“Better come out with us,” urged Ellen with unusual boldness.
Dick shrank instinctively.
“Wouldn’t do—wouldn’t do at all. Too bad, Ellen, but it’s too late for that. Remember what you promised; let me know if Mrs. Harrison ever needs me. Good-by, Leslie, old chunk; good-by, Dorothea, my darling.”
Ellen took them off reluctantly and Dick jumped on his train—a train of daycoaches, perambulated by boys with “popcorn, chewing gum and candy.” He felt like a tramp, and sitting slouched up beside his window, pulled his cap over his eyes. Homeless. What did it matter if he was rich and equipped with power? He was homeless. A wave of bitterness towards his wife swept over him. There were Walter and his Della, waiting for their child; Fliss with her Matthew; Cecily and he—separated.
“I must work,” he told himself. “I must work like hell.”
That was what he did, what he had to do. He was hardly back in Allenby before trouble broke out. The long winter had worn on every one. Nerves which could not be sent to Florida for rehabilitation were none the less shattered in dirty-faced miners and their stolid seeming wives. Professional agitators; a long list of impossible demands; poor whiskey obtained from the blind pigs; an official firing an unwary shot; other angry shots; the old story of the strike and its outcome. Dick toiled night and day now, using every ounce of influence he had gained, doing the things which must be done in every strike; trying to keep sparks from the inflammable bitterness, fighting, losing, winning a little, seeing privation and trouble face to face as he had never seen it.
It took him out of his own trouble, but while the men in Carrington congratulated themselves on their foresight in having “Harrison on the job up there,” Dick changed rather visibly. His step did not have so much spring and the youth which he had carried so blithely in his face until this age of thirty-seven seemed quite gone.
CHAPTER XXIX
CECILY was home when Ellen brought the children back from the train.
“Where have you all been?” she asked, pulling Leslie’s cap off and patting the rosy, wind-blown cheeks.