“Rue BoissonadeShall have its Claude,And l’AmeriqueThe new Van Dyck;But CarringtonShall have his son.”
“Rue BoissonadeShall have its Claude,And l’AmeriqueThe new Van Dyck;But CarringtonShall have his son.”
“Rue BoissonadeShall have its Claude,And l’AmeriqueThe new Van Dyck;But CarringtonShall have his son.”
The doorway was empty. He heard acochercrack his whip, and a cab-horse evidently making record time. Five francs,mon Dieu, ça vaut la peine!
Ned Carrington stood bewildered. What should he do? He might follow her—might make a scene—but he was always worsted when Elenore became daintily willful. She was quite capable of carrying it off, too. And itwasa lark!
A cab came clattering up the little street. The call of the East came to him with an overpowering lure. A wave of joy swept over him that hecouldgo, after all. He felt a fury of impatience to be off. He grudged the time to give Berthe her instructions, to snatch Elenore’s letter from the dresser, to catch up his hat and coat. The mere thought to do these things should be enough. But Berthe’s willing feet were speeding up the stairway. He flung the rug from his more-than-ready trunk, and laughed as he touched the strap caressingly with his fingers.
“I’m going!” he whispered; and the words sung themselves to the rhythm of rapture unalloyed.
“Et puis, m’sieu?” said Berthe, breathlessly, from the doorway.
The case of the old-fashioned watch snapped together for the fortieth time in John Carrington’s restless hands, and he sighed impatiently.
Not since those days of dread loneliness after his wife’s death, when he had first sent the children abroad, had time dragged so rackingly.
His leonine, iron-gray head moved irritably among the pillows of the bed where he had been “caged,” as he called it, for three interminable weeks.
Mrs. Kipley, tidying up the room with an accentuation of her usual briskness, gave him as indulgent a look as the formation of her rigid cast of countenance would permit.
“Wearin’ out your watch case won’t hurry up that train none,” she observed, as she straightened a china cat on the mantel into an expectant attitude.
It had been her gift the previous Christmas to John Carrington, and her admiration of it extended to the hope that it would pleasingly impress the returning traveler.
“Miss Elenore was fondest of animals, though,” she murmured, absently.
John Carrington’s eyes twinkled appreciatively. He did not share Mrs. Kipley’s admiration for her feline gift.
“Ned will appreciate that cat, though, Mrs. Kipley,” he said, genially. “You know he’s been studyingart;” but with the word a shadow came over his face.
“It’s hard on the lad, bringing him back,” he said. “Yellow Dog will look pretty crude to him, I expect.”
He moved his head restlessly, and the leg in its swinging splint became more exasperatingly painful.
Of course it would be only natural for Ned to have grown away from home ties. It was an unspoken thought against which he had braced himself for all these ten days. If the boy came back half-heartedly, contemptuous of the place, indifferent to the mine, alienated from his father—that was the touch of the thumbscrew.
And yet, he told himself wearily, six years was a long time. The boy was talented, cultured, used to all the refinementsof an older civilization. What wonder if—— And if he, through love for his son, and carrying out his mother’s wishes for his future, had been responsible for the separation which might mean all this?
Ah, well, he was not the first father, nor the last, to think out these same things, and try to see them dispassionately.
“He was real spry about starting,” said Mrs. Kipley.
John Carrington’s face relaxed.
“Caught the first boat,” he said. Then “Is his room ready and comfortable?” he demanded, as he had demanded many times.
“I wouldn’t worry about that room none, if I was you,” said Mrs. Kipley, serenely.
“Did you remember about the cigars and a decanter of whisky?” he asked.
Mrs. Kipley looked at him in a patient exasperation.
“They’s two kinds of cigars, every brand of cigarettes Kipley could lay hands on in Yellow Dog, the biggest decanter full of whisky, the motto ‘Love One Another,’ that my Sunday-school class worked for me last winter; red-white-and-blue soap in the soap dish, and two pincushions with a French motto worked on each of ’em. Hemmy did ’em in black and white pins. She thought’t would make it seem more like Paris to him. One says ‘Vive Napoleon,’ and the other says ‘Veuve Cliquot.’ Kind of twins, you see.”
John Carrington’s mouth twitched. Then he frowned slightly. For would the boy understand? If he were not amused—if he were merely contemptuous!
“Hemmy’s picking some flowers for the house now,” Mrs. Kipley went on, serenely. “And Kipley’s took a saddle horse besides the road wagon, so’s if Mr. Ned wanted to ride over, he could.”
The case of John Carrington’s watch came open once more. If the train was on time, and Ned did choose the saddle horse, another ten minutes—— But would he? The lad was a bit of a dandy. Carrington had smiled indulgently over some of his tailor’s bills. Probably you couldn’t coax him on a horse, even in Yellow Dog, unless he was arrayed in all the proper paraphernalia.
But what was that clatter of horse’s hoofs—fast and furious—faster and more furious than any Yellow Dog had heard since the day three weeks ago when the Carrington team, terrorized by a small boy’s premature bunch of firecrackers, had run away, and John Carrington, thrown from the wreckage of his light buggy, had been brought home with a badly fractured leg?
Mrs. Kipley looked out of the window.
“Merciful sakes!” she ejaculated, startled.
Not an accident to Ned, John Carrington prayed, with stiff, dry lips and apprehensive eyes.
“Of all things!” Mrs. Kipley murmured; and her tone indicated that she was now past surprise, and merely numbered with the numb.
Some one was running up the veranda steps; the door was flung open, and a tall, dark, slender boy in a marvelous suit of dull gray velveteens stood on the threshold.
A long, crimson-lined cape was flung over his arm. He tossed it from him. And “Dad!” he cried, exultantly, and was across the room, with his arms around his father’s neck, and had kissed him on both cheeks.
“French fashion, dad!” he laughed, flushing suddenly.
“Now we’ll do it the Anglo-Saxon way;” and he caught both his father’s hands in his own and wrung them heartily. “It’s great to be home again,” he said, buoyantly.
