<h2><SPAN name="X" id="X"></SPAN>X</h2>
<h3>A Question of Climate</h3>
<p>Colonel Morrison had three initials, so the town naturally called him
"Alphabetical" Morrison, and dropped the "Colonel." He came to our part
of the country in an early day—he used to explain that they caught him
in the trees, when he was drinking creek water, eating sheep-sorrel, and
running wild with a buffalo tail for a trolley, and that the first thing
they did, after teaching him to eat out of a plate, was to set him at
work in the grading gang that was laying out the Cottonwood and Walnut
Rivers and putting the limestone in the hills. He was one of the
original five patriots who laid out the Corn Belt Railroad from the
Mississippi to the Pacific, and was appointed one of that committee to
take the matter to New York for the inspection of capitalists—and be it
said to the credit of Alphabetical Morrison that he was the only person
in the crowd with money enough to pay the ferryman when he reached the
Missouri River, though he had only enough to get himself across. But in
spite of that the road was built, and though it missed our town, it was
because we didn't vote the bonds, though old Alphabetical went through
the county, roaring in the schoolhouses, bellowing at the crossroads,
and doing all that a good, honest pair of lungs could do for the cause.
However, he was not dismayed at his failure, and began immediately to
organise a company to build another road. We finally secured a railroad,
though it was only a branch.</p>
<p>Over his office door he had a sign—"Land Office"—painted on the false
board front of the building in letters as big as a cow, and the first
our newspaper knew of him was twenty years ago, when he brought in an
order for some stationery for the Commercial Club. At that time we had
not heard that the town supported a Commercial Club—nor had anyone else
heard of it, for that matter—for old Alphabetical was the president,
and his bookkeeper, with the Miss dropped off her name, was secretary.
But he had a wonderfully alluring letterhead printed, and seemed to get
results, for he made a living while his competitors starved. Later, when
he found time, he organised a real Commercial Club, and had himself
elected president of it. He used to call meetings of the club to discuss
things, but as no one cared much for his monologues on the future of the
town, the attendance was often light. He issued circulars referring to
our village as "the Queen City of the Prairies," and on the circulars
was a map, showing that the Queen City of the Prairies was "the railroad
axis of the West." There was one road running into the town; the others
old Alphabetical indicated with dotted lines, and explained in a
foot-note that they were in process of construction.</p>
<p>He became possessed of a theory that a canning factory would pay in the
Queen City of the Prairies, and the first step he took toward building
it was to invest in a high hat, a long coat and white vest, and a pair
of mouse-coloured trousers. With these and his theory he went East and
returned with a condition. The canning factory went up, but the railroad
rates went wrong, and the factory was never opened. Alphabetical
blinked at it through his gold-rimmed glasses for a few weeks, and then
organised a company to turn it into a woollen mill. He elected himself
president of that company and used to bring around to our paper, notices
of directors' meetings, and while he was in the office he would insist
that we devoted too much space to idle gossip and not enough to the
commercial and industrial interests of the Queen City.</p>
<p>At times he would bring in an editorial that he had written himself,
highly excitable and full of cyclonic language, and if we printed it
Alphabetical would buy a hundred copies of the paper containing it and
send them East. His office desk gradually filled with woodcuts and zinc
etchings of buildings that never existed save in his own dear old head,
and about twice a year during the boom days he would bring them around
and have a circular printed on which were the pictures showing the
imaginary public buildings and theoretical business thoroughfares of the
Queen City.</p>
<p>The woollen mill naturally didn't pay, and he persuaded some Eastern
capitalists to install an electric plant in the building and put a
streetcar line in the town, though the longest distance from one side of
the place to the other was less than ten blocks. But Alphabetical was
enthusiastic about it, and had the Governor come down to drive the first
spike. It was gold-plated, and Alphabetical pulled it up and used it for
a paper-weight in his office for many years, and it is now the only
reminder there is in town of the street railway, except a hard ridge of
earth over the ties in the middle of Main Street. When someone twitted
him on the failure of the street railway he made answer:</p>
<p>"Of course it failed; here I go pawing up the earth, milking out the
surplus capital of the effete East, and building up this town—and what
happens? Four thousand old silurian fossils comb the moss on the north
side of 'em, with mussel shell, and turn over and yawp that old
Alphabetical is visionary. Here I get a canning factory and nobody eats
the goods; I hustle up a woollen factory, and the community quits
wearing trousers; I build for them a streetcar line to haul them to and
from their palatial residences, and what do the sun-baked human mud
turtles do but all jump off the log into the water and hide from them
cars like they were chariots of fire? What this town needs is not
factories, nor railroads, nor modern improvements—Old Alphabetical can
get them—but the next great scheme I go into is to go down to the
river, get some good red mud, and make a few thousand men who will build
up a town."</p>
<p>It has been fifteen years and over since Colonel Morrison put on his
long coat and high hat and started for the money markets of the East,
seeking whom he might devour. At the close of the eighties the Colonel
and all his tribe found that the stock of Eastern capitalists who were
ready to pay good prices for the fine shimmering blue sky and bracing
ozone of the West was running low. It was said in town that the Colonel
had come to the end of his string, for not only were the doors of
capital closed to him in the East, but newcomers had stopped looking for
farms at home. There was nothing to do but to sit down and swap
jack-knives with other land agents, and as they had taken most of the
agencies for the best insurance companies while the Colonel was on
dress parade, there was nothing left for him to do but to run for
justice of the peace, and, being elected, do what he could to make his
tenure for life.</p>
<p>Though he was elected, more out of gratitude for what he had tried to do
for the town than because people thought he would make a fair judge, he
got no further than his office in popular esteem. He did not seem to
wear well with the people in the daily run and jostle of life. During
the forty years he has been in our town, he has lived most of the time
apart from the people—transacting his business in the East, or locating
strangers on new lands. He has not been one of us, and there were
stories afloat that his shrewdness had sometimes caused him to thrust a
toe over the dead-line of exact honesty. In the town he never helped us
to fight for those things of which the town is really proud: our
schools, the college, the municipal ownership of electric lights and
waterworks, the public library, the abolition of the saloon, and all of
the dozen small matters of public interest in which good citizens take a
pride. Colonel Morrison was living his grand life, in his tailor-made
clothes, while his townsmen were out with their coats off making our
town the substantial place it is. So in his latter days he is old
Alphabetical Morrison, a man apart from us. We like him well enough, and
so long as he cares to be justice of the peace no one will object, for
that is his due. But, someway, there is no talk of making him County
Clerk; and there is a reason in everyone's mind why no party names him
to run for County Treasurer. He has been trying hard enough for ten
years to break through the crust of the common interests that he has so
long ignored. One sees him at public meetings—a rather wistful-looking,
chubby-faced old man—on the edge of the crowd, ready to be called out
for a speech. But no one calls his name; no one cares particularly what
old Alphabetical has to say. Long ago he said all that he can say to our
people.</p>
<p>The only thing that Alphabetical ever organised that paid was a family.
