He got no note of acknowledgment from his flowers. Miss Lane was evidently better and played every night; no mention was made of her indisposition in the papers. But Dan couldn’t go to the Gaiety or bear to see her make the effort which he knew must tire her beyond words to conceive.
After a few days he called at the Savoy to get news of her. He got as far as the lift when going up in it he saw Prince Poniotowsky. The sight affected Miss Lane’s townsman so forcibly that instead of going up to the dancer’s apartment Dan took himself off, and anger, displeasure and something like disgust were the only sentiments he carried away from the Savoy. He sent her no flowers, and gave himself up unreservedly to Joshua Ruggles and to a couple of men who came in to see him by appointment. And when toward four o’clock he found himself alone with Ruggles, Dan threw himself down in a big chair and looked intensely bored.
“Well, I guess we don’t need to see any more of these fellows for a week, Dan,” Ruggles yawned with relief. “I’m blamed if it isn’t as hard to take care of money as to get it. I was a poor man once, and so was your father. Those were the days we had fun.”
Ruggles took out a big cigar, struck a match sharply, and when he had lit his Henry Clay he fixed his gaze on the flying London fog, whose black curtain drew itself across their window.
“There’s a lot of excitement,” Ruggles said, “in not knowing what you’re going to get; may turn out to be anything when you’re young and on the trail. That’s the way your father and me felt. And when we started out on the spot that’s Blairtown on the map to-day, your father had forty dollars a week to engineer a busted mine and to pull the company into shape.”
Dan knew the story of his father’s rise by heart, but he listened.
“He took on with the mine a lot of discontented half-hearted rapscallions—a whole bunch, who had failed all along the line. He didn’t chuck ’em out. ‘There’s no life in old wood, Josh,’ he said to me, ‘but sometimes there’s fire in it, and I’m going to light up,’ and he did. He won over the whole lot of them in eighteen months, and within two years he had that darned mine paying dividends. Meanwhile something came his way and he took it.”