Barnes was awakened the next morning by a gentle tap at his door. He thought it was John. But, in answer to his response, his mother entered. She looked as fresh as a girl of twenty. Her face was radiant. She crossed swiftly to his bedside.
“Oh, Dicky boy,” she cried joyously, “there’s been a miracle! The prodigal father has come back home.”
“Miracle?” questioned Barnes, patting her hand. “What about my part in it?”
“Why, you,” exclaimed the mother, “you’re the miracle.”
Barnes smiled. It was just so Dr. Merriweather had answered him when he had put a similar question about Carl. He was learning something about how miracles are performed. It seemed as though if you loved mightily it was possible to accomplish most anything. And yet, in the supreme undertaking of his life, where he had loved most, he had lost. All night long he had wondered about this.
At this moment Horatio Barnes himself strided in, dressed in a bath-robe and slippers that wouldn’t stay on.
“Morning, Dick,” he shouted, “I’m going to keep a herd of Jerseys. In the old days Mitchell used to beat us all hollow on stock, but I’ll have some this time that will make his eyes stick out. I hope there are a few Mitchells left to watch me carry off the blue ribbons. Suppose they still hold the County Fair?”
“Haven’t a doubt of it,” answered Barnes, enthusiastically, “but I’m afraid we won’t be able to get in for it this Fall.”
“Won’t?” snorted the father. “How much time do you want? I’ll have a herd within a week or know the reason why.”
“Steady, steady,” his son cautioned. “Remember there are tenants on the old farm at present.”
“I’ll move ’em out bag and baggage within a month. I’ll do it if it costs twenty thousand dollars.”
“Whew,” whistled Barnes, “but when you do make up your mind—”
“I don’t wait,” answered the senior. “There’s another thing I want settled right off. I’m going to start a close corporation for the promotion of Art. I’ll appoint myself president of the company and make you vice-president, treasurer, secretary, and general manager on a salary of five thousand a year.”
“You what?”
“Our offices will be on the farm. I’ll touch up the fences, while you attend to the sunsets.”
“This is a joke?”
“Not by a good deal,” snorted Barnes, Sr. “If you’re in for that sort of thing, I’m going for once to put it on a paying basis. If you’ll paint your mother as she looks this minute, I’ll pay you ten thousand cash for the job.”
Barnes turned towards her.
“I don’t believe I can do it,” he answered, “but I’ll try.”
“Then it’s a bargain?”
“A bargain,” answered Barnes, gripping his father’s hand.
That morning Barnes sent off a second telegram to Joe. It read,
“This is a case of life or death. Come home.”
“Do you remember,” he asked gently, “what I told you
about the true adventurers?”
Then he sat down to write a letter to the other father and through the father to Her. She had said that she would read these letters herself. Her hands would hold the paper; her eyes would scan the script; her lips would utter the words. If the waiting father were able to do nothing more, Barnes thanked him for this priceless privilege of thus indirectly furnishing him the means for talking a bit each day with Her.
The letters were necessarily vague and rambling. Barnes spoke mysteriously of business, of men seen and others to be seen, of the necessity of waiting here for word from one who he hoped in the end would relieve him of all his mining ventures.
“I await a reply, which should reach me any day now,” he wrote. “When it arrives, I’ll come back. Give my love to Aunt Philomela and to Eleanor.”
It was two days later that he received an answer in Eleanor’s own handwriting. At sight of the envelope he felt for a moment as though all his wildest dreams had come true—as though he were to find within all that he hungered to hear from her. But it turned out to be nothing but a quiet gossipy letter about Aunt Philomela and of course chiefly about her father. He was improving daily, and Dr. Merriweather was now quite sure he was to recover his sight. He spent all his waking hours in talking of his boy.
“Oh,” she concluded, “Joe must come home now. Not even you could save Daddy from the blow which would follow should the boy refuse. I am waiting every minute for a telegram from him. With a heart full of gratitude to you, I remain, sincerely yours, Eleanor Van Patten.”
That day Barnes sat in the park from lunch to sunset with his mother. Both he and she agreed that the only significant feature of the letter was that it contained no mention of Carl.
