They left him smudging the tears into his grimy cheeks and trying to get his disheveled letter back into its envelop. “But say—wait a minute!” He called after them. “I never told you about Luke! He’s——”
“I’ll tell her,” said Luke curtly. “Come, Glen!”
“Poor old Ben! Isn’t it wonderful for him? To slave all these years, here, without seeing anything else, and now— Oh, can’t you just picture him out there—basking in it all?” She glanced at his absorbed face. “But what about you, Luke? Does this mean——”
He nodded. “Yes. Carey’s made me superintendent. He and Ben were talking of it, just as I came in. At first, Carey figured I was too young, but Ben made him see that I knew the ropes better than any outsider—that I’ve been learning, day in, day out, for five years——”
“Of course you have! Of course you’re capable! Oh, Luke, I’m so glad for you, and so proud!” She met his eyes and almost gasped at the blaze of excitement and exultation she saw there. He was breathing like a runner who has just breasted the tape. “Dad would be so proud,” she added, faltering a little. It was rather frightening to see his silence, his reserve, broken up like this. “Dad always said you would go far, Luke. He had such faith in you. He often said to me——”
They had been walking swiftly ever since leaving old Ben behind in the lane, choosing automatically a quiet back street, and now, turning a corner, they were alone. He caught her wrists in a grip of steel, cutting her sentence short.
“It’s what I was aiming for the day I started to work,” he said, tensely. “Do you hear? I promised myself, then. And now you listen to me, Glen, you listen, and remember. Five years from the time I started in here as a hand, I’m superintendent: in less than five years more, I’ll own the Altonia!”
“Luke!”
“You listen to me, and you keep still about it, but you remember what I say!” A new Luke Manders, fiery, implacable—new voice, new eyes, new grasp of iron. Gloriana-Virginia Tolliver’s persistent word flashed into her mind and out again—“I’m jes’ pintly skeered of Luke Manders....” It came in of its own volition but she drove it out, loyally, in a panic at herself for harboring it even an instant.
“And your granny!” The image of his ancient kinswoman that day of the first meeting—“hit’s ontelling, what you might do and be, if you was to be fotched on!” How unerringly the old crone had divined power and purpose in her “son’s son’s son!”