Meanwhile his father began to talk fast and querulously, with plentiful oaths from time to time, and using a local miner's slang which was not always intelligible to Anderson. It seemed it was a question of an old silver mine on a mountainside in Idaho, deserted some ten years before when the river gravels had been exhausted, and now to be reopened, like many others in the same neighbourhood, with improved methods and machinery, tunnelling instead of washing. Silver enough to pave Montreal! Ten thousand dollars for plant, five thousand for the claim, and the thing was done.
He became incoherently eloquent, spoke of the ease and rapidity with which the thing could be resold to a syndicate at an enormous profit, should his "pardners" and he not care to develop it themselves. If George would find the money--why, George should make his fortune, like the rest, though he had behaved so scurvily all these years.
Anderson watched the speaker intently. Presently he began to put questions--close, technical questions. His father's eyes--till then eager and greedy--began to flicker. Anderson perceived an unwelcome surprise--annoyance--
"You knew, of course, that I was a mining engineer?" he said at last, pulling up in his examination.
"Well, I heard of you that onst at Dawson City," was the slow reply. "I supposed you were nosin' round like the rest."
"Why, I didn't go as a mere prospector! I'd had my training at Montreal." And Anderson resumed his questions.
But McEwen presently took no pains to answer them. He grew indeed less and less communicative. The exact locality of the mine, the names of the partners, the precise machinery required--Anderson, in the end, could get at neither the one nor the other. And before many more minutes had passed he had convinced himself that he was wasting his time. That there was some swindling plot in his father's mind he was certain; he was probably the tool of some shrewder confederates, who had no doubt sent him to Montreal after his legacy, and would fleece him on his return.
"By the way, Aunt Sykes's money, how much was it?" Anderson asked him suddenly. "I suppose you could draw on that?"
McEwen could not be got to give a plain answer. It wasn't near enough, anyhow; not near. The evasion seemed to Anderson purposeless; the mere shifting and doubling that comes of long years of dishonest living. And again the question stabbed his consciousness--were his children justified in casting him so inexorably adrift?
"Well, I'd better run down and have a look," he said at last. "If it's a good thing I dare say I can find you the dollars."