Thomas Skinner

“ Skinner stepped to the window, but Speed halted him with a trembling hand and a voice of agony.
"Mr. Skinner, I-I can't run that fast. F-fifteen is going some for me."
"What!" Skinner stared at his opponent strangely. "That's right.
I'm a lemon."
"Ain't you the Yale champ? The guy that goes under 'even time'?"
Wally shook his head. "I'm his chum. I couldn't catch a cramp."
The brown face of the Centipede sprinter split into a grin, his eyes gleamed. "Then I'll win," said he. "I'm the sucker, but I'll make good. Get your money down, and I'll split with you."
"No, no! Not you! Me! I must win!" ”

“ But what made it imperative for Skinner to ask for a raise was, he had been bragging. Skinner was only human, and being a hero to his wife had made him a little vain. He was a modest man, a first-rate fellow, but no man is proof against hero-worship. He had bragged—a little at first—about his value to the firm, which had increased the worship. He had given his wife the idea that he was a most important man in McLaughlin & Perkins, Inc., that he had only to suggest a raise in order to get it. ”

“ I don’t like Skinner, I never did like him, but he is unquestionably a man of genius, and no one turns out so many pupils who succeed at Oxford and Cambridge, and that is the best test. I have done my share towards starting him well. Skinner said he had been well grounded and was very forward. I suppose he will presume upon it now and do nothing, for his nature is an idle one. He is not fond of me, I’m sure he is not. He ought to be after all the trouble I have taken with him, but he is ungrateful and selfish. It is an unnatural thing for a boy not to be fond of his own father. ”

“ By Jove, McLaughlin's wife had thrust her arm through Honey's and was leading her off to another group. As he watched her, Skinner felt that even sin—when undertaken for another—has its compensations!
"Who is that very distinguished man over there?" said Mrs. J. Smith Crawford, the wife of the senior deacon of the First Presbyterian.
Miss Mayhew adjusted her lorgnette. "What very distinguished man?"
"There's only one," replied Mrs. Crawford. "The man over there who looks like a cross between a poet and an athlete."
"Oh, that's Skinner, of McLaughlin & Perkins, Inc. ”

“ Mr. Skinner answered, “and did it without prejudice. He swatted us, and we deserved it, but he didn't get angry. Every time he banged us, he'd look at me as much as to say: 'I hate to swat you two, but it's got to be done.' Bang! 'This hurts me more than it does you.' Biff! And then he went out smiling. I used to think he was an—an—interloper, I thought he had designs on the Blue Star Navigation Company and the Ricks Lumber and Logging Company, but he hasn't. He doesn't give a hoot for anything or anybody except for what he can be to them; not for what they can be to him. ”

“ Frigget. Oh, poor Amanda! Oh,16 poor Jemima! But it isn’t the end. She’ll have lots more.” Rosamond, all tender consternation, endeavoured to console. “It’s only her second, and they always have three, at least. Dr. Wells says he knew a patient who had seven.”
Failing to stop their cries by hopeful words, she took practical steps. She ran to the open door and called:
“Blake! Blake! Oh, there you are. Blake, you must harness the mare at once and drive Amanda and Jemima to Trenton. Their mother is ill!”
“Good-mornin’, Mrs. Mearely, mum. Ill, is she? ”

“ Two Knives believed that by keeping to the right he should make a circuit and surprise the Apache camp, while the miners would be sure to meet any outlying force by riding toward it in a straight line.
Captain Skinner's one idea was to get as far as possible from the Lipans, he hardly cared in what direction. To the "left" was also to the southward; and so he was better off than he had hoped for.
"Go slow, boys," he said to his men. "We must go right across every stream we come to. The more water we can put behind us, the better." ”

“ Skinner stepped off the train at Meadeville and threaded his way between the glaring, throbbing automobiles to the slush-covered sidewalk. He no longer felt his customary resentment of these social pretenders that whizzed by him in their devil-wagons—leaving him to inhale the stench of their gasoline. In a way, he was one of them now. By his ingenious little scheme of circulating his own money, strictly in his own domestic circle, he had elected himself to the bluffer class, and he felt strangely light-hearted. ”

