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ESIDE the Missouri River there is a busy city. At the outskirts of the city there is a beautiful suburb called Brookdale Park. In Brookdale Park there is a wide lawn, shaded here and there by tall elm-trees. Upon the wide lawn there is a sprawling gray stone castle. In the great castle there is a room, lined with leather and decorated with long rows of books, most of which stand in unbroken sets. In one of the books-a fat book bound in morocco-is the steel-engraved picture of a man with scraggly, unkempt beard and keen dark eyes. The picture shows the man wearing a black string necktie and a Prince Albert coat, after the exact fashion of the coats and ties in all the other pictures in the book. Under

the picture is a cramped fac-simile of a signature written with a stub-pen, without a curve or flourish. On the opposite page is the title of the volume, "Makers of the Mighty West," and near it is the page number, 983, and then follows this sketch :

"JOAB T. BARTON-FINANCIER.

"Joab Teal Barton was born in Huron County, Ohio, in 1838, of poor but honest parents. He was educated in the country schools and spent a few months in Miami Academy before the breaking out of the war. He entered the Seventh Regiment of Ohio Volunteers and served his country four years, taking part in the battles of the Wilderness and in the campaign

that ended at Appomattox Court House. He came west at the close of the war, and 1866 found him at Hannibal, Missouri, where, being without employment and funds, he accepted a position as brakeman on the Hannibal and St. Joe Railroad. Promotions came rapidly, and three years later as a conductor Mr. Barton ran the first train into Denver. A year later he was made trainmaster, and in 1872 he was superintendent of the Missouri Valley Division of the Hannibal and St. Joe, and in 1875 he became traffic manager of the Corn Belt system when it was known as the Leavenworth and Solomon Valley. The road at that time began at the Missouri River, and, as its directors used to say, lost itself in the sage-brush near what is now Abilene. To-day, when Joab T. Barton, President and General Manager of the close corporation which controls this mighty national highway, issues a system pass, it is good from the Great Lakes to the Pacific, and from the Missouri River to the Gulf.

"But the management of this vast enterprise consumes only a part of the man's energy. Being public-spirited, he organized the company which was granted the franchise for the water-works system that his home city enjoys, and his efforts were instrumental in getting Eastern capital to put down the first street railway in the city in 1876. That street railway was operated by three mules, yet it was the beginning from which the magnificent transportation system known as the West Side Electric Railway sprang. This is one of the enterprises to which Mr. Barton gives much of his attention. He is also a large owner of the stock of the Missouri Valley Gas Heating and Electric Company, and his real estate holdings are found all over the city.

"Personally the subject of this sketch is quiet and unassuming. He shrinks from publicity, and prefers the society of his intimate friends to the hubbub attendant upon a political career. He has fixed convictions, and cares nothing for the plaudits of the multitude. He is said to be a loyal ally, and a sleepless enemy. In 1870 he married Miss Mary Stone at Denver, and one child, George M., born in 1872, is the fruit of this union."

Now it may be proved easily that Joab

T. Barton owned this book, this room, this house, and this lawn. For all practical purposes he owned the soul of Brookdale Park, and there were five ably edited newspapers in the city which insisted that Joab T. Barton might as well have a warranty deed to the city, and there were two hundred thousand people who were supposed to go to bed at night in the belief that when they got up in the morning they might find that “Old Joab," as they called him, had dug up and carted away the Missouri River. For Barton was the town bogy

man.

If

People blamed him for every evil thing that happened in the community. If a bank failed, they said Old Joab wrecked it. If a street-car killed a man, Old Joab was committing his daily homicide. men couldn't pay their bills at the end of the month, they laid their failures to Old Joab's extortionate charges for light and water.

At different times he had been called an octopus, an incubus, a vampire, and a hydra-headed monster.

