"Mr. McVeigh is out of the city, but Mr. Keene is here. Will he do?" she again questioned.
At this juncture someone stepped briskly from an inner room, and then a man dashed impetuously across the general office, scattering books and clerks in his eagerness, and crying, "Why, it's Mrs. McVeigh!" as he caught her gaunt body in his arms.
"Johnny, me lad, is it yerself?" she gasped, after he had desisted from his attempts to smother her.
Young John Keene held Nancy's hand within his own whilst he showed her everything of interest in the office, for the mother loved it all because it was her son's. The clerks were courteous and attentive, and the girls fell in love with the quaint old lady on the spot.
"It's fer all the world like a school," she murmured in young John's ear.
"And I'm the big boy," he answered, laughing.
A telegram searched the far corners of Mexico that afternoon, and at an unheard-of place, with an unpronounceable name, it found Cornelius McVeigh, the centre of a group of gentlemen. The party had just emerged from the yawning mouth of a mine, and were resting in the sunshine and expelling the foul air from their lungs, whilst the young promoter of the western metropolis was explaining, from a sheet of paper covered with figures, the cost of base metal to the producer. The mine foreman suddenly interrupted his remarks with a yellow envelope, which he thrust respectfully forward. "A telegram, sir," he said, and withdrew. The array of men sighed gratefully at the respite, and Cornelius McVeigh hastily scanned the message.
"Your mother in Chicago, much disappointed at your absence. When may we expect you?" so it read.
The young man folded it carefully, put it into his pocket and continued his discourse, but his words were losing their pointedness, and he was occasionally absent-minded.
"It's dinner-time. I move an adjournment to the hotel," one of the grey-haired capitalists suggested, and, with scant dignity for men of such giant interests, they hurried to take advantage of the break in the negotiations. Cornelius McVeigh did not go in to lunch, but strolled the length of the verandah for a full hour, absorbed in thought, then with characteristic energy he hastened to the little telegraph room and wrote a reply to his home office: