In the middle of the following September, Radlett arrived in Tucson from the East. He was on his way to pay his first visit to his property in Kay, since Stephen had taken charge. As he signed his name on the hotel register, his eye was caught by the names of the arrivals of the day before. “Donald Cameron.”
“Miss Cameron.”
A flush came to his cheeks and a light to his eyes as he looked steadily at the page. Strange what power a written word may have to stir a man to the depths of his being! As Radlett read the names, he felt the years slip away from him. Five, six years was it since that summer at Bar Harbor when he and Jean Cameron had climbed together about the cliffs of the spouting horn or, staff in hand, had explored Duck Brook or floated idly in his canoe around the islands in the harbor? Like Loring he had dreamed his dream of what might be. By the[255] end of the summer he knew it was only a dream of what might have been. He carried away with him an ideal, an aching heart, and a knot of ribbon of the Cameron plaid. But he was a man of too much force and energy to spend his life in bewailing the past. He had shut the knot of ribbon in a secret drawer, set the ideal in a shrine, and flung his heart into business with such success that to-day, while he was still a young man, he was already a power to be reckoned with in the financial world, while a golden career opened ahead of him.
A man so loyal in his friendship could not be other than loyal in his love; but he had put the possibility of winning Jean Cameron definitely out of his mind, and he would have sworn that the years had reduced the fever of his feeling to a genial tranquillity of friendship, when now at the very sight of her name on a hotel register, all his philosophy was put to flight and he was conscious only of a burning desire to see her once more.
Being a man of action, he wasted no time on reminiscence; but inquired in quick incisive terms whether Mr. Cameron and his daughter were still at the hotel. Learning that they were,[256] he sent up his card. Then he lighted a cigarette and walked the floor of the lobby, smoking nervously till the bell-boy returned to say that Mr. Cameron would be glad to receive him in his private sitting-room. Before following the boy, Radlett stopped at the desk to arrange for his room and get his key.
“How good a room do you wish, sir, and how long will you stay?”
“The best you have, and as long as I choose,” Radlett answered with characteristic brevity. A moment later he stood before the door of the Camerons’ sitting-room, which opened at his knock to reveal Mr. Cameron’s bristling red head in the foreground, and in the background a figure in a traveling dress of gray cloth, with a hat to match and a knot of plaided ribbon under the brim.
At sight of Radlett, Jean rose, smiling, but with a slight consciousness in her manner, a consciousness resulting from the remembrance of a painful scene, the hope that the man before her had quite forgiven and the slighter hope, a mere faint ashamed shadow of a hope, that he had not quite forgotten.
Her mind must have been quickly set at[257] rest on that point, for such a rush of feeling swept over Radlett that he could scarcely make his greetings intelligible. Mr. Cameron gave him a firm grip, and Jean held out a gray gloved hand which Radlett clasped tremulously. Mr. Cameron looked at the man and girl as they stood talking together, and the longer he looked the better he liked the combination.
“There would be a son-in-law to be proud of,” he thought, naturally enough perhaps considering him in that relation first. “Baird Radlett has everything that a girl could ask,—a hard head, a long purse, a free hand and an endless stock of common sense. And then, if I had him to help me, what a property I could build up! He used to seem devoted to Jean. But she could not have refused him—no, and by heaven she should not.” (Mr. Cameron liked to keep up even to himself the illusion that he was a tyrannical parent whose will was law.) “Rather different this man from Loring! Jean must see that. If she does not, she must be made to see it. I was afraid at one time that she might be foolish enough to fall in love with Loring; but I took it in time—I took it in time. Yet she is too efficient not to make some[258] one big mistake in her life. We Camerons all do it sooner or later. If it is not one thing it is another—misdirected energy, I suppose—” Then aloud, in answer to a question from Radlett as to how he happened to be in that part of the world: “Why, about a year and a half ago I became interested in a mine in Arizona which was not being run properly, and so for the present I am giving up my time to managing it myself.”
“And have you too become a mining engineer?” Radlett asked of Jean.
“Not quite,” she laughed.
“Jean came rather near it at first,” added her father; “but I think that now she is half tired of the life out here. It has not the charm for her that it had at first.”
“I should think not!” exclaimed Radlett emphatically. “Do you mean that you have spent a whole year out in the hills here?” he asked Jean.
“Yes,” she answered. “This trip marks the first time that I have been back to the East since last fall; but I have not yet become such a savage that I can dispense with afternoon tea. I hope you will join us,” she added.