As for Mrs. Barton (she that was Mary Stone) she never read the papers, even though her husband bought one-type, presses, editor and all-that the family might enjoy the news of the day without wading through columns filled with abuse of the head of the household. Under the circumstances, the purchase of the newspaper was a wanton waste of money, for young George M. Barton read all the other papers at the club, and enjoyed the remarks about his father immensely. The young man did not take his father seriously. He played chess in the middle of the day and refused to go to meetings of directors where he didn't know the rules of the game, and often renigged and did other embarrassing things. He drank some hot, rebellious liquor, but not too much, and winked pleasantly at policemen who had been of service to him. He knew the names of the street-car conductors and the elevator-boys with whom he rode, and if he went to the boiler-makers' ball, he didn't conceal it from the patronesses of the dances given by the Colonial Dames. He was rated as a good fellow by those who knew him, and by his father's friends he was accounted worthless, but not a spendthrift. The elder Barton seemed to be concealing an expression of unspeak

membership in the Federation a joke. He found the Federation at his club, with the occasional cocktail and the billiard-cue, and took the Federation with the other things, because they were easier to embrace than to avoid. He gave it about as much thought as he gave to the affair with Mrs. Kelsey at Manitou. Mrs. Kelsey was a blondined lady, who drove bobtailed horses in silver-mounted harness hitched to outlandish rigs. George had met her somewhat informally before she found Kelsey. At Manitou, with a maid and a nurse for her two overdressed children, Mrs. Kelsey was the queen of something like one hundred linear feet of veranda at the barny summer hotel. The affair between the youth and "our lady of the sawdust," as George was wont to call her, was really trivial. A handsome young man with unlimited credit is a decorative appurtenance to a high yellow and black English cart. And when the owner of the cart puts just a little too much padding-not much too much, but just a little too much on her hips and at her bust, and lays one thin hair-line too much of black on her eyebrows and under her eyes—and when the lady after doing these things adds three unnecessary carats to the weight of her diamond earrings, she may ornament her equipage with a young man a trifle too youthful and a trifle too careless of the amenities, even if she does have to pay the price. But as at a summer-resort the price of these things is not so high as it is elsewhere in the world, Mrs. Kelsey paid it; and as for George Barton, he sent the account home to his parents. His father's estimate of the importance of the affair was gathered from the size of the florist's bill. It was under two hundred dollars, and the father was not disturbed. But when the Manitou gossip filtered into her home, George's mother went to bed and remained there a week in rage and humiliation. After that Mrs. Barton carried with her a hatred for Mrs. Kelsey and a fear of her that distinguished Mrs. Kelsey from the throng of strangers beyond the pale, and brought her into the circle of Mrs. Barton's intimate enemies. Barton and Jim Kelsey had been friends for ten years. Kelsey had been a section boss on the Corn Belt, and had prospered after constructing two or three branch

VOL. XXVI.-57

lines for the system in the eighties. Later he had moved to the city, and had turned a more or less honest penny in cedar block paving; still later he went into asphalt paving and kept in the State Senate and in the city council, half a dozen foremen, a superintendent, and friends innumerable who acted with Barton's friends in the Legislature. If Barton's son wished to be pleasant to Jim Kelsey's new wife and Tom Hubbard's children, Joab T. Barton saw no reason for a demonstration of grief, if Jim did not complain. But Mrs. Barton gave more importance than her husband to Mrs. Kelsey's social impossibility, and since George Barton's return from Manitou, Mrs. Barton had felt an uneasiness lest the idle hours the boy spent with Mrs. Kelsey should affect the family's status in society. Yet so long as Mrs. Barton had the gray stone castle in Brookdale Park, the command of the incomes from a fortune that piled into the teens among the millions, and so long as she had the advantage of having entered the portals of the town's aristocracy, just before the boom widened the threshold, she was firmly established. This fact of her absolute social security was one of the many important things that Mrs. Barton did not know. Bright-eyed, fluffy-haired Mrs. Kelsey, who had struggled bravely for several years to keep the gentlemen of her acquaintance from saying "Hello" to her on the street, was shrewd enough to know what Mrs. Joab Barton did not know that to land and to have money to bank up and keep the tide back was to have her feet upon a rock. Mrs. Barton always harbored a fear that she would betray the fact of her humble origin. Her mother once presided at the lunch-counter in Sharon Springs, and her father used to work on the cinder-pit at the round-house; and although the family came up in the world so rapidly that the child wore silk dresses before she was sixteen, her girlhood was spent in a family where nothing was thought of leaving the soap in the water or of sweeping dirt under the cupboard. So existence with Mrs. Barton was a constant struggle against reversion to type. In her twenties and thirties she wore the longest possible sealskins, and the most dazzling jewels. In her forties she built the castle in Brookdale Park

