Colonel Arthur Dale had been a very selfish man, though he called his selfishness “family pride.” He had also been a very self-willed one, though this he would have said indicated strength of character.
Of late years, however, both of these faults had been dealt heavy blows. The losing of his beautiful daughter Virginia was the first blow. Then his wife died, and then the war came. It left him a poor man, with a large but unproductive estate on his hands, and no opportunity, that he could discover, for going into business and retrieving his shattered fortunes.
Instead of hardening his nature, these trials softened it. His pride was broken. He no longer thought of himself alone. His stubbornness disappeared and he longed for human love and sympathy. His once princely estate was now so encumbered by mortgages that they promised soon completely to overwhelm it. In spite of its owner’s efforts to keep the place in order, it showed evidences of decay and ruin in every direction. Many of the old family servants still clung to Dalecourt, and the Colonel was too kind-hearted to turn them away. Thus there was always a large number of mouths to feed, and each year brought less to feed them with.
Of late the lonely man had thought much of his dead daughter, and wondered if her son, the grandson whose existence he had never openly acknowledged, was still alive, and what sort of a boy he was. Thus, when his niece began to speak to him on this very subject, he proved an eager listener to all that she had to say.
“He is one of the very dearest, sweetest, and bravest little fellows I ever saw,” she cried impulsively. “When I met him he was making believe to be a prince, and was defending a child, younger than himself, from what he thought was the savage attack of a big dog. He was so covered with dust when I picked him up out of the road, that I called him ‘Prince Dusty,’ and the title of ‘Prince’ seems somehow exactly to suit him. Although he was ragged and barefooted, he was every inch a little gentleman, and the last I saw of him he was lifting his tattered straw hat to me, as I drove away.”
The result of this conversation, and of several similar ones that followed it, was that, toward the end of October, Colonel Dale set out for the oil region of Pennsylvania, determined to bring his dead daughter’s child home with him, and thereafter to treat him as his own son.
He had, by this time, so set his heart upon having the boy to love and to care for, and had centred so many plans for the future about him, that to learn, from the Dustins, of Arthur’s absolute and mysterious disappearance, was a grievous disappointment, for which he was not prepared. He could not believe that the boy was not still in that vicinity, and insisted that a search should be made for him throughout all the surrounding country, though the runaways had been gone for nearly a month.
Colonel Dale read and re-read the rudely pencilled note that Arthur had left for Cynthia, and asked to be allowed to keep it: but the child would not give it up. It was her most treasured possession, and though he bribed her with money, and candy, and toys, she could not be induced to part with it.
Brace Barlow, the only person who knew how and in what direction Arthur and Uncle Phin had gone, was in a distant part of the oil region, so that he heard nothing of Colonel Dale’s arrival, nor of the eager search for the little fellow who used to call him “dear giant.”
Arthur’s grandfather even visited the farm that had belonged to his unacknowledged son-in-law, Richard Dustin, with the faint hope that his grandson might have sought shelter there.