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Page 59
"Oho!" said Dan, shuffling with the accordion round the backyard,
ready to leap the fence if the enemy advanced. "Dan, you're
welcome to your own judgment, but remember I've warned ye.
Your own flesh an' blood ha' warned ye! 'Tain't any o' my fault
ef you're mistook, but I'll be on deck to watch ye. An' ez fer yeou,
Uncle Salters, Pharaoh's chief butler ain't in it 'longside o' you!
You watch aout an' wait. You'll be plowed under like your own
blamed clover; but me--Dan Troop--I'll flourish
like a green bay-tree because I warn't stuck on my own opinion."
Disko was smoking in all his shore dignity and a pair of beautiful
carpet-slippers. "You're gettin' ez crazy as poor Harve. You two go
araound gigglin' an' squinchin' an' kickin' each other under the
table till there's no peace in the haouse," said he.
"There's goin' to be a heap less--fer some folks," Dan replied. "You
wait an' see."
He and Harvey went out on the trolley to East Gloucester, where
they tramped through the bayberry bushes to the lighthouse, and
lay down on the big red boulders and laughed themselves hungry.
Harvey had shown Dan a telegram, and the two swore to keep
silence till the shell burst.
"Harve's folk?" said Dan, with an unruffled face after supper.
"Well, I guess they don't amount to much of anything, or we'd ha'
heard from 'em by naow. His pop keeps a kind o' store out West.
Maybe he'll give you 's much as five dollars, Dad."
"What did I tell ye?" said Salters. "Don't sputter over your vittles,
Dan."
CHAPTER IX
Whatever his private sorrows may be, a multimillionaire, like any
other workingman, should keep abreast of his business. Harvey
Cheyne, senior, had gone East late in June to meet a woman
broken down, half mad, who dreamed day and night of her son
drowning in the gray seas. He had surrounded her with doctors,
trained nurses, massage-women, and even faith-cure companions,
but they were useless. Mrs. Cheyne lay still and moaned, or talked
of her boy by the hour together to any one who would listen. Hope
she had none, and who could offer it? All she needed was
assurance that drowning did not hurt; and her husband watched to
guard lest she should make the experiment. Of his own sorrow he
spoke little--hardly realized the depth of it till he caught himself
asking the calendar on his writing-desk, "What's the use of going
on?"
There had always lain a pleasant notion at the back of his head
that, some day, when he had rounded off everything and the boy
had left college, he would take his son to his heart and lead him
into his possessions. Then that boy, he argued, as busy fathers do,
would instantly become his companion, partner, and ally, and there
would follow splendid years of great works carried out
together--the old head backing the young fire. Now his boy was
dead--lost at sea, as it might have been a Swede sailor from one of
Cheyne's big teaships; the wife dying, or worse; he himself was
trodden down by platoons of women and doctors and maids and
attendants; worried almost beyond endurance by the shift and
change of her poor restless whims; hopeless, with no heart to meet
his many enemies.
He had taken the wife to his raw new palace in San Diego, where
she and her people occupied a wing of great price,
and Cheyne, in a veranda-room, between a secretary and a
typewriter, who was also a telegraphist, toiled along wearily from
day to day. There was a war of rates among four Western railroads
in which he was supposed to be interested; a devastating strike had
developed in his lumber camps in Oregon, and the legislature of
the State of California, which has no love for its makers, was
preparing open war against him.
Ordinarily he would have accepted battle ere it was offered, and
have waged a pleasant and unscrupulous campaign. But now he sat
limply, his soft black hat pushed forward on to his nose, his big
body shrunk inside his loose clothes, staring at his boots or the
Chinese junks in the bay, and assenting absently to the secretary's
questions as he opened the Saturday mail.
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