And the joyful light in his eyes was unmistakably genuine.
John Carrington’s face softened amazingly. Happiness such as he had not known for six years gripped him. The warm ardor of his son’s embrace, the touch of the soft, boyish lips, unnerved him, but he liked it astonishingly. It was so naïf, so unspoiled, so reassuring against that dread of alienation he had endured, that he felt submerged in the warm, comfortable certitude of hisson’s affection. He gripped the lad’s hands strongly, and surveyed him with a proud, fatherly interest.
The blue eyes that looked frankly into his own were like the lad’s mother’s, like Althea’s; the face that smiled gayly at him was alight with youthful energy, and the mouth, though the lips were a trifle full, had firm and resolute lines.
It was no dawdling dreamer that he saw, but an action-lover.
He nodded satisfiedly.
“You’ll do, lad,” he said, briefly.
Then he smiled as he caught sight of Mrs. Kipley, standing with the rigidity of an automaton, dust cloth in hand.
“You remember Mrs. Kipley,” he said, significantly. The boy wheeled instantly.
“Don’t I!” he said, laughingly, and something in his advance galvanized Mrs. Kipley into life again.
“None of your French fashions with me,” she said, severely, extending her right hand to him, less in greeting than as a rampart.
He swept a wonderful bow over it. Bent to it as a courtier might have done, and kissed its wrinkled, work-hardened back lightly. Then he straightened up to look her full in the eyes, and laughed his bubbling laugh once more.
“Do you still make those wonderful twisted doughnuts, Mrs. Kipley?” he asked, gayly. “I’ve bragged about them in Paris till they’re famous.”
Mrs. Kipley was scrutinizing the back of her hand minutely, to see if it was still intact. Finding it apparently uninjured, she drew breath and looked the surprising apparition in the face. Her own relaxed to his handsome, dashing youth and to his praise.
“I guess they’re about the same,” she said, dryly. But John Carrington chuckled to himself. He recognized the subjugation of Mrs. Kipley.
“What will he be with the young women!” he commented, to himself, amusedly.
Then he asked the question that was consuming Mrs. Kipley:
“Ned, are those clothes thestylein Paris?”
The boy swung himself lightly into the big armchair beside the bed.
“They’re the badge of my craft, sir,” he said, good-humoredly, settling the soft cravat with deft fingers. “Don’t you like them?”
“Oh,Ilike them,” said John Carrington. (“Handsome lad!” he was whispering to himself, proudly.) “But I was wondering how they would strike Yellow Dog, that’s all.”
“There did seem to be some little interest in my arrival,” the lad admitted, gleefully.
“Sakes alive! They beat anything I ever see in all my life!” Mrs. Kipley communed with herself.
“And Elenore?” said John Carrington. “How did you leave Elenore?”
The boy stirred slightly in his chair.
“Elenore is well, dad. She wanted to come. I think she was a little disappointed that you didn’t want your daughter instead of your son.”
John Carrington shook his head.
“Yellow Dog is no place for a young lady, Ned,” he said. “It was better for her to stay with her friends. I should have liked to see her, though. She’s quite a woman, from her picture. Time for sweethearts, eh? Your Aunt Sarah wrote a good deal about a young Hastings. She seemed to think it might be serious.”
The boy flushed annoyedly.
“Aunt Sarah loves to fuss and exaggerate,” he said, and there was a slight coolness in his voice. “Maiden aunts are apt to, you know,” he went on, more naturally. He smiled his attractive smile once more. Whatever had perturbed him for the instant was past.
Miss Hematite Kipley,ætatseventeen, coming into the room with a fragrant bowl of syringa blossoms, compared it favorably with any picture her beloved romancers had been able to conjure up.
From the moment when she had seen the picturesque figure dismount and make a rapid way into the house, she had been perishing to make this entrance, but she had restrained herself in accordance with her ideas of propriety and gentility. Miss Kipley stroveto be “elegant,” aided by certain open columns in respected periodicals, after which she patterned her conduct and her clothes.
The meeting between father and son she characterized as “a sacred moment,” and she regretted her mother’s continued intrusion upon it with the resigned exasperation of one who had often and fruitlessly pointed out to a primitive parent the proper forms of procedure.
Miss Kipley was rather pretty in a wholesome, buxom, blond way, and the “open columns” had stimulated her to a crisp freshness of attire, and partially reconciled her to the maternal regulations of its enforced simplicity.
She came into the room with her eyelids so demurely lowered that she might have been taken for a sleepwalker.
“Good-morning, Hemmy,” said John Carrington, with an outward courtesy which marked an inward amusement. In spite of her physical bulk, Miss Hematite was mentally transparent.
“Why,Hemmy!” said young Carrington, gayly, “how awfully pretty you have grown!”
Miss Kipley felt an inward commotion which threatened suffocation. Her fingers tightened on the blue bowl in a way which tested its enduring qualities. Mrs. Kipley’s maternal eye became vigilant.
There was a suggestion of a wrinkle on John Carrington’s brow. He hoped the boy would remember that this was not Paris; that the Kipleys represented the survival of a good many New England traits.
But neither parent could find anything to criticise in the way the lad relieved the blushing Hemmy of the bowl, shook her hand in a cordial, unaffected way, and turned to set the white blossoms on the square ledge of the open window, where the breeze converted them into a spicy censer.
As for Hematite, though visibly she stood in a deep pink embarrassment, in fancy she trod the sunny slopes of romance. This was the way things happened in the books over which she pored, palpitant. She sought vainly for some appropriate expression of welcome.
“I guess Hemmy and me will let you have a chance to get acquainted. I can finish dusting by and by,” said Mrs. Kipley, tersely. “Your old room’s all ready for you, Mr. Ned. Come, Hemmy.”
That young person followed her mother mechanically from the room.
“Cat got your tongue?” inquired Mrs. Kipley, severely, in the hall. “For all you are forever reading about the proper way to do things, you can’t even say ‘Glad to see you back.’”
Miss Kipley looked down from the happy heights to which she had mentally withdrawn herself, to the prosaic parent treading the valley of plain realities.
