"I'm not much of a hand for holding back what I want to give out," Jock rushed on, "and I ain't much of an orator. What I'm going to tell you, Drew, has been corked up for over ten years—it's ripe for opening—will you share it?"
"Can you ask that, Filmer?" The two men looked steadily at each other.
"Did you ever hear of Jasper Filmer on the Pacific Coast?" Jock asked suddenly.
"Yes; he died a week ago. The papers were full of it. We noticed the name—" Drew bent forward—"and wondered."
"I'm his son. There ain't much to tell. It's a common enough yarn. The world's full of the like. It's only when you tackle the separate ones that they seem to differ. The old man—made himself. That kind is either hard as nails or soft as mush. My governor had the iron in his. He banked everything on—me—and I wasn't up to the expectation. I was made out of the odds and ends that were left out of his constitution—and we didn't get on. My mother—" Jock pulled himself together; "she was the sort those self-made men generally hanker after, all lady, and pretty and dainty. You know the kind?"
Drew nodded. His face was ashen.
"I wish you could have seen her, Drew, I've seen a good many, but none, no, not one, who ever came up to her for softness, and fetching ways. Lord! how I loved her. The old man might have known that if I could have gone straight I'd have done it for—mother. She never lost faith in me. Every time I went wrong—she just stopped singing for a time." Filmer gulped. "Then when I pulled myself together, after a while she'd begin again, singing as she went about, and smiling and laughing a laugh that keeps ringing, even now.
"At last the governor got tired of the lapses. I don't blame him; just remember that. He thought if I went off and nibbled—what is it—husks? that I'd come around. He didn't understand that it was the motive power that was lacking in me.
"Good God, Drew! I've been hungry and cold and homesick until I've thought death was the next step; but I couldn't stick to anything long enough to make good. Such men as my father never know what hell-suffering men like me go through—before they fall, and fall, and fall!
"I wrote—lies, home. I wanted to keep mother singing and laughing. I was always doing fine, you know. Coming home in a year or so. I was in Chicago, then New York; but I was getting lower all the time. I put up in those haunted houses—the lodging dives, but I kept those letters going to her, always cheerful.