“So far as my father is concerned, family don’t count, and neither does money. But he confidently expects me to take up his business in Chicago, and I suppose it is my duty to do so. If he finds me looking fit he may order me into the ranks at once.”
“I’ll go there—I’ll do anything you want me to do,” she urged. “You can tell your father that I’ll help you in the office. I can learn. I’m ready to use a typewriter—anything.”
He was silent in the face of her naïve expression of self-sacrificing love, and after a moment she added, hesitatingly: “I wish I could meet your father. Perhaps he’d come up here if you asked him to do so?”
He seized upon the suggestion. “By George! I believe he would. I don’t want to go to town. I just believe I’ll wire him that I’m laid up here and can’t come.” Then a shade of new trouble came over his face. How would the stern, methodical old business man regard this slovenly ranch and its primitive ways? She felt the question in his face.
“You’re afraid to have him come,” she said, with the same disconcerting penetration which had marked every moment of her interview thus far. “You’re afraid he wouldn’t like me?”
With almost equal frankness he replied: “No. I think he’d like you, but this town and the people up here would gall him. Order is a religion with him. Then he’s got a vicious slant against all this conservation business—calls it tommy-rot. He and your father might lock horns first crack out of the box. But I’ll risk it. I’ll wire him at once.”
A knock at the door interrupted him, and Mrs. McFarlane’s voice, filled with new excitement, called out: “Berrie, the District office is on the wire.”
Berrie opened the door and confronted her mother, who said: “Mr. Evingham ’phones that the afternoon papers contain an account of a fight at Coal City between Settle and one of Alec Belden’s men, and that the District Forester is coming down to investigate it.”
“Let him come,” answered Berrie, defiantly. “He can’t do us any harm. What was the row about?”
“I didn’t hear much of it. Your father was at the ’phone.”