In the early days he managed to get a home clear of indebtedness and was
shrewd enough to keep it out of all of his transactions. Tow-headed
Morrisons filled the schoolhouse, and twenty years later there were so
many of his girls teaching school that the school-board had to make a
ruling limiting the number of teachers from one family in the city
school, in order to force the younger Morrison girls to go to the
country to teach. In these days the girls keep the house going and
Alphabetical is a notary public and a justice of the peace, which keeps
his office going in the little square board building at the end of the
street. But every day for the past ten years he has been coming to our
office for his bundle of old newspapers. These he reads carefully, and
sometimes what he reads inspires him to write something for our paper on
the future of the Queen City, though much oftener his articles are
retrospective. He is the president of the Old Settlers' Society, and
once or twice a year he brings in an obituary which he has written for
the family of some of the old-timers.</p>
<p>One would think that an idler would be a nuisance in a busy place, but,
on the contrary, we all like old Alphabetical around our office. For he
is an old man who has not grown sour. His smooth, fat face has not been
wrinkled by the vinegar of failure, and the noise that came from his
lusty lungs in the old days is subsiding. But he has never forgiven
General Durham, of the <i>Statesman</i>, for saying of a fight between
Alphabetical and another land agent back in the sixties that "those who
heard it pronounced it the most vocal engagement they had ever known."
That is why he brings his obituaries to us; that is why he does us the
honour of borrowing papers from us; and that is why, on a dull
afternoon, he likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and tell us
his theory of the increase in the rainfall, his notion about the
influence of trees upon the hot winds, his opinion of the disappearance
of the grasshoppers. Also, that is why we always save a circus-ticket
for old Alphabetical, just as we save one for each of the boys in the
office.</p>
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<h3>He likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and tell us his theory of the increase in the rainfall</h3>
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<p>One day he came into the office in a bad humour. He picked up a country
paper, glanced it over, threw it down, kicked from under his feet a dog
that had followed a subscriber into the room, and slammed his hat into
the waste-basket with considerable feeling as he picked up a New York
paper.</p>
<p>"Well—well, what's the matter with the judiciary this morning?"
someone asked the old man.</p>
<p>He did not reply at once, but turned his paper over and over, apparently
looking for something to interest him. Gradually the revolutions of his
paper became slower and slower, and finally he stopped turning the paper
and began reading. It was ten or fifteen minutes before he spoke. When
he put down the paper his cherubic face was beaming, and he said:</p>
<p>"Oh—I know I'm a fool, but I wish the Lord had sent me to live in a
town large enough so that every dirty-faced brat on the street wouldn't
feel he had a right to call me 'Alphabetical'! Dammit, I've done the
best I could! I haven't made any alarming success. I know it. There's no
need of rubbing it in on me."—He was silent for a time with his hands
on his knees and his head thrown back looking at the ceiling. Almost
imperceptibly a smile began to crack his features, and, when he turned
his eyes to the man at the desk, they were dancing with merriment, as he
said: "Just been reading a piece here in the <i>Sun</i> about the influence
of climate on human endeavour. It says that in northern latitudes there
is more oxygen in the air and folks breathe faster, and their blood
flows faster, and that keeps their livers going. Trouble with me has
always been climate—sluggish liver. If I had had just a little more
oxygen floating round in my system, the woollen mill would still be
running, the street-cars would be going, and this town would have had
forty thousand inhabitants. My fatal mistake was one of latitude.
But"—and he drawled out the word mockingly—"but I guess if the Lord
had wanted me to make a town here he would have given me a different
kind of liver!" He slapped his knees as he sighed: "This is a funny
world, and the more you see of it the funnier it gets." The old man
grinned complacently at the ceiling for a minute, and before getting out
of his chair kicked his shoe-heels together merrily, wiped his glasses
as he rose, put his bundle of papers under his arm, and left the office
whistling an old, old-fashioned tune.</p>
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