"Another row with the head of the house?" he smiled, as he rose from his easy-chair at a smoking-table to shake hands with the new arrival, who, hot and dusty, had alighted from a rickety cab, driven by a sleepy negro in a battered silk top-hat, and sauntered in, looking anything but cheerful.
"Why did you think that?" Langdon asked, after the negro had put down his bag and gone.
"Why? Oh, because it has been brewing for a long time, old chap," Sively smiled; "and because it is as natural for old people to want to curb the young as it is for them to forget their own youth. When I was up there last, Uncle Pres could scarcely talk of anything but your numerous escapades."
"We didn't actually have the row," Langdon sighed, "but it would have come if I hadn't lit out before he got back from Savannah. The truth is"—the visitor dropped his eyes—"he has allowed me almost no pocket-money of late, and, getting in a tight place—debts, you know, and one thing and another—I let my best horse go at a sacrifice the other day. Father likes to ride him, and he's going to raise sand about it. Oh, I couldn't stand it, and so I came away. It will blow over, you know, but it will do so quicker if I'm here and he's there. Besides, he is always nagging me about having no profession or regular business, and if I see a fair opening down here, I'm really going to work."
"You'll never do it in this world." Sively laughed, and his dark eyes flashed merrily as he pulled at his well-trained mustache. "You can no more do that sort of thing than a cat-fish can hop about in a bird-cage. In an office or bank you'd simply pine away and die. Your ancestors lived in the open air, with other people to work for them, and you are simply too near that period to do otherwise. I know, my boy, because I've tried to work. If I didn't have private interests that pin me down to a sort of routine, I'd be as helpless as you are."
"You are right, I reckon." Langdon reached out to the copper bowl on the table and took a cigar. "I know, somehow, that the few business openings I have heard of now and then have simply sickened me. When I get as much city life as is good for me down here, I like to run back to the mountains. Up there I can take my pipe and gun and dog and—"
"And enjoy life right; you bet you can," Sively said, enthusiastically. "Well, after all, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other. My life isn't all it's cracked up to be by men who say they are yearning for it. Between you and me, I feel like a defunct something or other when I hear these thoroughly up-to-date chaps talking at the club about their big enterprises which they are making go by the very skin of their teeth. Why, I know one fellow under thirty who has got every electric car-line in the city tied to the tips of his fingers. I know another who is about to get Northern backing for a new railroad from here to Asheville, which he started on nothing but a scrap of club writing-paper one afternoon over a bottle of beer. Then there is that darned chap from up your way, Luke King. He's a corker. He had little education, I am told, and sprang from the lowest cracker stock, but he's the sensation of the hour down here."
"He's doing well, then," Langdon said, a touch of anger in his tone as he recalled Virginia's reference to King on their last meeting.
"Well? You'd think so. Half the capitalists in Atlanta are daft about him. They call him a great political, financial, and moral force, with a brain as big as Abraham Lincoln's. I was an idiot. I had a chance to get in on the ground-floor when that paper of his started, but I was wise—I was knowing. When I heard the manager of the thing was the son of one of your father's old tenants, I pulled down one corner of my eye and turned him over to my financial rivals. You bet I see my mistake now. The stock is worth two for one, and not a scrap on the market at that. Do you know what the directors did the other day? When folks do it for you or me we will feel flattered. They insured his life for one hundred thousand dollars, because if he were to die the enterprise wouldn't have a leg to stand on. You see, it's all in his big brain. I suppose you know something about his boyhood?"
"Oh yes," Langdon said, testily; "we were near the same age, and met now and then, but, you know, at that time our house was so full of visitors that I had little chance to see much of people in the neighborhood, and then he went West."