“And, by the way, I'll take the stock off your hands at a slight—”
“It isn't mine—”
“No matter whose it is, I'll take it at a hundred and five. That will give you or your friends—”
“No, sir. I must find out—”
“You do what I tell you. At a hundred and five—two hundred and ten thousand dollars,” said Thompson, sternly. “But you come back here, do you hear? You are becoming really valuable to us. Run along now.”
Tommy wrung Thompson's hand, pocketed the hundred dollars his chief had given him and, unable to speak, rushed from the office.
He caught his train, but Dayton was far behind him before he was able to think coherently of the affair. The more calmly he thought, the more certain he became that his father was responsible. It gave him not a new problem to solve, but the conviction that the old problem plus this new phase must be settled once for all. He could not live through another six months like the last.
So he thought of the last six months. He remembered how, after his father's confession, the secret had appeared before him, a flaming sword in its hand. It had driven him out of New York. He had sought respite in Dayton, and there he had become a man, in this new world that was all the world there could now be for him.
The secret, therefore, had given to him not only the will, but the power to fight now. He had Thompson for an ally—Thompson, who had said, “Come back with or without an explanation”; Thompson, who would understand, as no other man could understand, how his father had been prompted to do this evil deed by nothing more evil than a great and unreasoning love. And the great and unreasoning love had changed the mind that could think of nothing but to fulfil at any cost his promises to a dead wife. Oh, Thompson would surely understand!
Yet he could not say that his father was legally insane. He was, in fact, a keen and shrewd man, who had surprised Tommy with his advice as to what he should tell Willetts. But on one subject his father was as irresponsible as a child. That was it—a child. And Tommy found himself reversing their positions, until Mr. Leigh was the son and Tommy the father, whose duty it was to protect the poor boy.