”

“Why!”

Camilla paused, either from stress of feeling or inability altogether to say why. Hennion had seen the paragraphs, but had not thought about them.

“Well, if you mean it's not just, Milly, I don't suppose Carroll ever bothers about that. There's a good deal of give and take in politics. Aidee has given it pretty sharply himself. I dare say he knows how to take it.”

“It's wicked!” cried Camilla passionately.

Hennion laughed.

“Well—he needn't have called Wood names—that's true.”

“If you're going to laugh about it, you can go away!”

“'Instigator of crime,' isn't so strong as 'thief,' is it? It's a pity they can't get along without blackguarding each other, but probably they can't.”

Camilla turned away. Her indignation was too genuine, and sobered him.

“My dear girl! I don't suppose Wood was properly called a 'thief' nor Aidee 'an instigator of crime.' Probably Aidee believes what he says. Probably Carroll hasn't the remotest idea what he believes. What of it? I've been tramping the wilderness of Port Argent all day and seeing visions, Milly, and I'd rather not quarrel. Did Aidee say he was going to do anything in particular?”

“He said he was going to see Mr. Hicks.”

“What!”

“To see Mr. Hicks to-night. Of course he'll go to comfort someone that nobody else will,” cried Camilla breathlessly, “and of course you'll say he'd be wiser to keep away and nurse his reputation, because people will talk. Perhaps you think it proves he's an anarchist, and makes bombs.”

“You go too fast for me.” He thought he did not dislike Aidee so much that he would not have stopped his going to see Hicks, if he could. He was not quite clear why he disliked him at all.

It was a turn of mind, characteristic of the Hennions, somewhat of the grimly philosophical, which set him to thinking next that Aidee's situation now, in the whitewashed cell with the alias Hicks, must be confusing and not pleasant, that his own situation was vastly more comfortable, and that these, on the whole, were not bad situations.

He set himself to the fascinating task of making Camilla's eyes shine with excitement,—but he did not seem to succeed,—over the subject of a moon-shaped Boulevard, strung with parks, like a necklace around a lady's throat.

“I worked out that figure of speech for you, Milly. It's a beauty. Port Argent is the lady. A necklace ought to raise her self-respect. She'll have three hundred acres of brooch in the middle called Wabash Park. She's eight miles on the curve from shoulder to shoulder. I walked it today. It struck me she needed washing and drying.”

True, Camilla's indignation seemed to fade away. She said, “That's tremendously nice, Dick,” and stared into the fire with absent wistful eyes.

He drew nearer her and spoke lower, “Milly.”

“No, no! Don't begin on that!”

Presently he was striding up Lower Bank Street, hot-hearted with his disappointment.

“Well, Port Argent shall have her necklace, anyhow. Maybe I shan't. But I will, though!”

He went through the Court House Square past the old jail, glanced up under the trees at Hicks' barred window.

“Aidee's getting a black eye too in there,” he thought. “That's too bad.”

When he reached his rooms he was already thinking of Macclesfield's bridge.