“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 some people —

“I needed you,” he said, quietly. “Not on account of this confounded leg; though it’s been hard to be shut up for 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, and we lift 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 son I had 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 came swiftly, 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.

CHAPTER III

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 there are times 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’ they will play poker. So they used mittens ’n’ stockings for chips. ’N’ this fellow had got most of ’em. He told me,” 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 they believe that?” 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 “perfectly lovely 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, though he was not a king, and she was not pauperized. “I think, perhaps, it’s even sweeter,” 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.

CHAPTER IV

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 rated l’art nouveau with nouveaux 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.

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