“Wha' for?” he repeated persistently. “Wha's that for?” and whimpered, and rubbed his eyes with a limp hand, and leaned a long time on the rail, staring down at the mystery, with the other limp hand hung over the water pointing downward. “Wha' for?” The city was waking with distant murmurs and nearby jarring noise. A freight train went over the P. and N. bridge. Shays drew back from the railing and shuffled on till he had come almost to Bank Street; there he stopped and turned back, seeing a trolley car in the distance coming down Maple Street. He went down on the littered wharves, close to the abutments of the bridge, sat down on a box, leaned against the masonry, and took from his pocket the chisel he had picked up, stared at it, rubbed it in the refuse at his feet, and put it back in his pocket. The sun was risen now, the spot grew pleasantly warm, and he went to sleep muttering in the morning sunlight on the wharf by the Muscadine, and over his head went the trucks, waggons, trolley cars, the stamp of hoofs, and the shuffle of feet. CHAPTER XV--HENNION AND SHAYS |HENNION came to his office early that Saturday morning with his mind full of Macclesfield's bridge, and of the question of how to get Macclesfield interested in the Boulevard and the parks. He wondered how Macclesfield would take to the part of a municipal patriot. He thought that if he could only conquer some shining success, something marked, public, and celebrated, then, perhaps, his success might succeed with Camilla. At any rate, it paid to keep your eyes on the path where you seemed to be getting somewhere, and to follow that path, for so one travelled ahead and found that success attracted success by a sort of gravitation between them. All things came about to him who kept going. This was the native Hennion philosophy, of father and son, much as it was a Champney trait to crave something to canonise. Neither Henry Champney nor Camilla could ever find peace without believing something to be better than they could prove it to be; neither the elder Hennion nor his son could ever find peace without the occupation of making something a little better than it had been. Hennion leaned back in his office chair and stared out of the window. “I'll bet Miss Eunice is level-headed,” he thought. The half-begun plans and rough drawings for Macclesfield's bridge lay reproachful on his desk; a typewriter clicked in the anteroom; the clamour of trucks and trolley cars came in through the window, familiar noises, now sounding dull and far away to his ears. The maze of telephone wires and the window panes across the street glittered in the bright sunlight. The sound of shambling feet outside approached the corridor door. The owner of the feet knocked, hesitated, and came in, the pallid, unsubstantial, wavering Shays. His lips trembled, and his hand lingered on the door knob. Hennion swung around promptly in his chair.