“There are moments beyond words,” she vouchsafed. Then she sped down the garden path to the now sacred syringa.
Mrs. Kipley watched her from the doorway with an anxious air.
“I hope she ain’t caught anything,” she murmured. “That was a terrible fool remark. I don’t know what there is around just now for hertocatch.”
But it is characteristic of the disorder which Miss Hematite had so recently acquired that no one save the person afflicted knows it’s around till the case has taken.
*****
The lad had slipped his fingers in his father’s, and they sat a little while in silence. So Althea and John Carrington had often sat, in that silent communion which is the bond of the finest fellowship.
Mr. Abner Kipley, entering suddenly, with Ned’s suit case in hand and a desire to expatiate on recent events oozing from every pore, viewed this singular proceeding as one further extraordinary manifestation emanating from the same remarkable cause.
“Seems youcanteach an old dog new tricks,” he communed with himself. “Probably by to-morrow I’ll be holding hands myself.” He chuckled grimly to himself over the impossible thought. But the glance he gave thelad from under his shaggy eyebrows was unwillingly admiring.
Yet Mr. Kipley prided himself on his unerring attitude of judicial criticism.
The boy swung round in his chair to greet him smilingly.
“You walked over, Mr. Kipley, I assume,” he said, mischievously.
“I didn’t try to kill a horse ’n’ get my neck broke,” responded Mr. Kipley, defensively.
“You picked up thet baby nice, though,” he added, with the air of a man willing to be just.
John Carrington looked at him with an air of sudden inquiry.
“Itwaslucky,” said the lad, languidly; and he lounged over to the open window, as though the subject was finished.
“I’m goin’ to,” said Mr. Kipley, impatiently, to the growing insistence of John Carrington’s look.
He objected to being hurried in the narration of a story which he rejoiced was his to tell.
“When he,” he began, jerking his head in the lad’s direction, “’lected to ride the Colonel home, he threw that red-backed garmint”—no mere black-and-white could reproduce the patronage of Mr. Kipley’s tone—“’cross the saddle in front of him. ’N’ the Colonel, not being used to the fashions in Paris, bolted. They went up the road’s though they was goin’ to glory, ’n’ didn’t have but one chance to ketch the limited. ’N’Ithrew his grip in the wagon ’n’ started after ’em.
“It was good ridin’,” said Mr. Kipley, approvingly, “’n’ everybody thet could turned out to see it. It was interestin’ and free.
“Thet curve by Trevanion’s cottage is a mean place,” Mr. Kipley continued, reflectively. “I’ve run the team into several things there myself, includin’ a dog fight, which c’ncluded about the time we run over the principal fighter’s tail.” He switched himself back on the main track. “Thet baby of Trevanion’s was tryin’ to ketch a hen just as the exhibition come along.”
“Well?” said John Carrington, and his voice whistled like a pistol shot.
“Down with his arm, ’n’ half out of the saddle—grab—’n’ yank up—’n’ ’bout face—hand the baby to a long-legged girl—’n’ off he goes, leaving me to destroy my c’nstitution, breathin’ dust all the way home. Thet’s your son’s idea of gettin’ here,” he concluded, dryly.
John Carrington drew a breath of relief.
“If anything had happened to that baby, we should have had the devil’s own time,” he said. “Trevanion has been sullen ugly ever since his wife died—took his trouble that way—and the baby is the only thing in the world he cares for. If—well, we might have lost the best shift boss in the country.”
Young Carrington stood very still, looking out of the window. If the incident had shaken him a bit, there was at least no outward sign of it.
Mr. Kipley drew nearer to the bed.
“There’s good stuff in him,” he said, semi-confidentially, as though recent residence in a foreign land unfitted one to hear undertone, “’n’ grit. But, for the sake of Moses, get those clo’s offen him.”
Upon which advice, he retired hastily from the room.
John Carrington looked across the room at his son with a smile that was at once quizzical and affectionate.
“Yellow Dog finds you a trifle too picturesque, boy,” he said, and his tone suggested that he at any rate was satisfied. “How about you? Pretty big trial to come back?”
“I should have come, whether you sent for me or not, when I knew you were hurt,” said the boy, and there was a defiant little ring in his voice. “Where should I be, or want to be, but at home and with you?”
John Carrington’s heart beat proudly. This was the kind of son to have. He said “home” as though he meant it. He was loyal. Now he, John Carrington, had an heir to show to somepeople——
“I needed you,” he said, quietly. “Not on account of this confounded leg; though it’s been hard to be shut upfor the first time in my life—hung up to mend, like a china plate. But it made me think I was just mortal, after all. And of your future and Elenore’s. And it’s only fair to you to let you decide how you’d rather have things.”
The look the boy gave him now was a quiet, concentrated attention.
“Without going into details about our mine, that no one but a mining man could understand,” Carrington went on, with a restful security engendered by that look, “I want to tell you the straight facts. It’s characteristic of this region that in sinking every now and then you strike a big hole filled with water—a vug, they call it. Now, we can take care of what we strike ourselves, but the Tray-Spot, which is newer and shallower, is letting us take care of theirs. Instead of pumping it up, they let the water seep through to the Star, andwelift it. It cuts off profits, and makes our mine dangerous. The two mines ought to be under the same management, anyway. Expenses could be cut almost in two. So I wrote the owner of the Tray-Spot—an Easterner—never comes out here—to ask him what he’d sell for. Richards, the superintendent, is a good deal of a scoundrel, and responsible for all the trouble. Of course mining is just a business proposition to those Easterners. They haven’t fought things out here in the early days, as some of us have. And this man had never even been on the ground. Bought the mine from Riley when he went to smash. And he’s childless. No second generation to take it up.