So a restless week passed, the most important incident of which, outside his daily letter from Eleanor, was the fact that Barnes, Sr., received an offer for the Acme and in his usual impetuous fashion closed with it in twenty-four hours. He came home that momentous day at three instead of five, and save for the time when Barnes, Sr., received her promise to be his wife, he never received a finer reward than that which greeted his announcement to her of this decision.
“And so, you old prodigal,” choked Barnes, as he grasped his father’s hand, “you’ve come home, too.”
“Prodigal?” stammered his father, though with tears in his eyes.
“Think of all the years you’ve wasted in riotous earning,” exclaimed the son. “You can thank old Van Patten for your conversion. You two men have got to meet. He wasted five years in riotous pride. But he’s come home, too, now. We’re all home except Joe, and—well, I’m back in the old home any way.”
“What do you mean, sonny?”
“Nothing. I’m going to get Joe back now if I have to go to Alaska for him, that’s all.”
It was no easy matter to keep Barnes, Sr., in New York during the following week, but for that matter it was no easy matter for Barnes himself to stay. But he couldn’t leave until he had settled this other affair, and his father refused even to visit the old farm without him. In the meanwhile, too, Mr. Van Patten became insistent. He had been able to see his daughter and sister for the first time in three years, and now was eager almost to the point of petulance to see his son. He could not understand why the boy couldn’t come down for a day at least. It was becoming more and more difficult to quiet him. The girl showed plainly enough in her letters the distress under which they all labored. Matters were fast reaching a crisis.
It was at this point that he received the wire from Eleanor.
“Joe on way home. Don’t know when he will get here. You’d better come back if you can.”
Come back? Nothing else counted. He found his mother in her dressing-room kneeling before a trunk filled with old letters.
“Mother,” he whispered, “I take the next train for Chester.”
She looked up with moist eyes.
“But mother—”
“No matter how it turns out, Dick. My boy loves her, so—I love her too.”
“Tell Dad,” choked Barnes, “I haven’t time to see him.”
Barnes boarded the train with all the excitement of a boy making his first journey. He took a seat in the smoking-car, filled his pipe, and adjusting his knees comfortably against the wooden card-table before him, settled down to deep reflection. A man with an obtrusive arrangement of a large dress-suit case and much rattling of newspapers took the seat facing him. He would meet her, Barnes dreamed, in the sitting-room. She would wear her China silk with the polka dots in it. It would be at about sunset time, so that the gold in her hair would be more than ever in evidence as it always was when the sun took it slantwise. The ivory forehead would be flushed with the lightest crimson; her lips would be like damson preserves; and she would hold herself like a Venetian noblewoman.
His thoughts were interrupted by the voice of the stranger.
“The lies which are circulated about Alaska,” declared the latter with spirit, “would fill a book.”
Barnes glanced up at the man with some interest. He saw a young fellow with a decent if somewhat brazen face. His wide felt hat was set at a rakish angle and his clothes were a trifle over emphasized. The fellow was evidently referring to something he had read in the New York paper which he held in his big hand.
“They ought to jail men who slander a country like that,” he further declared.
“What’s the trouble?” inquired Barnes.
“Trouble? Why, the man who wrote this couldn’t have been within a thousand miles of Alaska. The stuff is libel—nothing else. You’d think from this that the place was up near the North Pole somewhere; you’d think all we had to eat was icicles; you’d think we lived in huts and wore a couple of feet of fur the year round. You’d think we were all a gang of wild Indians who wouldn’t know a street car by sight.”
“Well,” observed Barnes, straightening up, “I suppose you do lack many of the modern conveniences.”
“Not by a good deal,” answered the stranger with heat. “We’ve got everything a red-blooded man needs.”
“You hail from Alaska yourself?” inquired Barnes with growing interest.
“You bet I do.”
“Ever happen to hear of a town called ‘The Last Chance’?”
“Heard of it? Why, I live there.”
“Then,” faltered Barnes, “did you ever happen to hear of one Van Patten?”
He held his breath for the answer.
“Hear of it? Why, that’s my name!”
“Not Joe Van Patten?”
“Joe Van Patten.”
Barnes pressed down the ashes in his pipe. He relighted the tobacco with deliberate carefulness.
“You seem to know me,” broke in the young man uneasily, “but I’m hanged if I remember you.”
“No. My name is Barnes. I met your family a while ago.”
“Is that a fact?” exclaimed Van Patten.
