He called Reade into the room and introduced him. “Take Mr. McKay and show him where he is to live. Put him in that new shack on the right-hand side of the road.” With a sudden recollection of McKay’s treatment of him on that first night at Quentin, Stephen went on with a broad grin: “To-night I will send you over some blankets. You can pay for them out of your first month’s pay, and to-morrow I will let you have an old straw hat of mine.”
McKay smiled sheepishly, as he stood twirling his rusty black felt hat in his fingers. Accustomed as he was to the sudden changes which Arizona brings about in men’s fortunes, Loring’s meteoric rise was too great a problem for him to solve. He could not adjust himself to the miraculous change which had been wrought in the life of the man before him. He could only stand speechless and gaze at the marvel, and then drop his eyes again to the baggy knees of his best trousers.
Stephen took pity on him in his bewilderment and interrupted his reflections: “If you can start in to work after lunch, I will have Mr. Fitz, the man who is leaving, show you what little he has done. You had better take a microscope to see it with.”
McKay followed Reade out of the office, his efficient, right-angled and non-complex mind in a whirl.
“Steve Loring, manager of the Kay mine! I certainly will be damned. Him running all this!” He gazed stupefied at the ordered confusion of the busy camp before him. “Steve Loring! Phew!”
And all the time the man of whom McKay was thinking with admiring envy sat before his desk, his head sunk upon his folded arms in an attitude of profound dejection.
To McKay, Loring seemed to have reached the highest level of the up grade in being the manager of a successful mine. What more could any man wish? But to Loring all that he had achieved was as nothing.
The sight of McKay had brought back with photographic vividness all the familiar things and scenes of the old days at Quentin,—the smelter, the dip in the hills, the hoist, “Muy Bueno,” and then, in spite of himself, above them all rose the face of Jean Cameron, Jean as she had looked bending over his cot in the hospital with the sheaf of flowers across her arm, Jean smiling at him as she passed the hoist, Jean stretching out her hand to him on that never-to-be-forgotten ride through the soft Arizona night.
With a sudden pang he realized that all success would be as dust and ashes unless he could bring it to her and say: “Whatever I have won, it was all for you. My only pride is that whether you ever know it or not, I have at last justified your faith in me. Oh, Jean,” he murmured, “it is not success or power or money that I want. It is you, dear, you, you, you!”