“ And you'll come home with me to-night, won't you, Skinner? I'm a little afraid—I want you near me, Skinner—in case I can't get away with it to Florry.”
His dry, dead eyes studied the pattern in the office carpet.
“Two mates, a cook and ten A. B.'s!” he murmured presently. “One man, even a Matt Peasley, cannot do the work of thirteen men. No, Skinner; it isn't done. One man simply cannot sail a barkentine.”
But Mr. Skinner was not listening. He was on the long-distance phone calling the master of the Tillicum, just about finishing discharge of a cargo of nitrate at San Pedro. ”

“ Butter! It enraptures me to think your childish hands played in the churn with what Nature alone had produced.” He caught her hands and kissed them fervently.
“So that is how you think of it?” she smiled.
“Hush; I wish to play you the little Tschaikowsky.”
161 He leaned his head over the instrument again and began to play. Watching him, she noted the whitening temple-locks against the coal black of his hair where it had not turned, and the lines in his thin, dark-skinned face, and wondered what sorrow had written these marks of age upon so young a man. ”

“ He argued that, if the firm had considered him worth more money, they would have advanced him. But on the other hand was the well-known meanness of the partners. Nothing short of a threat to quit by one or another of their valuable men had ever served to pry them loose from any cash.
Presently Skinner stepped out of his cage and locked the door behind him. As he entered the long passageway that led to McLaughlin's office. Skinner felt like a man who had emerged from a bath-house and was about to traverse a long stretch between himself and the icy water into which he was to plunge. ”

“ They are about to use violence when, through the open door, comes Washington, who checks them with a word. The general bears a drooping form with a blood splash on its breast, and deposits it on the hearth as gently as a mother puts a babe into its cradle. As the firelight falls on the still face the farmer's eyes grow round and big; then he shrieks and drops upon his knees, for it is his son who is lying there. Beside him is a pistol; it was dropped by the Tory when he entered. Grasping it eagerly the farmer leaps to his feet. ”

“ William Manning Skinner, of McLaughlin & Perkins, Inc., of New York, to a reporter this afternoon. The Skinners had just returned from a spin over beyond Minneapolis with the J. Matthews Wilkinsons—"
"The devil you say!" said Jackson, reaching over and taking the paper. "Aw!" He chucked the paper aside. "That don't establish their social status any more than living in Hastings-on-the-Hudson or being a Rutherford. It don't amount to anything. It's just business. ”

“ But if I could compose it I would call it ‘Rosamond.’”
“And dedicate it to me as if I were a royal highness.”
He frowned.
“Not at all!” he asserted almost with violence. “I compose no masterpieces for royal highnesses. Royal highnesses are ugly and artificial. But you! Fair Rosamond, they tell me—Miss Watts, I think it was, told me last—that you were born on the farm. ‘Farm product,’ she called you. Your mother....”
“Made and sold butter! I am sure all Roseborough has informed you of that!” ”

“ It was her fashion to request favours with this little flirt and smile which suggested, with guileless conceit, that to serve any one so beautiful and so young was payment enough and to spare for any man in Roseborough. Little did she remember at this moment, however, the results of that same perking from her father’s farm gate, when Hibbert Mearely had asked her to tell him if he had, or had not, taken the wrong turning at the bridge.
“Mrs. Mearely!” (He would dare to believe it blue. He would act as if it were blue!)
“What on earth is the matter with the poor man? ”

“ When she could endure parting with the vision the Orleans mirror gave her, she tossed a white wrap over her and went downstairs. Presently she giggled.
“Oh, wouldn’t the Pelham-Hews and Palametta and The Kilties” (her name for the MacMillans) “rave if I were to go to Mr. Falcon’s breakfast in this glorious thing! They needn’t worry. I shall be a dowd to-morrow. But to-night! The shock may kill Mrs. Witherby—and incite Mr. Andrews and the Judge—but I’ll end my Wonderful Day in splendour, even if it must be lonely splendour.” Whatever rashness her gown proclaimed, she would refuse censure for it ”

“ To Mr Skinner's son, whom he accidentally met in Aberdeen on his return, he expressed a deep regret for the blunder, as "he would have gone twenty miles out of his way to visit the author of 'Tullochgorum.'"
As a man of ingenuity, various acquirements, and agreeable manners, Mr Skinner was held in much [Pg 8] estimation among his contemporaries. Whatever he read, with the assistance of a commonplace-book, he accurately remembered, and could readily turn to account ”