and covered it with towers, swelling balconies, bulging windows and ginger-bread confections of architecture, until the house seemed inflated with sinful pride to the bursting-point.

The year before the Manitou incident ruffled her, Mrs. Barton had begun to find solace in severe simplicity. She came to worship austerity as madly and as abjectly as she had worshipped flash and show. Thereafter the footman went in black, the silver came off the harness, the front of the house was straightened. The towers were scraped away; the débris of brica-brac was swept out of the halls and reception-rooms, and life became a serious business to her. Yet eight years before she had beamed with joy that the newspaper printed her name among the patronesses of the Harvard Glee Club's annual entertainment. She had been reading the society columns of that paper every Sunday for years, familiarizing herself with the important names, and when she saw the excellent company she was in as a patroness, Mrs. Barton was sure for the first time that she had arrived. But she knew how thin her veneer was and she always feared it would crack and show the truth.

It was a vain house, an arrogant house, was this house of Barton. It stood amid the turmoil and the hubbub of a bitter contest with the people, when calamity fell and brought mourning with it. The news of George Barton's sudden death appearing on the first page of the morning papers, under one of the four flash-heads that greeted the reader's eyes, brought a shock with it, for the very papers which contained the news of the death crowded the account of it down to half a column, in order to print fiery communications from leading citizens and tax-payers, protesting against the passage of the Barton bill. The council was to cast its final vote in the matter on the evening of the next day. In their newspaper protests the citizens took for granted that the council would stand by Joab T. Barton in the street railway matter, as the council had protected him in the water-works bond proposition, in his gas and electric lighting schemes, in his river-front right-of-way grab, and in all the matters wherein the welfare of the people and the interests of Joab T. Barton had stood in opposition.

Therefore the town did not mourn with the Bartons. When death came to them and smote them dumb the town forgot them. The mourning in the town was for the young life that was cut off; for the smile that was chilled; for the boyish heart that was still; for the loss of the warm hand's clasp, and the eternal silence of a cheery voice. But for the living-for old Joab and his proud wife- the world forgot that they were coming through the great shadow, where the high and the lowly, the worldly and the righteous, the saints and those who are unclean, grope and stretch out their hands, and where all are kith and kin in the Democracy of Despair. But over the great house in Brookdale Park there hung a dreadful silence. Now and again the creak of a door would shatter it; the thud of a booted foot upon a heavy hall-rug told of the florist's invasion. The day-light darted impertinently through the hush of the darkened rooms; the master of the house, alone in the library, could feel rather than hear the servants gliding by his door. The whispering of visitors in the hall below sounded to Barton like an agitation in some cave of bats. He sat in a leather chair for hours, staring at the frescoed pattern on the ceiling. By mid-day his nerves had set him walking. For a time he paced the room; tiring of it, he went down the stairs and slipped past the parlor, and the neighbors saw the gray-clad human pendulum swing for two hours from end to end of the long veranda. An instinct for work nagged at Joab Barton, and the instinct brought the bitter knowledge that the incentive for work was gone. day before he would not have owned that all his labor was for his son; but as the father walked his weary round that day there came a mighty press of grief upon him and he was sick-sick in the very flesh-at the stress of it. In that hour it was not the loss of one whom he loved that lashed his spirit; perhaps it was pride, perhaps it was the uprooting of the unspoken hopes that nature plants and nourishes in the breasts of fathers, though they know it not; perhaps it was the smarting of the blow that death deals to those near the swath of the sickle; perhaps it was-God knows what. But some mighty force came to the father there and he wrestled with a growing impulse which

The