“I reckon she could,” said Miss Smith; she was speaking sincerely.
“When my father didn’t strike pay dirt, my mother would open her bakery and make pies for the miners; she could make bread with potato yeast or ‘salt-emptins’—can you make salt-rising bread?”
“I can—shall I make you some, to-morrow?”
“I’d like it. My mother used to make more money than my father; sometimes when we children were low in clothes and dad owed a bigger lot of money than usual, we had a laundry at our house as well as a bakery. Yet, in spite of all the work, my mother found time to teach all of us; and she knew how to teach, too; for she was principal of a school when my father married her. She was a New Englander; so was he; but they went West. We’re forty-niners. I saw the place where our little cloth-and-board shack used to stand. After the big fire, you know. It burned us all up; we had saved a good deal and my mother had a nice bakery. She worked too hard; it killed her. Work and struggle and losing the children.”
“They died?” said Miss Janet.
“Diphtheria. They didn’t know anything about the disease then. We all had it; and my little sister and both my brothers died; but I’m tough. I lived. My mother fell into what they called a decline. I was making a little money then—I was sixteen; but I couldn’t keep her from working. Perhaps it made no difference; but it did make a difference her not having the—the right kind of food. Nobody knew anything about consumption then. I used to go out in the morning and be afraid I’d find her dead when I got back. One night I did.” He stopped abruptly, crimsoning up to his eyes—“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
“I call that tough,”—as the colonel blurted out the words, he was conscious of a sense of repetition. When had he said those very same words before, to whom? Of all people in the world, to Cary Mercer. “Mighty tough,” murmured he softly.
“Yes,” said Keatcham, “it was.” He did not say anything more. Neither did the colonel. Keatcham obediently ate his milk and biscuit; and very shortly the colonel took his leave.
The next morning after an uneventful hour of sorting, reading and answering letters for Miss Smith to copy on the traveling type-writer, Keatcham gave his new secretary a sharp sensation; he ordered in his quiet but peremptory fashion: “Now put that trash away; sit down; tell me all you know of Cary—real name is Cary Mercer, isn’t it?”
The colonel said it was; he asked him if he wanted everything.