Little Tony drew his eyes away at last, turned and started for the door. Silently Anthony watched him as he reached for the knob, turned again, and looked back at his father. On the very threshold the child stood still and stared back. His brown eyes filled, his red lips quivered. The stern face which watched his melted into a winning smile, and Anthony held out his arms. An instant longer, and his son had run across the floor and flung himself into them.
When the childish storm of tears had quieted, and several big hugs had been exchanged, Anthony set the boy down upon the floor and took his hand. Silently the two walked out of the house and down the garden. The hook-and-ladder cart stood patiently waiting, just where it had waited all day. Little Tony ran to it and picked it up. Over his exquisite face broke the first smile that had been seen there since the earliest disregarded command of the morning.
“Ve fire chief’s gone,” he said. “He was a bad fire chief.”
So together the man and the boy escorted the hook-and-ladder cart to the nursery, and backed it carefully into its stall, between the milk wagon and the automobile. Then the child went to his play. But the man drew a long breath.
“I would rather manage a hundred striking workmen,” he said to himself with emphasis.
XXVI.—On Guard
While little Tony had been growing, waxing strong and sturdy: while Juliet had been tending and training him, learning, as every mother does, more than she could impart: Anthony, in his place, had not stood still. The strength and determination he had from the first hour put into his daily work had begun to tell. His position in a great mercantile establishment had steadily advanced as he had made himself more and more indispensable to its heads.
Cathcart, the successful architect, began to talk about a new home for the man into whose hands Henderson and Henderson were putting large interests to manage for them, and whose salary, he asserted, must now justify, indeed call for, life under more ideal surroundings than the little home in the unfashionable suburb which poverty had at first made necessary.