“That’s practically what I wrote him,” Carrington went on, doggedly, “and why it should have struck him just wrong, and turned him pig-head and ugly is beyond me. But he wrote back that if he had never been here, he wasn’t too old to come now. And that if he didn’t have a son, he had a nephew, who was a first-class business man and smart as a steel trap, whom he proposed to bring out here, and to keep on the ground. And that, as he understood from his superintendent that the one sonIhad was spending his time in Paris studying art, the mines would be better off with his heir than mine. And would I put a selling price on the Star? The Star, that I’ve put my lifeblood into! And that letter”—there was the rage of a wounded lion now—“was the first thing they read me after I came out from the ether to find myself tied up like—like this——” he finished, at a loss for any adequate comparison.
“We’ve got to fight or to sell,” he finished, “and if anything happened to me, what would you children know about disposing of it? That’s what I’ve thought as I’ve lain here. Hadn’t I better leave things safe for you, if I do have to kill time for a few years myself?”
His eyes looked worn. How many times he had gone over it! How many times affection for his children had warred against his pride in the mine he had discovered, developed, managed, owned! It all seemed a part of long, restless nights, of narcotics and anodynes that brought nightmares as often as oblivion; nights in which the young mine doctor seemed mixed up with the obstinate Easterner who owned the Tray-Spot, and the pain throbs and the pumping apparatus at the mine seemed to have some curious relationship.
“Sell! Never!” the fresh young voice flung back instantly, and the timbre of it was a battle-cry. “We’ll fight, dad—for our rights first, and then—then we’ll buy!”
He stood erect, every curve of fine youthfulness buoyant with victories to come, his head flung a trifle back and his mouth resolute.
Fatherly pride, exultation, triumph, swung John Carrington up on his elbow from his pillows in a certain fierce joy, and something glistened on his cheek—something that pain and fatigue and loneliness had never crystaled there.
“I have a son to stand by me,” he said, and it was the dignity of a king to the crown prince.
The leonine old head was lifted proudly, and the hand that he stretched out might have held a scepter.
Then reaction of the strain cameswiftly, and the lad leaped to him, as he dropped back limp and white against the pillows, with a sudden film drawn over the eyes so lately keen of sight, and the rushing of many waters in the ears that had heard so happily.
Yellow Dog was having the time of its life.
It was, to use a local idiom, passing out a new line of talk every day.
What this sudden access of interest meant to an isolated small town which existed solely on account of its two mines one would have to live in Yellow Dog to understand.
The Tray-Spot and the Star were at opposite ends of the town’s main street, each a local fetish in its way to the miners.
Underfoot everywhere the soft red hematite ore stained everything that it touched.
Beyond, hills after hills covered with scraggy pine. Half a mile to the south was the railway station, and a spur ran to both mines.
Since the loungers around that station had witnessed the home-coming of young Carrington, conversation had flourished in dialects Cornish and Irish and Swedish and “Dago,” as well as that tongue to which its users alluded proudly as “United States.”
The first comment of all this polyglot assemblage had inclined toward the critical, with emphasis which ran the gamut from the humorous to the snarl, laid on what Mr. Kipley had characterized as “those dum clothes.”
Trevanion, shift boss, coming to the surface that first night, to learn of the child’s peril, heard it in silence and with smoldering eyes; heard it sullenly as he held the child in his arms, and with a surly nod went back to his cottage.
And the long-legged girl who told him resented his silence as a lack of interest not only in the event, but in her narrative.
It was not often that anything so exciting happened. Events were usually underground casualties in Yellow Dog. “’E could ’a’ said ’e was glad the child wasna killed,” she complained to her father.
“’E’d na say what you maun know, onyway,” she got for comfort; for the men admired Trevanion, and trusted him blindly.
They comprehended, too, the way he had taken his trouble, and they left him to himself, since he wished it. It was his way; just as it was his way to read, to study, to get some beginnings of the patiently dug-out education of a dully persistent man.
If he had lost his Cornish accent, save in excitement or in his orders to them, he had not lost his Cornish patience, nor that curious Cornish affinity between man and mine.
What they did not understand was the measure of his fierce love for his child; the child that was to have a chance. This was the mainspring of his life.
Trevanion was seated on his doorstep, with the child on his knee, when young Carrington rode down the street once more, leisurely this time; looking at everything with interested eyes that recognized the old and familiar, and saw the new and changed, with a buoyant alertness which seemed to match the careless grace of the way he sat his horse.
The boy Trevanion had used to see at play had grown up to this lordliness, had he? To ride recklessly, careless of whom he ran down, trusting to luck to snatch children from under his horse’s feet. Trevanion hated him.
He saw him rein in the Colonel to ask some question of a woman who was leaning her elbows interestedly on her gatepost. Then young Carrington came on to stop opposite him.
“You’re just the man I’m looking for, Trevanion,” he said, and his tone was clear and crisp.
Trevanion got on his feet and looked at him loweringly. The child smiled at him.
“One of these days, Trevanion, I’m going to let you give me a few lessons in practical mining,” he said, pleasantly.“I may decide to become a mining man, after all. But that will have to go for the present, and you may be thankful for it. I’m inclined to think you’d find it harder work than being shift boss.”
Trevanion looked at him unsmilingly.
“However,” young Carrington went on, “they tell me you’ve never failed in anything you’ve tried yet, and I’m sure you wouldn’t begin with me. I’m no record-breaker,” he laughed, and there was something so pleasant in its sound that Trevanion was furious to find that he liked it.
“No, soberly, Trevanion,” he said, and his voice dropped to a seriousness that was sweeter toned than even his laughter, “father isn’t quite so well to-day. We’ve got to keep him pretty quiet for a few days, free from worry as much as possible; but we don’t want the men to know that. When he is up again we’ll get after those Tray-Spot people and put a stop to those free baths they’ve been good enough to give us. But we’ve got to pull him up carefully for a while. It’ll mean extra work and responsibility for you.”
Then a new note came in the musical voice.
“It means everything to the mine just now, Trevanion, that you are just where you are, a man to be trusted.”
