“Nope,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders at her sarcasm, “I’m nothing but a prospector, yet. And you don’t need to be so surprised.”
“No!” she retorted, giving way to swift resentment. “I guess I don’t–when you consider how you got your money. Here’s Mother out cooking for you, and I’m the waiter; and you’re traveling around in racing cars with thousand-dollar rings on your hands. But if old Honest John hadn’t sold all his stock while he was advising my father to hold on─”
“He did not!”
“Yes, he did! He did, too! And now, after Father has been lost in Death Valley, and we have come down to this, your father writes over and offers to buy our stock for just the same as nothing. That’s myring you’re wearing, and the money that paid for it─”
“Oh, all right then,” he sneered, stripping off the ring and handing it abruptly over to her, “if 8it’s your ring, take it! But don’t you say my father─”
“Well, he did,” she declared, “and you can keep your old ring! It won’t bring back my father–now!”
“No, it won’t,” he agreed, “but while we’re about it I just want to tell you something. My father went broke, buying back Paymaster stock from friends he’d advised to go in–and he’s got the stock to prove it–and when he heard that the Colonel was dead he decided to buy in your mother’s. He mortgaged his cows to raise the money for her and then that old terror–I don’t care if she is your mother–she slapped him in the face by refusing it. Well, he didn’t like to say anything, but you can tell her from me she don’t have to cook unless she wants to! She can sell–or buy–a hundred thousand shares of Paymaster any day she says the word; and if that isn’t honest I don’t know what is! I ask you, now; isn’t that fair?”
“What, at ten cents a share? When it used to sell for forty dollars! He’s just trying to get control of the mine. And as for offering to buy or sell, that’s perfectly ludicrous, because he knows we haven’t any money!”
“Well, what doyou want?” he demanded irritably, and then he thrust up his lip. “I know,” he said, “you want your own way! All right, I’ll never trouble you again. You can keep right on guarding that hole-in-the-ground until you dry up 9 and blow away across the desert. And as for that old she-devil─”
He paused at a sudden slam from the kitchen, and Virginia’s eyes grew big; but as he rose to face the Widow Huff he slipped the white rock into his pocket.