"He did so. He had the International finished in three more days, turned down a job in the new bank building cold, and went into the mining business just like he'd do anything else—slow and sure, yet impetuous here and there. It wasn't a hard proposition, the stuff being there nearly from the grass roots, and the money soon come a-plenty. Snowstorm not only got things trimmed up but had 'em dyed black as a crow's wing and retired to a life of sinful ease in Spokane, eating bacon and beans and cocoanut custard pie three times a day till the doctors found out what a lot of expensive things he had the matter with him.
"Angus not only kept on the job but branched out into other mines that he bought up, and pretty soon he quit counting his money. You know what that would mean to most of his race. It fazed him a mite at first. He tried faithfully to act like a crazy fool with his money, experimenting with revelry and champagne for breakfast, and buying up the Sans Soosy dance hall every Saturday night for his friends and admirers. But he wasn't gaited to go on that track long. Even Ellabelle wasn't worried the least bit, and in fact she thought something of the kind was due his position. And she was busy herself buying the things that are champagne to a woman, only they're kept on the outside. That was when Angus told her if she was going in for diamonds at all to get enough so she could appear to be wasteful and contemptuous of them. Two thousand she give for one little diamond circlet to pin her napkin up on her chest with. It was her own idea.
"Then Angus for a time complicated his amateur debauchery with fast horses. He got him a pair of matched pacing stallions that would go anywhere, he said. And he frequently put them there when he had the main chandelier lighted. In driving them over a watering-trough one night an accident of some sort happened. Angus didn't come to till after his leg was set and the stitches in—eight in one place, six in another, and so on; I wonder why they're always so careful to count the stitches in a person that way—and he wished to know if his new side-bar buggy was safe and they told him it wasn't, and he wanted to know where his team was, but nobody knew that for three days, so he says to the doctors and Ellabelle: 'Hereafter I suspect I shall take only soft drinks like beer and sherry. Champagne has a bonnier look but it's too enterprising. I might get into trouble some time.' And he's done so to this day. Oh, I've seen him take a sip or two of champagne to some one's health, or as much Scotch whiskey in a tumbler of water as you could dribble from a medium-boilered fountain pen. But that's a high riot with him. He'll eat one of these corned peaches in brandy, and mebbe take a cream pitcher of beer on his oatmeal of a morning when his stomach don't feel just right, but he's never been a willing performer since that experiment in hurdling.
"When he could walk again him and Ellabelle moved to the International Hotel, where she wouldn't have to cook or split kindling and could make a brutal display of diamonds at every meal, and we went down to see them. That was when Angus give Lysander John the scarfpin he'd sent clear to New York for—a big gold bull's head with ruby eyes and in its mouth a nugget of platinum set with three diamonds. Of course Lysander John never dast wear it except when Angus was going to see it.
"Then along comes Angus, Junior, though poor Ellabelle thinks for several days that he's Elwin. We'd gone down so I could be with her.
"'Elwin is the name I have chosen for my son,' says she to Angus the third day.
"'Not so,' says Angus, slumping down his one eyebrow clear across in a firm manner. 'You're too late. My son is already named. I named him Angus the night before he was born.'
"'How could you do that when you didn't know the sex?' demands Ellabelle with a frightened air of triumph.
"'I did it, didn't I?' says Angus. 'Then why ask how I could?' And he curved the eyebrow up one side and down the other in a fighting way.
"Ellabelle had been wedded wife of Angus long enough to know when the Scotch curse was on him. 'Very well,' she says, though turning her face to the wall. Angus straightened the eyebrow. 'Like we might have two now, one of each kind,' says he quite soft, 'you'd name your daughter as you liked, with perhaps no more than a bit of a suggestion from me, to be taken or not by you, unless we'd contend amiably about it for a length of time till we had it settled right as it should be. But a son—my son—why, look at the chest on him already, projecting outward like a clock shelf—and you would name him—but no matter! I was forehanded, thank God.' Oh, you saw plainly that in case a girl ever come along Ellabelle would have the privilege of naming it anything in the world she wanted to that Angus thought suitable.