Father and son faced each other in silence for a full minute. Then the latter’s eyes fell.
“I’ll stay!” he muttered.
“I thought so. Now chase! I’m busy.”
Gerald slouched to the door. On the threshold he turned and shook his fist in impotent fury at the broad back turned on him.
“I’ll stay!” he repeated, his voice scaling an octave and breaking in a hysterical sob, “I’ll stay! But, before God, I’ll find a way to pay you off for this before the campaign is over.”
Caleb did not turn at the threat nor at the loud-slamming door. He was scribbling a telegram to his New York lawyer.
“Gerald in scrape with chorus girl, Enid Montmorency,” he wrote. “Find her and buy her off. Go as high as $100,000.”
“Father Healy says, ‘The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children,’” he quoted half-aloud as he finished; “but when they are visited in the shape of blithering idiocy, it seems ’most like a breach of contract.”
The Railroader was not fated to enjoy even the scant privilege of solitude. He had hardly seated himself at his desk when the sacred door was once more assailed by inquisitive knuckles.
“The Boys haven’t wasted much time,” he thought as he growled permission to enter.