Phil demurred.
“Why, man alive!––give me credit for knowing my own father. Do you suppose he doesn’t know all about us already?––more than we know ourselves. Just go ahead and answer that. Doing it that way will humour him.
“It is by far the biggest thing we have landed yet. Unlimited capital to lend on good security is a grand foundation for a Financial Corporation. But we have to see that everything is absolutely right––absolutely straight––absolutely secure. One mistake with Langford & Macdonald and that’s the end of it.”
And the banks knew of the stabilising of the Langford-Ralston Company almost before the L. R. Company realised it themselves, and they vied with one another for the privilege of handling their bank account, putting inquiring clients in touch with them direct as a sop for future business. What the banks did became the fashion in town. And in such days as the West was then passing through, that meant much indeed, for everyone was thinking, talking, handling and dreaming Real Estate. Even Percival DeRue Hannington forgot his former hurt and gave them his business. All were making money––nobody lost. They bought at a price and sold for more, and the difference in value was debited and redebited to old Mother Earth. Prosperity vaunted itself in rolling wheels, cigar smoke, late orgies and rare wines; costly winter trips to the South; dress, diamonds, foolishness and mining and oil stocks.
Yet through that wildest year of all, Phil and Jim stood firm to the principles of their business––they bought and sold for their clients, they loaned on first-class security––they paid as they went and they banked their 344 commissions. Not once, but a hundred times, could they have doubled their savings by speculation with a quick turn-over, but they held fast; and their savings increased faster than their wildest dreams had ever pictured.
They did more advertising than all the others combined. Their staff of salesmen and stenographers increased in numbers by rapid jumps. They had correspondents in every city of importance in the Dominion and the United States. They had the best stand in town. Anyone coming in by train could not fail to see it and could not fail to be impressed by its importance and apparent prosperity, even when they had not been previously apprised of it.
When early June arrived with its continuous sunshine, when the older ranches revelled in miles of pink and white apple blossom, when the small, wild sunflowers spread themselves like a sea of gold over the hills and valleys bursting in fairy splendour even through the hard roads and the rock fissures; when the air was redolent with the hypnotising, cloying sweetness of Nature’s perfume from a hundred million blossoms and charged with the melody of her gaily bedecked feathered choristers,––Eileen Pederstone came back to her beloved “Valley of Tempestuous Waters.”
In the six short months she had been away, she had written only occasionally to Phil and then it had been superficially, for she was not one given to expressing her feelings in pen and ink.
And Phil, in the rush of the new enterprise, had been something of a desultory correspondent. He had refrained from mentioning business in any of his letters to her––despite her many questions to him regarding his endeavours and his progress––intending, thereby, to spring the greater surprise when she should return. But he might have saved himself such thoughts, for Eileen 345 was fully posted on every move he and Jim had made.
She came in on them one day with the brightness and impetuosity of the June sun bursting through the early morning clouds over Blue Nose Mountain, causing everything but the sun she emulated to stand still for half an hour and breathe in the added sweetness in the atmosphere.