“I ought to know,” murmured Royal Phelps, and his face clouded.
Ruth, determined to get to the root of this mysterious matter, thrust in a deep probe: “I believe you have been to college, Mr. Phelps?”
He reddened to his ears. “Oh, yes,” he answered shortly.
“And then did you come out here to go into the mining business?” she continued, with some cruelty, for he was writhing.
“After the pater put me out—yes,” he said, looking directly at her now, even though his face flamed.
Ruth was doubly assured that Royal Phelps could not be as black as he was painted. “Though I do not believe any painter could reflect the Italian sunset hue that now mantles his brow,” she thought.
“I am sorry that you have had trouble with your father. Is it insurmountable?” she asked him quietly, and with the air that always gave even strangers confidence in Ruth Fielding.
“I hope not,” he admitted. “I was mad enough when I came away. I just wanted to ‘show him.’ But now I’d like to show him. Do—do you get me?”
“There is no difference in the words, but a great deal in the inflection, Mr. Phelps,” Ruth said quietly.
“Well. You’re an understandable girl. After I had come a cropper at Harvard—silly thing, too, but made the whole faculty wild,” and here he grinned like a naughty small boy at the remembrance—“the pater said I wasn’t worth the powder to blow me to Halifax. And I guess he was right. But he’d not given me a chance.