White Ashes
Kennedy Sidney R.;Noble Alden C.
English
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E-text prepared by Al Haines
WHITE ASHES
by
KENNEDY-NOBLE
[Transcriber's note: Full names--Sidney R. Kennedy, Alden C. Noble.]
New York
The MacMillan Company
1912
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1912,
by The MacMillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1912.
TO
NATALIE STANTON KENNEDY
THIS BOOK
IS INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHORS
SIDNEY R. KENNEDY
ALDEN C. NOBLE
WHITE ASHES
CHAPTER I
On the top floor of one of the lesser office buildings in the insurance
district of lower New York, a man stood silent before a map desk on
which was laid an opened map of the burned city. No other man was in
the office, for this was on a Sunday; but it would not have mattered to
the man at the map had the big room presented its usual busy
appearance. All that went on about him would have passed his notice;
he only gazed stolidly from the map to the newspaper with flaring
headlines, and from newspaper back to map, trying to gauge the measure
of his calamity.
The morning papers had been able to print nothing save the bare facts
that the fire had started near a large hotel, had spread with appalling
rapidity to the adjacent buildings, and getting beyond the control of
the fire department was sweeping southward under a wind of thirty miles
an hour. The afternoon extras, however, gave fuller--and
graver--details. The central business section of the city was entirely
in ruins, and the conflagration had as yet shown no sign of a stay.
Sunday though it was, in many of the greater insurance offices on
William Street the executives had gathered and were endeavoring to
calculate the effect of this catastrophe on their assets.
But in the office on the top floor, where the man stood alone, there
was no longer any doubt. Whether the fire was checked or whether it
swept onward mattered now to him not at all; he was looking into the
eyes of ruin utter and absolute. . . . But this, perhaps, is
premature, since before this day was to arrive much water was to flow
under many bridges, and it is with the flowing of some of that water
that this story has to deal.
About five o'clock, Charles Wilkinson called, as he often did, through
inclinations in which the gastronomic and the amatory were about evenly
divided. Long since, after a series of titanic but perfectly hopeless
struggles, he had abandoned all direct attempts to borrow money from
his opulent step-uncle; subsequent efforts to achieve indirectly the
same result by a myriad of methods admirably subtle and of marked
ingenuity had resulted only in equal failure. To be sure, there had
never been any really valid reason why his endeavors should have been
successful unless as compensation for years of patient labor. He
conceived his esteemed relation as a sort of safe-deposit box, to a
share of whose contents he was entitled if he could contrive to open
it. Farther back in the quest, he had approached Mr. Hurd with the
dash and confidence of a successful burglar, but of late the pursuit
had lapsed to a mere occasional half-hearted fumble at the combination.
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