Lane shrugged his shoulders, as does the man of imperturbable will, perfect digestion, and constant equilibrium, for the troubles of a weaker vessel.
"If he doesn't like what his wife does, he should have character enough to control her. Besides he should have known all that before he married!"
Isabelle smiled at this piece of masculine complacency,—as if a man could know any essential fact about a woman from the way she did her hair to the way she spent money before he had lived with her!
"I do hope he will get a better place," Isabelle remarked good-naturedly.
"It would do them both so much good."
As we have seen, Falkner's chance came at last through Lane, who recommended him to the A. and P. engineer in charge of the great terminal works that the road had undertaken in St. Louis. The salary of the new position was four thousand dollars a year,—a very considerable advance over the Torso position, and the work gave Falkner an opportunity such as he had never had before. The railroad system had other large projects in contemplation also.
"Bessie has written me such a letter,—the child!" Isabelle told her husband. "You would think they had inherited a million. And yet she seems sad to leave Torso, after all the ragging she gave the place. She has a good word to say even for Mrs. Fraser!"
Bessie Falkner was one of those who put down many small roots wherever chance places them. She had settled into Torso more solidly than she knew until she came to pull up her roots and put them down in a large, strange city. "We won't know any one there," she said dolefully to her Torso friends. "The Lanes, of course; but they are such grand folk now—and Isabella has all her old friends about her." Nevertheless, it scarcely entered her mind to remain "in this prairie village all our days." Bessie had to the full the American ambition to move on and up as far as possible….
Fortune, having turned its attention to the Falkners, seemed determined to smile on them this year. An uncle of Bessie's died on his lonely ranch in Wyoming, and when the infrequent local authorities got around to settling his affairs, they found that he had left his little estate to Elizabeth Bissell, who was now Mrs. Robert Falkner of Torso. The lonely old rancher, it seemed, had remembered the pretty, vivacious blond girl of eighteen, who had taken the trouble to show him the sights of Denver the one time he had visited his sister ten years before. Bessie, amused at his eccentric appearance, had tried to give "Uncle Billy" a good time. "Uncle Billy," she would say, "you must do this,—you will remember it all your life. Uncle Billy, won't you lunch with me down town to-day? You must go to the theatre, while you are here. Uncle, I am going to make you a necktie!" So she had chirped from morning until night, flattering, coaxing, and also making sport of the old man. "Bess has a good heart," her mother said to Uncle Bill, and it must be added Bessie also had a woman's instinct to please a possible benefactor. Uncle Billy when he returned to the lonely ranch wrote a letter to his pretty niece, which Bessie neglected to answer. Nevertheless, when Uncle Billy made ready to die, he bestowed all that he had to give upon the girl who had smiled on him once.
Thus Bessie's purring good nature bore fruit, Before the property could be sold, the most imaginative ideas about her inheritance filled Bessie's dreams. Day and night she planned what they would do with this fortune,—everything from a year in Europe to new dresses for the children! When it came finally in the form of a draft for thirteen thousand and some odd dollars, her visions were dampened for a time,—so many of her castles could not be acquired for thirteen thousand and some odd dollars.
Falkner was for investing the legacy in Freke's mines, which, he had good reason to believe, were better than gold mines. But when Bessie learned that the annual dividends would only be about twelve hundred dollars, she demurred. That was too slow. Secretly she thought that "if Rob were only clever about money," he might in a few years make a real fortune out of this capital. There were men she had known in Denver, as she told her husband, "who hadn't half of that and who had bought mines that had brought them hundreds of thousands of dollars." To which remark, Rob had replied curtly that he was not in that sort of business and that there were many more suckers than millionnaires in Denver—and elsewhere.