“Your aunt has always been inclined to disapprove of my doings, and I don’t suppose she’d be interested in my prospecting experiences. We’ll let them stand over till another day.”
Ruth agreed, but she had a puzzling suspicion that her father was relieved by the interruption. When Miss Dexter joined them Ruth was forced to follow his lead and confine herself to general conversation. This, however, did not keep her from thinking, and she wondered why her aunt, whose love for her she knew, had shown herself so hypercritical about her father. Caroline was narrow, but she was upright, and it seemed impossible that she could find any serious fault with him. For all that, Ruth wished that his connection with Clay were not quite so close. Clay was not a man of refinement or high principles, and, to do him justice, he did not pretend to be. Ruth had heard his business exploits mentioned with indignation and cynical amusement by men of different temperament. There were, she supposed, envious people who delighted to traduce successful men; but Clay was certainly not free from suspicion, and she would have preferred that her father had chosen a different associate.
CHAPTER X—THE WRECK OF THE KANAWHA
Ruth had time to ponder her father’s unfinished story, for a week elapsed before she could persuade him to continue it. Osborne was away for a few days, and when he came home his preoccupied manner suggested that he had business of importance on hand, and Ruth refrained from questioning him. The subject, however, had its fascination for the girl. She had been too young to retain more than a hazy recollection of her father in his struggling days, and she had fallen into the way of thinking of him as the polished and prosperous gentleman whom she had rejoined after a long separation. Now it was difficult to readjust her ideas and picture him as a needy adventurer, taking strange risks and engaging in occupations of doubtful respectability. She was, she hoped, not hypercritical, but she found it hard to reconcile the two sharply contrasted sides of his character.
At last, one evening, when they strolled across the lawn as dusk was falling, she determinedly led up to the subject, regardless of the smile with which he evaded her first questions.
“I don’t know why you should be so bent on hearing about the mine,” he said. “On the whole, I’d rather forget the thing, because good luck never followed the gold that was taken from Snowy Creek. There seemed to be a curse upon it.”
They sat down on a bench beneath a tall, ragged pine, and Osborne lighted a cigar.
“Well,” he began, “some time after the Klondyke rush started, when gold had been found freely on American as well as Canadian soil, I went up to Alaska to re-locate the mine. Clay had gone north before this, but not as a miner—he said it was cheaper to let somebody else dig the gold for him. He had a share in a wooden steamboat, started a transport service to several mining camps, and financed prospectors who made lucky finds. Everything he touched prospered, and the man was popular where the canvas towns sprang up; so I was not surprised when I found him unenthusiastic about my project. However, after much persuasion, he agreed to come, and we set off with two hired packers and supplies enough to give us a good chance of success.
“Summer was late that year, and we hauled the hand-sledges two hundred miles over the snow; but I needn’t tell you about our journey. We made it with some trouble, and one afternoon came down to the creek, wet and worn out, plowing through belts of melting snow and soft muskegs made by the sudden thaw. I had hide moccasins which were generally soaked and they had given out under the fastenings of the snowshoes. My foot, which had been frost-bitten on the march when I first found the mine, was cut deep, and it cost me a pretty grim effort to hold out for the last few miles. I made it because I couldn’t let another night come before I learned my luck. All I had was in the venture, and if it failed I must go back to camp destitute.”
“One can understand that you were anxious.”