The information seemed to check rather than promote loquaciousness on the part of the young man. He settled back uneasily in his seat and drummed nervously on the table. Barnes discerned now a certain family resemblance which would have been more pronounced had the man been in more conventional Eastern garb. There was nothing in his face to indicate viciousness—at worst nothing but stubbornness and selfishness.
“I understand you’re interested in mining?” began Barnes, in the hope of getting him to talk again.
“Up to my neck.”
“You left ‘The Lucky Find’ well?” he inquired much as John had inquired of him.
“You mean to say they haven’t heard back here of the strike?”
“Strike?”
“‘The Lucky Find,’” announced Van Patten, “is to-day the best paying mine within a hundred miles of ‘The Last Chance.’”
Barnes nodded. After all, when analyzed, that was not necessarily a very rash statement.
“Why, look here,” exclaimed Van Patten, “take a peek at this.”
And before Barnes’ astonished gaze Van Patten spread out one of the identical gorgeous certificates which he himself had described to Aunt Philomela. There it was within touch—the very thing he had seen the man draw out when sitting in the hut by the side of three-fingered Bill. He was glad to have one thing at least substantiated. It was swirled over with a bewildering design of engraved spirals. Across its face the name of the mine was dashed in a flourishing script that reminded him of the exhibition writing of an old-time teacher of penmanship. Each certificate proclaimed that it represented one hundred shares of stock in ‘The Lucky Find’—par value one hundred dollars. Barnes held the crinkling papers in his hand a moment as though suspecting still that this was only some particularly vivid piece of dreaming.
“Just had these made in New York,” explained Van Patten.
“They are very pretty,” commented Barnes.
“And growing prettier every day,” answered Van Patten. “That stock is at a premium. A month ago we struck it rich—real gold this time.”
The man spoke as though he, at least, believed it.
“That ought to be good news for the stockholders,” said Barnes, thinking of John.
“It will put every mother’s son of ’em where they need do no more worrying,” declared Van Patten proudly.
He sank back comfortably into his seat as though this statement settled satisfactorily most of the big affairs of the universe.
If what the boy said was true, Barnes was very glad for those back in the mellow brick house. It would simplify Aunt Philomela’s accounts and make John’s gray hairs less pathetic.
“You came East to place your stock on the market?” inquired Barnes with fresh suspicion.
“I’ve come back to make good,” answered Van Patten. “I’ve come back to pay some of my debts.”
“That ought to make you a welcome visitor.”
“I don’t know,” faltered Van Patten with what appeared to be more or less genuine emotion. “I can’t say that I’ve used my folks very well.”
“How long since you’ve been home?” asked Barnes.
“Not for years.”
“Years?”
“Dad and I had a bit of a scrap, and I cut.”
“Heard from him lately?”
“A month or so ago I got a letter. He was sick and wanted me to come home, but I was strapped and I couldn’t. It was just before we made the strike. I wouldn’t tell him I was busted. When you quit home with your dander up, you want to make good before you come back, don’t you?”
“It saves your pride,” admitted Barnes.
He met Van Patten’s eyes with frank friendliness. He found himself beginning to sympathize in a way with the man.
“I suppose Dad thought I didn’t use him very well,” ran on Van Patten, “but that can’t be helped now. I’ll square things with him when I see him.”
Barnes waited.
“Say,” exclaimed Van Patten with enthusiasm, “I’m going to give the Dad the time of his life in these next few years. I’m going to show him something of this country. He’s been too busy to travel, but I’m going to make him go back to Alaska with me. Why, do you know we’ve got a country up there as large as all the United States east of the Mississippi river if you take out Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and West Virginia?”
“Yes,” answered Barnes, mildly. “I knew that.”
“Why, there’s over half a million square miles up there.”
“To be exact, five hundred and eighty-six miles.”
Van Patten leaned forward.
“Say, stranger,” he exclaimed, “do you come from there?”
“In a way.”
“Where’s your claim?”
“I—well, you see I haven’t located it yet.”
“How long you been down?”
“Not long.”
“Give us your hand.”
Barnes extended his hand.
“I wish we were traveling farther the same way,” declared Van Patten.
The train was even then drawing close to the little station huddled in among the houses. Van Patten began to gather up his traps.
“I get off here,” explained Van Patten.
Barnes, too, rose.
“So do I,” he announced.