He mounted several steps of the staircase and then descended, stepping as heavily as he could, and, as he advanced on the parlor, coughed with aggressive loudness. He was on the threshold when he encountered his daughter, her head lowered, her gait quick, almost a run. Without a word he stepped aside and let her pass, the rustling of her skirt diminishing as she ran up the hall and mounted the stairs.
They stood thus for a moment, rising above
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Dominick was standing on the hearth-rug, his head raised like a stag’s; his eyes, wide and gleaming, on the doorway through which she had passed. Cannon stopped directly in front of him and fixed a stony, menacing glare on him.
“Well, Dominick Ryan,” he said in a low voice, “I saw that. I came in here a moment ago and saw that. What have you got to say about it?”
The young man turned his eyes slowly from vacancy to the angry face before him. For a moment he looked slightly dazed, staring blankly at Cannon. Then wrath gathered thunderously on his brow.
“Let me alone!” he said fiercely, thrusting him aside. “Get out of my way and let me alone! I can’t talk to you now.”
He swept the elder man out of his path, and, lurching and staggering on his wounded feet, hurled himself out of the room.
CHAPTER IX
THE SONS OF THEIR FATHERS
It was at the end of the Bonanza times, that period of startling upheavals and downfalls, when miners had suddenly become millionaires, and rich men found themselves paupers, that Bill Cannon built his mansion in San Francisco. He had made his fortune in Virginia City, not in a few meteoric years, as the public, who loves picturesque histories, was wont to recount relishingly, but in a series of broken periods of plenty with lean years in between. The Crown Point and Belcher rise made him a man of means, and its collapse was said to have ruined him. Afterward, wiseacres shook their heads and there were rumors that it was not Bill Cannon who was ruined. In the dead period which followed this disastrous cataclysm of fortune and confidence, he was surreptitiously loyal to the capricious town from which men had withdrawn their affection and belief as from a beguiling woman, once loved and trusted, now finally proved false.