The words were spoken with a grace which made them seem like a decoration conferred. The eyes that Trevanion raised met deep blue eyes with a mysterious something in them that conquered him. Fealty was suddenly strong in him, loyalty to the lad through thick and thin. Every fiber of his big burliness thrilled with a proud protectiveness. The child on his arm was holding out his arms to young Carrington. Three minutes before, his father would have resented it. Now he saw the firm, sure, tender grasp with which Carrington took him up before him on the saddle; he exulted in the child’s laugh as the Colonel walked off daintily, then took a bit of a canter down the street, and finally young Carrington brought a reluctant two-year-old back to the fatherly arms.
It was then that he said what he had had in his mind since morning—said it with a tenderness that rang perfectly true:
“All I was thinking of this morning, Trevanion, was to get to my father as soon as possible. But if my impatience had resulted in accident I should never have gotten over it.”
And Dick Trevanion, holding the little, warm, happy figure close in his great arms, said what half an hour ago he had never thought to say:
“I believe you, Mr. Ned.”
*****
“Quiet!” said Mr. Kipley, to young Carrington’s comment, as he sat on the veranda steps that evening after dinner, looking with growing approval at that young gentleman as he lounged in a big wicker chair. “Well, of course, it tain’t the Boo-lee-vards”—for Mr. Kipley had consulted the encyclopedia painstakingly in order to converse comfortably with the returning traveler. “It tain’t the Boo-lee-vards,” he repeated, with an air of erudition, “but therearetimes when Yellow Dog can have as big a pack of firecrackers tied to its tail as you’d see anywhere.”
“Yes?” said the boy, and it was a yes that coaxed. He was enjoying Mr. Kipley hugely.
“Yes,” said Kipley, placidly. “Day after pay-day occasionally, or when the lumber-jacks come down from Raegan camp at Christmas time to get their money and blow it in before New Year’s.” Then he chuckled reminiscently.
“They’re queer cusses,” he said. “One of ’em came in last Christmas that was a walkin’ woolen store, ’n’ when he tried to sell mittens and stockin’s by the hundred pair, they just naturally locked him up. But he come by ’em honest, after all. You know,” he explained, kindly, “these lumber-jacks can’t get any money while they are in the woods, but they can trade at the company’s store there, ’n’ have it checked against their time. ’N’ theywillplay poker. So they used mittens ’n’ stockings for chips. ’N’ this fellow had got most of ’em. He toldme,” said Mr. Kipley, with intense enjoyment,“that he won eleven hundred pair of mittens on three aces. The other fellow had kings. ’N’ he bluffed forty pair of stockings outen a greenhorn on ace high.
“You play poker?” he inquired, for young Carrington’s laugh had been deliciously prompt.
The boy nodded.
“Enough to appreciate a good poker story, anyway,” he said. “That’s a corker.”
Mr. Kipley wiped his mouth with his handkerchief to hide a pleased smile.
“D’you know,” he said, “Mis’ Kipley can’t see a thing in that story?” His tone suggested a puzzled commiseration.
“Oh, well,” the boy said, gayly, “it’s hardly a woman’s story, you know.” And he showed his white teeth in so gleeful a smile that it warmed Mr. Kipley’s heart.
It resulted in his making some inquiries on a subject that had roused his interest earlier in the day.
“Paris is gettin’ kind of run down, ain’t it?” he asked, cautiously.
“Why, no,” said the boy; “it’s getting built up. What made you think so?”
“They’s a picture in the encyclopedia,” said Mr. Kipley, “that I come acrost to-day. What a lot a person would know who’d read ’em all through!” he commented. “It was a cathedral—Catholic, I s’pose, ’n’ they’re usually willin’ to give liberal to keep up their buildin’s, too. It was pretty well timbered up the back, ’s though they was expecting a cave-out.”
Young Carrington recognized the description with an inward joy.
“That’s one of the most famous churches of Paris,” he said, soberly. “Notre Dame. And it was built that way on purpose.”
“Do theybelievethat?” Mr. Kipley inquired.
“Yes,” said young Carrington.
“Who give it its name?” Kipley demanded.
“I really couldn’t say,” the boy laughed.
“It would be interestin’ to know,” reflected Mr. Kipley. “Of course he wa’n’t no kind of an architect, or he wouldn’t have had to brace his walls like that; but whether he had the gall to name it because he didn’t care a damn, or they named it because it wasn’t worth a damn——”
“Your pa’s waked up and wanted to know where you was,” said Mrs. Kipley, appearing in the door, just as young Carrington was trying to decide whether to enlighten an ignorance which was such bliss to the listener.
“Thank you,” he said, and sped into the house at once.
Mr. Kipley turned a philosopher’s eye upon the wife of his bosom.
“He’s got good principles, M’r’,” he said, with conviction; “’n’ a very entertainin’ way of puttin’ things. He’s good company.”
“What was he talkin’ about?” asked Mrs. Kipley, interestedly.
Mr. Kipley’s cough was extremely apologetic.
“Come to think of it, I guess I did most of the talkin’,” he said, with some embarrassment.
“I should say ’t was likely,” said Mrs. Kipley, dryly; and she disappeared in the house. She reappeared for a parting shot. “I s’pose his principles was good because he agreed with you,” she observed, sarcastically. Mr. Kipley gazed at the evening star confidentially.
“Beats all about women!” he mused. “They act’s if all the principles was theirs, ’n’ kind of exasperated if you’ve got any. ’N’ more if you ain’t,” he murmured.
He had refilled his pipe, and was looking placidly across the lights of the town to the hills beyond.
Hemmy came up the walk with the light of a new and lovely romantic suggestion in her eyes.
She sat down beside her father and slipped a warm, plump hand in his.
“Pa,” she said, sweetly, “am I really your child and ma’s?”
Mr. Kipley recoiled sharply.
“Well, of all things!” he ejaculated.
Miss Hematite Kipley experienced a pang of disappointment.
She had just been reading a “perfectlylovely romance,” where an adopted child turned out to be the daughter of a duke. While she did not insist on a dukedom, she had had an ecstatic feeling that she might be a millionairess.
“You never brought me home in your arms and told ma that a beautiful young gypsy girl——” she began, falteringly.
