The Valiants of Virginia

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

THE CRASH

“

Failed!” ejaculated John Valiant blankly, and the hat he held dropped to the claret-colored rug like a huge white splotch of sudden fright. “The Corporation—failed!”

The young man was the glass of fashion, from the silken ribbon on the spotless Panama to his pearl-gray gaiters, and well favored—a lithe stalwart figure, with wide-set hazel eyes and strong brown hair waving back from a candid forehead. The soft straw, however, had been wrung to a wisp between clutching fingers and the face was glazed in a kind of horrified and assiduous surprise, as if the rosy peach of life, bitten, had suddenly revealed itself an unripe persimmon. The very words themselves came with a galvanic twitch and a stagger that conveyed a sense at once of shock and of protest. Even the white bulldog stretched on the floor, nose between paws and one restless eye on his master in a troubled wonder that any one should prefer to forsake the ecstatic sunshine of the street, with its thousand fascinating scents and cross-trails, for a stuffy business office, lifted his wrinkling pink nose and snuffled with acute and hopeful inquiry.

Never had John Valiant’s innocuous and butterfly existence known a surprise more startling. He had swung into the room with all the nonchalant habits, the ingrained certitude of the man born with achievement ready-made in his hands. And a single curt statement—like the ruthless blades of a pair of shears—had snipped across the one splendid scarlet thread in the woof that constituted life as he knew it. He had knotted his lavender scarf that morning a vice-president of the Valiant Corporation—one of the greatest and most successful of modern-day organizations; he sat now in the fading afternoon trying to realize that the huge fabric, without warning, had toppled to its fall.

With every nerve of his six feet of manhood in rebellion, he rose and strode to the half-opened window, through which sifted the smell of growing things—for the great building fronted the square—and the soft alluring moistness of early spring. “Failed!” he repeated helplessly, and the echo seemed to go flittering about the substantial walls like a derisive India-rubber bat on a spree.

The bulldog sat up, thumping the rug with a vibrant tail. There was some mistake, surely; one went out by the door, not by the window! He rose, picked up the Panama in his mouth, and padding across the rug, poked it tentatively into his master’s hand. But no, the hand made no response. Clearly they were not to go out, and he dropped it and went puzzledly back and lay down with pricked ears, while his master stared out into the foliaged day.

How solid and changeless it had always seemed—that great business fabric woven by the father he could so dimly remember! His own invested fortune had been derived from the great corporation the elder Valiant had founded and controlled until his death. With almost unprecedented earnings, it had stood as a very Gibraltar of finance, a type and sign of brilliant organization. Now, on the heels of a trust’s dissolution which would be a nine-days’ wonder, the vast structure had crumpled up like a cardboard. The rains had descended and the floods had come, and it had fallen!

The man at the desk had wheeled in his revolving chair and was looking at the trim athletic back blotting the daylight, with a smile that was little short of a covert sneer. He was one of the local managers of the Corporation whose ruin was to be that day’s sensation, a colorless man who had acquired middle age with his first long trousers and had been dedicated to the commercial treadmill before he had bought a safety-razor. He despised all loiterers along the primrose paths, and John Valiant was but a decorative figurehead.

The bulldog lifted his head. The ghost of a furred throaty growl rumbled in the silence, and the man at the desk shrank a little, as the hair rippled up on the thick neck and the faithful red-rimmed eyes opened a shade wider....