Part 9 (1/2)
After the visitor had gone, he walked out to the front, and stared at the red smudges that marked the furnaces and rolling mills. When Mary joined him, a wrap thrown around her shoulders, he was chewing the end of an unlighted cigar. She laid her hand on his arm.
”Paul, dear, you weren't angry at what I said at supper?”
”Of course not. Women can't be expected to look on a business matter as men do.”
She shrank from the implied rebuke. ”You--you aren't serious about this mining, are you?”
He waved toward the dark foot of the hill with the cigar. ”D'ye know what we cleared from the bottom of the Crenshaw lands, Mary, on these first sales?”
She was silent.
”Our share was ninety thousand dollars! And the place didn't cost fifty.”
”I'm sorry to see any of it go, Paul. It would make such a wonderful home for our children--when they're grown up and married, and have their own little homes within reach----”
He crushed the cigar beneath his heel. ”You're much too sentimental, sometimes, Mary. The children wouldn't thank me to hold on to the land, when I can get a hundred and ten a foot for inside lots.”
”We have all the money we can possibly use now, Paul. You must have made a hundred and fifty thousand this year----”
”That hardly touches it.”
”It makes me afraid, sometimes--our having so much, when so many people have so little. If we could just keep Hillcrest as it is----”
”We haven't anything,” he answered sharply. ”Jack Lamar and his brother came here just before I did; they've five million apiece. And G.o.d only knows how much Russell Ross has made out of iron. He's in with that South Atlantic Steel bunch; he could sell out for twenty-five millions to-morrow, I verily believe.... I'd be lucky to get a million.”
She stubbornly returned to what was on her mind. ”And now you are willing to take this wonderful estate you have worked over for ten years, and throw it away, because Russell Ross has more money than you!
Think what the Rosses were.”
”My father wouldn't have wiped his shoes on them. And any one of them could buy out Jackson three or four times now. This mountain--if it's handled right--it will simply mint money. It will be a mountain of gold.”
She shuddered. ”Paul----”
”I can imagine what you would say, if I hadn't made what I have out of it. You spend what I make quickly enough.”
”I save everywhere I can----”
”Oh, you, and the place, and the girls; and it costs a lot to keep Pelham going. We need every cent of it. I tell you, this mountain is worth millions! And I won't stop until I've gotten every red cent out of it.”
It was in that mood that he went to the conference with the iron men.
One Sunday morning, when the negotiations had been carried over until the next week, Nathaniel's housekeeper phoned that the old man had died shortly before daybreak. Paul took charge of the funeral, saw to the s.h.i.+pping of the body to the Ohio home, and turned the matter over to the lawyers for the estate.
Within a month he had secured his partner's interest in the whole property, and was the sole owner of the mountain.
”If we do mine,” he told Mary, ”Pelham's mining engineering course will make him the man for the place. He'll get Nate's share, if he's worth it.”
In June Snell and Judson threw open another large subdivision, in a cheaper suburb near Hazelton, and Mr. Snell's incapacity put the burden of this on Paul's shoulders. Further plans for Hillcrest were laid over until he could find time to take them up again.