“No,” said Mr. Kipley, with precision; “I never did, and that’s the reason I’m alive to-day. If I’d come home with a baby, talking about beautiful young gypsies, there’d have been a funeral, and no mourners. An ’t would have served me right, too.”
Then he softened parentally toward this young woman of his own flesh and blood.
“It don’t seem so very long ago, Hemmy, since you was born. Born in the regular, genu-wine way. Why, we named you Hematite because they struck the big find of ore in the mine that same morning. It was my idea, too, for your aunt, who lived in the copper country, had just named her little girl Amygdoloid—Amy, for short—and she was plum offensive about having the most elegant name out. ‘What’s the matter with Hematite?’ says I!”
Miss Hematite kissed her undoubted parent forgivingly, and rose from the ashes of her air castle like an undiscouraged young phœnix.
Already she had another in process of construction, and she pillowed her cheek against the battered volume containing the encounter between Cophetua and the beggar maid, thoughhewas not a king, andshewas not pauperized. “I think, perhaps, it’s evensweeter,” she whispered, as she fell asleep.
*****
Down in the village of Yellow Dog, the club which the Star had built for its miners was ablaze not only with lights, but with excitement.
There was a circle of miners around the room.
In the center of the floor lay a man who had been shaken into a little heap of clothes; a heap that stirred with caution even in catching breath, lest more punishment should follow.
Over it towered Dick Trevanion’s sturdy figure, made brawnier still by rage.
“Any more remarks about Mr. Ned and his clothes?” he demanded, sweeping that quiet group with furious eyes.
There was not a breath from them. Trevanion’s reputation as an athlete and a boxer was a matter of local pride.
He walked across the room to the door and flung it open.
Then he turned his flushed face to them.
“You can all have as much and more, if you like,” he said. “I stand for him.”
He struck the side of the door a blow with his closed fist, a blow that seemed to shake the entire side of the room. “Remember that when your tongues start,” he emphasized, and was gone in the darkness.
There was no danger that they would forget.
*****
In a quiet bedroom, the lad whom he had championed had fallen asleep in a big chair beside his father’s bed.
He had sat there till John Carrington had slept, and then, too drowsy to move, had slept himself—that youthful sleep of healthy exhaustion.
John Carrington, waking in the night, looked at the boy as he rested his head in the corner of the high-backed chair. The long, dark lashes lay lightly on cheeks rounded daintily enough for a girl, but the lines of the firm young chin had a quiet decision even now.
Far into the night John Carrington lay with open eyes resting on his son, and in the depths of those eyes was content immeasurable.
*****
The days stretched into weeks, weeks to months. It was September now.
John Carrington was almost convalescent.
He could walk now with a crutch from his bedroom to the veranda couch. The bone had knit, but the flesh was slow to heal.
And what a comfort his son had been to him through those months!
Sunny. Tireless. Capable. Ready to read if he wanted to be read to; to write letters when they had to be written; to amuse him with tales of his life and Elenore’s in Paris, when the pain was bad and time dragged.
And outside there was not a miner who did not speak boastingly of Mr. Ned. Even Yellow Dog, noncommittal Yellow Dog, sang his praises.
Only the miners at the Tray-Spot sneered. Only their wives flung a contemptuous laugh when young Carrington and the Colonel sped by out on long rides through the country.
These rides, in whose solitude one might think one’s own mind freely; and certain letters that went overseas addressed to one E. Carrington, to be held in Paris till called for, were the only relaxations in which young Carrington permitted himself an entire honesty of thought.
One morning Mr. Kipley came home jubilant.
“Strangers in town,” he announced. “Owner of the Tray-Spot, I guess, and a young fellow. Saw them driving with Richards.”
John Carrington rapped his crutch sharply against a chair.
“Now there’s going to be something doing,” he said, defiantly; and all the repressed activity of months rang in the words.
Young Carrington waved a hand airily in the direction of the other mine.
“The Tray-Spot shall cease from troubling,” he said, gayly, “and we’ll just gather you gently in.”
If anything stirred the stillness, it was the mocking laughter of the goddess of fate.
The brownstone house on Madison Avenue suggested the solid and respectable affluence of its owner, Mr. Livingstone Wade, in that quieter old New York way which preceded Millionaire’s Row, and which, on account of that precedence, Mr. Livingstone Wade considered immeasurably superior.
Nor was this suggestion a mere exterior effect.
The somber elegance of its interior furnishings showed in every detail that Mr. Wade’s conservatism to earlier ideals was unfaltering.
The ormolu clock on the drawing-room mantel was flanked by a pair of tall vases, Sèvres, as a matter of course, standing equidistant with the precision of sentinels.
His pictures included a Landseer, a Meissonier, a Bouguereau, and some excellent copies of Raphael. He was fond of calling your attention to the fact that all of these gentlemen could draw, and that their figures “stood out.”
The books in his library showed a strong tendency to run in sets, with modern fiction conspicuously absent. And as for his dinner services, they were complete, and he considered odd sets of plates as a fad which had its origin in economy or inefficient housekeeping.
He ratedl’art nouveauwithnouveaux riches, considered impressionism as a cloak for defective draughtsmanship, declined to admit anything made as far west as Rookwood to the companionship of the Capodamonte and Meissen in his cabinets, and would have banished to his stables the most priceless Indian basket ever made.
West of New York he considered that the wilderness howled, impelled to such mournful vocalization by a dawning sense of its own abnormal crudities.
In business, however, Mr. Wade consented to compromise with the spirit of the times. No out-of-date methods characterized the bank of which he was president, nor, on the other hand, did any up-to-date crook contrive to outwit the keen-eyed, white-haired, thin-lipped old gentleman, who held himself as erect ethically as he did physically.
His wife, born a Van Dorn, christened in Grace Church and married in the same, had died at fifty-seven, childless—a course of conduct which Mr. Wade, while he preserved a high silence, felt as deeply as a European monarch might have done. It was nota mere personal question, but the continuation of the Wade line would have been for the good of the country at large.
