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After the voyage of the Barnum was first announced and it became known that the Tribune would have a pass, everybody on the staff wanted to go. For weeks it was the talk of the office. Even grave graybeards of the editorial rooms were paying court for the preference to Mr. W. F. G. Shanks, that prince of an earlier generation of city editors, who of course controlled the assignment of the pass.
Somewhere, there, in the north-east and north, I knew was a broken, iron coast of rocks upon which the graybeards thundered. And there, in the chart-room, a redoubtable sailorman bent anxiously over a chart as he measured and calculated, and measured and calculated again, our position and our drift. And I knew it could not be. It was not the Samurai but the henchman who was weak and wrong.
The flash of steel spread terror through-out the streets of the city. 'What steel! alack, what steel! Such were the bewildered cries the citizens raised. The firmness of manhood and of youth gave way at sight of the steel; and the steel paralyzed the wisdom of graybeards.
'And I know that this is true, he said, 'because Purun Dass always limped from the blow that he got in a riot when his account-books were burned, and the tiger that I speak of he limps, too, for the tracks of his pads are unequal. 'True, true, that must be the truth, said the graybeards, nodding together. 'Are all these tales such cobwebs and moontalk? said Mowgli.
"Good-morning, father!" was the universal answer. Then the old graybeards, standing beside the king, said again: "Good-morning, father! it is very cold to-day." "It will be warm enough before the day is over, boys!" said the king. "There is much to be done. Be brave, my children, and I will care for you as a father."
I watched them file past Wayne's, Varnum's, Scott's brigades, and Jackson's and Grayson's regiments marking the brown, dust-caked faces, the eager eyes, the sturdy, tireless tread, the well oiled muskets. Boys, men, graybeards, all alike exhibited in their faces the same expression.
It was the greatest "bear" raid in the annals of the Stock Exchange, so graybeards said; and what peculiarly marked it for the admiration of mankind was that it had had the least success. In three days, with five hundred and sixty-one thousand shares sold, the stock had fallen only eleven points. The raid was over and the "bears" had growlingly retreated thirty minutes before the close on Friday.
That first shovel of dirt means so much, possibly a fortune for all! Even the graybeards, Mr. Conroyal and Rad Randolph and Frank Holt, men who could, who often had faced death without the quiver of a muscle, are now all of a tremble with excitement. Thure and Bud are both bending forward so far that there is danger of their tumbling into the hole on top of Ham.
If he bragged a little, quizzed graybeards, sought strange places, sported with convention, and eluded women, it was due to his restlessness. Yet, he had the secretiveness of sand; he absorbed, but he revealed nothing. He knew his friends; they thought they knew him. It was his delight to have women think him a butterfly, men write him down a fool; it covered up his real desires and left him free.
To me, glancing back from where I held position beside Farrell, they seemed like spectral figures, with no rattle of accoutrements, no glimmer of steel, no semblance of uniform. Yet my heart warmed to the knowledge that these were no holiday warriors, but grim fighting men. I had seen the faces, some boyish, others graybeards, and had read in them all sternness of purpose.