Rich men's children

by Geraldine Bonner

That was all the consolation the Bonanza King could extract from the situation, and it did not greatly mitigate his uneasiness and bad humor. This latter condition of being had other matter to feed it, matter which in the interview of the afternoon had been pushed into the background, but which now once again obtruded itself upon his attention. It was the first of May. By the morning’s mail he had received a letter from Gene announcing, with the playful blitheness which marked all the young man’s allusions to the transfer of the Santa Trinidad Ranch, that the year of probation was up and he would shortly arrive in San Francisco to claim his own.

Gene’s father had read this missive in grim-visaged silence. The sense of self-approval that he might have experienced was not his; he only felt that he had been “done”. Two months before, thinking that the ranch was slipping too easily from his grasp, that he was making too little effort to retain his own, he had hired a detective to go to San Luis Obispo and watch the career of Gene for signs of his old waywardness. On the thirtieth of April the man had reported that Gene’s course had been marked by an abstinence as genuine and complete as the most exacting father could wish.

The old man crumpled up the letter and threw it into the waste-paper basket, muttering balefully, like a cloud charged with thunder. It was not that he wished Gene to drink again; it was that he hated most bitterly giving him the finest piece of ranch land in California. It was not that he did not wish his son to be prosperous and respectable, only he wished that this happy condition had been achieved at some one else’s expense.

His mood was unusually black when he entered the house. The servant, who came forward to help him off with his coat, knew it the moment he saw the heavy, scowling face. The piece of intelligence the man had to convey—that Mr. Gene Cannon had arrived half an hour earlier from San Luis Obispo—was not calculated to abate the Bonanza King’s irritation. He received it with the expressionless grunt he reserved for displeasing information, and, without further comment or inquiry, went up the stairs to his own rooms. From these he did not emerge till dinner was announced, when he greeted Gene with a bovine glance of inspection and the briefest sentence of welcome.

Gene, however, was not at all abashed by any lack of cordiality. At the best of times, he was not a sensitive person, and as this had been his portion since his early manhood, he was now used to it. Moreover, to-night he was in high spirits. In his year of exile he had learned to love the outdoor life for which he was fitted, and had conceived a passionate desire to own the splendid tract of land for which he felt the love and pride of a proprietor. Now it was his without let or hindrance. He was the owner of a principality, the lord of thousands of teeming acres, watered by crystal streams and shadowed by ancient oaks. He glowed with the joy of possession, and if anything was needed to complete his father’s discomfiture, it was Gene’s naïve and bridling triumph.

Always a loquacious person, a stream of talk flowed from him to which the old man offered no interruption, and in which even Rose found it difficult to insert an occasional, arresting question. Gene had any number of new plans. His head was fuller than it had been for years with ideas for the improvement of his land, the development of his irrigating system, the planting of new orchards, the erecting of necessary buildings. He used the possessive pronoun continually, rolled it unctuously on his tongue with a new, rich delight. He directed most of his conversation toward Rose, but every now and then he turned on his father, enthusiastically dilating on a projected improvement certain to increase the ranch’s revenues by many thousands per annum.

The old man listened without speaking, his chin on his collar, his eyes fixed in a wide, dull stare on his happy boy. At intervals—Gene almost clamoring for a response—he emitted one of those inarticulate sounds with which it was his custom to greet information that he did not like or the exact purport of which he did not fathom.

The only thing which would have sweetened his mood would have been a conversation, peaceful and uninterrupted, with his daughter. He had not seen as much of her as usual during the last few days, as she had been confined to her room with a cold. This was the first evening she had been at dinner for four days, and the old man had looked forward to one of their slow, enjoyable meals together, with a long, comfortable chat over the black coffee, as was their wont. Even if Rose did not know of his distractions and schemes, she soothed him. She never, like this chattering jackass from San Luis Obispo—and he looked sulkily at his son—rubbed him the wrong way. And he had hardly had a word with her, hardly, in fact, had heard her voice during the whole meal.

When it was over, and she rose from her seat, he asked her to play on the piano in the sitting-room near by.

“Give us some music,” he said, “I want to hear something pleasant. The whole day I’ve been listening to jays and knaves and fools, and I want to hear something different that doesn’t make me mad or make me sick.”