As for his only nephew, he had done his duty by him. Not extravagantly, to spoil the young man, or delude him with unfounded hopes of heirship; but by a college course, Columbiabien entendu! and when he determined to become an architect, the Beaux Arts was naturally the only correct place.
When he read John Carrington’s letter, with its phrase “since you have no direct heir,” Mr. Livingstone Wade experienced a very primitive bitterness, which resolved itself into a determination to make his nephew heir to that particular piece of property at least; to recall him from Paris, and to insist upon his going out to Michigan and becoming thoroughly conversant with the mine as soon as possible.
Having begun the accomplishment of this design, Mr. Livingstone Wade began to feel a consciousness of benevolence in acting so generously toward the young man, which resulted, very naturally, in his regarding his nephew with more affection than even Mr. Wade himself would have thought possible.
As they sat together in the well-ordered library, Mr. Wade said to himself that he had done well.
“When the mine came to us with that tangle of collateral from the Riley failure, I found that it was paying dividends regularly; and Richards, the manager, wrote me that they could be doubled easily if he was allowed a free hand to cut down expenses and exercise his own judgment. He has done it, too, and the mine is a splendid property. And it is yours, my boy, when you have made yourself thoroughly conversant with it.” Mr. Wade’s tone was complacently benevolent.
“Do you mean that you want me to take a course in mining engineering?” said Hastings, and his voice was carefully expressionless.
“No,” said his uncle; “I want you to go out to the mine itself, put yourself in Richards’ hands, and get a good working knowledge of the proposition, so that Richards will know you are master. He wouldn’t try any tricks with me, because it is pretty well known that men who have tried have repented it; but with a young fellow like you, it’s different, of course. I shall not expect you to spend all your time there. Perhaps for a year or so you’d better stay on the ground. Then come East, open your architect’s office, and go West once a year on a tour of inspection.”
Hastings’ face cleared.
“It is more than good of you, sir. I’ll try to deserve it,” he said, frankly.
“There is only one condition,” Mr. Wade went on, “and your word is sufficient for that. You are not to sell the mine without my consent. The very fact that John Carrington is so anxious to get hold of it is one of the best points in its favor.”
“Carrington?” said Hastings, mechanically, wondering if the name so constantly in his thoughts had begun to repeat itself audibly.
“He is a—a boor—who owns the adjoining mine,” Mr. Wade classified him. “He offered to buy the Tray-Spot. Of course I declined. And he had the insolence to charge Richards with flooding his mine with water from ours, instead of pumping it to the surface. Threatened us with a lawsuit if we didn’t put in additional pumps. He said his men were not educated to the luxury of free baths as yet, and that swimming was an unpopular sport on the eleventh level.”
“But if it was true?” said Hastings.
“Of course it wasn’t,” said Mr. Wade, testily. “I wrote Richards, and he said Carrington was just trying to get hold of the mine, and wouldn’t stop at anything to do it, because his, the Star, is down so deep it is about worked out. Do you know,” Mr. Wade went on, “this John Carrington had the audacity to say that, since I’d never been West, he didn’t suppose I’d care to begin such tripsat my age, and that, as I had no son, he should think a reasonable proposition to sell ought to interest me.”
Mr. Wade intended to suggest onlyJohn Carrington’s breach of good manners, but in spite of himself his voice showed where the taunt stung. And Hastings had a sudden comprehension of his uncle’s sudden benevolence, which in its very humanness quickened him from his heavy sense of indebtedness for benefits received, into that warmer loyalty of the ties of blood, into that sense of inter-dependence which this was the first emergency to rouse.
He began to feel ashamed of the sense of injury he had had in the abrupt summons to quit Paris, to put away his chosen profession for a time. He began to feel ashamed of the lagging gratitude with which he had received a gift which would make him a rich man; of that involuntary wish that his uncle’s generosity had taken another form.
A realization of the loneliness of age bound him to the older man with bonds of sentiment stronger far, with warmhearted, generous youth, than all those the government has seen fit to issue.
But Carrington? Though there might be dozens of Carringtons who owned mines in the West.
“We’ll take Holliday’s car—he’s offered it to me time and again—and go out there. We can live on the car the few days I am here, and you’re young and can manage to make yourself comfortable afterward. I shall be proud to introduce you as my nephew, Laurence.” Mr. Wade was tasting victory in prospect, and the taste was palatable. “Carrington has only one son, and he’s daubing canvas in Paris.”
Then this was Elenore’s father. Hastings foresaw complications to come.
“Ned Carrington and his sister were two of my best friends in Paris, sir,” he said, firmly. “I knew their father was a mine owner somewhere in the West.”
“Has this young Carrington any business ability?” demanded Mr. Wade. His tone was quick and keen. He was getting at an important factor.
Hastings smiled in spite of himself.
“Not a scrap,” he said, amusedly, “but he’s a genius. He’ll be a new ‘old master’ one of these days.”
Mr. Wade’s countenance relaxed amiably.
“These erratic young fellows are alwaysgoingto do wonders,” he said, indulgently. “For all the help he’ll be to his father, he might as well be a girl. One of these days you will be buying out John Carrington on your own terms.”
Nor did he dream that in the silence that followed, as he sat comfortably certain of the discomfiture of the man who had flung at him the two-edged taunt of age and childlessness, his nephew was saying to himself that surely Elenore’s father must be a reasonable man, that there must be some rational basis on which he and John Carrington could meet as friends. More, he saw himself with an assured income.Thencould he not, by virtue of that future friendship, gain a remarkably valuable ally in that siege of the marvelous citadel—invulnerable, indeed, save to a certain small sportsman who bends his bow to no man’s dictation, and yet for love of valor, or from mere caprice, ranges himself at the unlikeliest moment with the besieging force, and wins with a single well-sped shaft?
Whatever emotions the arrival of Mr. Wade and his nephew at Yellow Dog excited in Richards, his outward attitude was one of bluff heartiness.
“You can’t stay on your car, though, Mr. Wade,” he said, decisively, looking over its comfortable appointments with an appraising eye. “The miners at the Star are too lawless. You’ll have to put up with the hotel.” (“About twenty-four hours of the Raegan House will start them for New York,” he thought, with grim humor.)
