“You wouldn’t let them turn me out-of-doors, would you Wayne?”
“Well, if father went broke it would hardly be up to me to carry on the house here; it’s an expensive establishment to run. I might have to sell it myself.”
“Yes; I suppose your interests and your father’s are identical. What hurts him would hurt you.”
“Not at all! Our interests are anything but identical. We belong”—he said, with an irony that was for his own satisfaction—“we belong to different schools of finance. Father’s a plunger without knowing it; I’m a Wayne and the Waynes were always true Scots and kept what they had and sat on it. Father likes to be director of things, and the things liked to have him. He’s been used a good deal as bait—that’s what it amounts to. He’s just paid about two hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of sitting with a lot of solemn gentlemen up at Boston who organized a big corporation to raise bananas or grape fruit or something in the torrid deserts of Mexico. You know father well enough by this time to understand how that idea would appeal to him—irrigation to water the desert and make it blossom as the rose! I went in for a few thousand and so did Walsh; but we quit, and to-day when I told father I had sold out he was wounded. Tom Walsh is about the shrewdest old party there is around here. We sold out at the same time and both made money.”
He laughed softly to himself and slapped his knee.
“If you knew your father had got into a bad thing you ought to have told him—don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” he mocked her, still chuckling; “we ought to have told the Colonel he had bought a dead horse—and been gently kicked for our trouble. We know the Colonel, Tom and I. You notice that Tom bought out the mercantile house. Tom’s wiser than a serpent; he knew it was the best thing father had. Tom likes me. Isn’t it funny? He’s always settled all claims for damages against me when I’ve ripped things loose—and done it economically and quietly—never said anything, but just asked later for my check and said ‘Um’ when I thanked him. I caught the old rascal once giving an organ to a church somewhere—Vermont or New Hampshire; I guess it was Vermont, come to think of it. He was terribly bored when the bill strayed in to my desk. It was in memory of his father and mother and he growled fiercely because I got on to it.”
“He’s a strange man; I don’t understand him,” remarked Mrs. Craighill carelessly.
“By the way, how did you come out with your drive with Tom? Of course you told father you had been out riding with another man. I don’t know just how he would have taken it; you see Tom was only a sort of clerk in father’s office; father never knew him socially. I’ll wager you didn’t tell the Colonel.”
“No; I didn’t tell him. He was so angry about mother having spoiled his visit to the Brodericks’ and threatening to come here for a visit that I couldn’t have told him if I had wanted to.”