“He’s a liar!” cried Charley savagely, “and don’t you go to talking or I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.”
“No, I won’t,” assured Wiley, “but here’s the proposition–the Colonel left a lot of stock. And Mrs. Huff, being crazy, gave it all to Blount on a loan of eight hundred dollars. But if the Colonel should come back that transfer would be illegal and he could fix it to get back the mine. So don’t 159talk to me about giving Virginia her mine–you go out and bring in the Colonel.”
“He’s dead!” yelled Charley, scrabbling madly out the door. “You’re a liar–I tell you he’s dead!”
“Yes, he’s dead,” observed Wiley, “just the same as I am. I’ll have to get old Charley drunk.”
160CHAPTER XVIII
On Christmas Day
Christmas came to Keno in a whirling snowstorm that shrouded Shadow Mountain in white and, as he stepped out in the morning and looked up at the peak, Wiley Holman felt a thrill of joy. The black shadow had bothered him, now that he had come to live under it; and a hundred times a day as it caught his eye he would glance up to find the dark cloud. But now it was gone and in place of the lava cap there was a mantle of gleaming snow. He looked down at the town and, on every graceless house, there had been bestowed a crown of white; all the tin cans were buried, the burned spots were covered over, and Keno was almost beautiful. A family of children were out in the street, trying to coast in their new Christmas wagons, and Wiley smiled to himself.
He had brought back those children; he had brought the town to life and tenanted its vacant houses; and now, best of all, he had brought the spirit of Christmas, for he had sent a peace-offering to Virginia. She had spurned it once in the heat of passion, and called him a coward and a crook; 161but that package of stock would recall to her mind a time when she had known him for a friend. It would bring up old memories of their boy-and-girl love, which she knew he had never forgotten, and if there was anything to forgive she would know that he remembered it when he sent this offering by Charley.
He was a crazy old rat, but he had his uses; and he had promised to give her the stock, without fail. It was to come, of course, from Charley himself, in atonement for selling it for nothing; but Virginia would know, even if she missed his flowered Christmas card, that the stock was a present from him. It had a value now far above the price he had paid for it when Charley had thrust it upon him and the dividend alone from the royalties on his lease would be twelve hundred dollars and more. And then her pro rata share, when he paid his fifty thousand dollars, would add another six hundred; and she knew that, for the asking, she could have half of what he had–or all, if she would take him, too.
Wiley looked down on the house that sheltered Virginia and smiled to think of her there. She was waiting on miners, but the time would come when someone would be waiting on her. In the back of his brain a bold plan had been forming to feed fat his grudge against Blount and restore the Huffs to their own–and it needed but a word from her to put the plan into action. He held from Blount two separate and distinct papers; 162one a bond and lease on the mine, the other an option on his personal stock. But to grant the bond and lease–with its option for fifty thousand–Blount had been compelled to vote the Widow’s stock; and if that stock was not his and had been illegally voted, then of course the bond and lease would be void.