Within a month he had formed a partnership with Joseph Calvin, the
town's eldest lawyer; and young Henry Fenn, who had been trying for a
year to buy a partnership with Calvin, was left to go it alone. So Henry
Fenn contented himself with forming a social partnership with his young
rival. And when the respectable Joseph Calvin was at home or considering
the affairs of the Methodist Sunday School of which he was
superintendent, young Mr. Fenn and young Mr. Van Dorn were rambling at
large over the town and the adjacent prairie, seeking such diversion as
young men in their exceedingly early twenties delight in: Mr. Riley's
saloon, the waters of the Wahoo, by moonlight, the melliferous strains
of "Larboard watch," the shot gun, the quail and the prairie chicken,
the quarterhorse, and the jackpot, the cocktail, the Indian pony, the
election, the footrace, the baseball team, the Sunday School picnic, the
Fourth of July celebration, the dining room girls at the Palace Hotel,
the cross country circus and the trial of the occasional line fence
murder case--all were divertissements that engaged their passing young
attention.
If ever the world was an oyster for a youth the world of Harvey and the
fullness thereof was an oyster to Thomas Van Dorn. He had all that the
crude western community cherished: the prestige of money, family,
education, and that indefinable grace and courtesy of body and soul that
we call charm. And Harvey people seemed to be made for him. He liked
their candor, their strength, their crass materialism, their bray and
bluster, their vain protests of democracy and their unconscious regard
for his caste and culture. So whatever there was of egoism in his nature
grew unchecked by Harvey. He was the young lord of the manor. However
Harvey might hoot at his hat and gibe at his elided R's and mock his
rather elaborate manners behind his back; nevertheless he had his way
with the town and he knew that he was the master. While those about him
worked and worried Tom Van Dorn had but to rub lightly his lamp and the
slave appeared and served him. Naturally a young man of his conspicuous
talents in his exceedingly early twenties who has the vast misfortune to
have a lamp of Aladdin to rub, asks genii first of all for girls and
girls and more girls. Then incidentally he asks for business and perhaps
for politics and may be as an afterthought and for his own comfort he
may pray for the good will of his fellows. Tom Van Dorn became known in
the vernacular as a "ladies man." It did not hurt his reputation as a
lawyer, for he was young and youth is supposed to have its follies so
long as its follies are mere follies. No one in that day hinted that Tom
Van Dorn was anything more dangerous than a butterfly. So he flitted
from girl to girl, from love affair to love affair, from heart to heart
in his gay clothes with his gay manners and his merry face. And men
smiled and women and girls whispered and boys hooted and all the world
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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