“ I’ll make him pay—all his life long. I’ll show them all who’s who in Roseborough. Let them see if the butter-maker’s daughter isn’t a match for them!” She marched—sailed is perhaps the better word—to the door, threw it open and called with a great authority to the tea-drinking conspirators in the dining room:
“Mrs. Witherby, kindly put my cups down on my table and come out of my dining room.”
She walked swiftly to the stand by the settee and picked up the Digest. She stood there holding the paper, waiting. Mrs. Witherby looked flustered but belligerent. Howard was patently apprehensive. ”

“ Skinner, I simply cannot afford to lose those two damned scoundrels in the Retriever. They're good men! And a good man who knows he's good will not take any slack from man or devil; so I cannot afford to lose those two. Skinner, I've got myself into an awful mess. Here I've been running by dead reckoning and now I'm on the rocks! What'll I do, Skinner? I'm licked; but, dang it all, sir, I can't admit it, can I? Isn't there some way to referee this scrap and call it a draw?”
“I see no way out of it now except to send another captain to Tacoma.” ”

“ The Smiths arrived there to find that the Skinners had preceded them on the same errand, and they recognized through the windows, in the leader of the band, a noted brigand on whose head a price was laid. He was searching every crack and cranny of the room, while Crosby, stripped to shirt and trousers, stood before the empty fireplace and begged for that night to be left alone with his dying father.
"To hell with the old man!" roared the Skinner. "Give up your gold, or we'll put you to the torture," and he significantly whirled the end of a rope that he carried about his waist. ”

“ And it's easier to do business with big men. They're more imaginative, quicker to grasp."
"That's how they got there," Honey interjected.
"But particularly, Honey, these men are all keen students of human nature. They can size a man up—gee! 'Brown's able,' says one. 'Yes, but he's tricky,' says another. 'Carpenter's honest, but he's a fool.' With the 'gold bugs' credit is a combination of honesty and ability."
Skinner sipped his demi-tasse reflectively. ”

“ Witherby so that dear Mrs. Lee can continue to believe in the beneficent spirit of Roseborough. Roseborough will open its arms to her Jack Falcon instead of tearing off his hair—that is, if he still has hair. B’r’r’r, but I am a-weary of old men!”
She gathered up her breakfast dishes, and took them into the kitchen. The kitchen closet yielded a blue-checked all-over apron of Amanda’s. Rosamond literally dropped herself into it at the neck. ”

“ I ain’t had a wink of sleep; and maw’s jest come and stuck a Dollop’s stickem headache plaster on to the back of my neck. I declare I’m weak as a plucked chicken. I give all Roseborough fair warning, right now, that I ain’t a-goin’ to stand much more of it. Here, hold on. Don’t ring off. There’s your party.” Anon, Howard was answering the same questions in the same wearily courteous manner.
Seeing that the door was closed Rosamond glanced at Marks and knew, by his rhythmic snores, that he was resting peacefully. ”

“ Amanda moaned, torn between two duties. “Somethin’ a’ways goes wrong in Mr. Hibbert Mearely’s home when His Friggets leaves it. Oh, be sure and sen’ right away for Bella Greenup to tidy up an’ get your dinner.”
“Nonsense, Amanda. What should happen? Nothing has ever happened in Roseborough yet. Nothing ever will happen in Roseborough. Leave everything and go at once to your mother.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Jemima said between sobs. “It’s kin’ of you. If you’ll telephone to Dollop’s Drugs, he’ll sen’ to Bella Greenup for you—him bein’ sweet on her an’ more’n willin’ to take her messages.” ”

“ On the edge of the village his flight was stayed by a tall form that arose in his path-that of the Indian. "I gave you all," said the chief, "the woman who should have been my wife, and then my land. This is your thanks. You shall go no farther."
With a quick stroke of the axe he cleft the skull of the shrinking wretch, and then, cutting off his scalp, the Indian ran to the cottage where sat the abandoned wife, weeping before the embers of her fire. He roused her by tossing on fresh fuel, but she shrank back in grief and shame when she saw who had come to her. "Do not fear," he said. ”