Rose left the room and presently the sound of her playing came softly from the sitting-room across the hall. Neither of the men spoke for a space, and the old man, casting a side look at Gene, was maliciously gratified by the thought that his son was offended. But he had reckoned without his offspring’s amiable imperviousness to the brutalities of the parental manner, wrought to-night to a condition of absolute invulnerability by the young man’s unclouded gladness. Gene, his eyes on his coffee-cup, was in anything but a state of insulted sullenness, as was proved by his presently looking up and remarking, with innocent brightness,
“You didn’t expect I’d get it, did you, Pop? I knew from the start you were sure I’d slip up before the year was out.”
His father eyed him without replying, a blank, stony stare, before which Gene did not show the slightest sign of quailing. He went on jubilantly in his high, throaty voice.
“I wasn’t dead certain of it myself at the start. You know it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to break off drinking habits that have had you as long as mine had me. But when I went down there and lived right on the land, when I used to get up in the morning and look out of my window across the hills and see the cattle dotted all over them, and the oaks thick and big and bushy, and feel the air just as soft as silk, I said to myself, ‘By gum, Gene Cannon, you’ve got to have this ranch if you die for want of whisky.’”
“Well, you’ve got it!” said his father in a loud, pugnacious tone. “You’ve got it, haven’t you?”
“Well, I guess I have,” said Gene, his triumph tempered by an air of modesty, “and I guess I earned it fair. I stuck to the bargain and there were times when I can tell you it was a struggle. I never once slipped up. If you don’t believe my word, I can bring you men from down there that know me well, and they’ll testify that I speak the truth.”
The father raised his eyebrows but said nothing. If there was anything further needed to show him what a complete, consistent fool his son was, it was the young man’s evident impression that the Santa Trinidad Ranch had been relinquished upon his own unsupported testimony. That was just like Gene. For weeks the detective had trotted at his heels, an entirely unsuspected shadow.
“It was Rose who really put me up to it,” he went on. “She’d say to me I could do it, I only had to try; any one could do anything they really made their minds up to. If you said you couldn’t do a thing, why, then you couldn’t, but if you said you could, you got your mind into that attitude, and it wasn’t hard any more. And she was right. When I got my mind round to looking at it that way, it came quite easily. Rose’s always right.”
This, the first statement of his son’s to which the Bonanza King could subscribe, did not placate the old man. On the contrary, it still further inflamed his sense of angry grievance. It was bad enough to have Gene stealing the ranch—that’s all it was—but to have him chuckling and grinning over it, when that very day Rose’s chances of happiness had come to a deadlock, was just what you might expect of such a fool. Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth spoke, growled rather,
“I was just waiting to hear you give some credit to Rose. Here you are talking all through dinner like a megaphone all about yourself and your affairs, and not giving a thought to your sister.”