“They are well—and well provided for, now.”
“I suppose they have given me up for dead, haven’t they?”
“I don’t know; I only know that I hadn’t.”
“Maybe it would have been better if you had.”
“No!” Philip broke in desperately. “There is something for you to do—a thing I can help you do, now that I have money.”
“What is it?”
“To go back to New Hampshire with me and fight those liars, who said you stole from the bank, to a finish in the courts; to make the Trask name once more what it has always been—an honest one. I’ll back you, to the last dollar there is in my half of the mine.”
The thin lips of the older man parted in the ghost of a smile.
“Spoken like a good son—or at least a dutiful one,” he said, in a tone that seemed slightly acid. “But why be so anxious about the name?”
“Why?—why?” Philip demanded. “Why shouldn’t I be anxious about it? Isn’t it the name I bear?”