She nodded.
“But I shall not tell you his name,” she said, her eyes alight. “Not just yet, at any rate. Let us get on to other particulars. I see another rock ahead in the person of his father. Do you think he will consent?”
“I had thought of that,” answered the minister, slowly. “That will be another great difficulty. But I believe he will consent if we go about it carefully. He is beginning to take a certain pride in the boy,—so is the mother,—and I shall appeal to that. It is worth trying.”
“Yes, it is worth trying,” she repeated, “and we will try.”
Tommy, who lay in his favorite spot high up on the mountain, reading for the tenth time of John Ridd’s fight for Lorna, saw them walking together along the river path. He watched them pacing slowly back and forth, deep in converse, but he had no thought that they were planning his life for him.
CHAPTER V
JABEZ SMITH MAKES A BUSINESS PROPOSITION
When one is fired with an idea, the wisest thing is to work it out immediately, and Miss Andrews lost no time in carrying through her part of the bargain. She knew Jabez Smith’s habits from a year’s observation, and that evening, after supper, she hunted him out where he sat on the back porch of the house, reflectively smoking his pipe. His preference for the back porch over the front porch was one of his peculiarities. From the front porch one could see the whole sweep of the valley, with its ever-changing beauties of light and shade. From the back one, nothing was visible but the imminent hillside mounting steeply upward.
To be sure, if one leaned forward in his chair, a glimpse might be had of the mouth of a coal-mine high up on the hillside, and his sister said that it was to look at this that Jabez sat on the back porch. It seemed likely enough, for it was from that drift that he had drawn enough money to make his remaining years comfortable. Jabez Smith had come into these mountains while they were yet a wilderness, unknown, or almost so, to white men, save where the highroads crossed them scores of miles apart. What circumstance had driven him from his home near Philadelphia was never known, but certain it was that he had plunged alone into the mountains, and battled through them until he had reached the New River valley. Caprice, or perhaps the beauty of the place, moved him to make his home here. He bought two hundred acres of land for half as many dollars, built himself a rude log cabin, and settled down, apparently to spend the remainder of his life in solitude.
Then came the discovery of the great beds of coal, and the building of the railroad through this very valley. His two hundred acres jumped in value to a thousand times what he had paid for them, and when the Great Eastern Coal Company was organized to develop the mines, he sold to them all of the land except a few acres which he reserved for his home. There he had built a comfortable house, and had sent for his widowed sister to come and live with him. He gradually grew to be something of a power in the place, and had been postmaster ever since an office had been established there. It was he who had secured money for the erection of the school-house, and he had been the only local contributor to Mr. Bayliss’s church. Still, he was a peculiar man, and bore the reputation of being harsh. Women said that was because he had never married. Men wondered why, with all his wealth, he should be content to spend his life in this humdrum and unattractive place. But he seemed to pay no heed to all these comments. He formed habits of peculiar regularity, and one of these was, as has been already said, to sit on the back porch after supper and smoke an evening pipe.
It was there he was that Sunday evening, and he turned as he heard steps on the porch behind him.