“I should have come, whether you sent for me or not, when I knew you were hurt,” said the boy, and there was a defiant little ring in his voice. “Where should I be, or want to be, but at home and with you?”
John Carrington’s heart beat proudly. This was the kind of son to have. He said “home” as though he meant it. He was loyal. Now he, John Carrington, had an heir to show to some people——
“I needed you,” he said, quietly. “Not on account of this confounded leg; though it’s been hard to be shut up for the first time in my life—hung up to mend, like a china plate. But it made me think I was just mortal, after all. And of your future and Elenore’s. And it’s only fair to you to let you decide how you’d rather have things.”
The look the boy gave him now was a quiet, concentrated attention.
“Without going into details about our mine, that no one but a mining man could understand,” Carrington went on, with a restful security engendered by that look, “I want to tell you the straight facts. It’s characteristic of this region that in sinking every now and then you strike a big hole filled with water—a vug, they call it. Now, we can take care of what we strike ourselves, but the Tray-Spot, which is newer and shallower, is letting us take care of theirs. Instead of pumping it up, they let the water seep through to the Star, and we lift it. It cuts off profits, and makes our mine dangerous. The two mines ought to be under the same management, anyway. Expenses could be cut almost in two. So I wrote the owner of the Tray-Spot—an Easterner—never comes out here—to ask him what he’d sell for. Richards, the superintendent, is a good deal of a scoundrel, and responsible for all the trouble. Of course mining is just a business proposition to those Easterners. They haven’t fought things out here in the early days, as some of us have. And this man had never even been on the ground. Bought the mine from Riley when he went to smash. And he’s childless. No second generation to take it up.
“That’s practically what I wrote him,” Carrington went on, doggedly, “and why it should have struck him just wrong, and turned him pig-head and ugly is beyond me. But he wrote back that if he had never been here, he wasn’t too old to come now. And that if he didn’t have a son, he had a nephew, who was a first-class business man and smart as a steel trap, whom he proposed to bring out here, and to keep on the ground. And that, as he understood from his superintendent that the one son I had was spending his time in Paris studying art, the mines would be better off with his heir than mine. And would I put a selling price on the Star? The Star, that I’ve put my lifeblood into! And that letter”—there was the rage of a wounded lion now—“was the first thing they read me after I came out from the ether to find myself tied up like—like this——” he finished, at a loss for any adequate comparison.
“We’ve got to fight or to sell,” he finished, “and if anything happened to me, what would you children know about disposing of it? That’s what I’ve thought as I’ve lain here. Hadn’t I better leave things safe for you, if I do have to kill time for a few years myself?”
His eyes looked worn. How many times he had gone over it! How many times affection for his children had warred against his pride in the mine he had discovered, developed, managed, owned! It all seemed a part of long, restless nights, of narcotics and anodynes that brought nightmares as often as oblivion; nights in which the young mine doctor seemed mixed up with the obstinate Easterner who owned the Tray-Spot, and the pain throbs and the pumping apparatus at the mine seemed to have some curious relationship.
“Sell! Never!” the fresh young voice flung back instantly, and the timbre of it was a battle-cry. “We’ll fight, dad—for our rights first, and then—then we’ll buy!”
He stood erect, every curve of fine youthfulness buoyant with victories to come, his head flung a trifle back and his mouth resolute.