CHAPTER XXIII—THE COUNCIL OF WAR.
Having left the castle, Bernard walked briskly away across the open square, past the quay and along the curling stretch of sands which led to the path under the cliffs. He had taken the hammer from his pocket and swung it as he strode onward, whistling as he went.
A mile or so along the strand, he turned off at a footway leading up the rocks, and climbed this nimbly to the top, gaining which, he began to scan closely the broad expanse of dun-colored bog-plain which dipped gradually toward Mount Gabriel. His search was not protracted. He had made out the figures he sought, and straightway set out over the bog, with a light, springing step, still timed to a whistled marching tune, toward them.
“Well, I’ve treed the coon!” was his remark when he had joined Jerry and Linsky. “It was worth waiting for a week just to catch him like that, with his guard down. Wait a minute, then I can be sure of what I’m talking about.”
The others had not invited this adjuration by any overt display of impatience, and they watched the young man now take an envelope from his pocket and work out a sum on its back with a pencil in placid if open-eyed contentment. They both studied him, in fact, much as their grandfathers might have gazed at the learned pig at a fair—as a being with resources and accomplishments quite beyond the laborious necessity of comprehension.
He finished his ciphering, and gave them, in terse summary, the benefit of it.
“The way I figure the thing,” he said, with his eye on the envelope, “is this: The mines were going all right when your man went away, twelve years ago. The output then was worth, say, eight thousand pounds sterling a year. Since then it has once or twice gone as high at twenty thousand pounds, and once it’s been down to eleven thousand pouunds. From all I can gather the average ought to have been, say, fourteen thousand pounds. The mining tenants hold on the usual thirty-one-year lease, paying fifty pounds a year to begin with, and then one-sixteenth on the gross sales. There is a provision of a maximum surface-drainage charge of two pounds an acre, but there’s nothing in that. On my average, the whole royalties would be nine hundred and twenty-five pounds a year. That, in twelve years, would be eleven thousand pounds. I think, myself, that it’s a good deal more; but that’ll do as a starter. And you say O’Daly’s been sending the boss two hundred pounds a year?”
“At laste for tin years—not for the last two,” said Jerry.