“Who’s the girl?” he ventured carelessly; and Walsh’s “Um” seemed for a moment to have been interposed as a rebuff. But Walsh stirred his glass slowly and replied:
“It certainly beats hell how things come around. That girl’s grandfather is one of these old fellows that ought to have been rich if he’d had any sense. He owned a lot of coal land around here years ago but he swindled himself out of it in one way or another. He got cleaned out down here and moved up into the anthracite country where he never did any good. He’s got a claim against the Colonel on account of a coal-mining company that the Colonel took over and merged with a lot of other small concerns about ten years ago. He and the Colonel were old friends, and Gregory, this Morley girl’s grandfather, thought the Colonel so great and good that he wouldn’t do even a blind and deaf and dumb beggar in a horse trade. The facts were that the Colonel, being smooth on negotiation and an impressive party to send out to make deals, was ‘used’ right along by the fellows he was in with. The Colonel didn’t know he was doing the other fellow half the time—it was so easy and his associates told him what to do. Gregory was practically the sole owner of the Sand Creek property; he had worked it himself and failed to make any money, and the Colonel offered to take it into the combination just as a favour to an old friend. They wiped out the old Gregory company—took over the stocks and bonds—but the Colonel made a personal agreement with the old man, as a sort of sop, that at the end of ten years, if coal should be mined in the property, he should be paid a royalty. There was no contract—he wrote a letter about it. Well, they’re working Gregory’s property all right—found a lower vein, and it’s fine coking coal, which they mine economically through the old workings. The Colonel is only a figurehead now in the new corporation—his name looks good when they want anything done at Harrisburg—see? And the real powers in the company can’t hear Gregory—don’t know anything about the Colonel’s promises—say the agreement was made without authority—and there you are.”
Walsh breathed heavily and lighted a fresh cigar.
“If it was a personal agreement, of course it’s no good if the Colonel won’t see it! But we don’t expect the Colonel to do that sort of thing—the soul of honour and all that!”
“The soul of punk and piffle!” grunted Walsh. “Mr. Wingfield, it’s worth remembering that we’re all human beings—poor, damned, stumbling sinners, even you and me. The Colonel’s a good man; he means well, but he hasn’t any more influence with that corporation than the waiter who pours soup in this club. In all these corporations Craighill’s in, they don’t pay any attention to him except when they’ve got something that he can do, like appearing before investigating committees and that sort of thing. He hardly remembers that he ever knew Gregory, and his lawyer has interpreted that agreement to mean coal mined on the property as it existed when it was taken over—which doesn’t touch the lower vein. Do you get the idea?”
“Didn’t the Colonel know about the lower vein? And didn’t Gregory know?”
“I doubt if Gregory knew—he dates back to the time when anybody with a pick and coal scuttle could go into bituminous around here. He’d been a preacher or a school-teacher or something like that, and really didn’t know mine-run from Easter eggs.”
“So it’s not a business proposition strictly, but a matter of personal morals—which is far more interesting. Thank you for the information. The Colonel interests me deeply; he presents rare psychological problems. This incident confirms one of my impressions concerning him—that he’s not an acute person, and that he might even go far wrong—through his vanity and conceit—and be utterly unconscious of it.”
“Um.”
“And the girl?”