"There," indicated Ogden; "the sixth door along, on the right. 'Vesuvian Fire Insurance Co.' it says." And he himself continued an abstracted descent by the stairway.
His nearest way home lay through the court and out of the door that led into the asphalted alley. Just within the archway of this door two men stood. The one was Vibert and the other was a dark young fellow of twenty or more whom Ogden, by a brief glimmer of fancy, made to be Brainard's younger son. Vibert was in the act of receiving a roll of bills from him.
The youth had a pinched and slender aspect; there was a furtive tremulousness in his hands; his eyes were reddish and the pupils swam half hazily in a lucent humor.
"I didn't know, Mark, but what you'd gone back on me, too," Vibert was saying to him. "If you'd managed to get around a little sooner you'd have saved a certain party from the grand razoo." He smiled grimly. "It's pretty close sailing—thirty, forty, forty-five"—he ran over the bills, rolled them up, and thrust them into his pocket.
The boy looked at him with some doubt and with a shade of fear. He seemed to have been fascinated and then dominated by the bigness and the hardihood of the other.
"It's all right, Mark," Vibert presently went on with a dogged vagueness; "I'm his son, too. Why wouldn't he give me any show? Why wouldn't he let me have a chance to show him what I am? Why did he go and shut down on me at the very start?"
"You!" cried the boy. "What can you expect, after the way he's treated me—his own son? They're up there now, I dare say"—with a bitter glance towards the corner of the Underground—"but they can never make things right with me. If it hadn't been for Abbie—she's about the only one that's turned a hand for me."
"Haven't I done well by you, too?—don't forget that. Well, you don't—'sh! I say you don't. Let the executors settle, and give 'em plenty to settle, too; they'll get enough for doing it." Vibert glanced up at the Underground windows. "He can't live forever." He brought his eyes back to the boy. "You've got to live yourself, though, and so have I. You've got some rights, haven't you?"
The boy did not accept this cue; perhaps he had already followed it more than once. He studied Vibert with eyes that seemed to indicate a change of thought.
"Say, Russ," he hinted, deprecatingly, "you're going to be a little more patient with Mayme?"