“I thought a week, perhaps two,” answered the young man. “A feller gets darned lonely, down there in the country.”
There was something apologetic, almost pleading in his words and way of speech. He looked after his father’s receding figure as if quite oblivious to the rudeness of the large, retiring back and the manner of careless scorn.
“Make it three,” said the Bonanza King, turning his head slightly and throwing the sentence over his shoulder.
Gene Cannon was now twenty-nine years of age and had drunk since his eighteenth year. His mother had died in ignorance of his vice. When his father discovered it, it simply augmented the old man’s impatience against the feeble youth who would carry on his name and be one of the inheritors of his fortune. Bill Cannon had never cared much for his only son. He had early seen the stuff of which the boy was made. “Doesn’t amount to a hill of beans,” he would say, throwing the words at his wife over the bitten end of his cigar. He could have forgiven the drinking, as he could other vices, if Gene had had some of his own force, some of that driving power which had carried him triumphant over friend and foe. But the boy had no initiative, no brains, no energy. “How did I ever come to have such a son?” he queried sometimes in an access of disgust in which the surprise was stronger than the disgust. The question possessed a sort of scientific interest for him which was deeper than the personal and over which the disappointed magnate would ponder.
As Gene grew older and his intemperance assumed more serious proportions, the father’s scorn grew more open and was augmented by a sort of exasperated dislike. The Bonanza King had no patience with those who failed from ill-health or the persistent persecutions of bad luck. His contention was that they should not have been ill, and they should have conquered their bad luck. He had no excuses for those who were beaten back against the wall—only death should be able to do that. But when it came to a useless, hampering vice, a weakness that in itself was harmless enough, but that was allowed to gain paralyzing proportions, his original contempt was intensified into a fierce intolerance which would have been terrifying if it had not been tempered with an indifferent disdain.
Rose’s attitude toward her brother was a source of secret wonder to him. She loved the feeble youth; a tie of the deepest affection existed between them, upon which Gene’s intemperance seemed to have no effect. The Bonanza King had always admitted that the ways of the gentler sex were beyond his comprehension, but that the two women he had known best—his wife and his daughter—should have lavished the tenderest love upon an intemperate, incompetent, useless weakling was to him one of the fathomless mysteries of life.
It was Rose’s suggestion that Gene should be withdrawn from temptation by sending him to the country. As the only son of Bill Cannon he was the object of a variety of attentions and allurements in the city to which a stronger-willed man might have succumbed. The father readily agreed to the plan. He could graciously subscribe to all Rose said, as the removal of Gene’s amiable visage and uninspired conversation would not cause him any particular distress or sense of loss.
But when Rose unfolded the whole of her scheme he was not so enthusiastically in accord with her. It was that Gene should be put on his father’s ranch—the historic Rancho of the Santa Trinidad near San Luis Obispo—as manager, that all responsibility should be placed in his hands, and that if, during one year’s probation, he should remain sober and maintain a record of quiet conduct and general good behavior, the ranch should be turned over to him as his own property, to be developed on such lines as he thought best.
The Rancho of the Santa Trinidad was one of the finest pieces of agricultural property in California. The Bonanza King visited it once a year, and at intervals received crates of fruit and spring chickens raised upon it. This was about all he got out of it, but when he heard Rose calmly arranging to have it become Gene’s property, he felt like a man who suddenly finds himself being robbed. He had difficulty in restraining a roar of refusal. Had it been any one but Rose he would not have restrained it.
Of course he gave way to her, as he always did. He even gave way gracefully with an effect of a generosity too large to bother over trifles, not because he felt it but because he did not want Rose to guess how it “went against him.” Under the genial blandness of his demeanor he reconciled himself to the situation by the thought that Gene would certainly never keep sober for a year, and that there was therefore no fear of the richest piece of ranch land in the state passing into the hands of that dull and incapable young man.