[259]
“Yes, with thanks,” Radlett answered. Up to this moment he had never found any use for Tucson. Now he discovered that it existed to hold a tea-table and Jean Cameron.
“What brings you to Tucson, Baird?” she asked, while the waiter laid the cloth.
“I am in the mining business myself, in a small way,” he rejoined. “Last year I bought a property in Pinal County on speculation. I am going up to visit it now for the first time. I do not really need to go. In fact I shall probably do more harm than good. I have a manager up there who has accomplished wonders. He has made the mine pay in six months after he took control. As far as I can learn, he has done practically everything himself, from mining the ore to putting it on the cars. I bought the mine at a big risk, and now it is about the most satisfactory investment that I own.”
“I wish that I had such a man to put in charge of Quentin. When I am not there the whole plant seems to go to pieces.”
“Quentin!” exclaimed Radlett in surprise. “Is that the name of your property?”
“It is,” said Mr. Cameron. “Why? Had you ever heard of it?”
[260]
Radlett opened his lips to speak; but the arrival of the tea turned the subject of conversation for the moment. As he watched Jean pouring the tea all thoughts of mines and business vanished from Radlett’s mind. He wondered how he had ever existed throughout the years in which he had not seen her.
While Jean Cameron talked to Radlett, she glanced at him over her teacup with that interest which a girl naturally bestows upon a man who might have been a part of her life had she so willed it. In the past year the standards by which she judged men had changed considerably. She had much more regard for the qualities of steadiness and determination which Baird possessed than she had felt at the time when she refused him. From her widened experiences she had learned that ability without reliability was useless. Perhaps, too, now that disappointment in her new surroundings had set in, she looked back with more tenderness upon those who had peopled her life in the East.
The talk ranged over many scenes and people familiar to them all, then gradually drifted to the plans of each for the future. Baird’s[261] mind had been working fast. Seeing Jean for an hour had made him wish to see her for many more hours, and by the time that he had finished his second cup of tea, he had evolved a plan by which he hoped to achieve that end. If he could persuade Mr. Cameron, when on his way to Quentin, to stop over at Kay, and to make an expert report on the property, it would enable him to have at least a week more with Jean. Turning to Mr. Cameron, he approached him on the subject.
“I wish very much that I could persuade you to stop over and examine my property for me. If you had the time I should greatly value your professional opinion.”
“Where is your mine situated?”
“At Kay,” answered Radlett. “I think it is on the direct route to Quentin.”
“So you are the man who bought that property. I had not heard who owned it.”
“Yes,” said Baird. “Now do you think that you could possibly spare four or fives days to investigate the place for me?”
“I do not know whether I can possibly spare the time,” reflected Mr. Cameron, half aloud. If it had been any man besides Radlett, Mr.[262] Cameron would have refused at once, as he had for some time given up all such work. But he was glad to do a favor to Baird, and also he felt that he would like to have him and Jean thrown together for a while. “Still I can get in touch with Quentin, and if they need me there I can get there at short notice. Yes, I think that I can take the time. I shall be interested to see how the mine is doing with this wonderful new manager of yours. Frankly, it never used to be much good.”
“Don’t be discouraging, Father!” said Jean. “You might at least be an optimist until you have seen Baird’s mine.”
“If your father should be a pessimist after seeing it, I should certainly give up the mine, I have such respect for his judgment.”
Mr. Cameron expanded under the compliment. “By the way, did you not have a big riot or something up there this spring? I read about it, I think, in the Eastern papers. They said that there had been a race riot in Kay which, but for the coolness and nerve of the manager, would have been a desperate outbreak.”
“Yes, there was a desperate state of affairs,” answered Radlett, and he proceeded to give an[263] account of the riot, the details of which he had learned through a postscript added by Reade to one of Loring’s reports. When he reached the part of the story which told how the manager had held the mob at bay until the arrival of the deputies, both Jean and her father exclaimed with approval. Jean’s eyes were shining with the enthusiasm which she always felt for a brave act well carried out.
“And,” said Radlett in conclusion, “since then there has not been a hint of trouble in the camp. In fact a labor agitator came up there last month, and the men themselves ran him out of camp.”
“You certainly have a wonderful man there,” said Mr. Cameron. “If I had chanced upon him first, you would never have had him. If there is one thing on which I pride myself, it is............