He stared thoughtfully at the floor and Lindsay waited. Caroline ran up the front stairs, and he had counted each step before the man went on.
"So I sent the money regular every quarter," he muttered, as if continuing some tale, "and I'd go to see him sometimes all dressed up, and I tried to talk like he did. He thought I was traveling and didn't want to be bothered. But I couldn't see him much—was I going to drag him down, just as I'd got him started right? Not much. 'Go and visit your friends, o' course,' I used to tell him, 'and you can write to me.' The best schools I picked out, the very best. And they came high. But I was good for it."
He shifted in his chair and rubbed his eyes.
"I had a hunch when I bought the ticket," he muttered. "It just come over me—'you ought not to go to a place you got the idea of from Jim,' something seemed to say to me, 'it's unlucky.' And everything so still, and the stuff so easy—'twas like finding it in the road. And the last time, too—the last time."
"But Jim—he thought—" Lindsay prompted. A dreadful curiosity held him.
"So then he wrote, 'of course it's Yale, dad,' he wrote, 'we're all going up together. You don't mind if it costs a little to get settled, do you?' And was I going to go to him—he was head of his class, mind you—and say, the Trust has treated me the way I wouldn't treat a dog—it's all up with me and you? I can go back and be foreman again at the works—we're bought up, chewed up and spit out like a wad o' paper?' Not much, I guess. No. Here's where I quit the honesty game, I said, for it don't pay. You stole my patent, and I shut up because I couldn't afford to fight you, and you raised me and raised me—and let me into the firm when you knew it was going to bust! Now, I says, since my boy's education has been stole from me, I'll steal it back, I says, and only from them that can afford it, too! And I'll use no lawyer to do it, either, and we'll have no trick-work with papers. I'll get it straight from the wives and daughters of the big thieves that pass the plate on Sundays."
Lindsay listened to Caroline moving over their heads; her steps seemed the only reality in this horrid dream.
"It—it will just about kill Jim," he said slowly.
"It would have killed him not to go to college," the man returned sharply, "and he had a right to go."
"But, good heavens, there are ways—he could have earned money—he's clever enough to work his way through a dozen colleges!" Lindsay cried despairingly.