Rogers had placed Benny in school, and each evening after supper he would steal up to the child's room, where Benny carefully rehearsed for his benefit such portions of the lessons of the day as he remembered, while his father listened, with a look of tender yearning in his dark, sunken eyes. Then, when Benny was safely bestowed in his bed, if custom was slack at the bar, and he alone with Tucker, he would sit silent and absorbed, thinking of the boy and the future he had planned, of the riches he would yet achieve for him in spite of sickness and mortal weariness. It was all so fair a dream, and his hopes so tenderly unselfish, that the harsh lines of his face would soften; and his thin, shaven lips whose hard expression usually indicated nothing beyond a dry reserve, would relax in a slow, wistful smile; and the old innkeeper watching him, would wonder in his vague way that one who had seen so much of violence and bloodshed, who, by his own indifferent telling, had been no better than others of his own reckless class, could look so mild and gentle.
“I tell you, Tucker, he's keen as a briar!” Rogers never wearied of telling his companion. “I reckon he's about the first of us Rogers in many a long year who's done more than make a cross when it came to signing his name.”
“But you got something better than learning,” Tucker would say, with a wise shake of his head. “You got knowledge; wonderful, astonishing knowledge. Personally you've wedged open my mind more than any other man I know, not excepting Colonel Sharp, who's been talking Latin to me, which I never did understand, for near about twenty years; but I can't see that it's ever done me the good you're doing me. What'll you drink?”
From the incipiency of the company on, that enterprise had seemed to Rogers to go forward with a deadly slowness: Those who invested in the shares requiring so much of him before they were convinced that their money would not only be safe, but would increase with the dazzling rapidity he said, and believed it must. Yet, devoured as he was by impatience, he told his story over and over, with an earnestness that never failed to fascinate his hearers, though he had to meet the habitual caution of men whose means had grown slowly in trade or petty speculations.
“It's disencouraging,” agreed Mr. Tucker benevolently. “But you couldn't a done better than get the Landray boys to take hold. Everybody knows them—they got money—they got influence; no one can't ever complain of any sharp practice from them. I've had dealings with them myself; I bought the distillery from them. I traded them land, a thousand acres in Belmont County. They took that at a valuation of twenty-five hundred dollars, and I got as much more to pay; but I'm trying to talk them into taking another thousand acres instead of the cash. My aim is to get shut of all that there land; then my money will be here where I can watch it.”
There were those among Rogers's auditors, however, who appeared quite ready to be convinced of the reasonableness of all he promised, arguing with him against their own doubt even; and when he thought it only remained for them to decide how many shares they could take, their enthusiasm would suddenly wane, they would become cold and hesitating, frankly anxious to make their escape uncommitted from him and from the Landrays, and this would be the last he would see of them for days; he would give them up for lost; and after he had fully made up his mind that nothing would come of it, they would appear and put their names to the paper which Stephen Landray always carried, and it was perhaps another hundred dollars added to the capital stock of the Benson and California Mining and Trading Company.
The necessity for haste was the one thing he urged on Stephen and his brother; but it was December before all of the shares were actually taken, and he was forced to own that to start across the plains in the dead of winter was out of the question, even if it had been feasible to make the first stage of the journey down the Ohio. They must wait until spring. This delay had seemed the last vengeful fling of fate. Whatever was evil to know and endure he had known and endured on that far frontier where his best years had been spent; he had acquired a fortitude and patience that rarely failed him; he had accepted hardship and danger as the natural, expected, things of life; and the ordinary deaths he had seen men die, by knife or bullet, he had himself bravely faced; but the slow approach of an enemy he could not see, but could only feel in his wasted muscles and weakened will, appalled him.
“I can feel it here—here—gnawing at my throat, gnawing like some hungry varment,” he told Stephen Landray. “I reckon if I was a praying man, I'd pray to die a sudden death; this is just wasting away—wasting and remembering, and hoping. God Almighty! Such hope and such remembering.”
But it was only to Stephen that he told his fears; he did not speak of them to the others, and they never guessed that a fever of despair was consuming him.
Stephen Landray was as free from superstitious imaginings as most men, but Rogers's low spirits, coupled with the sorrow and apprehension Virginia vainly strove to conceal, had its effect on his mental vigour. A dozen times he was on the verge of appealing to the other shareholders for his release from the active direction of an enterprise that was going forward under such distressing auspices; but he comforted himself with the thought that his absence would only be for a year or two.