“Do you mean to tell me that they would dare attack a private car?” Mr. Wade demanded, aghast.
Richards shrugged his shoulders.
“There isn’t much they wouldn’t dare,” he said, coolly, wondering how thick it would be safe to pile it on, “but they’re more interested in people than property. The car’s safe enough as long as you aren’t in it, but if a stick ofdynamite happened to drop under it some night when you were——”
“What has made such bad feeling between the mines?” Hastings asked, quietly.
Richards’ eyes narrowed slightly.
“Miners take the tone of their manager,” he said, significantly.
Simple as question and answer were, antipathy quickened in that instant between the two men.
Richards resented a certain something in Hastings’ tone, and Hastings made up his mind that Richards was overplaying.
Mr. Wade was regretting with exceeding heartiness that he had come at all. Being blown to bits in this desolate-looking hole was furthest from his desire.
Trusting himself to the horrors of a wilderness hotel seemed about as hazardous an alternative. As for leaving his nephew in such a place, was it not virtually condemning him to a more or less lingering death? And Mr. Wade had grown amazingly fond of him during the last few months, in the companionship which had resulted from their many-times delayed expedition westward.
He was half inclined to make a formal tour of inspection, announcing Hastings as the future owner, and then take him back and let him open his architect’s office at once. But Mr. Wade hated retreat.
“Then I am sure that you have men equally vigilant in repelling any attacks upon property or persons,” Hastings said, smoothly. “However, it doesn’t matter to me. I should have to come to the hotel, anyway, later, when you have gone back, sir.”
“Going to stay with us a while?” Richards asked him.
“Permanently,” said Hastings, pleasantly.
Richards swung a questioning face toward Mr. Wade.
“The mine would have been my nephew’s at my death, naturally, Richards,” Mr. Wade explained, with some dignity. “He is coming into his own a little sooner, that is all. And if he chooses to remain——”
“As he does,” Hastings laughed, genially, “and to learn all about his mine from its competent manager.”
Mr. Richards’ face did not express any extreme joy.
“If you’ll take my advice, you’ll go home with your uncle and leave your mine in my hands, Mr. Hastings,” he said, bluffly. “It’s a rough country, and hard, dangerous work—work that you don’t know anything about, and that it will take you years to learn. And—I beg your pardon, but I’ll speak plainly—while you are learning you’ll want to give orders, and you’ll make bad mistakes—expensive mistakes. They’re easy to make and hard to right. Not that it will be your fault. I should if I tried to run Mr. Wade’s bank. If you want your mine to keep on being a good paying proposition, leave it in the hands of men who made it one. Isn’t that business, Mr. Wade? I’ve satisfied you, haven’t I?” His manner had a certain brusque appeal.
“Perfectly,” said Mr. Wade, suavely.
Then he looked at Hastings. He was standing by the table heaped with books and magazines, and there was something in the alertness of his virile figure, well poised enough for a soldier; something in the lines of his well-cut features, something in the steadiness and frankness of the cool gray eyes, that suggested not only the strength of youth, but the strength of the spirit. It came to Mr. Wade suddenly that he was going to miss him, that the young fellow ought to have a chance to live with his own class.
“And my nephew may suit himself,” Mr. Wade went on, steadily. “The mine is his without condition”—he spoke the words slowly—“and if he chooses to leave it in your hands, and return East with me, he is quite at liberty to do so.”
Hastings smiled at him cheerfully.
“I shall stay, of course,” he said, decidedly. “But I’ll try not to make my mining education too expensive.”
“I’ve got a carriage outside,” said Mr. Richards, rising abruptly. “Is’pose you’d like to drive around town and out to the mine, to look around a little. Then if you’ll take dinner with me at the Raegan House, you’ll have quite an idea what it’s like out here.”
Mr. Livingstone Wade surveyed the landau into which he stepped with scant favor; and the look which he gave to the ragged darky who held the reins was only equaled by the one he bestowed on the two battered equines who were to serve as their means of locomotion.
As they swung into the main street of the little town, Hastings laughed with a perfectly genuine amusement.
“I might open an architect’s office here, on the side,” he said. “They certainly need it.”
Mr. Wade’s eyes were upon an up-to-date trap, drawn by a well-matched, high-stepping pair. The middle-aged man who was driving turned on them a look of amused curiosity as they passed.
“Whom do those horses belong to?” demanded Mr. Wade, sharply.
“Belong to Carrington,” said Richards, shortly. “That was his man. That’s his house at the other end of the street—that big one on the hill.” He jerked his head to indicate that it was back of them, and they turned to see it. It had a large, comfortable, hospitable look, more suggestive of the South than of the North.
“The hotel’s good enough for me,” said Richards, dryly.
Mr. Wade wondered why this sentiment, which had seemed so admirable to him in New York, lost its flavor here on the ground.
As they passed a blacksmith’s shop, the smith was shoeing a Kentucky thoroughbred, who looked at them with an airy unconcern.
“Carrington’s,” said Richards to Mr. Wade’s uplifted eyebrows.
The expression on Mr. Wade’s face was a curious one. Your tourist in Europe now and then wears its twin, on discovering that the United States is renting a second-rate building for an embassy, when other governments own pretentious ones.
“Tell you what,” said Hastings, suddenly. “I think I shall buy a neat little touring car to run around here. Pretty bad grades, but there are half a dozen makes that could take them easily.”
Mr. Wade looked at him with the ever-growing conviction that he was the kind of nephew to have. In spite of his conservatism, he had adopted the auto as he had the telephone.
“Quite right, Laurence,” he said, complacently. “When you order the one you prefer, have the bill sent to me.”
“Going to import a show-fure?” queried Richards, with ironic pleasantry.
Hastings shook his head.
“Never saw one I couldn’t run yet,” he said, cheerfully, “and when I do I’ll send it back to the factory as defective.”
“If he’ll just put in his time running it, it’s all I’ll ask of him,” communed Richards with himself.